For about a decade during the 50s and 60s, screenwriter and playwright George Axelrod was one of the hottest and most prolific writers in Hollywood. His movie credits include The Seven Year Itch (1955), Bus Stop (1956), Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Paris – When It Sizzles (1964), and How to Murder Your Wife (1965).
Bus Stop, an adaptation of a William Inge play, provides the cinema’s fondest window on Marilyn Monroe. Axelrod viewed Monroe, a close friend, tragically, and so does the movie. Among the actress’s dramatic vehicles, only The Misfits approaches its insight and compassion. But Bus Stop also has Axelrod’s wicked sense of humor.Breakfast at Tiffany’s, loosely drawn from Truman Capote’s novella, was another triumph of adaptation, a heart-on-its-sleeve romantic comedy that revealed the rarely indulged flip side of Axelrod’s cynicism. Tiffany’s is usually given short shrift in discussions of the scriptwriter’s career, as if it were somehow an impersonal project. Capote, too, was a close friend, and staying faithful inside of the restrictions of the day without bowdlerizing the source material was a challenge that whetted the writer’s appetite. Axelrod’s reteaming with Audrey Hepburn, Paris When It Sizzles, turned out to be “Paris When It Fizzles,” but the sweetness, sentimentality, and high-toned comedy of Tiffany’s stands the test of time.The Manchurian Candidate —well, how many movies enjoy a revival and national re-release twenty-seven years after their first exhibition? How many movies of that era were so far ahead of their audience that their comedy and politique are still on the cutting edge today? Richard Condon’s novel was a pet project, ingeniously adapted, then cast and coproduced by Axelrod and the director John Frankenheimer. Its polished blend of black comedy, high-octane thriller, and cautionary political parable remains unique.
That’s how editor Patrick McGilligan describes some of Axelrod’s hit movies in the book “Backstory 3: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 60s,” one of a 4-part series. Here are some notable excerpts from the book, revealing how Axelrod approached the craft of screenwriting.
ON WHY HE DECIDED TO BECOME A WRITER
I have no idea. It never occurred to me to do anything else. I guess I realized I could make a living as a writer during the period when I was miserable at the Hill, a boarding school in Pennsylvania. One afternoon in the winter, when I was supposed to be in the gym, I was goofing off in the library and pulled down a book I had also seen on my father’s bookshelf—[Ernest Hemingway's novel] The Sun Also Rises. I read it in two afternoons, two sittings, and it changed my life. I said to myself, “My God, writing is about conversation. Is this how you do it? I could do this . . . ” It was a revelation.
Very shortly thereafter, I encountered the short stories of William Saroyan—the early, wonderful ones where he’s in a hotel in New York, with his hair freezing because there’s no heat, with all the romance of being a young writer in New York. I thought, “Christ, that’s for me . . . “
When I was eighteen, I wrote a play that actually Dick Aldrich considered for a while. It wasn’t any good, but it had something . . . and I spent some time trying to write short stories for preposterous magazines. Then I sold a half-hour radio play when I was twenty, the first big thing I sold and the first thing I wrote for radio.
I knew a guy in an ad agency who produced radio shows, and he let me go to a rehearsal. I had never seen a radio script before I got a copy of one. The phrase “music up and down” is how they used to do the bridges. That was the “fade in and fade out.” I read that and thought, “Oh, that’s how they do that!” I went home and wrote a radio script, and I sold it.
ON ADAPTING HIS PLAY “THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH” INTO A MOVIE
I lobbied for Billy for the movie. When the play was up for sale, I said, “I want Billy Wilder.” I longed to meet Billy Wilder. [The agent] Irving Lazar got into the act, and he put the package together and offered it to [the agent-producer] Charlie Feldman and Billy Wilder. I was sitting in my kitchen one night and the phone rings and it’s Billy Wilder. He said (Billy Wilder imitation ), “You are putting me in the impossible position of bidding against Loew’s Incorporated!” He said, “You will do the following: you will get on the airplane in the morning; then you will come out here and . . . ” Right away, he started running my life.
I was so in awe of Billy. But we didn’t really make a very good picture. In addition to having a horrible Breen Office problem, the play just didn’t adapt. The claustrophic element of the play is what makes it work—the guy trapped in the little apartment, his imagination soaring out of the apartment. When you open the play up, it loses its tension. Certain stories God doesn’t mean to be movies. Every story has its form, its ideal form. The trick of doing an adaptation is to see if you can take the heart—the genetic code of the play—and transport that code, into another medium… while retaining the integrity of the original code and recoding it into a movie. I have a certain gift for that sometimes. Sometimes, I can see right into a thing and see what the genetic code is. Sometimes, you get touched on the shoulder, and then you can see how to transport it.
What’s amazing to me is that nowadays everybody in the world is writing a screenplay. A screenplay is the hardest single form there is. You can’t make any mistakes. Because it’s not like a book where you can turn back the pages and say, “Oh, that’s what he said!” It’s continuous, razor-edge-of-now action. You aren’t allowed any mistakes, because the audience is a fantastic entity. You can have 1,100 morons sitting in the audience, but when they come together in the darkness, an almost mystical thing happens, a kind of mass unconscious that is smarter than you are. They can spot a phony a mile off.
