Word: scripting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Everyone's Freddy. "My desire to direct," he says, "became acute about five years ago." It took almost that long to find and prepare a suitable script, and None but the Brave seems worth the delay. A sort of World War II in miniature, the story tells of two groups of Japanese and American soldiers on a Pacific island who bicker internally and battle externally until they are driven to declare a truce. But the hard-won armistice ends in mutual and inevitable annihilation. Defined by the director as "an integrated picture," its stars are 17 Japanese actors...
...Sinatra is a fulltime professional who personally supervises every phase of production from the ordering of ten gallons of concentrated "blood" (needed to provide 50 gallons of gore when mixed with water) to learning the script so thoroughly that he never has to look at the screenplay. He knows every cast and crew member by name, though he calls most of the Japanese "Freddy," thinks privately "they should all be called Kim." The cast and crew are impressed. A prop man claims "He really listens to you." Actor Tatsuya Mihashi, "the Japanese Robert Taylor," calls him a director "who knows...
...often when a good book or play becomes a movie, the script writers fail to see that they have good things in front of their noses; passionate (and pointless) adaptation turned such solid novels as Exodus and Advise and Consent into mediocre cinema. Fortunately, the men who took Gore Vidal's recent hit play The Best Man and made it into a movie had the sense to leave well enough alone. As a result, they have put together a terrific film...
Schwartz's often epigramatic script is imaginative, humorous, and insightful. At times it is almost musical in construct, with choral effects and the use of repeated images or words to introduce recurrent themes and to identify characters. But it is almost too complex and episodic for coherent drama...
...staging is secondary to the script itself. And one viewing may leave you a little dissatisfied. Schwartz says and depicts so much in this short play that you will want to return to it several times...