Word: screenplay
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...down-and the Oscar built up. In a business founded on insecurities, the statuette now seems more solid than the studios, more enduring than art. In the past, there have been recipients who put down the Oscar, and meant it. When George Bernard Shaw won one for his screenplay of Pygmalion, he boomed: "It's an insult." Director John Ford has won Oscars four times and has never attended a single ceremony...
...Saturday Evening Post, soon switched to The New Yorker as drama critic. Next stop was Hollywood in 1932, where he and Billy Wilder collaborated on 15 pictures, including Academy Award winners The Lost Weekend (1945) and Sunset Boulevard (1950). Brackett's final Oscar was for his Titanic (1953) screenplay, which captured all the heroism and much of the horror of the world's greatest maritime disaster...
...giving herself to men who need her. Besides being something of a satire of the American view of sex, it also contains sporadically funny pokes at psychiatry, transcendental meditation, scholars and assimilation-conscious Jews. All this is gone (or reduced to the basest terms) in the Buck Henry screenplay...
...Henry's Candy screenplay (an unpleasant topic to discuss, I assure you), it is astoundingly unfunny, unoriginal and tasteless. Dr. Krankeit (Jewish and author of the prize-winning Masturbation Now in the book) becomes a quack surgeon of Italian descent in the movie. The marvelous, obscene Aunt Livia character is transformed into a grotesque nymphomaniac, about as funny as a scrawl on a public bathroom wall. Candy herself becomes an aimless slut--hardly what the original work intended...
James Goldman, who adapted the screenplay from his own fairly successful Broadway script, must've had it in for Katharine Hepburn. She's forced through lines like "Of course he has a knife, we all have knives. It's 1183--we're barbarians." "Hush dear, mother's fighting." She makes it through such embarrassments by playing Katharine Hepburn, adding her wry little smile to some lines ("Well, what family doesn't have its ups and downs?") and telegraphing strong emotion by quivering...