#Script color revisions movie

The famously exacting Alfred Hitchcock had his own ideas, however, and having rejected Uris’ attempts at a draft, hired Vertigo writer Samuel A Taylor to prepare a new one. Hollywood screenwriter Michael Wilson (who’d been blacklisted during the McCarthyist flap in 1950) had written the original draft for Lawrence Of Arabia, which Lean disliked.īased on the Cold War thriller novel of the same name by Leon Uris, Topaz was initially adapted for the screen by the author himself. Lawrence Of Arabia (1962)ĭavid Lean’s sparkling three-and-a-half-hour biopic bears little evidence of its mishap-strewn production, caused in small part by the lack of a finished script. By contrast, Sydney Pollack’s 1995 remake did start with a finished script, and was a flop. It’s a testament to Wilder and Lehman’s talent that Sabrina turned out to be another critical and financial success, with many reviewers ironically praising Bogart’s performance as the finest in his career. It’s said that Wilder even asked his leading lady Audrey Hepburn to stall the production by pretending to be ill, with the delay giving him more time to finish writing.

This led to a fair amount of tension on set, as a rather grumpy Humphrey Bogart – who was already convinced that he’d been miscast – lost his temper with Lehman over the absence of rewritten scenes.

Like that earlier film, Sabrina’s script was still being written by Wilder and Ernest Lehman as scenes were being filmed.

It’s said that Wilder’s response was a swift, pithy, “Go shit in your hat.” Sabrina (1954)įour years after the Oscar-winning Sunset Boulevard, Wilder directed the less controversial Sabrina. After a private screening, MGM boss Louis B Mayer loudly stated, “You should be tarred and feathered and run out of Hollywood!”

#Script color revisions movie

Aware that their movie, which didn’t show Hollywood in a particularly positive light, would horrify both Paramount and the board of examiners, Wilder and Brackett was produced under the title A Can Of Beans, while pages of the script were submitted to the censors a few pages at a time to obscure what the story was actually about.Īlthough minor dialogue changes were still forced on the script, Wilder and Brackett’s ploy worked – the movie was a critical and financial hit, and predictably, ruffled quite a few feathers in Hollywood.