Tag Archives: Woody Allen

Who Was Lajos Egri?

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A few years ago, when I began to reacquaint myself with the study of the screenplay, I was surprised to see the name of Lajos Egri being associated with screenwriting manual writers and film studies programs located primarily on the West Coast of the United States.  I noted that he was particularly highly regarded at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles.  This both puzzled and surprised me because Egri, the author of a very old book on playwriting, was rarely ever mentioned on the East Coast of the United States; furthermore, I considered his work extremely dated when I first read it decades ago.  This prompted me to re-examine this very interesting man and his work.  I now share this re-examination with you.

Lajos Egri was born in Hungary in 1888.   He immigrated to the United States when he was eighteen years old and earned a livelihood working in the New York City garment industry.  He is purported to have written his first play when he was ten years old.  In New York he also wrote plays, but was not a well-known playwright.  In 1942 Egri published a manual on play writing entitled How to Write a Play.  This manual was revised and republished in 1946 under the title The Art of Dramatic Writing, which was, as far as I can discern, revised at least once more. At some point, I am not sure when, Egri opened a school for writing in a small office in midtown Manhattan (New York).

We do not know much about this school of Egri’s. I was only able to find two pertinent references to it: one is an article in the New York Times (1961), and the other is a reference by one of his students—a very young Woody Allen. The New York Times article describes how one of his students, a sixty-three year-old grandmother, had her first play produced on Off-Broadway; it received mixed reviews and ran for only a few weeks. (By the way, sixty-three years was considered old in those days.)    Allen, while generally praising Egri, described the other half dozen or so students in his class as “real losers–some fat house wife, a salesman.  There was no one in the class under forty-five years of age and nobody knew what they were doing…”

Sometime in the early 1960’s Egri moved to Los Angeles, where he continued to offer writing classes (in his home) until his death in 1967.  The edition of his book that I own states that Egri “now resides in Los Angeles, California, where he is teaching and working with members of the film industry.”  However, I was not able to substantiate that he had any impact on Hollywood during the few years that he lived in Los Angeles.

By now I am sure that some of you suspect that I am sitting behind my computer screen, smirking at this obscure, humble immigrant: this tailor by trade who eked out a meager living by mentoring would-be playwrights with precious little talent and less chance of success.  After all, he wasn’t a graduate of the Yale School of Drama.    Totally Wrong!   Lajos Egri was a man I could admire.  He was absolutely brilliant!

Every hundred or so years–if we are so fortunate–a person comes along who can see things that no one else can see.  A person who sees order where others can only discern chaos.  A person who perceives simple, but profound truths where others can only perceive confusion.  A person who is able to see the forest despite the trees.  Lajos Egri was such a person.

What Egri did was to set out to uncover the secrets of successful play writing.  His methodology was straight forward: he saw every play possible (from the classics to the Broadway fare of his day) and he read all the major books on playwriting that were in print at the time.  Then, he formulated his discoveries in a very simple and direct way.  His major discovery was that although the authors of most books on playwriting used different terminology and proposed differing theories, they were essentially saying the same thing: which is that all plays must possess what Egri termed a premise.  Whether they talked about a “theme,” “thesis,” “root idea,” “goal,” “aim,” “driving force” etc, they were really talking about a “premise.”  And whether this was true or not, that is, that other authors writing on dramatic art actually meant the same thing, is unimportant.  What is important is that Egri believed that it was true.

To understand Egri one has to understand Henrik Ibsen, a Nineteenth Century Norwegian playwright who was a major influence on him.  Ibsen, in the late Nineteenth century, introduced a type play that served as a major model for succeeding playwrights for the next sevent-five years: plays which took place in a realistic milieu and employed idiomatic dialogue—but more importantly, plays that prove and/or demonstrate a socially-significant premise.  In his The Art of Dramatic Writing, Egri uses Ibsen’s A Doll’s House as his main teaching example and thoroughly analyzes the play.  The major tenet that Egri derives from Ibsen is that all plays must have a well-formulated premise.   For Egri, the “premise” was “a tyrant” that demanded that the playwright go in only one direction: its absolute proof.   The approach that Egri recommends for writing a play is to start with a well-formulated premise and then select the characters that will prove it.  For example, according to this methodology, if your premise was “Poverty breeds crime,” and your protagonist is a young man who grows up in poverty and then becomes a criminal, the young man cannot have a brother who becomes a priest, because that would undermine the premise.  Nor can he have friends who are the sons of rich men, but turn to crime for the thrill of it.

