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61-507: The screenplay by Jay Presson Allen , adapted from her novel, won her the David di Donatello Award for Best Screenplay of a Foreign Film. This is MacGraw's last leading role in a film. Max Herschel, the married, wealthy, vulgar, egotistical, middle-aged head of a corporate empire, is satisfied with the somewhat casual love/hate relationship he shares with his mistress and protegee, television producer "Bones" Burton, just as it is, but she wants

122-487: A script doctor and observing particularly salacious crime trials from the benches in Manhattan Criminal Court. Allen had just about given up writing any more movies from beginning to end, preferring to do lucrative rewrites. It had stopped being fun for her. Script 'development' translated to 'scripts written by committee', but the upside was that "developed" scripts tend to need rewrites – from outside

183-542: A child, but the play came back from Whitehead's office rejected. Allen waited for a couple of months and sent it back, rightly figuring that some reader had rejected it instead of Whitehead himself. This time Whitehead read the play and instantly optioned it, but due to casting problems her play was never produced on stage. The reader who had initially rejected her play was Lewis M. Allen , whom she would later marry. Allen returned to New York and performed on radio and in cabaret, both of which she loathed, and would go through

244-424: A devastating situation." Friends of Capote were amazed at her accuracy portraying a man she had only met but not known, and there was much question about how many of the lines are Capote's and how many Allen's; she maintained that at least 70% of the dialogue is Capote's own. When she was not writing, Allen and her husband were among the most visible of Manhattan's theater crowd. She would spend her later years as

305-435: A limousine be sent for her every day, whether she wanted it or not. In Allen's opinion, she could not learn fast enough to make a first-rate movie, although she thought Marnie did have some good scenes in it. Hitchcock would have made her a director but she told him no. Said Allen: "It seems perfectly clear to me that any project takes a minimum of a year to direct. I like to get things on and over with. ... Did you ever hear

366-445: A more serious commitment. The young woman attempts to extricate herself from the affair—or perhaps force her lover into taking the next, more permanent step—by dating a younger man, off-off-Broadway playwright Steven Routledge. Max, however, is not a man to accept defeat in any of his endeavors, and he retaliates with a vengeance. The two engage in an escalating battle of wits, with Max discovering money can't resolve everything when he

427-533: A musical reset in New Orleans. The never-to-be-produced production was called The Queen of Basin Street , and was to be directed by Mike Nichols with Tommy Tune choreographing and Maury Yeston writing the songs. Nichols, who was a producing partner with Lewis Allen, eventually quit in a dispute over profits; Tommy Tune followed him and Carr fired Jay Allen. When Carr finally produced a musical version, Allen

488-470: A production deal with Mike Nichols , who turned down all their ideas in favor of the script for Family that his Connecticut neighbor Jay Allen had shown him. It was Nichols who brought in Mark Rydell for the pilot, which premiered at 10:00 pm on March 9, 1976; the series went on to run for four years and 86 episodes. Later in life Allen would remark about television: "I hate it, I hate it because

549-568: A promising young singer, and they lived in Claremont, California , during World War II. She continued acting while in California; she has a small credited role (under the name Jay Presson) in the 1945 film An Angel Comes to Brooklyn and can be glimpsed briefly as "Miss Zelda" in the 1946 film Gay Blades . Allen became a writer by default, having always read constantly. Being able to write pretty well, she decided to "write her way out" of

610-595: A seven-year-old second-grader at the time. Waters, Harris, and deWilde reprised their stage roles, with Arthur Franz , Nancy Gates , and Dickie Moore joining the cast, for the 1952 film version The Member of the Wedding . The screenplay was adapted by Edna and Edward Anhalt and directed by Fred Zinnemann . It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for Julie Harris, in her debut screen appearance. A stage musical version, F. Jasmine Addams ,

