The Scripts That Would Not Die

Wait long enough and someone will make the movie.

That’s the message of hope that might be found in the historic logs of two movies heading our way, both examples of the strange currents that cause some scripts to sail and others to flounder.

So this is for all the people who write and wait and who think they have what it takes to pull off the Great American Movie Story.

By some ironic coincidence, NBC’s Sunday night movie “The Nightman” and Universal’s “American Me,’ which opens next week, have histories that reach back to 1947, were written by young women setting out in their careers and were first done for media other than the movies.

Both carry a story behind a story, of how themes and marketing change with time.

Writer Lucille Fletcher boasts humorously that her half-hour 1947 script for “The Nightman” brought her an impressive $75 from the mystery radio series, “Suspense,” even after writing 22 previous stories for the CBS show.

Producer Hal B. Wallis bought “The Nightman” and asked Fletcher to adapt the story of a World War II veteran who, as a hotel night desk clerk, gets caught up in a love-and-murder triangle with his employer and her daughter. (Murder was what this real Ms. Fletcher wrote.)

Ida Lupino was the radio mother. Burt Lancaster was to have been the night man of the Wallis movie. For Fletcher this was the second of her “Suspense” scripts optioned for a movie. Her first was “Sorry, Wrong Number,” which starred Lancaster and Barbara Stanwyck and, in a later cable version, Loni Anderson and Hal Holbrook.

After two attempts at the original screenplay and seeing radio drama in its last agonies, Fletcher moved on to novels and mysteries, eventually selling eight books.

Wallis, then at Paramount, persisted. At least 16 writers, many early in their own careers, would attempt adaptations of the radio story, including Leon Uris, Academy Award-winner James Poe (“Around the World in 80 Days”) and Oscar nominee Gavin Lambert (“I Never Promised You a Rose Garden”).

In 1981, USC graduate student John Wells, enrolled in the Peter Stark Program at the university’s cinema department, came across a collection of unproduced motion picture scripts, among which was the 1957 James Poe version of “The Nightman.”

Wells saw possibilities written all over it and wrote an adaptation, his first attempt at screenwriting. He tracked the retired Wallis to his Palm Springs poolside and offered to option the screen rights. Wallis wanted $5,000, says Wells, while he, pleading graduate student status, put forth a $1 bid. Wallis persisted: $5,000 for the first year, $5,000 for each year of the option.

“He seemed to enjoy the transaction,” Wells says of the late producer. Wells raised the $5,000 from relatives and friends and shopped the script to studios, later renewing for a second year.

Then $10,000 poorer, Wells linked up with his former Carnegie Mellon classmate, Charles Haid, who by then was enjoying some acting fame as Renko on television’s “Hill Street Blues.”

Fast forward through the years, through three more options and $15,000, through some interest at Universal and Paramount and from actors Richard Widmark and Demi Moore. No deals. Haid and Wells then linked up with producers Jordan Kerner and Jon Avnet (who more recently produced “Fried Green Tomatoes”). Still no studio deal.

Haid and Wells finally reasoned that if the movie was to be made, it would have to be done for television. They envisioned taking the murder-romance triangle into a newer realm, fashioning what Haid calls a sensitive, erotic story from a woman’s viewpoint, turning the male lead into a Vietnam veteran and moving away visually from a film noir concept while remaining true to the original story.

Haid lined up the support of actress Joanna Kerns as a co-executive producer and took the script to NBC. In a 30-minute meeting, he and Wells came out with a deal. Six weeks later, pre-production began. Three months later, the two-hour movie wrapped.

Now starring Kerns, along with Jenny Robertson and Ted Marcoux, it gets its American screening Sunday night at 9 on NBC, and later this year a more explicit version will be either in European theaters or on television overseas.

“It was a tremendous vindication for me,” Wells said, who during all of this carved out an impressive, award-winning collateral career as a writer and producer for “China Beach” and is now developing a pilot for a future CBS detective series, “Polish Hill.”

Fletcher--as Lucille F. Wallop (her late husband, novelist Douglas Wallop, wrote 14 novels, including “The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant”), continues to write from her Oxford, Md., home. Two years ago her book “Mirror Image” was optioned for a film, and her book “And Presumed Dead” was also optioned as a play.

Her best scripts from those $75 free-lance stories, she believes, even after all these years, have yet to be made into movies.

The connection between this month’s Edward James Olmos movie “American Me” and a book titled “American Me,” which was published in 1947 by Houghton Mifflin, is more clouded than the paper trail of “The Nightman.”

Universal Pictures’ advance publicity says the movie “takes its title from Beatrice Griffith’s 1947 book on the ‘pachuco’ lifestyle” of post-World War II Mexican-American youth gangs in Los Angeles.

But Floyd Mutrux, who wrote the script in 1977--a long enough wait by most standards to get a movie made--says that he never heard of the book. The title refers to a gang name he came across while researching the movie, he says.

The film’s co-producer, Sean Daniel, describes the novel as “a history” but says that the title and some incidents are used in the film.

Lou Adler, a producer involved with the movie in the late ‘70s, says that he heard of the book only after seeing a script. “You can’t copyright a title,” he says.

The book begins with the 1943 zoot suit riots in which wartime servicemen and Latino gang members fought throughout Los Angeles for about a week.

The movie, too, starts with the riots but moves into the present with gang members turned into contemporary, imprisoned Mexican Mafia members.

The book is a sympathetic portrayal of the barrio life of immigrants and Mexican-Americans, a human portrayal, which has caused some educators and community leaders who remember the book’s message to be concerned about the movie’s emphasis.

Beatrice Griffith was a social worker with the National Youth Administration who collected stories from the families with whom she worked. The book alternates fictionalized personal stories with sociological material. It was a minor literary success in post-war Los Angeles.

“With World War II, the younger Mexican Americans have gained about 10 years in Americanization,” Griffith wrote 45 years ago. “They have come home from the war fronts and factories, from foreign lands and American cities, to change their old ways of living. They are sustaining their new dreams with new knowledge of American work habits, skilled trades, and organizational methods. Like the Phoenix, they, too, are rising from their own ashes.”

Griffith’s publisher retained all but movie rights to the book, which 20 years ago reverted to the writer’s estate, according to publisher records, which give no details on who in Hollywood had optioned the book.

The title, “American Me,” comes from a fight in the book involving two boys, a Latino and an Anglo, in which they taunt each other with echoing, belligerent boasts of “me American me.”

The movie makes no reference to its title.

Ten years after writing the movie and failing to get “American Me” made, Mutrux wrote another script five years ago about Latino youth gangs, “Blood In . . . Blood Out.” Last year production started on both of Mutrux’s works. Two different companies, two stories 10 years apart, a start date for both 30 days apart.

Wait long enough.

Someone will make the movie.