Egri gives a very interesting but bizarre example of this “tyranny” of the premise.  He presents the premise that if a girl cannot find any other means of support, she will turn to prostitution.  The protagonist he chooses to prove this premise is named Irene, an attractive young woman who lives in a small town and comes from a good family.  She goes to New York to become a dancer, fails at that and then sinks into prostitution.  But we know that not every girl who comes to New York and fails to succeed as a performer (or some similar endeavor) becomes a prostitute—or at least we would like to believe so. There must be something else she could do?  Egri’s answer is that in order to prove your premise you must choose a girl who under these circumstances does just that—becomes a prostitute.  Furthermore, Egri urges that you, the playwright, must make Irene try every conceivable way to avoid prostitution.  But, according to Egri, she must fail! Otherwise you will not be able to prove your premise.  In fact, he goes so far as to say, “If, for any reason, we feel that prostitution wasn’t the only way out for Irene, you have failed as a craftsman and as a dramatist.”  (Italics by Egri.)   To be fair, it must be understood that Egri is not saying that any girl would do this, only a girl with  Irene’s ( mostly selfish and vain) character traits.

The premise, as Egri defines it, is also a capsule summary of the plot.  But it was not in plotting where Egri excelled the most: it was in his treatment of character.  On this subject Egri broke with Aristotle, who decreed that character was secondary to plot.   What is more important, Egri asks:  plot or character?  That is a pointless question, Egri would answer, because plot emanates from character.  If you have chosen your characters well, and fully understand them, then they have no choice but to take the path that you have destined for them—the path that proves your premise.  On the subject of character, Egri acknowledges that  the great Russian playwright Chekhov “has no story to tell, no situation to speak of, but his plays are popular and will be so in time to come, because he permits his characters to reveal themselves and the time in which they lived.”  Regrettably, Egri never fully explains how the success of Chekhov’s essentially “premise-less” plays relates to his own seemingly contradictory theories.

One area in which Egri particularly excelled—and in which other manual writers usually completely ignore—was in his analyses of why certain “bad” plays succeed at the box office.  And in this vein, his analysis of Tobacco Road, a play about an impoverished dysfunctional family in the American Deep South during the 1930’s is particularly insightful.  “The play has characters, but no growth,” he points out.  But these were not ordinary characters.  These were characters that you could smell.  “Their sexual depravity, their animal existence, capture the imagination,” Egri astutely observes:”The most poverty-stricken New York audience feels that its fate is incomparably better. . . . The audience, mesmerized, flocked to see these animals who somehow resembled human beings.”  But Egri’s penetrating analysis didn’t stop there.  He notes that Jeeter Lester, the central character, is “a weak-kneed man, without the strength to live or die successfully.  Poverty stares him in the face, his wife and children starve,” yet he does nothing. ”Is he a weak or a strong character?” Egri asks.  “To our way of thinking he is one of the strongest characters we have seen in the theater in a long time,” he answers. “Lester stubbornly maintains his status quo, or seems to maintain it, against the changes of time….in his weakness he is exceptionally strong, and condemns himself and his class to slow death rather than change.”

Egri had some very sage advice for the aspiring writer:  “If you are interested not in writing good plays, but in making money quickly, there’s no hope for you,” he warned. “Not only won’t you write a good play; you won’t make any money. . . . . write something you really believe in,” he advised.  And lastly, “Don’t write for the producers or for the public.  Write for yourself.”

Egri was indeed brilliant, and I have incorporated certain of his concepts, particularly those dealing with character, in my own work.  His conceptualization of premise has been embraced by both critics and industry professionals alike.  Yet Egri is dated, terribly dated.   Plays and screenplays with Egri-styled premises are rare today.  Audiences are too sophisticated; they have seen it all.  There is little you can prove to them that they don’t already know.  And they don’t like to be preached to.  As a further illustration of this, Ibsen (who Egri greatly admired) is rarely performed today, while Chekhov is continually revived.

If you write like Egri would have you write, your work may very well be criticized as being didactic and contrived, with wooden characters as well.  On the other hand, If you write like Chekhov, critics might very well say that your work is unfocused and diffuse.  The creative processes of both approaches are different, although one is not necessarily better than the other.

