Hollywood Studio Magazine (February 1972)

STANLEY KRAMER (center) walks with the six boy stars in his movie, “Bless the Beasts and Children” for which Mac Benoff wrote the script. The youths are: Miles Chapin, Bob Kramer, Barry Robins, Marc Chanian, Nill Mumy and Darel Glaser. but gave writers great freedom.” He tells of being in a car pool of six writers, including Frank Cavett and William Faulkner, who worked at Warners. “Our collective earnings amounted to $15,000 a week but each morning all this talent squeezed into one auto and began concentrating on the most pressing problem of the day — making it to the studio before 9 o’clock. At Warners, the timeclock was King. At the end of each day, we writers had to line up and tramp through the clocking office so a guard could mark our time of departure as he had recorded the moment we checked in.” At RKO Studios, Benoff got involved in a writing situation that the Marx Brothers could have used in any of their movies. He was assigned to rewrite a script for a movie, “The Girl Rush,” which at the last minute was shifted next door to Paramount for production and release. Unknown to Benoff, the writer whose script he was revamping was a personal friend of the director. The original writer was opposed to having his brain child altered. “Each day I would rush my pages to the director and get a glowing ‘good job’ reaction, then speed back to turn out some more, while my lines presumably were being spoken on sound stages which I had no time to visit,” says Benoff. “The first writer was secretly getting my rewrite and restoring them to his own version. I never knew until it was all over that Fd been sweating for naught”. Benoff had come to Hollywood from New York where he had created and written the popular radio show, “Duffy’s Tavern.” A week after he arrived in our Bagdad of Ballyhoo, he was signed to a six months’ contract by Paramount. The thin young man of 27 years was given an office and a secretary and told he would be receiving an assignment soon. But after weeks of doing nothing, he went looking for action and found his way into the office of producer Ed Leshin. What he got was a shocking fill-in turmoil, as it then existed in the movie industry. Leshin recommended that the young writer go play golf until the waters settled. Someone was sure to contact him. By contract-renewal time, Benoff had become a low handicap golfer. But he still had no screeen credit and again he went looking. The studio had bought rights to the title, “Duffy’s Tavern”, so Benoff quickly assembled a good story line from some of his radio scripts and found an interested producer. The producer and Benoff ultimately were summoned, with story editor William Dozier, to the office of Buddy De Sylva, then the studio’s production head. As they strode across the carpet of De Sylva’s long office to discuss their idea, De Sylva looked up and said, “NO!” Dozier and the producer did an about-face and hurried toward the door. Benoff stood alone. “When the others realized I wasn’t with them, they came back and grabbed onto me as I was starting to argue,” Benoff recalls. “Dozier glared at me. I got the message. I walked with them. I kept on going after we got to their offices. I went back to the golf course, where I stayed until my contract ended.” Soon he was “elsewhere,” at a studio where he was put on a project that had been ordered expedited “right from the front office.” He began to work so hard on this first chance at screen credit that he did not notice the changes that were taking place. “Offices all around mine gradually became just empty rooms,” he says. “I began to miss the usual noises in the building. Then one day I realized nobody had been bringing me my Continued on Page 19 THE CAMPERS are watching the hunters slaughter the buffalo. From left to right, Bill Mumy, Bob Kramer, Darel Glaser, Miles Chapin, Barry Robins and Marc Vahanian in the Columbia Pictures presentation of Stanley Kramer’s production of “Bless the Beasts & Children.” 8