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Although Bolt was sympathetic to Wilson, he did not want to share the screen credit, writing in reply:
Your letter came this morning as a bombshell. I had no idea that there was any question of my sharing credits with anybody. I was under the impression that the script was shot as my own work utterly ... I cannot tell you how hard I have worked on this film. Some of it I have written five times over to meet the requirements of Sam and David. It has been back-breaking work ... I am particularly sympathetic because of your particular political predicament. I have myself no objection to your receiving credit for 'preliminary work' or 'Ideas' which are yours. But I'm damned if the screenplay is by anyone but Robert Bolt and that is what the Credit ought to say.12
Correspondence between Wilson and Bolt does not discuss exactly how much of Wilson's earlier work on the script had been appropriated, but it is evident that Bolt had, in fact, seen Wilson's screenplay. In discussing the general outline of the shooting script, Bolt wrote to Wilson that he would "look again at your script if Sam will give me one and see how closely you follow [the story-line being used] yourself"13 (author's emphasis). Wilson had been told by Spiegel that Bolt had not seen his work at all.
Lean also insisted that Wilson's screenplay had not been used by Bolt. As late as 1988, he was quoted as saying, "I don't think a word of Mike's is in the film. I worked day and night with Robert and we never had Mike's script to work from. It was a completely new story."14 But this statement contradicts Bolt's admission to Wilson as well as his formal contract with Academy Pictures, which stated that he was to write a "screenplay with reference to a script by Michael Wilson based upon the life and exploits of Lawrence of Arabia." It seems that, on this point at least, Lean and Spiegel were equivocating.
In fact, a side-by-side comparison of the Bolt and Wilson screenplays clearly indicates that the structure of Wilson's screenplay was appropriated by Lean and Bolt. The final screenplay for Lawrence of Arabia, as Wilson claimed when he argued for equal credit, did follow his blueprint closely. Dialogue was altered and notably improved, and scenes were moved, cut, or added. But the structure of the film, from beginning to end, was Michael Wilson's, as were many of the scenes and some of the dialogue.
The film begins in 1935 with Lawrence kickstarting his motorcycle and speeding along a country lane in Dorsetshire. He swerves to miss two boys on bicycles and is mortally injured in the ensuing crash. The scene then dissolves to St. Paul's in London for Lawrence's memorial service. Various dignitaries are interviewed about Lawrence on the steps of the Cathedral, their assessments mixed to indicate that in death, as in life, Lawrence was a controversial figure. Next follows a flashback to Cairo of the war years where Lawrence is serving as an intelligence officer. Lawrence, portrayed as an enigmatic and insubordinate junior officer, is summoned from the map room by the Chief of Staff and given leave to go to Arabia to assess the fledgling Arab Revolt.
This beginning, with considerable tightening but with some scenes intact, was originally written by Michael Wilson. Bolt argued that when he wrote his screenplay for the film he had not used Wilson's earlier work but had merely followed Lawrence's own account, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926). Obviously, however, when writing Seven Pillars, Lawrence could not have predicted his own manner of death or the time and place of his memorial service, nor had he composed his own elegies. The use of an epilogue and then flashbacks for the opening scenes of the film are Michael Wilson's inventions.
In the film, Lawrence then travels to Arabia where he is to be led by a guide, Tafas, to the desert encampment of Prince Feisal, the Sherif of Mecca's third son and a field commander of the Sherifian forces. Lawrence befriends Tafas and gives him a pistol which, in the first of many ironic gestures, causes the death of the guide. At a well in the desert, where Lawrence and Tafas have stopped to drink, they are approached by a lone Bedouin who, in one of the film's most memorable scenes, materializes from an ominous dot on the horizon. Afraid for his life, Lawrence's guide draws the pistol and is shot to death by the approaching Bedouin, Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif). This scene sets up a soliloquy by Lawrence on the meanness of Arab blood feuds: "Sherif Ali! So long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they remain a little people. A silly people!
Greedy, barbarous, and cruel-as you are!"
As many others that follow, the scene comes straight out of Wilson's earlier screenplay and not from Seven Pillars of Wisdom. In Seven Pillars, Lawrence is attended by two guides and does not give away his se~vice pistol as a gesture of friendship. A guide is not killed at the well and, of course, Lawrence does not begin his Arabian adventure with an angry tirade on desert customs that, in reality, would have won him no friends and might have gotten him killed. A similar scene does take place in Seven Pillars, but Sherif Ali and a companion peacefully share the well with Lawrence, his guides, and with other Bedouin who happen to be watering their camels at the same time. In Seven Pillars, the well account is a humorous, rather than a deadly, encounter.
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