Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God (26 page)

“I have two careers,” Stirling Silliphant said. “I write for the studio and for the shelf. I have at least fifteen scripts on the shelf that will probably never be made into films.” 
[307]
All screenwriters endure the heartbreak of working on projects that they can’t sell. The difference in Silliphant’s case is that the scripts he wrote for producers or studios were paid jobs. It was tempting to go for the money, especially in the lush days when it was offered to him so freely. Sometimes he was given seductive sums to polish another writer’s work or add flair to an existing script in order to attract a particular star. Sometimes a Silliphant polish was what turned a “close but no sale” script into a go project. When he was really hot, in the early 1960s, producers or networks would pay him upwards of $1,000 just to pitch them an idea, and thousands more if they wanted him to write it. (Today, everyone, including Writers Guild members, are expected not only to pitch for free but, often, to write on spec after pitching and even do free rewrites).

Following is a list of unrealized or aborted projects that were discovered among the Stirling Silliphant papers at UCLA and in his family’s personal files. If he commented on any of them, his remarks are included. Dates and remarks are given where they are known.

2 Plus 2
(Fries Productions,1985). Silliphant was announced to make his directing debut with this drama about the marriages of two couples who live together and whose relationships reflected the morals of the day. 
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Six years earlier, he had said, “I would consider directing a demotion, and it would take time away from my writing.” 
[309]
And thirteen years before that, just prior to making
The Slender Thread,
he had said, “I consider producing a demotion for a writer.” 
[310]
The show never happened. Fries: “Sometimes people plant stories just to try to generate interest in their career and maybe Stirling did want to direct it and he thought that story would attract other directing opportunities.” 
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Silliphant never directed.

Adieu, Saigon
(ABC-TV, 1988). Four-hour mini-series made with Warner Bros., television.

All the Emperor’s Horses
(Avco-Embassy, 1969). True account of a young American scholar who goes to China, falls in love with the daughter of one of China’s richest families, and then comes the Revolution. Drawn from articles in
The New Yorker.
“I ached to write the movie, but [producer] Joe [Levine] opted not to go ahead with it. I was probably paid off, I don’t remember, but I never wrote the script.” 
[312]

America the Beautiful
(Avco-Embassy, 1969). A satire on sex, security and the soft buck from essays by David White. Written for Joseph E. Levine’s company. “I don’t regard it as a successful script. It never quite jelled beyond the fact that it seemed merely a collection of the essays on which I based the screenplay. Today I would do it as a non-fiction film.” Silliphant wound up bringing legal action against Avco-Embassy through the Writers Guild for his unpaid $15,000 fee.

Angel’s Twenty
(1956). Independent film set in Korea about the attack carrier U.S.S. Princeton. 117-page spec script.

