13 - Howard Hawks
from PART IV - INTERVIEWS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2013
Summary
This interview took place in Mr. Hawks's home in Palm Springs, California, on May 24, 1976. He was 79years old. Mr. Hawks was very generous with his time—we talked for four hours—and a few weeks after the interview he was good enough to send me the two Faulkner scripts he had mentioned. One of them turned out to be War Birds, on which Faulkner had been working at MGM, with a new title, A Ghost Story. (It can be found in my book Faulkner's MGM Screenplays.) The other one, the vampire story, was Dreadful Hollow—not an original as Hawks remembered but Faulkner's adaptation of the novel of the same title by Irina Karlova. It still has not been produced. To prompt Hawks's memory, I brought screenplays for the films that he and Faulkner had worked on together, beginning with Turn About (from Faulkner's story “Turn about, ” which was first published as “Turn About”; it was released as Today We Live) and including The Road to Glory, To Have and Have Not, and The Big Sleep. He touched on many things besides Faulkner, including the contributions of a chorus girl he called “Stuttering Sam” to the screenplay of To Have and Have Not, his own contributions to The Bridge on the River Kwai, the influence ofHis Girl Friday on Citizen Kane, and his use of “opposites” in I Was a Male War Bride. Just part of what's wonderful here is the way he talks in scenes. […]
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- Selected Film Essays and Interviews , pp. 89 - 128Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2013