Every writer—novelist, playwright and screenwriter alike—should read Egri, if for no other reason than to be able to defend their work should it be criticized for not adhering to his dogma.  As to why Egri is so widely embraced on the West Coast of the United States, I think it has more to do with the fact that for a long time his manual on playwriting was the only one to be found in bookstores, not because he had lived and worked in Los Angeles for the last few years of his life.

Lajos Egri: a very wise  man–and a name you should know!

Is The Screenplay Really Literature?

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I am sure that many of you who have been following this blog were wondering when I would finally address this subject.  Well, today I propose to do just that.  The reason that I have been tardy in joining this debate is because I believed that this question has been answered long ago, if not by me, then by others.  But before I present a definitive answer and the arguments to support it, let us examine this question in its historical context.

In 1943, in a preface to one of the first volumes of screenplays to be published in the United States, John Gassner put forward the rather audacious proposition that the “screenplay” could be considered not only as a new form of literature but also as a very important form in its own right.  However, although Gassner was a respected literary and theater critic of the day (and Professor, too), his proposition was not well received by his literary and academic colleagues.  Gassner’s arguments appeared to treat the word “literature” at its most basic level: as something that is written or read.  And most of his essay (titled “The Screenplay as Literature,” by the way) compared the screenplay to the stage play; in a revised edition he underlines this analogy by stating that “my sometimes far too logical mind tells me that if the drama intended for the stage can be called a form of literature, so can a screenplay.”  Gassner never directly addresses the question of whether or not screenplays were worthy of being called Literature (note I use the word here with a capital “L”).    Although he does state that ”film writing already has substantial claims to literary recognition,” he does little to support that contention other than noting the screenplays included in this volume (I will address their merits later on).  Yet he appears to undermine that assertion when he states: “There is indeed no intrinsic reason why film art cannot use or produce notable literature,” implying that it had yet to do so.  Furthermore, his collaborator on the editing of this volume, successful screenwriter Dudley Nichols, appeared to contradict him when he states that “the screenplay might easily become a fascinating new form of literature” and then proceeds to explain why it had not.

Twenty-seven years later, I came along with my book The Screenplay as Literature.  What prompted me to write it was the status that cinema itself had attained—that of an art (if not literary) form.  The post-Second World War cinema had proved once and for all that the cinema not only could entertain people but enlighten them as with, with the same subtleties and complexities that are to be found in any other art or literary form.  This “renaissance” in film could be traced in part (at least in inspiration) to a 1948 article written by a French critic who ultimately became a film director—Alexandre Astruc.  In this article, entitled the “La Camera-Stylo” (“camera-pen”), Astruc first called attention to some of the changes that cinema was undergoing at the time:

“. . . the cinema  is quite simply becoming a means of expression, just as all the other arts have been before it, and in particular painting and the novel… [having become] a form  in which and by which an artist can express his thoughts, however abstract they may be, or translate his obsession exactly as he does in the contemporary essay or novel.”

Astruc went on to boldly predict that

“From today onwards it will be possible for the cinema to produce works which are equivalent, in their profundity and meaning to the novels of Faulkner and Malraux, to the essays of Sartre and Camus.”

Many critics have assumed that because of the title of my book and my acknowledgement of Gassner’s pioneering work, I actually concurred with his arguments on the literary status of the screenplay.  It was quite the contrary: besides using the word “literature” in a much different sense—I referred to it as “the highest level of artistic and intellectual achievement attained by a particular people or culture”–I implied that there was an equally important criterion that had to be met: that the writer writes for the screen in order to express himself in way impossible in any other medium—and not simply for the money to be earned. The screenplays that Gassner selected for his anthology, all superb examples from Hollywood’s so-called Golden Age, do not meet, I am afraid,  this essential criterion, notwithstanding the fact that two of them were based on a novels which led to their author’s receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature.  All of them, I believe, were adaptations of novels, novellas, biographies and short stories (the name of this volume was, by the way, Twenty Best Film Plays).  In fact, if I had been around in 1943, and all I had to work with was the product that was coming out of Hollywood at the time—polished as it was– not only would I not have written my book, I certainly never would have had the temerity to use the title “The Screenplay as Literature.”

Although my work might not have adequately addressed all the issues surrounding this “controversy,” for the next fifteen or twenty-years the issue remained dormant.  However, with the world-wide proliferation of cinema studies programs, and the concomitant need to publish scholarly books and write University theses, this “debate,” has resurfaced.   Although the emphasis today appears more focused on what a screenplay is (e.g., is it a “sovereign” work, only a blueprint, etc.) rather than its literary qualities, if any.  Now, let me cite some of the most frequent reasons given for denying the screenplay the status of literature, and my responses to them.

