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Interview with Stewart Stern
Stewart Stern was born in New York City in 1922. After
graduating from the University of Iowa in Iowa City, he served in World War II
(1939-1945) as a staff sergeant in the United States Army, fighting in Germany.
After surviving the Battle of the Bulge—memories of which he partially dealt
with in his screenplay for the 1973 film Summer Wishes, Winter
Dreams—Stern became an actor and assistant stage manager on Broadway. In
1945 he went to Hollywood as a dialogue director for Eagle Lion studios, then in
1951 became a contract writer for MGM.
Stern’s first script for a feature film was
Teresa, a 1951 work directed by the legendary Fred Zinnemann, who
directed From Here to Eternity (1953). The story of a G.I. who faces his
own postponed adolescence upon returning to his hometown with an Italian bride,
Stern’s script—written under Zinnemann’s tutelage—became a model for the
writer’s commitment to research and resonating detail of real life. Stern next
wrote the story and script for the Oscar-winning documentary, Benjy, also
directed by Zinnemann. Next came screenplays for Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without
a Cause, Arnold Laven’s The Rack (1956, adapted from a Rod Serling
teleplay), Delbert Mann’s The Outsider (1962), George H. Englund’s The
Ugly American (1963), Paul Newman’s Rachel, Rachel (1968), and
Gilbert Cates’s Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams (1973). Stern also wrote for
television during the medium’s glory years of live drama. He returned to TV in
1976 to write the Emmy-winning Sybil, and won a Writers Guild of America
West award for A Christmas to Remember.
Keogh: How did you come to write Rebel
Without a Cause?
Stern: It was a project that had been tried on a
number of occasions. Warner Brothers had bought the rights to the Dr. Robert
Lindner book called Rebel Without a Cause, which was about the
psychoanalysis of a young prisoner. Warner's had a gaggle of writers try to
dramatize that book, but it never went anywhere. And then director Nicholas Ray
came to them with a seven-page treatment for a movie called Blind
Run—which he told me about but I never read—a story about middle-class
teenagers and their so-called juvenile delinquency, which we today would call
dysfunctional, anti-social behavior, or acting-out. Their problems came from
emotional deprivation and misunderstanding at home, though the prevailing idea
at that time was that juvenile delinquency was a symptom of the inner city. That
it was mostly poor people and their deprived kids. So the fact that [Ray] was
shining a spotlight on trouble in the middle class, and that things were not
what they appeared to be in middle-class families, was very provocative.
Keogh: You had only written one feature film,
Teresa, at that point, though you had been working in television and won
an Oscar for the documentary Benjy. Why did Ray ask you to write the
script for Rebel?
Stern: I had been working in New York on
Philco-Goodyear Playhouse [on live television]. I went to Los Angeles for
Christmas vacation, and Arthur Loew, Jr.—my cousin—had made friends with [James]
Dean. Jimmy and I met and we kind of liked each other. And he and another friend
of mine—Lenny Rosenman, who had composed the music for East of Eden and
had been hired to write the score for Rebel Without a Cause—persuaded
Nick to talk to me.
Keogh: How did Ray get you up to speed for the
project as it existed at that point?
Stern: He had done some reading and research and
made contact with the juvenile division of the Los Angeles Police Department. He
settled on the idea, I think, of dealing with the children of three different
families [in the story], and he wanted a climax point that was a race through
the Mulholland Tunnel on the top of Mulholland Drive. That was where teen gangs
routinely would meet at night and play chicken, driving at each other through
the tunnel, one pair at a time from opposite ends and whoever got out of the way
first was “chicken.” [Ray] hired Leon Uris to write a screenplay, but the
screenplay didn’t work. So Warners hired Irving Schulman, who had written a book
called The Amboy Dukes, about gang kids in Chicago that was really very
good. They weren’t happy with his script, and he was still writing it by the
time they interviewed me. Nick and I had a meeting, and he described the idea
for the film and gave me some newspaper articles and the first part of Irving’s
script. I was fascinated, but I didn’t connect personally with what Irving had
done. I couldn’t explain it, but I knew I couldn’t fix his characters. We
weren’t coming from the same emotional background.
Keogh: What was different about your take on
it?
Stern: I was involved very deeply in the
psychoanalysis I had begun after [World War II]. I was really looking under
appearances in every direction and more concerned with subtext. I could recite
all the crimes of my parents and none of their virtues. So I thought the
Rebel script would really be right up my alley. And Nick was having a
pretty bad time himself as a father, because he didn’t feel he was a good
father. So he had it in for grown-ups as much as I did.
Keogh: How did you begin the process of
writing the script?
