The Worker Bees…..

                                                    now introduces
                                            ……the Script Writer 

In Worker Bees, we have covered the director, the fashion designer, the scene creator, but we haven’t covered the people who give these people the road map they need to do their jobs. This person is called the Scriptwriter.
The script is the basis of the movie.  It is the lines that the actors say, the atmosphere that needs to be set by the set designers, and the basic line from which the costume designer can design clothes. It’s also the starting place for when authors are asked to write novelizations for movies, such as Iron Man, Star Wars or the latest Star Trek film.

Sometimes they write simply from an idea that they or someone else had.   Other times, they take a book and change it from what is written on the page, to something that can be seen in a theater.   There are competitions, challenges (such as Script Frenzy) and classes on script writing.  There are even computer programs created to help script writers.

They have been in the news recently, as the Screen Writers Guild held a strike a few years ago.  For the most part, this effected television scripts, earning truncated seasons for many shows, and a few cancelations when the shows couldn’t stand after the strike ended.

Jane Austen

The script writer is very important to the process of creating a visual product, be it television, theatre or a film. To show this, I’ve chosen Pride and Prejudice.  It’s a well known book, and has had several movies made of it, even one well known film based on a novel inspired by it (Bridget Jones’ Diary). Each time a movie was made, the screen writer was given the task of taking Jane Austen’s vision and channeling it into something they could put on screen.
     

Jane Austen has had 43 movies made based on her six books, twelve of which are for Pride and Prejudice alone. And this is not including the many films based on the same premise of one of her novels (for example, Clueless which is based on Emma).  I am not going to focus on all twelve versions of Pride and Prejudice, but I’ll at least list them all.

Pride and Prejudice 1938

This was a television production starring Curigwen Lewis and Andrew Osbourn as Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy respectively. This was produced in the UK, with Michael Berry listed with writing credits. It was one of the first TV programs.

Pride and Prejudice 1940

Garson and Olivier

The Story:
Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier star in this version. It walks away slightly from the normal path and puts the story in another time period, and as such changed some of the order of events. While not exactly true to the book, the spirit is there and the movie is good on its own.
Some of the major differences in this movie from the novel by Jane Austin are in how the characters are written.  Mr. Darcy isn’t as shy, and Aunt Catherine is cheering on Darcy and Elizabeth instead of trying to keep them apart (although she does keep up appearances to make sure Elizabeth is the right one for her nephew).
Some lines that are usually given to particular characters were given to other characters. It fit within the movie, but I know it was jarring hearing what I recall being Darcy’s words coming out of the mouth of Wickham.

Edward Ashley as Wickham

The Script Writers: The main credited writers are Aldous Huxley and Jane Murfin, with Helen Jerome credited with dramatization and Victor Heerman is listed unaccredited.

Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley should sound familiar. He is a famous author of several books, including Brave New World. He is also credited with the screenplay of Jane Eyre (1944) and Madam Curie (1943).
Huxley came from a family of people who made names for themselves. Two of his brothers were both well documented biologists, his father a biographer and school master and his grandfather Thomas a well known Darwinism theorist.

He was born on Godalming, Surrey, England in 1894. His parents, having founded a school were his teachers for most of his youth, including his time at Hillside School where the teacher was his mother until her death in 1908 when he was fourteen. At seventeen, he contracted Keratitis which caused him to be nearly blind for a few years. Do to this factor, he was not allowed to join the British Army during the First World War. However, it cleared up enough after three years that he was able to attend Eton and Oxford. After he graduated he began to teach French at Eton, where he taught other future well known authors such as Eric Blair, more commonly known as George Orwell (Animal Farm, 1984).

He continued to take various jobs, each inspiring in a way one of his stories.  His first novel was published shortly after his graduation in 1916. He moved around the world, settling in Italy for awhile before finally finding a home in LA in 1937 where he lived till his death on November 22, 1963. He continued to write and publish novels, including Brave New World (1932), and The Island (1962).
His career in Hollywood was minor, with only a few writing credits including Pride and Prejudice, and Madam Curie. He tried his hand at Alice in Wonderland, but his script was rejected by Walt Disney.  It appeared Hollywood in general was not ready for his type of writing.
He shares his date of death with President John F. Kennedy and fellow novelist C.S. Lewis.
 

Jane Murfin

Jane Murfin was a well known script writer. She wrote scripts for MGM for years, including several film versions of Smilin Through, one of which stared Jeanette MacDonald.  
She was born on October 27, 1884 in Quincy Michigan. She got into the film business in 1913 by becoming a scenarist. During her career she wrote scripts and plays for theater, television, and film. She occasionally wrote under a pseudonym Alan Langdon Martin with Jane Cowl. Together they wrote Smilin’ Though. They also wrote Lilac Time, Daybreak and Information Please together. Originally Broadway plays, all four were made into films.   After her first marriage to Laurence Trimble, She continued to write plays, but also tried her hand in producing films starring her own dog Strongheart and directing the 1924 film Flapper Wives which was based on a play she wrote with Cowl. The pair dissolved their production company in 1924.

Jane and husband actor Donald Crisp

After her divorce from Trimble in 1927, she went back to writing scripts for MGM and RKO. She wrote several films, even getting nominated for the script to What Price Hollywood? in 1932.  
She remarried in August 1932 to Donald Crisp, but the marriage ended in divorce after twelve years in 1944. She passed away on August 10, 1955 in Los Angeles, California. However she was not yet done working. In 2008, her screenplay The Woman (based on a play by Clare Booth Luce) was used as the basis for a film starring Meg Ryan, Annette Bening, Eva Mendes and more. While the script of this movie was written by another script writer, the film was a remake of the 1939 film using Murfin’s script.
On her grave is the inscription “Still “Smilin’ Though””
The 1939 version of The Woman also has a connection to this version of Pride and Prejudice. The actress who plays Mrs. Bennet, Mary Boland, appears in this clip:

More on Scriptwriters in coming issues.

Artist…Lanouette  LLOL