Word: benton
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Bonnie and Clyde has also brought the metamorphosis of success to its scenarists, Robert Benton and David Newman. They began thinking about the movie four years ago in New York City, after mulling over the films of Francois Truffaut-Jules and Jim and Shoot the Piano Player. At the time, Benton and Newman were house satirists at Esquire, writing sophomoric advice to college boys like how to fake mononucleosis. The Dillinger Days, a book about crime in the '30s, crossed their desk. The way they like to tell it, a figurative light bulb appeared over their heads when they...
Yelling Thirties. Benton and Newman were not the first to see the cinematic potential of Bonnie and Clyde. Back in 1937 the gangster couple inspired Fritz Lang's You Only Live Once, a fictionalized treatment of a man ruined by a prison sentence, starring Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sydney. As recently as 1958, The Bonnie Parker Story starred Dorothy Provine, a veteran of TV's Roaring Twenties turned into a Yelling Thirties girl...
None of these earlier reincarnations bore much relation to the true Bonnie and Clyde story, and they did not bother Benton and Newman. Frankly imitating the juxtaposition of dulcet tragedy and saline comedy that characterizes the work of France's François Truffaut, the two writers decided to write a script for him-even though they had never met him. In their original version, Clyde was a homosexual; he and Bonnie shared the favors of C. W. Moss in a weird menage a trois. At the time, Truffaut was working on Farenheit 451, but he took a week...
...script next went to Jean-Luc Godard. "He came over and said, 'Great, let's do it now,'" recalls Newman. "He wanted to leave right away for Texas and do the movie in two weeks." But the producers-two friends of Benton and Newman who had never done a movie before-procrastinated. The film was supposed to take place in summer, they argued, and this was winter. Godard abruptly cooled on the subject. "All they can think of is meteorology," he complained, and flew back to Paris. Exit Godard...
...time living up to his original billing as the next James Dean of 1961; director Arthur Penn started out on Broadway, and went on to make a series of inconsistent pictures including The Miracle Worker, Mickey One (with Beatty), and The Chase; and his screenwriters, David Newman and Robert Benton, have as their one claim to fame their book to the less than wonderful musical It's Superman. But somehow their collaborative efforts have produced a single work which, for each of its creators, overshadows all he has done previously...