Scénariste

1945 · WRCLIT85228 — Culver City: Vanguard Films Inc. 1945. 1168 leaves altered by scores of dated revises on colored paper and lettered inserts. Quarto. Mimeographed typescript printed on rectos only. Bradbound but without title- leaf and upper wrapper. The preliminary leaf with script number and receipt coupon is intact and unclipped. Modest use otherwise very good to near fine. A heavily revised rainbow script with a primary date the same as one of the early forms of the "final shooting script" but substantially altered over more than five months by dated revises and inserts. David O. Selznick's adaptation to the screen of Busch's 1944 novel directed by King Vidor starring Jennifer Jones Joseph Cotten Gregory Peck Lionel Barrymore Lillian Gish Butterfly McQueen and Harry Carey. Eventually the film won the award for the Best Overall Production at the Venice Film Festival but had something of a bumpy road in development. Although Busch was himself a productive screenwriter for three decades with a dozen credited screenplays and uncredited work on others and he was responsible for a full treatment and collaborative early draft of the screenplay his final screen credit for the film consisted solely of "Suggested by a Novel by ." The present draft credits the script to Oliver Garrett solo. In fact an actual final shooting script would turn out to be nearly 11 months away with Ben Hecht doing some uncredited script doctoring and several uncredited directors including Josef von Sternberg stepping in to help out. Many changes were required to accommodate the various protectors of public morality and an analysis of the evolution of the film through the succession of widely disparate scripts would be informative. By the time an as yet further revised "final shooting script" dated 12 January 1946 rolled around David O. Selznick was the sole credit for screenwriter printed on the 208pp script and the Vanguard Films association was dropped entirely for Selznick International. Vanguard Films Inc. unknown books