Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God Read Online Free
Author: Nat Segaloff
write or be unhappy for the rest of my life.”
But first he had to tell his boss. Not surprisingly, Skouras roiled, “You’ll be back. You’ll come back crawling, but you’ll be back some day.” And, indeed, Silliphant did come back to Fox one day, but it wasn’t crawling, it was to make The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, the box office successes of which saved the studio. But by then Skouras was long gone.
“I heard from somebody in publicity at MGM in New York that their studio was looking for a script for Joan Crawford,” Silliphant said. “I got a copy of some of our Fox scripts to see what the physical layout of such work looked like. Then I wrote a romantic story, the Joan Crawford role built around a Pulitzer Prize-winning poetess seeking love in Cuba and in the oil city of Maracaibo, Venezuela. I wrote the script in two weeks, working all night every night, doing my Fox publicity job in the daytime. Then I rushed the finished script over to MGM to a sort of godfather of mine, Oscar Doob, who was Metro’s VP in charge of advertising-publicity, and ‘submitted’ it to him to send along, if he thought it was worthy, to his studio. He told me he’d be happy to read it, but he knew nothing of the studio looking for a Joan Crawford script. Where had I heard that rumor? ‘From friends in your publicity department,’ I replied. Right then and there he called the studio in Culver City. Result: nobody, but nobody, was either looking for or wanted a script for Joan Crawford. At least at MGM.
“So there I was, script in hand, no market. A week later, while at lunch with Roger Straus (Farrar, Straus publishing house) I told him the story and joked about my gullibility. ‘Let me read the script,’ he suggested. I sent it to him and the following day he called to tell me he thought it would translate into a pretty fair novel. Did I know how to write a novel? ‘Well,’ I said, ‘three weeks ago I didn’t know how to write a screenplay, so I might as well see if I can’t also find out how to write a novel.’”
But first, he embarked on a producing gambit. He secured the life story rights from heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis and landed financing from Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. (son of the founder of the Chrysler Corporation and a well-known art collector and benefactor) and William Zeckendorf (the real estate developer who would make the deal with Spyros Skouras to build Century City). They hired Robert Sylvester — a columnist friend from The New York Daily News and a fight buff — to write the screenplay. He engaged workmanlike director Robert Gordon and secured promise of release from United Artists, and then found himself doing the one thing he hated to do most: wait.
“It never occurred to me to write the film, only to produce it,” he said. “Only when Bob failed to give me some of the scenes I felt were essential did I step in and write them myself. Later, when I watched the completed movie, I saw that the several scenes I had written were far and away the best ones in the flick — at least to my considerably prejudiced opinion. But, even more, I had discovered the pain of having to sit there and wait — as a producer — for the writer to deliver. What the hell, it struck me, why not be the guy everybody’s waiting for rather than the guy who’s going crazy waiting?
“As I recall, Bob wrote the mother-son violin scene. The scenes I wrote were the later John Marley scenes and virtually all of the Joe vs. Maria marital scenes, along with the ‘finding himself ’ wind-up. The gutsy, fight and ringside stuff is all Bob’s. My scenes are the more personal, intimate moments, which, for some reason, evaded Bob in his writing of the draft.”
Joe Louis, the “Brown Bomber,” is credited with bringing new excitement to boxing following the retirement of Jack Dempsey. But Dempsey was white and Louis was black: something that made no difference to Silliphant, but did to
But first he had to tell his boss. Not surprisingly, Skouras roiled, “You’ll be back. You’ll come back crawling, but you’ll be back some day.” And, indeed, Silliphant did come back to Fox one day, but it wasn’t crawling, it was to make The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, the box office successes of which saved the studio. But by then Skouras was long gone.
“I heard from somebody in publicity at MGM in New York that their studio was looking for a script for Joan Crawford,” Silliphant said. “I got a copy of some of our Fox scripts to see what the physical layout of such work looked like. Then I wrote a romantic story, the Joan Crawford role built around a Pulitzer Prize-winning poetess seeking love in Cuba and in the oil city of Maracaibo, Venezuela. I wrote the script in two weeks, working all night every night, doing my Fox publicity job in the daytime. Then I rushed the finished script over to MGM to a sort of godfather of mine, Oscar Doob, who was Metro’s VP in charge of advertising-publicity, and ‘submitted’ it to him to send along, if he thought it was worthy, to his studio. He told me he’d be happy to read it, but he knew nothing of the studio looking for a Joan Crawford script. Where had I heard that rumor? ‘From friends in your publicity department,’ I replied. Right then and there he called the studio in Culver City. Result: nobody, but nobody, was either looking for or wanted a script for Joan Crawford. At least at MGM.
“So there I was, script in hand, no market. A week later, while at lunch with Roger Straus (Farrar, Straus publishing house) I told him the story and joked about my gullibility. ‘Let me read the script,’ he suggested. I sent it to him and the following day he called to tell me he thought it would translate into a pretty fair novel. Did I know how to write a novel? ‘Well,’ I said, ‘three weeks ago I didn’t know how to write a screenplay, so I might as well see if I can’t also find out how to write a novel.’”
But first, he embarked on a producing gambit. He secured the life story rights from heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis and landed financing from Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. (son of the founder of the Chrysler Corporation and a well-known art collector and benefactor) and William Zeckendorf (the real estate developer who would make the deal with Spyros Skouras to build Century City). They hired Robert Sylvester — a columnist friend from The New York Daily News and a fight buff — to write the screenplay. He engaged workmanlike director Robert Gordon and secured promise of release from United Artists, and then found himself doing the one thing he hated to do most: wait.
“It never occurred to me to write the film, only to produce it,” he said. “Only when Bob failed to give me some of the scenes I felt were essential did I step in and write them myself. Later, when I watched the completed movie, I saw that the several scenes I had written were far and away the best ones in the flick — at least to my considerably prejudiced opinion. But, even more, I had discovered the pain of having to sit there and wait — as a producer — for the writer to deliver. What the hell, it struck me, why not be the guy everybody’s waiting for rather than the guy who’s going crazy waiting?
“As I recall, Bob wrote the mother-son violin scene. The scenes I wrote were the later John Marley scenes and virtually all of the Joe vs. Maria marital scenes, along with the ‘finding himself ’ wind-up. The gutsy, fight and ringside stuff is all Bob’s. My scenes are the more personal, intimate moments, which, for some reason, evaded Bob in his writing of the draft.”
Joe Louis, the “Brown Bomber,” is credited with bringing new excitement to boxing following the retirement of Jack Dempsey. But Dempsey was white and Louis was black: something that made no difference to Silliphant, but did to
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