Word: scriptful
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...Elmer the Great, a farcical saga of a rookie pitcher with an arm like a whip and a Model T brain. A story goes when Lardner first saw the show on Broadway, he was convinced that it was terrible. He acknowledged as his own only one line of the script. He underestimated both the play and his part in its conception. Elmer spoke Ring Lardners language, proved as durable as his Alibi Ike. Last week, with a few of its gags refurbished, Elmer the Great was in the groove again at the Cape Playhouse at Dennis, Mass...
Gertrude Stein's book has good pictures, peaceful and exciting pictures. There is one of Sacre Coeur and the hill of Montmartre painted gaily like a cake with a frilled yellowish cloud up on top, by Lascaux. There are other pictures, one of them is an 18th-Century script drawing of Voltaire one is by Picasso one is by Sir Francis Rose. The Germans are in Paris but would they paint pictures like these and would they like Gertrude Stein's writing about Paris and the French. Would they yes would they...
Since David Lewis had sold Hal Wallis the novel, he looked like the logical producer. Equally inevitable seemed the choice of Casey Robinson, who scripted such Bette Davis successes as Dark Victory and The Old Maid, to turn the 600 crowded Field pages into a workable screen treatment. So Producer Lewis and Scripter Robinson holed up for five days in Phoenix, Ariz., emerged with a 90-page synopsis, which Scripter Robinson expanded into a 225-page script-too long for the most ambitious of photoplays...
Suddenly, by one of those crises that occur hourly in Hollywood, Wallis discovered that he needed a script for Bette Davis at once. Anatole Litvak, already scheduled to produce the next Davis film, was called in. Lewis, Robinson and Litvak trimmed the script to 180 pages. Litvak, who understands the Davis temperament, suggested alterations which would change the heroine from "a woman in love to one with more subtle complicated emotions." But the biggest Litvak contribution was to bring Bette Davis and the Duke de Praslin (Charles Boyer) together as the Duke is dying-something Novelist Field had found unnecessary...
...With the script thus carefully prepared, Director Litvak, a notoriously slow worker, was able to whizz along with almost no changes in filming (a Hollywood record), finishing some three weeks ahead of schedule. Whenever two or three reels could be got in a can, the film was rushed to Hal Wallis, who sat with a dictaphone in front of him, spouting such corrections as "Take out the noise when she blows the lamp out"; "Get a new voice for the old man roasting apples"; "See if you haven't another angle where Davis doesn't yank the little...