Introduction

Introduction Genesis and composition Discussions of the project that would result in Puma began in 1975, in the offices of the independent film production company Zanuck/ Brown, at Universal Pictures in California. Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown, whose Jaws was released in June 1975, were evidently on the lookout for the next blockbusting disaster movie. Their discussions began with an interoffice memorandum from Joan Southerden Orihuela, working in the Universal City Studios’ Story Department, to David Brown on 8 April 1975. The subject of the memo, and the basis for the abortive film project that would produce Puma, was ‘When Worlds Collide and After Worlds Collide by Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie’. The memo offers a brief assessment of Balmer and Wylie’s co-written novels When Worlds Collide (1933) and After Worlds Collide (1934) as possible future film projects, along with a fifty-one-page summary of the plots of the two books. Taken together, the books offer, Southerden Orihuela suggests, ‘a good possibility for the ultimate in disaster pictures, in spite of a style that seems old-fashioned now and so repetitious that it fairly screams for an editing job’.1 Brown evidently agreed that the project was worth 1 Joan Southerden Orihuela, ‘Copy memorandum to David Brown from Joan Southerden Orihuela regarding a proposed remake of When Worlds Collide and After Worlds Collide, with attached story synopsis’, unpublished typescript, 8 April 1975, International Anthony Burgess Foundation (hereafter IABF), Manchester, GB 3104 AB/ARCH/A/PUM/4. 9781526132734_PRINT.indd 1 16/08/2018 09:38 2 introduction exploring further and a second (author-facing) proposal was written, setting out the premise for the ‘ultimate’ science fiction film ‘to be presented to a writer of superb imagination, scientific knowledge and human insight’.2 News of the potential project reached the Burgess household, if not Burgess himself, on 21 July 1975 in a telegram from Brenda Leys, who handled dramatic rights for the Deborah Rogers Agency in London: ‘Zanuck Brown Universal want you for major science fiction screen play sending novel and back up material Siena please reply re interest.’3 Deborah Rogers, Burgess’s London agent, would write, just four days later: ‘Universal anxious for acknowledgement receipt of material and your reaction please contact me soonest.’4 When Burgess expressed his preliminary interest in the project, prior, it seems, to his having seen the detailed information, Zanuck and Brown responded with delight, describing him as their first choice of author and promising to send him a second set of the materials relating to the project.5 Zanuck and Brown met with Burgess in Rome to discuss the project in September 1975, and a contract for a screenplay based on When Worlds Collide was drawn up in early October. Burgess’s motivations for accepting the project appear to have been largely financial. The reward for the work was generous, with the original contract for a screenplay of ‘not less than 40,000’ words promising Burgess a payment of $65,000, and when asked by William M. Murray in an interview about the project, ‘Why do you want to write a disaster film?’, Burgess replied: ‘For the money, for the money …’6 2 Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown, ‘Outline for a proposed major science fiction film by Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown (Universal Pictures)’, unpublished typescript, 1975, IABF, GB 3104 AB/ARCH/A/PUM/3. 3 Brenda Leys, telegram to Anthony Burgess, 21 July 1975, IABF. 4 Deborah Rogers, letter to Anthony Burgess, 25 July 1975, IABF. 5 Richard Zanuck and David Brown, telegram to Anthony Burgess, 9 August 1975, IABF. 6 William M. Murray, ‘Anthony Burgess on Apocalypse’, Iowa Review, vol. 8, no. 3 (1977), 37–45 (p. 44). For details of the contract, see Zanuck/Brown Productions, letter to Burgess, 5 October 1976; and Liana Burgess, letter to Robert Lantz, 14 January 1976, both IABF. 9781526132734_PRINT.indd 2 16/08/2018 09:38 introduction 3 Burgess met with Zanuck and Brown again in New York in late 1975 and was evidently working on the project in October of that year while he was a visiting professor at the University of Iowa. There he met Professor James Van Allen, the magnetospheric and space physicist after whom the Van Allen radiation belts are named.7 Burgess told Murray: It was useful for me to come to Iowa because I’d already met Brown and Zanuck in New York and I could see a very great man, Van Allen, who is here in Iowa, and he would be able to tell me actually what will happen if an asteroid or some other heavenly body comes into our orbit – what would happen in terms of the physical apocalypse. He was