Friday, July 15, 2005
RIP, Ernest Lehman: a brief appreciation
Better late than never. You young folks who have not ever seen Lehman's North by Northwest or Sweet Smell of Success, turn off all your electronic implements RIGHT NOW and rent them. And watch them. And learn, learn, learn. Lehman created a figure of classic evil in the character of J.J. Hunsecker, premiere gossip columnist, dark power, and ruiner of lives from jazz musicians to presidents. Hunsecker surfaced first in a short story, and then in a movie starring Burt Lancaster, who sniffs the night air of Manhattan like the predator he is and says, "I love this dirty town."
The movie is full of dialogue like that, not to mention the blossoming of Tony Curtis as a Serious Actor, playing desperate publicist Sidney Falco, whom, Lancaster dubs, "a cookie full of arsenic." Lehman's script suggests that the cookies from the "cookie cutter 50s" were filled with something other than sugar, and yet its makes you revel, just a little, in the brutal primeval forest of Manhattan night clubs.
There is so much more here to appreciate. Imagine a writer who could do this AND adapt both The Sound of Music AND Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Listen to more about him here. NPR : Recalling the Art of Screenwriter Ernest Lehman
And salute a writer who, when writing North by Northwest, climbed halfway up Mt. Rushmore...because he wrote it into a scene. And then came down...because he didn't want to die before he finished the script.
Better late than never. You young folks who have not ever seen Lehman's North by Northwest or Sweet Smell of Success, turn off all your electronic implements RIGHT NOW and rent them. And watch them. And learn, learn, learn. Lehman created a figure of classic evil in the character of J.J. Hunsecker, premiere gossip columnist, dark power, and ruiner of lives from jazz musicians to presidents. Hunsecker surfaced first in a short story, and then in a movie starring Burt Lancaster, who sniffs the night air of Manhattan like the predator he is and says, "I love this dirty town."
The movie is full of dialogue like that, not to mention the blossoming of Tony Curtis as a Serious Actor, playing desperate publicist Sidney Falco, whom, Lancaster dubs, "a cookie full of arsenic." Lehman's script suggests that the cookies from the "cookie cutter 50s" were filled with something other than sugar, and yet its makes you revel, just a little, in the brutal primeval forest of Manhattan night clubs.
There is so much more here to appreciate. Imagine a writer who could do this AND adapt both The Sound of Music AND Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Listen to more about him here. NPR : Recalling the Art of Screenwriter Ernest Lehman
And salute a writer who, when writing North by Northwest, climbed halfway up Mt. Rushmore...because he wrote it into a scene. And then came down...because he didn't want to die before he finished the script.
