The screen writer (Apr-Oct 1948)

stuff. Those were his words. (The word mature was often in his vocabulary.) The reactions he got troubled Bentley. "What's happened, Bent?" a story editor would write. "Have you lost your zing? I still remember ..." and they'd mention an old script that had done well years before. They'd constantly remind him of the days when his stuff had carried the unmistakable hallmark of the sure, fresh hand. When his curve-ball would drop at the plate and his fast ball was a holy terror. Being a writer, of course, Bentley knew nothing of writers and their tics and phobias, their unnamed fears and terrors in the night. He had written, and well, and authoritatively, of men in death row, foxholes, psychiatric wards, men trapped in submarines, beleaguered desert forts and marriage, and he knew all about his characters. They were soldiers, sailors, chaplains, ski instructors, firemen, clerks and lumberjacks and he knew them all well. But he knew nothing about writers. If he had, of course, he might have understood his recent mood. Ignorant of his own kind, he had nothing to go on and he looked eagerly in every direction for a course of action. IT was not long in coming to him. He read that one studio was not buying any new stories, that it was going to dip into its accumulated inventory, that it was going to remake all its old successes. The joke was current that another lot, doing nothing was being called Remake Something or Other. T.hey were busy doing nothing but remaking their old pictures. The ads in the trade papers blazoned slogans like "Proven Hits." When the studios weren't making remakes, they were doing sequels. In a flash of illumination that can only be characterized as inspiration, a word he, as a professional, detested, Bentley had an idea. What was good enough for the studios would be good enough for him. If they could remake, why, by jingo, so could he. He found his old scripts all over the house, in the cellar, in his daugh ter's desk, propping up a bureau in his son's room. They were in cartons out in the garage; he even found one in his dog's house. He started writing like mad. He remembered that Shaw was just about his age when he started making money. Gide hadn't hit his stride until his forties; Maugham and Melville and Anatole France. He snapped his fingers at all the sensitive young men with one play behind them who always seemed to be making the "Scribbling" column in Daily Variety. Wait, he thought, till they'd been through all he'd been through. Would they have staying power? That's the question, he thought. He rewrote his first story, the one about two fellows who worked a plantation in South America, the one wanting to quit all the time, the other conniving to keep him in the tropics. He freshened it with allusions to Reds, nuclear fission and the "Queen Elizabeth." It was as good as ever. He did a rewrite on his charming (he had had an extended period of being "charming" in his youth) story about the poetical young man who lives behind the lion cage in the Central Park zoo, who falls in love with the picture of a girl in the society page, the girl he meets in the rain when her Yorkshire terrier breaks his leash and runs to him. That powerful story of Man Against Elements — how they pushed the tunnel through when everybody said it couldn't be done, that it was sheer madness, and how when they had done it the man had lost his best friend and won a wife. His screwball comedy about the husband who isn't sure of his wife so he gets his best friend to pretend to make love to his wife only the best friend falls in love and the wife, not to be dumb, plays along with the best friend and in turn gets her best friend — well, that was as good as ever. And he re-did his story about men against death, the pals who, in three versions he had written years before (he was surprised to find he had done this years ago) had matched themselves against submarines, airplanes and Zeppelins. It was a natural for jet airplanes and supersonic speeds. The wife could still chew her fingernails at home, begging her husband to give up jets — this time — and in the big scene, the devil-may-care hero who found himself falling in love with the wife, his best friend's wife, of course, got up earlier and hopped into the experimental jet her husband was scheduled to fly and pushed it so hard that it flattened out against the supersonic wall like a tomato, but not before he had radioed the men on the ground what he was up against so that it would never happen again. BENTLEY prospered. His hair he was sure, started growing again. He lost weight, admitted "The Naked and the Dead" was quite a good book, despite its author's extreme youth, and was planning a trip to France next summer to spend some blocked francs. He started running himself just like a studio. He made his wife rise at the same hour every morning. His kids followed a strict regimen, having to punch in and out every day. The cook and the maidlaundress were subjected to rigid time-motion studies to make sure they functioned with "optimum efficiency." He fired the gardener and got a schoolboy. If Economy was the answer in the studios, Economy and Remakes, it would be the answer for Bentley. He bawled out his girl for using too many carbons, for sharpening pencils unnecessarily and for changing pencils when there was some workable lead left in the stub. He grew strict about typewriter ribbons, outgoing phone calls and electric bills and unnecessary use of water and towels. So at last Roderick Bentley had found peace, happiness and security. He might even have been content. But despite everything, he was still troubled, especially late at night when sleep was hard to achieve. What, he thought, when I finish remaking all my stories, what then ? He would toss nervously in bed. Can I remake the remakes? He decided he would face this problem when the studios faced it. That enabled him to sleep, for the time being at least. 22 The Screen Writer, October, 1948