671-534: A sloppy satire of show business...There are still some bright moments, but they are separated by flaccid, poorly connected scenes that go nowhere at great length. The few high points belong to King and MacGraw. [He] is too much of a pussycat to convey the hero's toughness, but he delivers Allen's best sallies with crackling speed...Though MacGraw is no comedian, she is animated and playful for the first time in memory." Jay Presson Allen Jay Presson Allen (born Jacqueline Presson ; March 3, 1922 – May 1, 2006)

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732-416: A weak, confusing ending for a more directly resolved one. Though not being able to do what a screenwriter needs to do to a play – "opening it up," taking it outside the original set or sets, make it bigger – she was limited to bookending the script with scenes in a New York theater. The plotting was so very tight, which is what the studio executives had wanted when they bought it. It was up to Allen to cut away

793-508: A yearlong bout of writer's block, Allen produced a draft of the play in three days. While The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was still an unproduced script, Alfred Hitchcock read it and offered Allen the script for Marnie (1964). Hitchcock brought Allen to California to work on the film at Universal Studios in the San Fernando Valley . Allen, who lived close by, would bicycle to work. This upset Hitchcock, who insisted that

854-464: Is a killer. It is really not for sissies." The 1991 Broadway production of Tru starring Robert Morse as Truman Capote was actually a request of the lawyer for the Capote Estate. Allen was reluctant to write about Capote at first, but once she had researched him, she found the last ten years of his life not as off-putting as she had thought: "Capote had a kind of Gallantry in the face of

915-488: Is fluid, changeable, amorphous." Another critic, Margaret B. McDowell , has also stressed the role of Berenice Sadie Brown (and to a lesser extent John Henry West) in counter-pointing Frankie’s story. Jack Halberstam , in his book Female Masculinity, uses the character of Frankie to illustrate the pressures on girls to "outgrow" their tomboyishness, arguing that masculinity is tolerated in girls only as long as they ultimately conform to gender expectations in adulthood. In

976-581: Is in good enough shape, yet which I can contribute to and make it worth the pay they are going to give me... There are more than one of us out there. These jobs are quick, sometimes they're even fun, and you don't have to take the terrible meetings. They're not breathing on you. They're just desperate to get a script. I've never taken anything that I knew I couldn't help. They pay good money." In 1986, she had signed an agreement with Lorimar-Telepictures in order to help develop, write and produce projects, in collaboration with ABC Entertainment . Her last film work

1037-433: Is not much excuse for it otherwise." She originally planned to write a story about a girl who is in love with her piano teacher, but she had what she called "a divine spark: "Suddenly I said: Frankie is in love with her brother and the bride.... The illumination focused the whole book." The novel takes place over a few days in late August. It tells the story of 12-year-old tomboy Frankie Addams, who feels disconnected from

1098-593: Is outsmarted by business rival Seymour Berger and his grandson Mike. It leads to a comic fight between Max and Bones at New York's Bergdorf Goodman . The film features the last motion picture performance of Myrna Loy , who plays Herschel's confidential secretary. Interiors of the Warner Bros. release were filmed at the Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens, New York, with Manhattan exteriors (and

1159-527: The Scots novelist critic Ali Smith , this is to sentimentalize the work. They suggest that such a reading misses much of its profundity, darkness, and what Smith calls its "political heft." It should be seen, according to Smith, as a "very funny, very dark novel" and a "combination of hope, hopelessness and callousness." Its theme, says Smith, is "why people exclude others and what happens when they do." Other critics, including McKay Jenkins , have highlighted

1220-513: The Alaskan wilderness. The novel explores the psychology of the three main characters and is more concerned with evocative settings than with incident. Frankie does, however, have a brief and troubling encounter with a soldier. Her hopes of going away are disappointed and, her fantasy destroyed, a short coda reveals how her personality has changed. It also recounts the fate of John Henry West, and Berenice Sadie Brown's future plans. The Member of

