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  • Interview with Arthur Laurents
  • Walter Raubicheck (bio) and Walter Srebnick (bio)

Besides his work on Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948), Arthur Laurents (1917-2011) had a long and distinguished career as a playwright, novelist, screenwriter, and director. Best known perhaps for the book for West Side Story (1957), on which he collaborated with Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, and Stephen Sondheim, and Gypsy (1959), on which he shared credit with Sondheim and Julie Styne, he also wrote the dramas Home of the Brave (1945) and The Time of the Cuckoo (1952), as well as other plays. He later authored the novels The Way We Were (1973) and The Turning Point (1977), as well as both their screen adaptations. He also composed many other screenplays besides Rope, including The Snake Pit (1948), Summertime (1955), and Anastasia (1956). And he directed plays, including Gypsy and West Side Story several times. While never a Hollywood insider, Laurents was part of Hitchcock's inner social circle in the late 1940s, and the director told several other screenwriters, including Joseph Stefano, that he was as good a screenwriter as he had ever worked with. Always involved in politics, Laurents was blacklisted in the early 1950s and lost his passport for a time. In 1999 he published a memoir of his life and career, Original Story by Arthur Laurents, and after his death, friend and theatrical director David Saint published a coda to it, entitled The Rest of the Story (2012).

We first met Arthur Laurents in 1999 at NYU's Centennial Conference on Hitchcock, where he participated in a panel featuring authors who had written [End Page 97] screenplays for the director. Besides Laurents, the panel featured Evan Hunter and Joseph Stefano. Subsequently we interviewed all three writers individually, as well as Jay Presson Allen, hoping to do a book on Hitchcock and his collaborations with writers. This plan eventually resulted in Scripting Hitchcock (University of Illinois Press, 2011), which examined the process that produced what we dubbed the "triptych" of Psycho (1960), The Birds (1963), and Marnie (1964). However, since the book was limited to the years 1959-1964, we were unable to use the interesting interview we had done with Laurents about his work on Rope, an interview we are presenting now because it represents his last public comments on an important film in the Hitchcock canon, not only because of the "ten-minute takes," but also because of its politics and its treatment of homosexuality.

Laurents agreed to speak with us early in 2002, and he requested only that we buy him lunch at a French bistro near his apartment in the West Village (only a few blocks from the apartment where Jefferies gazed out his rear window). The food was good and the conversation even better. He was open, forthright, charming, witty, sharply critical about some people, films, and plays, but also enthusiastic and insightful about others. We laughed a lot and, though he cast a jaundiced eye on academic film criticism, he treated us with interest and respect.

Clearly he liked Hitchcock and believed that his visual sense was superior to that of other directors—though surprisingly he spent little time with him in pre-production crafting the script, unlike the other writers who claimed that Hitchcock could have taken a writing credit because of the extensiveness of the collaboration. Hitchcock, in turn, must have liked Laurents and thought highly of his talent, since he later asked him to work on Under Capricorn (1949), Torn Curtain (1966), and Topaz (1969), though Laurents declined because he did not like the source material. Though our conversation covered a number of topics (in particular West Side Story), what we are including, lightly [End Page 98] edited for clarity and continuity, are his comments on Rope, other Hitchcock films, and Hitchcock himself, as a person and filmmaker.

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Interviewer:

Before we talk about your work with Hitchcock, I just wanted to mention that this morning I was part of a committee interviewing a candidate to teach musical theater at Pace. There were some students and a couple of other faculty members on the committee, and when I mentioned that I had to leave because I...

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