The Artful Dodger
(undated). For director John Sturges and Mirisch Productions, United Artists. “What happened here is that Walter Mirisch, pleased with my contribution to
In the Heat of the Night,
called me in and assigned me to write a what-might-have-happened-after
The Great Escape
(1963). It was an original and John Sturges, who had directed
The Great Escape,
was signed to direct this new follow-up of what happened to the few people who escaped in the original. My script was originally designated
The Artful Dodger,
but I soon enough changed it to
The Yards at Essendorf.
I focused on the thousands of French prisoners the Nazis put into forced labor in the main railroad yards because John wanted to shoot trains and locomotives — much as John Frankenheimer did later on in his film about the French and trains (
The Train,
1964). I thought it turned out to be a powerful script, but John kept, as I accused him of, moving the piano from one part of the living room to another, while at the same time he was spending moist of his thought in getting a yacht either designed, outfitted, or some goddamn diverting thing, so after about six or seven more rewrites, I simply divorced myself from any further obligation to the project and it died on Walter Mirisch’s shelf. 
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Atlas Shrugged
(NBC, 1979). Treatment, 1,240 pages. “It broke down into ten hours. Not only is it formidable, but Miss Rand is a little formidable. She has absolute total creative control over the project; that was the only way she would make her deal with the network. That means she has to initial every page. She’s quite a taskmaster, a brilliant writer, and a lady who won’t let you change very much. For instance, let’s say there’s a line of dialogue, ‘
I think I’ll go upstairs.
’ She’ll say, ‘Why did you write that line of dialogue?’ I say, ‘Miss Rand, it’s from the book on page 452 if you will look.’ She said, ‘I don’t have to look. I would never have written that line of dialogue for the character of Dagny.’ I say, ‘I’ll show you.’ Now I open the book and the dialogue is not
I think I will go upstairs,
but
I will go upstairs.
I added the two words,
I think.
She will say, ‘Why did you do that?’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘because I wanted to suggest that she wasn’t too sure whether she would or wouldn’t.’ [Rand] said, ‘That’s wrong. Dagny is a character who always knows what she’s going to do, what she has done, what she will do. She would never qualify it with
I think
or
possibly
or
perhaps.
’ She said, ‘on top of that, her dialogue is written in iambic pentameter and when you add
I think,
aside from destroying the character I’ve created, you are destroying the rhythm of the sentence.’ That is how precise she is. As a writer, I learned craft from this lady. Suddenly you realize you’ve been writing dreck all these years. I worked for a year on this one only to have it destroyed
in utero
the first weekend NBC changed management, ousting the execs who had ordered it and replacing them with that shining genius of the tube, Fred Silverman.” (
Atlas Shrugged
was produced and released in two parts in 2011 and 2012 by independent producer Harman Kaslow’s Strike Productions. Silliphant’s material was not involved.).

Battle.
162-page script dated January 3, 1975. No producing information.

The Bitter and the Sweet
(Universal, 1985)
.
Proposed daytime drama (soap opera) with Dick Irving Highland for Universal City Studios. Silliphant felt that daily daytime television would have less censorship than prime time television because its viewing audience is mostly mature women as opposed to the mixed audiences who watch at night. 
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Fifty-one-page script dated May 24, 1965.

The Burma Horsemen.
Written for Raymond Chow, Golden Harvest Productions. No further information.

Captain James Cook project (1990, United National Pictures). UNP sued Silliphant for reneging on a verbal commitment to write a six-hour mini-series on Captain James Cook even though they say he deposited their $50,000 advance check. 
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He agreed to write the show bible on the condition that he write all of the scripts, and UNP said they’d make “best efforts” for him to do it, but they did not or could not, and, explained Silliphant, “in short, a $425,000 deal now suddenly was cut back to $125,000. I stopped my work and kept the $50,000 [start-up fee]. This has resulted in their suing me and I suing them. It’s in the hands of attorneys and I spend about one hundredth of a second every six months thinking about it.” 
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(Alternate title:
The Magnificent Invader.
)

Chasing the Dragon.
First draft screenplay, March 30, 1990. No further information.

Cinderella and the Pilot
(Summerton Productions, LA and London). Outline written by Irina Summerton based on a story by Stirling Silliphant).

A Circle in Water.
Notes for a novel. No further information.

Cleaning Up
(1983). Mr. T (
nee
Lawrence Tero) is a Chicago garbage man who not only cleans up the trash, he cleans up the streets. “I went off with Mr. T to Chicago and to the neighborhood where he grew up and I’m here to tell you I never felt so white in my life. I saw things I’d never seen before; Mr. T took me into his world more deeply than Joe Louis ever did into his. Mr. T’s Chicago was a place where you could lose your ass in a fraction of a second. Menace dripped from every doorway. Eyes looked into mine with expressions I had never seen before and would elect never to see again. And I was supposed to be writing a
comedy.
But after the first few days I began to go with the flow and turn myself inside out and let the black of me surface and put the white of me away somewhere and suddenly all the booby traps became disarmed and I felt and shared and went with the sense of humor that exists out there in the street because without humor there’s no fucking way you would want to live until tomorrow. Then watching some kid being chased by three other kids with baseball bats became hysterically amusing. ‘Hey, T, what they gonna do to the bro’?’ I’d ask. ‘Oh,’ T grinned, ‘Gonna kill him.’ ‘
Kill
?’ I played back. ‘Yeh,’ he said. ‘Looks like it to me.’ And we keep driving in his Mercedes. Ha, ha!”