1281-466: The "development circle". "A production rewrite means that the project is in production. Big money elements – directors, actors – are pay or play. There is a shooting date. The shit is in the fan. And that's where writers like me come in. Writers who are fast and reliable. We are nicely paid to do these production rewrites... and we love these jobs. Without credit? Never with credit. If you go for credit on somebody else's work, you have to completely dismantle

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1342-521: The 42-year-old who has an affair with a 22-year-old man. Harris won a Tony Award for her performance. In 1973, Allen adapted her play for the screen, which turned out to be a critical and commercial disappointment. Bobby Fryer, who had produced the Jean Brodie film , had collaborated with Katharine Hepburn to make the film version of Graham Greene 's Travels with My Aunt (1972), specifically for George Cukor to direct. Cukor for some reason

1403-454: The Wedding is a 1946 novel by Southern writer Carson McCullers . It took McCullers five years to complete, although she interrupted the work for a few months to write the novella The Ballad of the Sad Café . In a letter to her husband Reeves McCullers, she explained that the novel was "one of those works that the least slip can ruin. It must be beautifully done. For like a poem there

1464-478: The Wedding is told from the point of view of Frankie, who is a troubled adolescent. But some critics think it is a mistake to view The Member of the Wedding as simply a coming of age novel —a "sweet momentary illumination of adolescence before the disillusion of adulthood," as it is sometimes regarded, or as Patricia Yaeger puts it, "an economical way of learning about the pangs of growing up." For Yaeger and

1525-726: The age of 84. In 1982, Allen was awarded the Women in Film Crystal Award for outstanding women who, through their endurance and the excellence of their work, have helped to expand the role of women within the entertainment industry. The papers of Jay Presson Allen and her husband Lewis M. Allen are held at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas. Member of the Wedding The Member of

1586-485: The buck doesn't stop anywhere." "Male characters are easier to write. They're simpler. I think women are generally more psychologically complicated. You have to put a little more effort into writing a woman." – Jay Presson Allen. Allen wrote the novel Just Tell Me What You Want! in 1969, with the idea of turning it into a screenplay. After having trouble getting together a production, Allen sent it to Sidney Lumet , who surprisingly wanted to do it. In her opinion, Lumet

1647-520: The country." Eventually the couple came back to the city to work. By then, Bob Whitehead had become a good friend and encouraged Allen to write another play. She drew on her married life and wrote The First Wife , about a suburban working couple. It was made into the film Wives and Lovers in 1963, starring Janet Leigh and Van Johnson . When Allen read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie , by Muriel Spark , she instantly saw play potential where no one else did. After undergoing hypnotherapy to alleviate

1708-445: The example of Frankie, he argues, we can see that "the image of the tomboy can be tolerated only within a narrative of blossoming womanhood; within such a narrative, tomboyism represents a resistance to adulthood itself rather than to adult femininity." Critics such as Elizabeth Freeman and Nicole Seymour view the novel as "queer"—as challenging gender and sexual norms. In her article on the novel, Seymour argues that McCullers queers

1769-416: The frame of mind for work." In Allen's opinion most of the humor from the original was lost; she believed Fosse did not really like the lead character of Sally Bowles at all. She worked on the screenplay for ten months, but in the end Fosse and the producers were still unhappy with the final form, and having commitments elsewhere, Allen handed the script over to her friend Hugh Wheeler . In Allen's opinion,

1830-449: The human developmental schema (childhood-adolescence-adulthood) through various narrative methods. These methods include the novel's tripartite structure, its depiction of personal difficulties with narrativizing, and "the refusal of dynamism, and the use of the literary devices of repetition and analepsis ." Seymour concludes that "the novel allows us to imagine an adolescent body in synchronic rather than diachronic terms—thereby challenging

1891-509: The idea about a show that centered on the emotional life of a family. They pitched the idea to Allen and she liked it. Allen spent two weeks at the Beverly Hills Hotel while she knocked out a script. Len and Aaron loved it; it was touching and had marvelous moments of compassion, and was exactly what they had talked about in the kitchen. The pilot was great, but ABC did not buy it. It was not until two years later that ABC entered

