Will the Real Me Please Stand Up (review)

Show-biz autobiographies, familiar enough as the reminiscences of actors and producers, familiar enough too as exercises in preening self-regard or revenge, are oddly rare as the work of one set of film people—the set allegedly most familiar with, happiest around, words. Where are the memoirs of screenwriters? Of I. A. L. Diamond, longtime collaborator with Billy Wilder? Of Dudley Nichols, author of many 1930s hits including Bringing Up Baby, and the first Academy Award winner to turn down the Oscar? After all, it is not as though writers are exempt from self-regard and vengefulness, or indeed from more admirable motives for autobiography, such as a simple desire to set the record straight or explain to the world what writers for movies or television do to earn their fees and residuals. Perhaps scriptwriters' autobiographies are more an English than an American genre. There is not much on this side of the Atlantic to compare with memoirs like, say, My Nine Lives: Chapters of a Possible Past, by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the longtime writer for Merchant Ivory; or This Is Where I Came In, by T. E. B. Clarke, author of Passport to Pimlico, The Lavender Hill Mob, and many other Ealing comedy scripts.

In a singlehanded effort to redress the imbalance, Christopher Knopf has now brought out Will the Real Me Please Stand Up, the record of a fifty-year-long, intensely American career of writing for films and television. His is not exactly a familiar name, outside Hollywood working circles and especially outside the Writers Guild of America, Western Branch (Knopf played an important role, lightly sketched in this memoir, in standing up for authors' rights, negotiating contracts with penny-pinching studio bosses, even taking his turn on the picket line). Nevertheless, he has been a player, in the show-biz sense of that term, writing some significant films, developing successful television series (the most famous of which, and the only one currently available for watching on DVD, is The Big Valley), and in particular shaping a genre once important, now neglected, the made-for-television movie.

"Knopf" an unfamiliar name? In publishing, of course, it is a famous one. Christopher Knopf is the nephew of Alfred Knopf, and heritage is a part of the nephew's story, his career a chapter in that voluminous history of the ambitious, eager-to-assimilate, Jewish-American families so prominent in the world of twentieth-century letters—and beyond that in the entertainment industry, which if they did not invent they developed and maintained for the rest of the country. There are engaging anecdotes in Will the Real Me Please Stand Up about Knopf—his Judaism apparently never the be-all and end-all of his existence—writing for such intensely Christian projects as the four-hour CBS television film Peter and Paul, or the three-hour biopic for the same network on Pope John Paul II. The latter program, still purchasable in VHS, offers the chance to see Albert Finney, the erstwhile Tom Jones, the erstwhile Hercule Poirot, as the heroic Polish priest Karol Wojtyla, as John Paul was before his elevation to the Throne of Peter. Peter and Paul, meanwhile, features Anthony Hopkins as first the resistant Saul, then the acquiescent Paul. How do you guarantee the success of Biblical dramas? Knopf asks rhetorically. His answer is, "Start with an English actor." More seriously, Knopf might have answered "research." Several times in his memoir he mentions going to the UCLA Library to tackle books on a subject he was planning to write a script about.

At the start of Christopher Knopf's career, it was not Alfred Knopf who gave the would-be screenwriter his first chance, but Edwin Knopf, the publisher's brother and Christopher's father; he sent his son's college-written novella to Dore Schary at MGM, who promptly took the young man on as a trainee. About this sort of nepotistic leg-up Knopf is appealingly frank. About his father, a director at...