Screenplays are not written to be read (or published).  Obviously, I could state the fact that Shakespeare’s plays were not written to be read or published.  However, I primarily want to contradict the sweeping assertion that screenplays are not written to be read:  they most assuredly are!  They are written to be read by those who may be called upon to invest considerable sums of money to produce them, by creative talents, such as actors and directors, who will be asked to devote several months of their lives to work on them, and the myriad of film crafts persons who need to be inspired. As long as most cultures remain primarily verbally rather than visually oriented, the art of the cinema will be dependent on the word pictures of the screenwriter, at least in the earliest stages of production.

The Screenplay is only a blueprint for a production, not an autonomous work of its own.  First I object to the term “blueprint” to describe a screenplay.  Only a building professional or architect can read a blueprint.  Almost anyone today can read and understand a screenplay, even a final shooting script, because screenplay terminology, such as “cut,” “pan” and “close-up,” have become part of the standard language.  In fact, a screenplay is eminently more readable than a play script, in which stage terms such as “stage left,”  “stage right,” “upstage” and “downstage,” can be utterly confusing for anyone but a theater professional.  As for whether or not a screenplay is an autonomous work of its own, the fact that it is meant to be produced as a film need not detract from its completeness or validity: the screenplay is no less an autonomous work than is the play script—which is also meant to be produced.

A Screenplay is meant to be produced only once while a play is capable of inspiring a thousand different ways of being staged.  The assertion that screenplays are not capable of being produced more than once is factually untrue.  Films–and thus the underlying screenplays—are constantly being remade.  It is quite common to see a film/screenplay in one language and culture transposed into another language and culture.  And in these remakes new interpretations are given.  For example, the 1957 American film Twelve Angry Men, with a screenplay by Reginald Rose, was remade into a Russian film, 12, in 2007.  The story of both films centers around a jury of twelve men who deliberate on the fate of an adolescent boy charged with murder.  While the original version deals almost exclusively with the dynamics of the American jury system, with little or no social commentary, in the latter version the plot serves as a prism through which the ills of both Soviet and post-Soviet Russian society are examined.

Screenplays are often credited to multiple writers and it is difficult to determine who contributed what.  Literary critics have always shown a bias to the sole author, often ignoring worthy works which lack the same.  In fact, the cult of the “auteur,” of which Francois Truffaut was the chief architect, demands it.  However, there is nothing in any definition of “literature” that requires sole authorship.  Woody Allen is a writer-director whose original screenplays frequently dominate the American Motion Picture awards season.  Yet it is interesting to note that his arguably best film, Annie Hall (1977), was based on an original screenplay that was a collaboration.  (Annie Hall won Academy Awards for Best Original Screenplay, Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actress.)

A Screenwriter does not have the same control over his work as a playwright or novelist. There is no reason why a screenwriter cannot exercise such control.  For example, when Budd Schulberg, a successful novelist and playwright, was approached to write the screenplay for the award-winning On the Waterfront (1954), he was told by the director, Elia Kazan, that he would not change one line of dialogue in his script without his permission—the same as he would with esteemed playwright Tennessee Williams.  (Kazan was the principal director of William’s plays on Broadway.)  Then, of course, there are the many directors who write their own scripts.  However, the fact remains that because of the enormous expense of making a feature film, those who finance films will always exercise some sort of creative control in order to protect their investments; but that in itself is not a sufficient reason to deny the literary status of the screenplay.

Published Screenplays are purchased mainly by “fans” that have already seen the films, whereas published plays are bought by readers who most likely have never seen them produced but have a literary respect for their authors.  At one time paper-back versions of screenplays (with plenty of photos from the production) were published to coincide with the release of the films; this was done as a cross promotion between movie studio and publisher.  No doubt the people who bought these “promotional” screenplay editions were essentially buying them as souvenirs or movie memorabilia.  Promotional screenplay editions are much rarer today, but screenplays continue to be published in large numbers.  I would presume the market for these published screenplays encompasses more than mere “fans,” appealing, for the most part, to those who have seen the films but want to know more about them, which attests to their enduring qualities.

There is probably no end in sight to this academic debate on the screenplay’s legitimacy.  However, the question itself may have already been answered by the numerous University English and Literature departments that are now offering “Screenplay as Literature” courses in order to attract students who no longer read books.