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1952-486: The ideals of sexuality, gender, and race that normally accrue to such bodies." The book has been adapted for the stage, motion pictures, and television. McCullers herself adapted the novel for a Broadway production directed by Harold Clurman . It opened on January 5, 1950 at the Empire Theatre , where it ran for 501 performances. The cast included Ethel Waters , Julie Harris , and introduced Brandon deWilde ,

2013-419: The importance of themes of racial and sexual identity. Frankie wishes people could "change back and forth from boys to girls." John Henry wants them to be "half boy and half girl." Berenice would like there to be "no separate colored people in the world, but all human beings would be light brown color with blue eyes and black hair." For them, Jenkins suggests, the ideal world would be "a place where identity . . .

2074-413: The marriage and set out to become financially independent of her husband. She always claimed her first husband's big fault was marrying someone too young. Her debut novel, Spring Riot , was published in 1948 and got mixed reviews. Her next effort was a play, which she sent to producer Bob Whitehead. Because he had produced Member of the Wedding , she thought he would like it since her play was also about

2135-485: The original material. She produced a script they were happy with, but then handed it to Robert Redford , who began to tinker it to fit his persona. Eventually the producers took it away from Redford and offered it to Lumet, who had just seen a production of Mamet's, American Buffalo with Al Pacino , and preferred to use Mamet's original script. In the end the studio had paid both Allen and Redford and ended up with Mamet's original script anyway. Allen tried to recapture

2196-451: The original novel rather than the play as his source material. The Young Vic theatre in London produced the stage version of The Member of the Wedding in 2007, directed by Matthew Dunster . Frankie Addams was played by Flora Spencer-Longhurst and Berenice Sadie Brown by Portia, a member of Philip Seymour Hoffman 's LAByrinth Theater Company . Text from The Member of the Wedding

2257-484: The phrase, 'the lady proposes, the studio disposes'? I didn't make it up. I would never propose myself as a director." Under Hitchcock's mentoring, Allen developed the screenwriting talent she would use the rest of her career. Allen wrote that she never felt discriminated against. While being one of the rare female screenwriters in Hollywood in the 1960s, she said "almost all of the men I worked with were supportive. If I

2318-594: The picture for Sidney. Just as Lumet was about to sign for a different picture, they got the call that Prince of the City was theirs. Allen had not wanted to write Prince of the City , just produce it. She was put off by the book's non-linear story structure, but Lumet would not make the picture without her and agreed to write the outline for her. Lumet and Allen went over the book and agreed on what they could use and what they could do without. To her horror, Lumet would come in every day for weeks and scribble on legal pads. She

2379-456: The picture. One speech of Allen's remains in the script, otherwise it is all Hepburn's product. The Writer's Guild refused to put Hepburn's name on the script because she was not a guild member; Fryer refused to let Allen take her name off because she was the one he paid, and Wheeler was burned that he received no credit at all. Structure was what Allen brought to the screenplay for Bob Fosse 's Cabaret . The producers had not wanted to film

2440-532: The problem with Funny Lady was that Barbra Streisand had not wanted to do a sequel to Funny Girl and was determined to give the director, Herbert Ross , a hard time. The picture does, however, contain some of Allen's most satisfying work, some of which she doesn't remember writing and just seems to have come out of nowhere. The idea for the television show Family was born in Aaron Spelling 's kitchen, where he and Leonard Goldberg came up with

2501-457: The scene inside Bergdorf Goodman ) shot on location. In his review in Time , Frank Rich stated, "After a brisk 20 minutes, the movie loses its assurance and sense of purpose. Indeed, Jay Presson Allen's screenplay reels around like a drunken sailor. From moment to moment, Just Tell Me is a somber and confusingly plotted story of corporate power struggles, a syrupy account of a love triangle, and