able to tell me what it would be like if the moon was smashed up and so forth. But this is mere window dressing; this is mere background material. The interesting thing is how would people behave in these circumstances and how can we present little creatures behaving in a particular way. So I suppose my interest is not primarily in apocalypse at all in that sense, but rather in people facing any great disaster.8 Despite the implicit suggestion in the Murray interview that Burgess was working on the script for a disaster film, his initial response to the Zanuck/Brown commission was to write ‘not a film treatment but a brief novel’.9 While the two extant drafts of the screenplay are undated, internal evidence confirms that the novel preceded the screenplay. It is possible, to give but one example, to track the spelling of ‘ouranological’ across the three extant manuscripts. The spelling of the word, a term of Burgess’s coinage that is glossed as ‘the disci- pline that binds together the various specialisations necessary to the 7 Burgess, who taught a course on the modern novel (‘Problems of the Novel’) in the English Department of the University of Iowa, talks about his time in Iowa City, and of his meeting with Van Allen, in You’ve Had Your Time (London: Heinemann, 1990), pp. 324–6. 8 Murray, ‘Anthony Burgess on Apocalypse’, (p. 38). 9 Burgess, You’ve Had Your Time, p. 326. 9781526132734_PRINT.indd 3 16/08/2018 09:38 4 introduction building of a space microcosm’ (p. 99), is unstable in the Puma man- uscript, initially appearing as ‘houranological’. A handwritten anno- tation to page 53 of the typescript establishes ‘ourano-’ as Burgess’s preferred spelling, and all ‘h’ versions of the word are corrected by hand until its final appearance on page 82, by which point it appears in its final form. By contrast, neither draft of the screenplay includes the ‘h’ version of the word, suggesting that by the time of their writing its spelling had been established. The novel, it seems safe to say, came first. Evidently, writing prose fiction was a necessary first step for Burgess when tackling work for the screen – he would do the same a year later when working on Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth (1977), writing that he had to compose a ‘preliminary novel […] before I could deal in stark dialogue and camera direc- tions’.10 It would seem that script-writing, ‘a relief from the plod of fiction […] nearly all dialogue, with the récit left to the camera’, began for Burgess with a good deal of descriptive ‘plodding’.11 While a full draft of Puma would be finished by 31 January 1976, a letter from Burgess’s wife, Liana, to his New York agent, Robert Lantz, confirms that he was some way off completing the screenplay in mid-January: Anthony finds that the project requires a little more research and a little more time, and I am afraid it’s going to be much longer than originally planned. He is half-way through and is already approaching 40,000 words. From the contract, which I am enclosing, this does not seem to appear a problem (‘not less than 40,000’), although I wonder how serious is the deadline of February 1st. It may seem strange but Anthony finds it an extremely taxing work, very demanding upon the imagination and also such that cannot be speeded up.12 In the same letter Liana goes on to note that, ‘This second leg of the apocalyptic journey is being covered by Anthony entirely outside of 10 Burgess, You’ve Had Your Time, p. 303. 11 Burgess, You’ve Had Your Time, p. 142. 12 Liana Burgess, letter to Robert Lantz, 14 January 1976, IABF. 9781526132734_PRINT.indd 4 16/08/2018 09:38 introduction 5 the U.S.’ The significance of this lies in the fact that while the novel was completed in Bracciano, it had its genesis in the United States, primarily in Iowa City and New York, where Burgess and Liana were living for a time in 1975. Publication history The publication history of Puma, until its appearance here in this Irwell Edition, is the history of its non-publication in the 1970s, and later of its reworking as part of The End of the World News: An Entertainment in 1982. Conceived as both a film and a novel, the non-publication of Puma was a double disappointment for Burgess, who recounts the waning of the film project in You’ve Had Your Time (1990). Puma was, he writes, one of the ‘scripts for films and television series that were, as I knew while writing them, destined not to be made’: I was summoned by Zanuck and Brown to Culver City to meet their elected director, John Frankenheimer, but he was busy at Paramount editing a film about Palestine Liberationists drop- ping bombs from the Goodyear blimp on to the spectators of the Golden Bowl game in Florida.

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