Show Business: Life of a Wordsmith

At central casting, Edward Anhalt, 51, would be a natural for the chain-gang fugitive—head shaved, clothes impressed, face haggard. And indeed he lives the life of a man pursued—by nearly every studio and producer in Hollywood. If they catch him, it will cost them a minimum of $5,000 a week, for Anhalt is one of the highest-paid scriptwriters in the business (1965 estimated income: $225,000) and, as the burst of applause that greeted his Oscar award for Becket last week proved, in the judgment of his fellow craftsmen one of the best.

To even think of improving lean Anouilh’s Becket, whose Broadway production starred Laurence Olivier and Anthony Quinn, strikes theatrical circles as outrageous hubris, but it failed to faze Anhalt. “The main problem was to stop it from being a play,” he explains, “to stop it from being theatrical, and to make it real. Becket on the stage was a series of stylized tapestries. Anouilh had to refer to things that happened offstage, the excommunication scene, or the scene in which Becket is accused by the King’s prosecutor, for instance. I had to make the two men into people who were really living in the time that they lived and talking in conversational rather than theatrical terms.”

Through the Superscope. In preparation, Anhalt read the play repeatedly and attended several performances before he began blocking out the screenplay. With Anouilh’s dialogue firmly in mind, he proceeded to invent the missing scenes. Only when he had rewritten it as a screenplay, bearing in mind the mobility and intimacy of the camera, did he reread the play “to see if I had eliminated anything that I should have kept.” He found his most important change had been to take much that seemed “too cerebral and put it back in emotional terms.” The result was a stunning, emotional mano a mano between the two men.

It is a craft and technique that has to be learned the hard way. Manhattan-born Eddie Anhalt began when he left Columbia University in his sophomore year. First he turned to film editing, shoestring documentaries, pulp fiction, and eventually grade-B pictures. “The film story could be anything I chose to invent,” he recalls, “providing the star wore a dinner jacket at least once and was not obliged to run up or down stairs.” Given a crack at a grade-A picture, Anhalt, with his first wife Edna, proved how good he could be; his first film, Panic in the Streets, starring Richard Widmark, won an Oscar for the husband-wife team in 1950. Another original was The Sniper, the story of a young man who gets his kicks out of shooting people through a telescopic sight. It got them an Oscar nomination.

Tear Off the Binding. Anhalt and his wife split up after finishing The Pride and the Passion. But on his own, the talented wordsmith has stayed in constant demand. He finished The Young Lions (“by actual account, it was the fourteenth attempt by nine writers”), struck out on Walter Wanger’s Cleopatra after nine days, but made good with Not as a Stranger, an almost textbook example of Anhalt’s method.

The original novel, by Morton Thompson, is 948 pages, too long for even Anhalt to memorize. Instead, he read the book three or four times, then ripped off the binding; “I would take those pages which gave me a jazz—for any reason—and tack them up on the wall. I ended up with perhaps 100 pages which excited me. Then I would thread my continuity between that excitement, frequently changing the general moral tone of the book, or its purpose, to fit that excitement.”

Crack Up the Cars. Anhalt has since turned out two scripts for Elvis Presley, a Western, two comedies (Wives and Lovers and Boeing, Boeing) and, for Paramount, Affair in Arcady (“I call it an original because the novel was about a Chicago gangster turned Virginia farmer and the screenplay was about the late dictator of Iraq, Kassem”). He has just completed a TV script, A Time for Killing, with George C. Scott (Bob Hope Chrysler Theater, April 30), and is working on The Cruel Sport, a screen script about “the morality of Grand Prix racing.”

To keep the ideas flowing and allow himself time for second thoughts requires split-second scheduling, and Anhalt has taken to dictating to himself into a tiny microphone clipped onto the lapel of his jacket and picked up by a transistorized tape recorder at his side as he tears along the superhighways in his cream-colored Lancia. The process has caused Anhalt to crack up three cars in the past two years. But the price is cheap. For Hollywood’s busy scriptwriter, just another tax deduction.