Just Tell Me What You Want - Misplaced Pages Continue

2562-497: The school "having had no education to speak of". Allen skipped college and left home at the age of 18 to become an actress. She said her career in New York City lasted "for about 25 minutes" when she realized that she only liked rehearsals and the first week of performance, and would rather be "out there" where the decisions were being made. In the early 1940s, she married "the first grown man who asked me," Robert M. Davis,

2623-550: The screenplay for the 1969 film starring Maggie Smith and Robert Stephens. Said Allen: "All the women who played Brodie got whatever prize was going around at that time. Vanessa did, Maggie [Smith] did". After Jean Brodie , Allen had another success on Broadway with Forty Carats (1968). Her adaptation of the French boulevard comedy by Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Gredy premiered in December 1968 with Julie Harris as

2684-522: The stage script by Joe Masteroff and John Van Druten , and felt that not portraying the male lead as a homosexual was dishonest to the story. They wanted to go back to Christopher Isherwood 's original novel Goodbye to Berlin of 1939, but the Berlin stories weren't structured in any linear fashion and Allen had to diagram the entire story. Allen and Fosse got along badly from the start: she found him "so depressed that it took two hours just to get him in

2745-450: The structure. Who wants a job where you have to completely dismantle the structure? I only take things that I think are in reasonable shape. The director and the producer and the studio may not necessarily agree with me, but I think the script is in reasonable shape. Besides, no one but the writer ever knows how much trouble any one piece of work will be. Only the writer knows that. Only the writer. So I take what looks to me like something that

2806-399: The studio on a three-hour picture, but by offering to slash the budget to $ 10 million they agreed. When asked if the original author ever has anything to say about how their book is treated, Allen replied: "Not if I can help it. You cannot open that can of worms. You sell your book, you go to the bank, you shut up." Allen adapted Ira Levin 's play Deathtrap (1982) for Lumet, exchanging

2867-565: The success of Family with Hothouse for ABC in 1988; the drama about the lives and work experiences of the staff of a mental hospital lasted eight episodes. Personally Allen thought it was some of her best work, though its short life was a mixed blessing for her, said Allen: "Unfortunately, ABC didn't have the courage of their initial convictions. They skewered it, they turned tail on it. However if they had picked it up I'd have had to turn out 26 episodes. I'd be in Forest Lawn now. Television

2928-403: The underbrush, simplifying the rhetoric as much as possible and adding some realism to the characters. Allen returned to the stage with an adaptation for Angela Lansbury of A Little Family Business , a French boulevard comedy by Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Gredy . She was also hired by Broadway producer Allan Carr to adapt Jean Poiret's non-musical 1973 play La Cage Aux Folles as

2989-415: The whole performance wishing to be fired. In the meantime she started writing again, little by little, and sold some of her work to live television programs like The Philco Television Playhouse . When she married Lewis M. Allen in 1955, they moved to the countryside, where Lewis wrote and Allen in her words "didn't want to do anything." She had a baby, and spent two and a half "absolutely wonderful years in

3050-401: The world; in her words, an "unjoined person." Frankie's mother died when she was born, and her father is a distant, uncomprehending figure. Her closest companions are the family's African American maid, Berenice Sadie Brown, and her six-year-old cousin, John Henry West. She has no friends in her small Southern town and dreams of going away with her brother and his bride-to-be on their honeymoon in

3111-476: Was a wonderful structuralist but has his most difficult time with humorous dialogue; he had not found a way to shoot humorous dialogue as brilliantly as he shot everything else. When Allen read Robert Daley 's book, Prince of the City (1978), she was convinced it was a Sidney Lumet project, but the film rights had already been sold to Orion Pictures for Brian De Palma and David Rabe . Allen let it be known that if that deal should fall through, then she wanted

