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187 9 bette Davis and the South redux The Little Foxes (1941) Goldwyn’s studio was virtually shut down by the summer of 1940 as a result of a lawsuit over distribution rights with United artists. The only film he had in development was an adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s play The Little Foxes, which he would refer to for most of his life as “The Three Little Foxes.” He had purchased the rights to the hit play in 1939, despite warnings from one employee that it “deals with terribly greedy unpleasant people.”1 His story editor, edwin Knopf, reiterated that judgment and added that the story was “too caustic for films.”2 Goldwyn reportedly snapped back, “i don’t give a damn how much it costs. buy it.”3 Wyler expected that he would be directing The Little Foxes when Goldwyn resumed production. in the meantime, he was loaned out again, this time to Twentieth Century–Fox, whose production head, Darryl F. Zanuck, had long admired Wyler. Zanuck wanted to make another prestige property as a follow-up to John Ford’s successful film adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. because Ford was busy with another project, Zanuck chose Wyler to direct the film version of richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley, for which he had paid the astounding sum of $300,000. Zanuck commissioned a script from ernest Pascal and then asked Philip Dunne (Stanley and Livingstone, Johnny Apollo) to rewrite it. in his autobiography, Dunne characterizes the script as “long, turgid, and ugly.”4 When he wrote to Zanuck and asked why he had bought the rights in the first place, Zanuck sent him a copy of the novel, which Dunne found to be full of “warmth, love, nobility, and earthy humor.”5 it tells the story of Welsh coal miners whose valley is destroyed by industrial pollution, but above all, it is about a proud, self-reliant family that is divided over the right to strike. Dunne enthusiastically accepted the assignment but told 188 William Wyler Zanuck that because the novel had so much worthwhile material, he would have trouble cutting it to a manageable size. Gone with the Wind, at four hours long, was then the largest grossing film in the country, so Zanuck gave Dunne the go-ahead to write a four-hour film. When Zanuck received Dunne’s script, he pronounced it “twice too long.” Wyler came on board shortly thereafter, and his first job was to help Dunne make cuts. Dunne was thrilled to have Wyler as a collaborator (they had been friends since Wyler’s marriage to Margaret Sullavan). Dunne’s political bent was decidedly left wing, and he considered Wyler a fellow liberal and progressive who would be sympathetic to his pro-union approach to the story. in 1940, a union’s right to organize was still a hotly contested issue in the United States. Screenwriters like Dunne were fighting for recognition of the Screen Writers’ Guild, to which Zanuck was opposed . Dunne refused to write an anti-union script, but he knew Zanuck would never approve a militantly pro-union one. He wrote, “i proposed a sort of compromise: let the preacher . . . who in the earlier version was a fire-eating socialist, decide the family dispute by coming down firmly in favor of the union, but with the proviso that the young unionists accept full responsibility for their actions.”6 Wyler persuaded Zanuck to pay for a two-week trip to a mountain resort , where he and Dunne worked on revising the script. They succeeded in cutting parts of it, but in the process, they added two pages for every one they cut. by the time they returned to Los angeles, the script was even longer than before. in the meantime, casting had begun, and a Welsh mining village was being built in the Malibu hills. Dunne and Wyler spent ten more weeks working on the script. Dunne remembered, “i would shout in aggravation , ‘What is wrong with the god damn scene?’ and he would merely say, ‘You could do it better’—and eventually i always could.”7 The major problem the scriptwriters faced was trying to tell the entire life story of the protagonist, Huw, as he looked back on his childhood. The solution came when Wyler discovered a new child actor who had recently arrived in america. a certain Mrs. McDowall had contacted an agent to represent her son, roddy. The boy...

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