|
Today, with three of the four principals now dead, and Robert Bolt not inclined to answer any questions about Wilson's contribution to the film, any attempt to sort out the conflicting claims or discern the personal motivations involved in this dispute would be largely conjecture. Did David Lean, perhaps because he felt 'betrayed' by Michael Wilson's walking off the picture, continue to hold a personal grudge against the screenwriter? Did Sam Spiegel believe he was contractually justified in denying Michael Wilson a screen credit or was he simply taking advantage of a blacklisted screenwriter? Had Robert Bolt gone through so many rewrites for David Lean that he honestly felt the final shooting script was entirely his own creation? Was Michael Wilson correct in his suspicion that he was denied screen credit not simply because of David Lean's dissatisfaction but because of Sam Spiegel's discomfort with his HUAC “unfriendly witness" status and his refusal to "clear" himself?
What is beyond debate is that Michael Wilson was denied a screen credit he clearly deserved. The 1989 restoration of Lawrence of Arabia and its rerelease in a new "director's cut" version represented an ideal opportunity to finally place Michael Wilson's name next to that of Robert Bolt on the screen. In 1988, in fact, as the film was being restored, friends and family of Michael Wilson, who had died in 1978, approached the Writers Guild of America to enlist its support for formally recognizing Wilson's screenplay credit. Writer and producer Paul Jarrico, Wilson's brother-in-law, made an impassioned presentation to the Guild's board of directors in Los Angeles and received a favorable, highly sympathetic response. Brian Walton, the board's Executive Director, however, cautioned against publicly demanding that Columbia Pictures restore the screen credit and instead offered to make a quieter, behind-the- scenes effort among studio executives.
Whatever effort that might have been made, however, came to naught, presumably because of Columbia's fears of angering David Lean, who adamantly continued to deny that Wilson deserved any credit for the film's screenplay. Restoration supervisor Robert A. Harris says he tentatively broached the screenplay credit issue at one point, but Lean stuck to his story that he and Bolt had not used Wilson's screenplay at all. Since Harris needed to stay on the director's good side, he opted to stay out of the dispute. Unfortunately, as author Larry Ceplair has commented, "David Lean literally went to his grave refusing to allow Wilson to share the credit with Robert Bolt."18
Cheryl Rhoden, Public Affairs spokesperson for the Writers Guild, explained recently that the Guild today continues to regard the Michael Wilson claim as an "open matter " which, along with other unacknowledged or pseudonymous credits for blacklist-era films, is reviewed "from time to time" by an ad-hoc committee.19 Clearly, then, with David Lean no longer an obstacle, the time has come for the Writers Guild of America, in recognition of its sister guild's 1963 ruling, to officially acknowledge Michael Wilson's coauthorship of the screenplay for Lawrence of Arabia.20
[In September of 1995, the Writers Guild formally announced that Michael Wilson would receive credit.--ed.]
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to Michael Wilson's family for permission to use a copy of his script for Lawrence of Arabia in the Wilson Collection at the UCLA Theater Arts Library. The script is the revised second draft of September 27, 1960. With the exception of the January 5th, 1961 letter from Lean to Spiegel, provided by Kevin Brownlow of Photoplay Productions in London, correspondence quoted from or referred to in this article is housed at The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin, at The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, and in the Wilson Collection at the UCLA Theater Arts Library in Los Angeles. Thanks to Larry Ceplair and Gary Crowdus for research for this article.
1. Since Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson were blacklisted at the time, Sam Spiegel decided to give credit for the screenplay to Pierre Boulle (1912-1994), the French author of the novel on which the film was based. When the film won the Academy Award for Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium-along with six other Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Alec Guinness), as well as for Cinematography, Editing, and Music-the award was accepted on behalf of Boulle (who didn't even speak English) by David Lean. In a special ceremony at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1985, the widows of Carl Foreman (1914-1984) and Michael Wilson (1914-1978) were presented their husbands' posthumous Oscars.
