Solidly Constructed: Ernest Lehman, 1915-2005

The screenwriter Ernest Lehman passed away earlier this month at the age of 89. Shortly after reading of his death, I dipped in to William Goldman’s memoir, Which Lie Did I Tell?, which devotes pages to examining what may be Lehman’s most famous scene, the crop-duster sequence from North By Northwest. Goldman includes a rather amazing bit of trivia; the screenplays Lehman worked on between 1954 and 1966, notched up over 50 Academy Award nominations between them. But even aside from this industry acclaim, Lehman showed himself over time to be an exceptional craftsman, his scripts solidly constructed, literate and intelligent.

Born in 1915 to a moneyed family from Long Island, Lehman spent his formative years in New York. After college, he worked as a copywriter on Broadway before going freelance. He contributed articles and fiction to magazines such as Liberty, Colliers, and Cosmopolitan, and by the late 1940s, had made a splash in Hollywood with a number of short stories that seemed ripe for film adaptation. Confident that work awaited him, he moved to Los Angeles.

Ernest Lehman excelled at the difficult and notoriously thankless task of translating stage musicals to the screen.

At the beginning of the 1950s, the film industry was in trouble. Television was purloining its audience and continuing anti-trust suits against the Hollywood monoliths were taking their toll on the studio system. In this environment, good writers became a valuable commodity. Lehman was exactly that. On his arrival, MGM commissioned him to adapt Cameron Hawley’s novel Executive Suite for director Robert Wise. A year later, he worked on the screenplay for Sabrina (1954), along with director Billy Wilder and playwright Samuel Taylor. A polished, classy hit, Sabrina earned Lehman his first of six Academy Award nominations. The script was so good they used it twice — Sydney Pollack’s 1995 remake paid tribute to the word as well as the spirit of the original.

In 1957, Lehman adapted The Sweet Smell of Success from his own novella. Based on his experience as a writer working for a celebrity publicity firm in New York, the film centered on a bullying gossip columnist who specialized in demolishing the reputations of his foes on Broadway. Lean, mean and laced with memorable zingers (“I’d hate to take a bite out of you. You’re a cookie full of arsenic”), the film neatly skewers the Machiavellian side of New York’s show biz culture. A belated attempt to adapt it in to a musical in 2002, flopped largely because it just wasn’t nasty enough.

Lehman excelled as well at the difficult and notoriously thankless task of translating stage musicals to the screen. His first adaptation was Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I in 1956. He followed this huge success with others, including The Sound Of Music (1965), Hello Dolly! (1969), and perhaps most impressively,West Side Story (1961).

Directed by Robert Wise, West Side Story was credited with raising both the profile and the stature of the musical, which, at the time, had enjoyed only modest runs on Broadway and in the West End. Yet, behind Jerome Robbins’ twitchy choreography and Leonard Bernstein’s epochal score, Lehman and Wise devised a rock-solid film from a tale that must have seemed dauntingly stage-bound. His relationship with Wise would continue eight years later with The Sound of Music, another box-office barnstormer that cleaned up at the Oscars.

In 1958, he wrote one of his few original screenplays, for Hitchcock’s ultimate wrong-man thriller, North by Northwest, the director’s most commercially successful picture. With its breezy pace, eye-popping set pieces and super-smart dialogue, the film seems to point the way forward to the globe trotting capers of the 1960s. The tart dinner conversation between Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint, oozing with wry innuendo, sounds to this day like the dialogue from a better man’s James Bond.

Perhaps Lehman’s most memorable achievement was his stark adaptation of Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? (1966), a property then deemed untouchable due to its raw subject matter. Suggesting the same dark, bitter world as The Sweet Smell of Success, his uncompromising screenplay was a gamble that paid off. The film was a coruscating examination of a marriage gone horribly sour, marked out with corrosive verbal exchanges and superb performances from Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. It received 13 Academy Award nominations that year and launched the career of director Mike Nichols.

Surprisingly, writing never came easily for Lehman. He apparently spent two weeks staring at a typewriter while writing North by Northwest. And, like most writers, he had his duds. Hello Dolly! (1969) was a runaway film adaptation of Jerry Herman’s high camp Broadway show, directed by Gene Kelly. Though showered with award nominations, it bombed out at the box office, sounding a death knell for the Hollywood musical.

After that, he slowed down somewhat. The 1970s yielded Black Sunday (1973), an adaptation of Thomas Harris’s little-known first novel, and Family Plot (1976), another taut thriller for Hitchcock. Lehman retired from screenwriting in 1979, returning only to work on occasional television projects.

Although he received numerous Oscar nominations, and was lavished with awards and critical praise from all quarters, Lehman won not a single Academy Award for screenwriting during his career. In 2001, the Academy finally honored him with a Lifetime Achievement award, the first such award to be given to a screenwriter. He used the occasion to voice a poignant reminder of the importance of writers to Hollywood. He had surely earned the right:

I accept this rarest of honors on behalf of screenwriters everywhere, but especially those in the Writers Guild of America. We have suffered anonymity far too often. 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.