Ernest Lehman
by Andre Soares
Though hardly a household name, screenwriter and sometime producer Ernest Lehman is probably the best known American film scribe of the 1950s and 1960s. Lehman wrote the classic chase thriller North by Northwest, and the popular stage-to-screen adaptations of the Broadway hits The King and I, West Side Story, The Sound of Music, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.
During his 25-year film career, Lehman received six Academy Award nominations - four for his screenplays (1954: Sabrina, co-written with director Billy Wilder and playwright Samuel A. Taylor, from his own play; 1959: North by Northwest; 1961: West Side Story, from the Arthur Laurents-Jerome Robbins musical; 1966: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, from Edward Albee’s play), and two as the producer of Best Picture nominees Virginia Woolf? and Hello, Dolly!, the 1969 Broadway-to-Hollywood misfire. In 2001, he became the first screenwriter to receive an honorary Oscar, for his "varied and enduring work."
Yet, much of Lehman’s acclaim as a screenwriter is the result of dialogue, characters, and situations created by other writers, mostly playwrights. With the exception of his original screenplay for North by Northwest and his co-adaptation (with Clifford Odets) of one of his novellas into Sweet Smell of Success, Lehman’s most acclaimed work involved the conversion of someone else’s stories from one visual medium (the stage) to another (film). This type of adaptation may require a major revamping of the storyline, and the addition, deletion, and/or transformation of numerous characters and scenes, or it may at times simply require the retyping of dialogue and situations into screenplay format. Without comparing the original play to the final screenplay it’s impossible to pinpoint how much - or how little - credit for the final product should go to the screenwriter(s) and how much to the original author(s).
With the exception of The Sound of Music, which felt like a movie (and for which, perhaps a bit ironically, Lehman failed to get an Oscar nod), the films Lehman adapted from the stage are invariably - for better or for worse - stagebound. The King and I, West Side Story, and Hello, Dolly! all have the look and feel of filmed plays, frequently to the detriment of the cinematic narrative. (Though, admittedly, part of the blame belongs to the directors in question.) In contrast, the sense of stage claustrophobia works well in the film version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - but in this case should Lehman be credited for the film’s success (he helped to trim about 40 minutes from the stage version) or should most of the credit go to actors’ director Mike Nichols and to playwright Edward Albee, whose dialogue we hear, and whose characters and situations we see on screen?
Born on December 8, 1915, on Long Island, N.Y., Lehman had a comfortable life until his family’s financial stability was eroded by the Depression. Following graduation with a degree combining chemical engineering and English from the College of the City of New York, Lehman began working as a freelance writer. Since that was hardly a viable way to earn a living, he eventually settled as a writer for a publicity firm that catered to show business personalities.
During that period, Lehman wrote several short stories and novellas. The first he sold was a profile of bandleader Ted Lewisthat came out in Colliers magazine. More than 50 others were published by Esquire, Cosmopolitan, Redbook, and other publications. Additionally, the 1948 Republic Studios World War II comedy The Inside Story was based on "Silver Creek, N.Y.," a tale Lehman had co-written with Academy Award winner Geza Herczeg. (Herczeg won the Oscar for co-writing The Life of Emile Zola).
By the early 1950s, Lehman had acquired enough of a reputation for Paramount to offer him a writing contract. His first screenplay (on loan to MGM) was Executive Suite, an all-star 1954 melodrama about the behind-the-scene dealings at a large corporation. Directed by Robert Wise, and starring William Holden, June Allyson, Fredric March, Barbara Stanwyck, Shelley Winters, and others, Executive Suite - though nothing more than a glitzy but uninspired soap opera - was a considerable box-office success, and was nominated for four Academy Awards.
That same year - and now back at Paramount - Lehman collaborated with director Billy Wilder and playwright Samuel A. Taylor on the screenplay for Sabrina, a half-hearted romantic comedy that became a huge hit largely because of its cast - Audrey Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, and William Holden. The film won one Academy Award (for black-and-white costume design) and received four other nominations including Best Screenplay. (In 1995, Sydney Pollack remade Sabrina - from a screenplay by Barbara Benedek and David Rayfiel - with great fanfare but to considerably less acclaim. Julia Ormond, Harrison Ford, and Greg Kinnear starred.)