Stern: I said the planetarium setting in Irving’s
script could be a tremendously useful image. There was the sense of a Greek
temple about it, like the stage house in the theater of Dionysus. It suggested a
kind of classical treatment, though I didn’t know what that would be. I thought
of a sacrifice being made on the steps of this temple. So very early I thought
that might be a wonderful place to end the picture, if you could [also] use it
at the beginning of the film in a way that would set the characters off. Then I
began doing research. Nick arranged for me to go down to the juvenile division.
By then, I had learned enough from Fred Zinnemann to know that that’s what you
do. You go to where the truth is, and don’t look for background but look for the
heart of the story. So I interviewed a number of kids. I posed as a social
worker from Chicago in case anyone ever asked me what I was doing there, though
no one ever did. I was just there with a clipboard. The police were very
helpful. They even pulled kids out of solitary to talk to me in the middle of
the night. And I’d be there when the parents came in and I made notes about
that. The authorities also opened up a lot of confidential files because I told
them that when I was writing Teresa, I had gone to the Veterans
Administration in New York and not only spoken to people who interviewed the
veterans who needed treatment, but also some of the psychologists and
psychiatrists who were working there. So in telling them about my experiences
with the VA, [the juvenile division] opened up the same way. Upon condition of
confidentiality, they turned over everything to me: the tapes of interviews they
had with these kids, results of psychological tests, all the subjective testing
material.
Keogh: How were you translating what you were
seeing into visual ideas?
Stern: I had to keep in mind what Nick wanted. He
had a cinematic idea from visiting juvenile hall himself that it would be
wonderful to introduce the characters by looking through the glass walls of the
interview rooms. You could see through the glass windows from one room into
another. So I kept that in mind. Then he showed me an article about a knife
fight, so I knew I wanted to do that.
Keogh: Was it easy to start writing from that
point?
Stern: I couldn’t start writing at all. So I went
to see On the Waterfront for inspiration and was blown away. I was
deeply moved and excited and I raced home and started writing the script for
Rebel.
Keogh: Was there a specific way that watching
On the Waterfront inspired your writing of Rebel?
Stern: When I talk to screenwriting students, I
do a session on the use of objects and how an object can have character
significance that moves through a whole film. In my first film, Teresa,
there is a very dependent boy with a domineering mother who finds himself in
combat, and he’s scared. He can’t believe in his own manhood or that he can do
anything on his own initiative, and there’s a sergeant who kind of adopts him
and who the boy idolizes. There’s a point where the sergeant has to leave him on
the front and he hands the boy his scarf, and that scarf incorporates the soul
of the sergeant. It’s a talisman that goes all the way through the film. Then in
Rebel—remembering that scarf and the value of it in Teresa—I had
Jim [Dean’s character] offer his jacket to Plato [Sal Mineo] who’s shivering in
the police station at the beginning of the film. And it’s refused. Later on,
when Jim gets Plato to come out of the planetarium, one of the ways he draws him
out is to give him the jacket and assure him that he can keep it. Then at the
very end, when Plato is killed and he’s on a stretcher, Jim goes over and zips
the jacket up and says “He was always cold.” Last year, when I was viewing On
the Waterfront again, I noticed what happened to Terry Malloy’s jacket. It
had been on the guy he’d fingered when he was pushed off the roof; and the
jacket went to his sister, then to the murdered guy’s friend, then back to the
sister, who finally gave it to Terry in recognition of his change. When I saw
that, I realized that all this time I’d thought that using the jacket in
Rebel was my discovery. But it all went back to my watching On the
Waterfront on the day I started writing Rebel.
Keogh: Rebel outwardly concerns
juvenile delinquency, but it doesn’t really feel like a movie about social
issues. It’s really more about painful alienation between parents and kids. What
made you take that particular angle?
Stern: At least in my experience of growing up,
there is so little celebration of the simple fact of my being. There was a lot
of emphasis on what a child could produce in terms of accomplishment. In my
case, it was producing a painting or performing imitations, something that could
win my parents attention from their peers. But it was dependent so much on
performance, and I never felt for a minute that just because I was me that that
was a source of celebration for anybody. I didn’t have a model to grow up on,
somebody who would not try to obliterate my temper or my fantasies without
finding out what they meant. Someone who wouldn’t just lock you in your room
until you were sorry enough to come out, without ever knowing really what your
crime was except that you must have done something that made you get locked up
in a room. But no one ever fished for answers, no one ever went in and said,
“What’s going on in there? What is it? What hurts you so?” It seemed to be a
pretty common experience among my friends, and everybody seemed to have a secret
anguish and the feeling that their own anguish was unique. Because of the model
their parents set, they could not confide that to anyone, and everyone ended up
going around with these secret selves. Stiff-lipped miniatures of their mothers
and fathers and recreating their alienation. Alienation is just an inability to
trust ourselves to expose our emotional anatomies, or to allow ourselves to be
interested in each other’s. So in my experience there is an absolute chasm of
ignorance between the parent and the child, and an endless, inconsolable
loneliness.
