The principal players in Greed (right to left), Zasu Pitts, Gibson Gowland, Jean Hersholt.

F rom Screen to Page

Richard Whitehall

One of the more encouraging trends in that from Wilder's previous collaborations. Nothing publishers' gold-rush into books on film has by Sidney Buchman, Jules Furthman, Ben been a growing commitment to the film script. Hecht, Norman Krasna, Frances Marion (The The screen writer, these days, has a good Scarlet Letter was anthologized in 1928, but chance of film and script coming out together, nothing since), Nunnally Johnson, John Lee although there's still a long way to go before Mahin, Donald Ogden Stewart, Sidney Boehm, he achieves parity with the playwright. But Isobel Lennart, George Axelrod, to name a ran­ since, I think, there is much more imaginative dom dozen important American screen writers. writing presently going into film than into the­ On the other hand there has been the un­ ater, this is a step in the right direction. filmed script of Jesus, which Carl Dreyer had The general emphasis is still on the tried and spent the last twenty years of his life planning; true, the classic film. And there is still a bias in there has been Stanley Kubrick's Clockwork favor of the European (although Viking has be­ Orange script, a model of presentation in that gun to publish the M.G.M. library). No Preston each word is linked to its pictorial image; and Sturges, for instance. Some of the Billy Wilder­ there has been a major contribution to film I.A. L. Diamond scripts, but only Ninotchka scholarship in the publication of Erich von

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