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0n two separate occasions-once during preproduction in 1960 and again during filming in 1961-the Sam Spiegel-David Lean production of Lawrence of Arabia nearly collapsed for lack of a script, coming perilously close to joining several predecessors as yet another would have-been film on the WWI exploits of the controversial British scholar and soldier, T.E. Lawrence. Spiegel and Lean had hired Michael Wilson, a blacklisted American screenwriter then living in Paris, to write the screenplay. The Academy Award-winning screenwriter had earlier coauthored the script for the 1957 Spiegel-Lean production, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and had endeared himself to Lean for his willingness to work throughout the shooting of the film on location in Ceylon. Nevertheless, neither Wilson nor coauthor and fellow blacklistee Carl Foreman received screen credit.1
Wilson's employment for Lawrence of Arabia was initially questioned by the financing studio, Columbia Pictures, but they were reassured regarding his questionable political status by producer Sam Spiegel, whose September 1959 contract with Wilson included a clause stating that his company, Academy Pictures Enterprises, would give Wilson credit "as the writer of the screenplay on the screen" and would also "use its best efforts to secure similar credit for the writer on all exhibitions of said picture in the Western Hemisphere" on condition that "the writer furnishes the Corporation with a satisfactory statement as required by Mr. Spiegel." The contract does not specify exactly what sort of "statement" was involved, but later correspondence between Wilson's and Spiegel's attorneys make it clear that Spiegel had asked Wilson to recant his radical past, a condition often imposed on Hollywood screenwriters who had been members of the Communist Party.2
Between September 1959 and early 1961, Wilson completed three drafts of a screenplay for Lawrence of Arabia. Lean was ecstatic about Wilson's preliminary work, in early 1960 writing to him in Paris: "What a masterly job you are doing. Your extraordinary grasp and inventive appreciation of complex subject and character fills me with admiration and excitement." 3
Wilson delivered his first draft of the script in August 1960 and, over the next several months, in working sessions in London, Paris, and Switzerland, Lean and Wilson (sometimes joined by Spiegel) toiled over the screenplay, with Wilson writing, rewriting, and rewriting again based on their discussions. By the end of the year, however, the two had fallen out amid mutual feelings of dissatisfaction. Wilson, after having worked on the script for over fifteen months, despaired of ever being able to satisfy Lean, who had a well-deserved reputation for his meticulous preparation of scripts, a niggling attention to detail, and a tendency to repeatedly rework and rewrite the same sequence. During a December 1960 script conference trip to Jordan, where Lean was engaged in preproduction and scouting locations, Wilson decided to bow out of the project, shortly thereafter informing Spiegel's New York lawyer, Irwin Margulies, of Margulies & Heit, that he wished to terminate his contract.
By this time, too, Lean's original enthusiasm for Wilson's approach had cooled and he now felt that the script lacked continuity, failed to capture the complex character of Lawrence, and was "too American." Later, writing privately to Spiegel, Lean spelled out his disappointment with what he called a "near disaster script":
I have read the script again and hope you realise how very far off we are... The character of Lawrence which was what fascinated us in the first place hardly peeps through at all--and I don't think it ever can with the present way of telling the story...The basic flaw is that in the present construction there is no margin for comment or kick-back off the main character. He just keeps on doing things and the audience watches and draws their own conclusion ... I now see it for the dull diary-writing technique it is-and we've got to break it up and give the writer space to manoeuvrc and spark. We were pretty tough on Ross, but it tells far more of Lawrence than we have with our screen technique advantages in the bargain.4
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