Lehman followed his back-to-back successes with a popular adaptation of boxer Rocky Graziano’s autobiography, which became MGM’s sentimental 1956 melodrama Somebody Up There Likes Me, directed by Robert Wise, and starring a miscast Paul Newman as Graziano. Also in 1956, Lehman’s first adaptation of a Broadway musical, 20th Century-Fox’s The King and I, became a gigantic box-office hit. The sumptuous but stagy film garnered nine Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Direction (Walter Lang), Best Actress (Deborah Kerr), and won a Best Actor Oscar for Yul Brynner. (The film won a total of five Oscars.)
The following year, Lehman adapted his own novelette Tell Me About It Tomorrow, which was based on his experiences at the show business publicity firm. Due to illness, he had to withdraw from the project shortly before production work was to begin. Playwright Clifford Odets wrote the final draft, and eventually shared screen credit for the screenplay.
Released as Sweet Smell of Success, the film is a corrosive - if more than a tad melodramatic - look at the movers and scavengers of the world of newspaper columnists and press agents. Directed by Alexander Mackendrick, in a radical change of pace from his 1950s Ealing comedies, Sweet Smell of Success stars Burt Lancaster as a poisonous Walter Winchell-type gossip writer and Tony Curtis as a sleazy p.r. man. (In the early 1940s, Lehman had ghosted the New York Daily Mirror’s column "Walter Winchell on Broadway.") Although a box-office disappointment at the time, this dark drama about the pathological hunger for success in American society is now considered a classic.
(Also in 1957, another of Lehman’s novelettes, The Comedian, was adapted by Rod Serling for the CBS series Playhouse 90. Directed by John Frankenheimer, the special starred Mickey Rooney, Kim Hunter, and Edmond O’Brien.)
After dropping out of the screen adaptation of Hammond Innes’s The Wreck of the Mary Deare - and following Alfred Hitchcock’s suggestion that he create an original screenplay - Lehman came up with one of his most prestigious and best-remembered efforts, North by Northwest (1959), a nonstop chase film in which agents and spies pursue a man accused of a murder he didn’t commit. Directed by Hitchcock, the classy - if vapid - thriller was a major box-office success on the strength of its director and its stars, Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, and James Mason. For his original screenplay - actually a sort of revamped version of Hitchcock’s own The 39 Steps, with touches from myriad Saturday matinee flicks - Lehman received his second Academy Award nomination.
During that period, Lehman’s only artistic letdown was the overwrought 1960 family melodrama From the Terrace, which he adapted from John O’Hara’s novel for director Mark Robson, and stars Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Following that critical - though not commercial - misfire, Lehman had one of the biggest box-office and critical successes of his career with his adaptation of the Jerome Robbins-Arthur Laurents Broadway hit musical West Side Story.
Directed by Robbins (the ballet sequences) and Robert Wise (the Romeo & Juliet drama), and starring Natalie Wood and newcomer Richard Beymer as the star-crossed lovers, the film version opened in 1961 to great acclaim, ultimately winning a near-record 10 Academy Awards, including Best Film and Best Direction. (Lehman, the only West Side Story nominee to fail to win an Oscar, lost out to Abby Mann for his adaptation of his own television
play Judgment at Nuremberg.)
Lehman’s next two screenplays were successful but inconsequential affairs: The Prize (1963) and The Sound of Music (1965). The former, based on the novel by Irving Wallace, was a North by Northwest rehash directed by Mark Robson (with a Hitchcockian flair), and starring Paul Newman, Elke Sommer, and Edward G. Robinson. The latter was another film adaptation of a Broadway hit musical (by composer Richard Rodgers and writers Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse) — a diabetes-inducing concoction that struck a chord with sugar-addicted audiences worldwide, thus becoming the most commercially successful film up to that time. Directed by Robert Wise (his fourth and final pairing with Lehman), and starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer, The Sound of Music went on to win five Oscars, including Best Film and Best Direction. It received an additional five nominations, though Lehman’s screenplay was glaringly left out.
By the mid-1960s, Lehman had become highly regarded as an adapter of theatrical productions. It surely helped to have three consecutive commercial hits to his credit when he decided to transfer to the screen a property unlike anything on which he had previously worked: Edward Albee’s harrowing Tony Award-winning play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the story of two highly dysfunctional heterosexual couples’ long night’s journey into - an even darker - day.