The first part of a movie has got to be not only engaging their attention in some way but building their trust. If you lose their trust, you can never get it back. They’ve got to feel that they’re in good hands, that the guy who’s telling the story knows what he is doing. They’ll give you ten minutes. They’ll accept any premise. They’ve gone out of the house—or, nowadays, rented the video—in any case, they’ve paid their money, and they’re ready. Tell them a story, and they will listen for ten minutes.
The Seven Year Itch was a funny, funny play that still plays today. It plays all over the world today. I make quite a bit of money in royalties on it—it’s been translated into a number of foreign languages. But the premise of Seven Year Itch is that a guy has an affair with a girl while his wife is away, and [he] feels guilty about it. And the guilt is funny. In the movie, he couldn’t have the affair, but he felt guilty anyway; so the goddamn premise didn’t make any sense.
ON WORKING WITH BILLY WILDER
I’m the typer; he’s the walker. English is Billy’s third language. He doesn’t physically write. He’s always the walker and the talker. He can’t type. I made him use the typewriter once when we finished Itch. I turned the typewriter around and said, “You’ve got to type The End.’”
Billy has a foreigner’s love for American idiom—he is a master of American idiom. But, in overall sentence structure, English is still his third language. It comes out sounding not quite right. Izzy [I.A.L.] Diamond, rest his dear soul, used to say, “I’m a $150,000 secretary.”[*] Which was not true. That was irony!
When I say Billy was the walker, we really walked —because Billy loves to go shopping. We’d work at [20th Century-Fox] in the mornings, then go over to Warners for lunch, because Mr. Blau, in the executive dining room, was Billy’s favorite cook. We’d work a little bit in the afternoon, then go to Beverly Hills and go shopping—for anything. Billy is a compulsive buyer.
I learned so much about everything from Billy. Billy was, is, a wonderful teacher. I learned about art, food, everything. I didn’t learn about writing so much. I learned about real life. Culture. Look around this room. That painting . . . that one-hundred-year-old figure, which Billy gave me . . . Billy’s influence is everywhere.
[Re writing]: Billy has certain rules that are inviolate. Thou Shalt Not Bore. And, Anything Is Permitted—narration, anything you want to do, whatever gets the story across. Billy gave me the courage to do some of the nutty stuff we did in The Manchurian Candidate. If it works, do it.
ON THE MOVIE “BUS STOP”
In the case of Bus Stop, I believe the movie of Bus Stop is a better movie than the play of Bus Stop is a play. Because Bus Stop is not a particularly good play of Bill Inge’s, but it had two unforgettable characters—the chanteuse and the cowboy.
The play just plays in one set, at the bus stop, and I had to open it up. I had a brilliant scene in the screenplay for Bus Stop, which the Breen Office just murdered. In the play, the cowboy is bragging about how literate he is—that he can recite the Gettysburg Address. In the movie, I had him break into the girl’s room in the morning, while she is asleep, just to prove how literate he is. As he’s screwing her, he is reciting the Gettysburg Address. It went on and on: “We are met on a great battlefield . . . ” The longer it went on, the funnier it was, but he has to be screwing her while he’s doing it. Hilarious scene. But, of course, the Breen Office didn’t allow them to screw. So it was a botch.
The scene on the bus in Bus Stop, where she’s [Marilyn Monroe] pouring her heart out to Hope Lange, was a nightmare to shoot. “Rear projection” wasn’t as good as it is now, so they kept running out of film. We had this rickety insert of a bus, and a rear projection screen, and Hope and Marilyn with a big, long speech, and Marilyn couldn’t remember the words. Josh’s dialogue director was propped up just outside of the screen, feeding her the lines, which she would parrot back. She had reached a point in her neurosis where if anybody said, “Cut!” she took it as an affront, burst into tears, and ran into her dressing room. So Josh [Logan - the film's director] never said cut. He’d run the whole nine hundred feet, keep running it and running it while he talked to her.
He was a huge man. Josh, so most of the time the screen was filled with Josh’s behind and Marilyn’s face, with this voice coming from the sky reading the lines that Marilyn would parrot. It took four days to shoot this scene, but it cut together like a dream, partly because Hope Lange is a professional actress and we’d cut to her. Little pieces of what Marilyn would do were inspired, magical, but interspersed with tears and “oh, shit!” and “what the fuck!” and getting her back together—all of it with the camera running because you couldn’t say cut. God, the goings-on!
ON “THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE”
Johnny [Frankenheimer] and I had become friends and were looking around for something else to do. I read a review of The Manchurian Candidate in the New Yorker and bought the book [by Richard Condon (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959)] the next day. I thought, “Jesus Christ, what a fucking movie!” There was a lot of resistance. It was everything the studios didn’t want—political satire, worse than regular satire. It was not easy, but [Frank] Sinatra made it all possible. Sinatra agreed to play [Bennett] Marco, and that’s the only way United Artists would let us do it.