The Color of Deceit
(1992). Dramatized outline for a story set in Hong Kong involving stock traders and romantic intrigue.

Daredevil
(Warner Bros, TV, 1982). Based on the Marvel Comics character created by Stan Lee and Bill Everett. Silliphant owed Warner Bros. a third script on an overall deal, but his agent renegotiated that his commitment would be satisfied if
Daredevil
did not go to pilot but his other script,
Travis McGee,
did. This came to pass. 
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Dial 116
(Wilbert Productions, 1958). Silliphant wrote three scripts (“102 to Bakersfield,” “The Ammonia Trap,” and “Ferris Wheel”) for this series, which Bert Leonard wanted to produce. When the series didn’t happen, Leonard re-purposed the scripts, changing the title of “120 to Bakersfield” to “Dial 116” and selling it to CBS for
The Lineup,
and using “The Ammonia Trap” and “Ferris Wheel” on his own 1958 CBS Screen Gems series,
Rescue 8.
The name “Wilbert” combines Willeta and Herbert Leonard, who were married at the time. Silliphant used the pseudonym “Loren Dayle” after his two children by Ednamarie.

The Dilly Road
(Paramount, 1966). Set near Antofagasta, Chile, in the American mines and smelting plants. Dilly roads are the roads leading out of the mines in this escape drama. “I never wrote this because I never found the time to zip on down to Antofagasta. Since I seldom write anything without first researching the place and people, I couldn’t proceed without that first vital location trip. And anyway, I always thought of
The Dilly Road
(a title, incidentally, which I continue to love) more as a novel than as a film. I had this fantasy I’d write an even better book than the superb
Under the Volcano.
It never happened — and sadly never will — that book I didn’t write — that title I never used.

Dreamstreet
(1985, NBC). Mini-series about a group of young people who come to LA seeking fame and fortune in rock, film, communications, etc. A morality play. 
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“This was a final effort on my part to get something about young people going. I set this script on LA’s Melrose Avenue and I changed the characters to become the trendy kids who brought that street to life in the early ‘80s. I’ve never seen Aaron Spelling’s
Melrose Place
(Fox-TV) but I suspect I may have preceded him by a decade with this subject.”

East-West, Ltd.
Pilot (1986). script for a one-hour TV series. Revised draft January 10, 1986.

Embargo
(undated). Silliphant and best-selling European novelist Gerard deVilliers were signed to simultaneously write an original motion picture
and
a novel, which indie producer Doug Netter planned to develop in tandem for publishing and screen. 
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“It was one of those high-action, realism-based stories about Middle East bad guys striking back at the U.S.A. by planning to stage a series of raids on American refineries, thus bringing the country to its knees, since this lack of fossil fuel, coupled with a simultaneous Arab embargo, would permit political extortion of Washington. Gerard and I cooked up the story together, working both in Paris and in Hollywood, and set the primary action in Houston, Texas, where our research revealed that most of the American refineries, certainly the ones in Houston, had lousy security.

Determined Campfire Girls could easily knock out the cracking facilities and take the refinery off-stream for months.

“I wrote the script (I believe Gerard also wrote the novel), but Doug was never quite able to put the deal together. I seem to remember — but only vaguely — that Doug indicated he might be able to put some kind of a deal if I were to back off from the terms of my original contract and surrender profit points. I, of course, refused, and have the sense that somehow, when the smoke cleared, I got blamed by Doug and Gerard for being a spoil-sport and the wrench in the machine. For my part, I thought they had one hell of a nerve asking
me
to give up
my
points. Why didn’t
they
give up theirs? It was something like that, but it’s way back into the past and trying to remember exactly what went wrong here is like trying to remember what you ate for dinner three months ago.”