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3172-478: Was an American screenwriter, playwright, and novelist. Known for her withering wit and sometimes off-color wisecracks, she was one of the few women making a living as a screenwriter at a time when women were a rarity in the profession. Allen was born Jacqueline Presson in San Angelo, Texas , on March 3, 1922, the only child of buyer Willie Mae (née Miller) and department store merchant Albert Jack Presson. She

3233-481: Was forced to file suit for payment from her work on the adaptation. "What I really like to do is a very swift rewrite for a great deal of money. Then I'm out of it. There's no emotional commitment at all – your name's not on it, you're home free", she would explain. Twentieth-Century Fox brought Allen in for a rewrite when they were unhappy with the script that David Mamet had produced from Barry Reed 's novel The Verdict , thinking he had deviated too much from

3294-625: Was getting a bum rap somewhere, I didn't know it." The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie , about an iconoclast Scottish girls' school teacher, did not premiere on the London stage until after Marnie' s completion. Produced by Donald Albery , it premiered at the Wyndham's Theatre in May 1966 with Vanessa Redgrave and ran hundreds of performances. In January 1968, it opened in New York with Zoe Caldwell as Brodie and ran for an entire year. Allen also wrote

3355-550: Was her screenplay for the 1990 remake of the classic, Lord of the Flies . However, she disliked the finished product and had her name removed. The trick in adapting, Allen said in a 1972 interview with The New York Times , "is not to throw out the baby with the bath water. You can change all kinds of things, but don't muck around with the essence." Allen suffered a stroke and died at her home in Manhattan on May 1, 2006, at

3416-484: Was never particularly fond of her given name, and decided to use her first initial when writing. She would spend all day at the movie house every weekend, from 1 p.m. until somebody dragged her out at 7 p.m. From that time on, movies became very important to her and she knew she would not be staying in her hometown. She attended Miss Hockaday's School for Young Ladies in Dallas for a couple of years, but later said she left

3477-560: Was not getting any work and Hepburn was casting around for projects. They asked Allen to come on board for the script, but she was busy and instead suggested Hugh Wheeler . After a few months, Fryer and Hepburn still weren't happy with Wheeler's script, so Allen agreed to work on the project and wrote a very straightforward script for them. But Hepburn had just starred in the disastrous adaptation of Madwoman of Chaillot and did not want, in Allen's words, "to play another crazy old lady." Hepburn

3538-877: Was produced Off-Broadway in 1971. Another unauthorized musical adaptation was written by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane and produced by the University of Alabama at Birmingham 's "Town and Gown Theater" in 1987. A 1982 television adaptation, directed by Delbert Mann , starred Pearl Bailey , Dana Hill , and Howard E. Rollins, Jr. A 1989 Broadway revival production with Roundabout Theatre (directed by Harold Scott, set design by Thomas Cariello) starred Esther Rolle as Berenice, Amelia Campbell as Frankie, and Calvin Lennon Armitage as young John Henry. The 1997 film version, adapted by David W. Rintels and directed by Fielder Cook , starred Anna Paquin , Alfre Woodard , Corey Dunn , and Enrico Colantoni . Rintels used

3599-408: Was reluctant to let Cukor down and would not admit her reservations and began to find fault with the script, even rewriting many sections herself. Consequently, Allen finally gave up the endeavor, telling Hepburn that she ought to write it herself, which the actress did. Eventually, Hepburn provoked the studio into making her quit the project, leaving Fryer free to bring Jean Brodie' s Maggie Smith onto

3660-428: Was terrified that she would have to tell him that his stuff was unusable, but to her delight the outline was wonderful and she went to work. It was her first project with living subjects, and Allen interviewed nearly everyone in the book and had endless hours of Bob Leuci's tapes for back-up. With all her research and Lumet's outline, she eventually turned out a 365-page script in 10 days. It was nearly impossible to sell

3721-421: Was used by Jarvis Cocker on his debut album, Jarvis . It forms the introduction to the 11th song on the album, "Big Julie", and consists of his re-writing of the opening lines of the book. In the original these are: It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old. This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in

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