Documentary News Letter (1947-1949)

146 DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER Reprinted from the July issue by kind permission of the 'Screenwriter' WRITING AND REALIZATION By MEYER LEVIN it takes only a few minutes to write a scene in which a runaway boy wakes up on a high rocky ledge in Palestine, to find himself surrounded by sheep, with an Arab shepherd staring at him. But when you go to make the scene, in precisely the spot you had in mind when you wrote it, you discover that the equipment-truck can only go within a few hundred yards of the rocks because the driver does not want to risk his vehicle on a ploughed field. You help lug the camera equipment the rest of the way. The shepherd who was to be there at four o'clock with the sheep is found in a meadow a mile away at four o'clock, because he says his sheep could not feed on the rocks. You push and goad the sheep, but by the time they reach the scene the cameraman decides that the light is on the hairline of departure. There may be time for just one take. Then it is discovered that the sheep simply will not stay on the rocky ledge long enough for a take. They scramble away. Finally you make the scene without the sheep. But it isn't what you wrote. At night, worrying about it, you suddenly realize that the scene was wrongly written. It should have been goats. So the next day you decide to try it with goats. Although there are goatherds all over the mountainside, there are none within four miles of this particular spot on the day you want them. You go to Tiberius and personally lift a sufficient number of goats on to the truck. You transport them. You help herd them up the hill. And after a few dozen major and minor crises, and hours of toil as a goatherd, Arab-pacifier, reflector-holder and assistant camera boy, you get the scene that was so easy to write. The French have a word for it. They call it realization. The realization of Survivors, in Palestine, was a six-month try to catch a dawn shot, scarcely an evening that wasn't spent desperately hunting for a character for tomorrow's scene, because the one who had been cast had been called away by his Youth Group for a 'hike'. Every word that was innocently typed in the script, which was written in six weeks 'from scratch', later entailed laborious hours of realization. And yet, as the writer, I could not permit myself to feel that the rublic Relationship t Urns Ltd .tvichard lVLassingham in charge of production 29 WHITEHALL, LONDON, S.W. I * WHITEHALL 4OOO final responsibility of realization could rest entirely with someone else. In a studio set-up, it is simple for the writer to say that what he wrote was beautiful, but that after the script departed from his hands any number of people mangled and butchered it far beyond recognition. While this is usually true, there are surely times when every writer in his soul smiles at the task he has given the producers and directors, knowing that what he has so easily written is most difficult to realize, and inwardly glad that he does not have to take the responsibility for putting it on the screen. Conversely, and more often, the writer aches with the apprehension that what he has written cannot exactly and precisely be understood, I through the words themselves; he feels that an> I realizer, however talented, is bound to get the j atmosphere or the emphasis wrong, and knows I that the only true way to make films is for the writer to be present throughout the shooting and I to have at least as much control as anyone else in I the realization. Few writers ever get such an opportunity. Bui I with the increasing trend toward story-documentary technique, stimulated by the successful experiments produced during the war. these opportunities are increasing. And when Herbert Kline and I set out to make our Palestine film, it \sas agreed that this was to be the method. I would assume equal production responsibility and have equal production authority with him. He would direct the film, but the realization had to conform to the intention of the script. As it worked out in practice. Kline acted as my producer while I was writing the script, I acted as his producer while he was directing the film It need not be imagined that this procedure is perfect and that it always works harmoniously. Nor does it mean that each lakes responsibility for the merits of the other's work. In the end, the w riting stands on its own and the direction standi on its own. But although the French often use the word realization in the same way that we use the word direction, it reflects only their oxer-emphasis on the role of the director of films, for the realization in this type of film is trul> the work of both, and I believe that writers may justifiably insist that it is part o( their function in all filmmaking to have such a share in realization. As joint producers we decided from the K ginning that in the case o( severel) dispute, scenes, where we could arri\e at no agreement . to the method of filming, we would film both ve" sions and decide which to use when we sa 1 what they looked like on the screen. It becan 11 necessary to do this in only three or foi instances. To the making of Survivors, I brought a cor turning interest in Palestine that had begun Wit I m\ first visit to the count rv in 1925. I had ak<