2. In 1951, during the height of the anticommunist witch hunt in Hollywood, Wilson was subpoenaed to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). He refused to testify, citing his First and Fifth Amendment privileges, and, after being branded by the Committee as "a communist, past or present," was promptly blacklisted by the Association of Motion Picture Producers. Barred from employment by the major studios, Wilson joined the ranks of blacklisted screenwriters working pseudonymously on scripts at a fraction of their usual fees. He and his family left the U.S. in 1956 and lived in France for eight years, during which time he worked, uncredited, on numerous films in addition to The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia, including The Tempest (1958) and Five Branded Women Ll 958),
Before being blacklisted in 1951, Wilson won the Academy Award for his screenplay for A Place in the Sun (1951) and an Academy Award nomination for Five Fingers (1952). He was later denied a second Academy Award for Friendly Persuasion (1956), a film he had scripted some years earlier, because in 1957 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had written a new bylaw stating that no person who admitted he was a Communist or who refused to answer questions before "any duly constituted Federal legislative committee" was eligible to win an Oscar. As a result, no screenplay credit at all appears on the film! Wilson's post-blacklist credits include such films as The Sandpiper (1965), The Planet ofthe Apes (1968), and Chel (1969, a film he disowned). His most famous credit is for the blacklist-era labor and feminist classic, Salt of the Earth (1953).
3. Telegram to Michael Wilson from David Lear, February 3, 1960.
4. Letter to Sam Spiegel from David Lean, the Philadelphia Hotel, Amman, Jordan, January 5, 1961.
5. Interview with Michael Wilson, Positif #64/65, 1964, p. 94 (translation by the author).
6. "In Search of Lawrence of Arabia" by William K. 7insser, Esquire, June 1961, pp. 101-104.
7. Letter to Irwin Margulies of Margulies & Hert from Michael Wilson, March 7, 1961.
8. Interview with Robert Bolt in journal of the British Association of Cine, Television & Allied Technicians, May 1975.
9. Letter to Sam Spiegel from Michael Wilson, November7,1962.
10. Letter to James Johnson, General Secretary of the British Screen Writers' Guild, from Michael VVIson, November 28, 1962.
11. Letter to Robert Bolt from Michael Wilson, November 29, 1962,
12. Letter to Michael Wilson from Robert Bolt, December 3, 1962.
13. lbid,
14. Telephone interview with David Lean by David Robb, quoted in his article in Daily Variety, October 25, 1988.
15. Positif, op. cit., p. 94 (translation by the author).
16. The Village Voice, December 20, 1962.
17. Robert Bolt's controversial interpretation of T.E. Lawrence is one of a number of aspects explored in "Lawrence ofArabia: The Cinematic (Re)Writing of History" by Gary Crowdus, Cineaste, Vol. XVII, No. 21 1989, pp. 14-21,
18. "The Writers Guild Agrees to Correct the Historical Record" by Larry Ceplair, letter, Cineaste, Vol. XVIII, No. 4, 1991, p, 3.
19. Phone interview by Gary Crowdus with Cheryl Rhoden, Director of Public Affairs, Writers Guild of America, west, August 18, 1994,
20. The story of the writing of both Michael Wilson's and Robert Bolt's screenplays for Lawrence of Arabia is examined in detail in a chapter of Adrian Turner's forthcoming book, The Making of David Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia, " to be published in the U.K. this fall by Dragon's World. Turner's book also includes never-before-published documents such as Michael Wilson's "Lawrence of Arabia~ Elements and Facets of the Theme" and Robert Bolt's "Apologia," originally intended to accompany and explain the published screenplay of Lawrence of Arabia, which was never published.
Additional light may also be shed on this episode in the career of one of England's greatest filmmakers in Kevin Brownlow's forthcoming biography of David Lean, due for publication later this year in the U.K. and the U.S
|