Keogh: There is a feeling of great closeness
between Jim and Plato and Natalie Wood’s character. The three of them become a
surrogate family.
Stern: In the army, I saw young people put in a
crucible of war, away from parents. With distant “fathers” who were division
commanders, and all the surrogate older brothers down the line who were captains
and lieutenants and sergeants and so on. And all of us were so young and pushed
into a pressure cooker where death was everywhere, where there was no time for
pretending, and where only the shield of the night allowed you to speak your
heart to your buddy sharing a pup tent with you, saying things you would never
confide to anyone. Combat created surrogate families—it helped us love each
other.
Keogh: There is also a lot of fear among the
parents. The father of Natalie Wood’s character, for instance, gets angry after
she kisses him on the cheek. What were you thinking about when you wrote that
scene?
Stern: Well, it’s fear of their own fears. That
was like sending her to her room. The parents don’t investigate their children’s
feelings, they don’t understand them, they don’t tie those feelings in with
their own experience. They just push it all away. Jim’s father has answers to
everything—“let’s make lists, let’s ask your mom”—but he doesn’t know what Jim
means when Jim wants advice about how to be a man, about standing up, about
staying with your principles. The father has taught that if you’re going to say
it, do it. But when Jim asks him, “Dad, what do I do?”, the father falls apart.
“Protect yourself,” is his answer. And that’s not good enough anymore, because
whenever there was trouble in the past, the family would simply move away.
Keogh: Describe in a general way what you
learned from Fred Zinnemann about what’s involved in screenwriting.
Stern: You know, that word “truth.” I don’t know
what truth is. But I think that what Zinnemann meant and what he tried to live
his life by, creatively, was a kind of quest for that shared ideal at the core
of all common experience. In Indonesia, there are rituals having to do with the
casting of gongs for the gamelan orchestra. And in order to get the truest tone,
the metal has to be poured at a certain phase of the moon, and the casting has
to be done at a certain moment in the night. The gongs are tested for resonance
and when you tap the hardened metal in the true ones, the sound goes on and on
and on and never seems to dissipate. It’s that sound that Zinnemann was looking
for all the time: Trying to find that tap that would send rings of music out
that can include everybody without them necessarily having to know why they can
suddenly comprehend each other. One of the things he found is that the more
specific you are about a story and character, no matter how foreign they seem,
the more universal those things become. You can’t write generalities, you can’t
write themes, you can’t write ideas. If you’re going to move people, you have to
find some way to personalize experiences down to the most specific detail.
Keogh: How do you do that?
Stern: The best way to get at that is to find the
real life equivalents of the people who you’re writing about and to get out
there with them and find out what in their lives makes them tick. You can start
with a theme and an archetypal character, but you have to find the real people
whose specific personal experiences created the archetype in the first place,
and go down to the absolute bottom of the most core experiences those people
have ever had. That’s where you’ll find crisis after crisis, climax after
climax, and incident after incident. Pieces of behavior and exchanges and
details about the ways people meet or part, the way a child is born or received,
what happens when someone dies. And it is through all those hundreds of
testimonials that might come out of the living research that you find that ring,
that sound. And once you find it, if the impulse is right, you can’t go wrong.
If that is the sound that guides you, it’s like a radio attached to a freed
eagle, beaming a signal that won’t let you stray. And the minute you lose it,
you know it’s gone and you have to find it again. Zinnemann always went right to
the source in preparation for his work. If he was going to make a film about
displaced persons in Europe, he went to the camps and talked to the survivors.
If they were refugees on a ship to Israel, he traveled with them. That’s what he
taught me. He took me to Israel in 1948 to come up with a story that MGM might
like. We worked together over there for about six weeks under combat conditions,
living underground with the soldiers, living in the kibbutzim with the farmers,
because that was where the life was. That was where the stories were.
Keogh: Describe your involvement in the
process of getting the finished Rebel script to the screen.
Stern: On Rebel my involvement was
minimal. I really had nothing to do with casting it or anything. I didn’t hang
around for this reason: Jimmy [Dean] had decided he didn’t want to do the movie.