I was good friends with Frank anyway. I met Frank through Goody Ace. He had wanted to do Seven Year Itch, back when his career was on its ass. I had known Frank for years. We were very close friends.
I wrote the first draft of The Manchurian Candidate in New York, in a house in Bedford Village, in the summer. Then I came out here in August or September of ’61 to work with Frankenheimer, who produced Manchurian with me, and to prepare the film. I stayed here until ’68, when we moved to London.
For film, I do two very specifically different things. I’m a pretty good adapter, and I can do the odd original. They’re two very different techniques. The very best adaptation I ever did was The Manchurian Candidate. It is a brilliant, wildly chaotic novel. Wonderful voice. To take the essence of that and try to make it so that it worked for a film was a challenge.
A very good example of breaking the rules of the craft is The Manchurian Candidate screenplay: it breaks every single known rule. It’s got dream sequences, flashbacks, narration out of nowhere. When we got in trouble, it had just a voice explaining stuff. Everything in the world that you’re told not to do. But that was part of its genetic code, the secret of the crossword puzzle. It worked for this script.
For example, one scene: When the book describes the reading matter of the hero, it says his library consists of books which have been picked out for him at random by a guy in a bookstore in San Francisco from a list of titles he happens to have on hand at the moment. What I did was transpose that, so when the colonel [played by Douglas Henderson] comes in to fire Marco, he notices that Marco has a lot of books. I had Frank read off the titles of all his books: “The Ethnic Choices of Arabs, The Jurisdictional Practices of the Mafia . . . ” With Frank saying the titles, it makes an excellent scene. But it was not a scene in the book—I had to make a scene out of a piece of description by Condon. That’s what I mean by transposing the gene.
The main trick of Manchurian was to make the brainwashing believable. What I did was dramatize the way the prisoners were brainwashed into believing they were attending a meeting of a lady’s garden society. I had the further idea of making Corporal Melvin [played by James Edwards] black and doing the whole second half of the dream with black ladies. I remember we shot for days, getting all the different angles—front and back, black and white. At the time, we weren’t entirely sure how it was going to fit together. We had miles of film. It was bewildering.
Meanwhile, we had to screw the [production] board all up and schedule all Frank’s scenes up front. We had to shoot all his stuff in fifteen days—because he has the attention span of a gnat—to keep his interest. Then he was set to leave. He was going off to Europe or some place.
Before he left, he announced, “I want to see every foot of film that I’m in before I leave.” Johnny Frankenheimer said, “You can see everything except the brainwashing sequence.” Frank said, “Oh, no, no, no. I want to see everything, ” in a voice where you felt kneecaps were going to be broken. Now, this is totally self-serving but absolutely true: I said, “Let me take a crack at it because I really understand what I am trying to do . . . ” The editor, Ferris Webster, and I went back to my office, and we got the script out. I just penciled the script where the shots were—cut, cut, cut—then he went back and put it together, and we never changed the sequence. That’s how it was cut, that magical sequence.
ON THE PROCESS OF WRITING
Writing is such a mysterious process for me. For example, I don’t use a computer, because I like the manual feeling of building something with my hands. Someone said to me recently, “Computers are wonderful. You can just push a button and change a character’s name.” Change a character’s name! In my opinion, you’ve got to go to court and throw the whole script out if you have to change a character’s name. The name is part of his identity. When I want to make a change, I retype the whole page. Each time I put something through the typewriter, it gets tighter and cleaner—and better. The first half of any script of mine has been rewritten forty—fifty times. That’s the way you begin to get the stuff to jump off the page.
ON THE “MYSTERY” OF GETTING A MOVIE MADE
I’m the least New Age person you are ever going to find, but there is something mysterious about how a movie gets made. There is a mystery. That’s why I think screenplays are so hard. It’s not that there are no rules; there are, but nobody knows what they are, and they change with each picture. So you’re trying to play the game according to a very rigid set of rules which nobody has explained to you. Any violation, you lose. Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go.
Once you think you’ve got the rules, they change. It’s like doing a cross-word puzzle; every day there’s a new theme. This morning in the L.A. Times, the clue was “Planes from NY.” The answer was “JFK’s SSTs.” Once you’ve got the idea that in this puzzle the trick is initials, it begins to come together. But if you try that with tomorrow’s puzzle, it’s not going to work.
Each picture is like a crossword puzzle in a funny way. Every story has rules that govern it—you don’t know what they are, but you’ve got to solve them.
You miss much more often than you succeed. I’ve been a professional writer, from 1940 until now—over fifty years—and I have a relatively small body of work, because a lot of it doesn’t work out. I have maybe five or six pictures that I’m proud of, three plays that I’m proud of, and a lot of stuff that didn’t materialize, maybe because I misread the rules.
They all break your heart a little bit. But I’ve got a big heart.
Great stuff in this interview. Thanks, Scott.
I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Axelrod late in his life. He was very funny, hilariously self-deprecating. I don't think I've ever been as thrilled to meet anyone in Hollywood. I read that interview years ago and I've always loved his axioms: "Thou Shalt Not Bore, and Anything Is Permitted—narration, anything you want to do, whatever gets the story across." Amen.