Relying on the support of Warner Bros. chief Jack Warner, and on the stellar duo Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor (instead of Albee’s less commercial choices, James Mason and Bette Davis), Lehman - acting as writer-producer - managed to get the difficult project off the ground, cutting large chunks of the play so as to keep the film’s running time at a movie-audience friendly 130 minutes. Mike Nichols made his directorial feature-film debut, helping to turn the 1966 psychological drama into a major critical and commercial hit. Albee’s adult dialogue, though toned down from the original, was partly responsible both for the film’s box-office success and for the demise of the Production Code, Hollywood’s old set of censorship rules and regulations.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? received 13 Academy Award nominations - including Best Film, Best Direction, and Best Adapted Screenplay - more than any other film that year. Although it won five Oscars, including Best Actress for Taylor and Best Supporting Actress for Sandy Dennis, it lost the other major awards to the considerably weaker A Man for All Seasons. Fred Zinnemann’s historical - and very proper - drama was that year’s big winner, taking home statuettes for Best Film, Direction, Actor (Paul Scofield), and Adapted Screenplay (Robert Bolt).
In the case of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the most impressive film in Lehman’s career, the screenwriter’s job was akin to that of a book editor. He may not have improved on Albee’s play, but as per the reviews at the time he did manage to trim it without losing the author’s original vision. But would that be considered screen writing? I’d say not. In any case, even though Lehman’s editorial work was surely highly accomplished, the film version of Virginia Woolf? owes its artistic success to the performances (thanks in large part to Nichols’ solid handling of his actors), and to the characters and situations - Albee’s, not Lehman’s, creations.
Lehman’s string of successes came to a halt with his next effort as a writer-producer, Hello, Dolly! (1969), another lavish film adaptation of a stage musical (book by Michael Stewart, music by Jerry Herman). Gene Kelly handled the directorial chores, while box-office behemoths Barbra Streisand and Walter Matthau played the leads. One of the most expensive — and overblown — musicals ever made, Hello, Dolly!, though hardly a box-office flop, failed to recover its production costs. Despite its seven Academy Award nominations - including a puzzling Best Picture nod - the film was perceived as a major critical and financial disappointment.
Three years later, Lehman made his directorial debut with his own adaptation of Philip Roth’s bestselling novel Portnoy’s Complaint. As it had previously happened with From the Terrace, Lehman failed to properly adapt a literary work to a visual medium. (Film reviewer Roger Ebert called it a "true fiasco. It has been written, produced and directed by Ernest Lehman as a sort of expedition with gun and camera into the untamed jungle of Alexander Portnoy’s fantasies.")
Lehman ended his screenwriting career with two screenplays for minor films - Hitchcock’s swan song, the crime caper Family Plot (1976), and, sharing credit with Kenneth Ross and Ivan Moffat, John Frankenheimer’s Black Sunday (1977), about the threat of a terrorist attack during the Super Bowl. (Additionally, the 1979 TV miniseries The French Atlantic Affair, the story of a luxury liner hijacked by terrorists, was based on his first novel.)
Film projects that failed to materialize in later years included The Short Night, which would have reunited Lehman with the then ailing Hitchcock, and in the mid-1980s, I Am Zorba!, a musical version of Zorba, the Greek that would have paired Lehman once again with Robert Wise.
In 1982, Lehman’s second novel, Farewell Performance was published by McGraw-Hill. Later that year, Screening Sickness and Other Tales of Tinsel Town, a collection of his columns for American Film Magazine (for whom he wrote for three years in the late 1970s) were published in book form by G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
Between 1983-1985, Lehman served as president of the Writers Guild of America, West (WGA). Throughout his career, he won six WGA awards (1954: Sabrina, with Billy Wilder and Samuel A. Taylor; 1956: The King and I; 1961: West Side Story; 1965: The Sound of Music; 1966: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; and the Laurel Award for Screen Writing Achievement in 1972), plus four additional nominations (1954: Executive Suite; 1956: Somebody Up There Likes Me; 1959: North by Northwest; 1976: Family Plot).
A twist in Lehman’s career took place in 2002, when his own Sweet Smell of Success was used as the basis for a Broadway musical.
Ernest Lehman died at age 89 on July 2, 2005, at Los Angeles’ UCLA Medical Center. He had been stricken with pneumonia, and suffered a heart attack.
"We have suffered anonymity far too often," Lehman said while accepting his honorary Oscar in 2001. "I appeal to all movie critics and feature writers to please always bear in mind that a film production begins and ends with a screenplay."
Wise words, no doubt, though before the screenplay oftentimes there is a book or a play — or even another screenplay. That also shouldn’t be forgotten.
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