He hadn’t read the script yet but he was suddenly uncertain about Nick Ray. Nick
was a very people-eating person, very controlling, voracious for attention, and
at the same time he invited tremendous creative participation. But something
made Jimmy uneasy, because he had just had the best director available on
East of Eden, Elia Kazan. That experience for Jimmy had been unique,
marvelous for a debut performance. He recognized the preciousness, needed his
next film to be as solid as his first, and had a lot of anxiety about whether
Rebel would measure up and if he’d be as safe with Nick as he’d been with
[Kazan]. So he went into hiding and Warners was going to put him on suspension
and find a replacement. One night, out of the blue, he called me and asked if I
wanted him to come back and do the picture. I said, I can’t answer that. I can’t
tell you to do this movie because I can’t guarantee the outcome with Nick any
more than you can. I told him that this was only my second feature and I’d be
lying if I said I didn’t want him in it. But on the other hand, I didn’t want to
be the one to say “come back.” He said, “If I come back it will be for you.” I
said, “Don’t lay that on me.” He said, “Okay,” and he came back, but I know he
didn’t do the movie for me. No one in their right mind would do that for
anybody. The fact that he chose to personalize his reasons, whatever they were,
made me feel very good and very close to him. And it may just be another of his
magician’s charms to make everyone in his environment feel chosen. But I didn’t
want to be around the set of Rebel because I knew it would create tension
between Jimmy and Nick.
Keogh: You’ve had other experiences where
you’ve been more intimately involved in the process.
Stern: On Rachel, Rachel, I participated
in everything from beginning to end, from talking to art directors about props
and set dressing to finding locations and then giving Paul [Newman, who directed
the film] a shot list once, complete with drawings for the storyboard. And
casting: I was always fighting for my choices and sometimes losing, but very
often winning and seeing the people I had pushed to get certain roles actually
get the roles. I worked with Paul up through the final editing, but I also
learned when to keep quiet.
Keogh: You were very involved in the making of
Teresa.
Stern: On Teresa, Zinnemann cast Pier
Angeli on the basis of a little 16mm test I had made of her in Rome, reading a
scene that I’d had translated into Italian. He also had me work closely with the
actors because he thought I had more of a connection with them in terms of age
and emotion. On Sybil, I was there really every second. I worked very
closely with [director] Daniel Petrie. We had a whole set of signals worked out.
It takes a long time to learn how to be a writer on the set without interfering
or upsetting the actor’s trust in the director, no matter how you feel about
what the director’s doing. I had a system with Dan worked out where I would take
any comment I had about the way he was interpreting a scene and I would write a
note to him and go take it over to the script clerk. She would lower her script
and I would lay the note in there. Then, after a take, she would go up to Dan to
discuss camera angles, he would read the communication and say, “I’m going into
my dressing trailer for a minute.” And I would go in his trailer even before he
left the set-up and we would talk in private, and he’d go back to the set, and
after a moment I’d come out. So no one ever saw us talking.
Keogh: There’s a kind of chivalry in
that.
Stern: It’s absolutely essential. Sometimes the
best support you can give a director is to axe him right down the middle with
another point of view, but you have to do that out of sight of everybody. Half
my energy goes toward preserving my vision, so I’ve been on the set virtually
all the time except during Rebel and a lot of The Ugly American
and The Outsider. I’ve been blessed with tolerant and generous
directors.
Keogh: But that isn’t the norm for most
screenwriters—certainly not today—to be that involved.
Stern: Some of the directors I’ve worked very
closely with had worked on the stage, and they knew the value of having the
writer at rehearsals and on the set. So much writing happens in the rehearsal
process. Brad Davis could not play his role with much comfort [as the boyfriend
of Sally Field’s character] in Sybil. The part was written too
whimsically, and he did not have a funny bone in his body. I had to tear out a
lot of the pages and tailor the character to him to let him find the comfort to
give us the wonderfully idiosyncratic performance he did. On Rachel,
Rachel, it happened a couple of times that Joanne [Woodward] and Estelle
[Parsons] would start a scene and their impulse and energy would want to take
them somewhere else. If I hadn’t been there to see it, I couldn’t have provided
the words to take them there. I had to do a lot of transition work in the script
that came out of just watching those ladies improvise. I’d steal from their
improvisations and rewrite.
Keogh: Why haven’t you directed?
Stern: I’m best when I’m spontaneous, when
somebody presents me with a demand and I don’t know I have a solution until the
second they ask me—If I don’t have any time to think, I can be creative so I can
contribute to the director without having to take on his terrible
responsibility. All eyes are not on the star. All eyes are on the director on
the set. And he or she has to be God, has to have answers for everything. You
can’t show the anxieties you feel because everybody loses faith. To protect
themselves from attack, I’ve seen some insecure directors do awful things, abuse
and embarrass people, stick to arbitrary decisions they live to regret, so the
decision gets shot, but not the film. I’d rather just pass notes. |
