“To make a good film,” Alfred Hitchcock once said, “you need three things: the script, the script, and the script.” Yet while it’s easy to find (and argue over) lists of the greatest films ever, it’s difficult to find a list of the greatest screenwriters. We decided to remedy that — by polling more than 40 of today’s top screenwriters on which of their predecessors (and contemporaries) they consider to be the best. To compile such a list is to pose a question: What is the essence of the screenwriter’s art? Plot? Dialogue? Character? All that and more? We left that judgment to those who know best — the writers. Here are their selections (ranked in order of popularity, with ties broken by us), and representative testimonials for each.
“IT TAKES THIS HUGE AMOUNT OF WILL AND ENERGY FOR ANYTHING TO HAPPEN TO YOU.”
Nora Ephron says that when she’s writing a movie, the middle is the hardest part to get right. But in real life, and socially, she’s great at the middle. She’ll even substitute it for the beginning, which has the captivating effect of fostering an immediate sense of social intimacy.
While ageing can easily leave some frightened, the likes of Alec Guinness, Nora Ephron and Julian Barnes have produced wry, positive takes on old age, says septuagenarian author Christopher Matthews
Christopher Matthew
Wednesday 13 October 2017
W
e have all seen old age in action and often it is not a pretty sight. Chances are, it strikes suddenly. “It is,” said James Thurber, “one of the most unexpected of all the things that can happen to a man.” In Paolo Sorrentino’s film Youth, an elderly composer played by Michael Caine sums it up: “I’ve become old and I don’t know how I got here.”
But we should never allow catastrophe to get in the way of good humour and practical common sense. “One of the most irritating things about getting old,” a friend of mine once said at lunch, “is not having any idea of how much longer one has got. Take George’s dinner jacket. He’s nearly 80. His old one is practically falling to bits, but what is the point of getting a new one if he isn’t going to get decent use out of it?”
I am confident that my own dinner jacket will see me out. Being a mere 78, I am still enjoying late middle age. However, I am all too aware that senectitude is lurks around the corner and it occurred to me that, before it strikes, I could do worse than fill the unforgiving minute with a few light-hearted observations on the perils and pleasures it may bring. Most of the writers below have taken a positive, and often wry, look at old age, while never forgetting that beneath the eccentricities that accompany advancing years lie uncertainty, grief and thoughts of mortality.
Mortimer was only too aware that the price to be paid for getting old is making oneself looking ridiculous. The opening sentence says it all: “The day will come in your life, it will almost certainly come, when the voice of God will thunder at you from a cloud: ‘From this day forth thou shalt not be able to put on thine own socks.’” Reading this collection of theatrical anecdotes, gossip, fond memories of friends and witty observations made while growing old disgracefully reminds one that possibly the greatest pleasures of old age is reminiscence.
2. A Positively Final Appearance by Alec Guinness
Guinness is equally reassuring to those of us who wonder what enjoyment can be found in old age. Chock-a-block with opinions on books read, plays and films seen, stories of happy times spent with old friends such as Alan Bennett, Irene Worth and John Wells, and the joys of life at home in Hampshire, this diary is interspersed with poignant accounts of the death of friends and funerals attended.
Nora Ephron never made it to old age: she died aged 71, from pneumonia brought on by acute myeloid leukaemia. Yet the screenwriter and author knew as well anyone what it feels like to grow older and – as her title declaims – some of the annoying and often absurd failings that the advancing years bring with them. Not being able to remember a damned thing is only one; she cheerfully lists almost a dozen people she met who she can’t remember anything about (Groucho Marx, Cary Grant, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Peter Ustinov).
Moggach’s novel, on which the film of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is based, not only has a different title but also a more purposeful premise. Convinced that Britain is not good at looking after the elderly, and that no one is better at it than the Indians (“Know what our pension scheme is called? It’s called the family!”), wheeler dealer Sonny’s notion of converting an old guest house in his home town of Bangalore into a retirement home turns out to be a stroke of genius. Moggach’s story also contains a serious message for those struggling to cope with care in the community.
Gray has been a wonderful companionfor many oldies, including myself, thanks to the four volumes of utterly addictive diaries he started writing at 65 and continued until his death in 2008 aged 71. When he is not describing dinner with holidays in Greece with his beloved Victoria, trying to give up smoking or being in lights on Broadway, he is wondering – and often worrying – about almost any subject, however trivial, that drifts into his head. As well as being one of the funniest writers I have ever read, he is terribly moving, especially in this final volume, as he battles cancer in what he describes as “the beginning of my dying”.
Athill will be 100 on 21 December and is more qualified than most to reflect on the losses – and more importantly the gains – that old age brings. Never one to harbour regrets, her spirits are as high as ever in this wonderful book of reflections on loves, friendships and events in her long life. She cheerfully offers readers wonderful, wise and often comforting thoughts as she contemplates death.
Reading this book is like going on a long walk with a friend who is as erudite and serious as he is entertaining. Barnes is at his most contemplative as he takes us through his family and childhood and into arguments about the existence of God (“I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him”) and startling exchanges with his philosopher brother. But what preoccupies him most is death and the fear of death – his, mainly. What will it be like when it comes? A good one, or one filled with pain and regret?
“Mortality can be a treacherous subject,” writes surgeon Atul Gawande in this extraordinary book about ageing and death in the 21st century. For many people, medicines have turned the end of life into a thoroughly grim affair. But it need not be so, says Gawande. Dying should not be meaningless and something to be dreaded. To rely on medicines that addle our brains is to deprive us of useful and coherent last days on Earth. It is not a good death we should be hoping for, but a good life – to the very end.
Having nicked his title, the least I can do is nod in admiration at Hemingway’s legendary story of a young boy, an old man and a huge fish. Told in the sparest language, the respect that exists between the fisherman and the boy is perfect and touching, as is the respect the old man shows for the fish, with which he converses as it drags him far out to sea.
10. The Old Boys by William Trevor
The coming election for the presidency of the Old Boys’ Association brings out all the decades-old enmities held by these rather sad old men, in this funny if grim book. Yet old age has it benefits, as General Sanctuary points out to a fellow spectator at the Old Boys’ cricket match. “We are lucky, Lady Ponders: it is pleasanter to be over 70, as it was to be very young. Nothing new will happen to us again. To have everything to come, to have nothing to come – one can cope.”
The Old Man and the Knee by Christopher Matthew is published by Little Brown
Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion by Michelle Dean – review
Dean’s group biography of female writers who dared speak their mind is a great and worthy project
Rachel Cooke
Tue 8 May 2018
Joan Didion, pictured circa 1977, is among the women chronicled. Photograph: Alamy
I
n recent years, the group biography has become a spirited mainstay of the publishing landscape: a means both of revisiting and reinterpreting already familiar times, people and places, and of bringing together between hard covers lives that might not be deserving of an individual doorstop. In Sharp, though, Michelle Dean has assembled not so much a group as a small crowd: her book, with its title that brings to mind suddenly puckered lips, has the feeling of a cocktail party at which several people drink too much, nearly everyone talks too loudly, and no one really likes anyone else. Through this gathering, she wanders, ashtray in one hand, dishcloth in the other. Dean relishes her guests’ bad behaviour – you might call her a little starstruck – but only to a degree. As the evening goes on, she will sometimes find herself apologising for them, these women who are so clever and talented, and yet so madly competitive, so stubbornly reluctant to attach the word “feminist” to their neon-bright names.
But we’re running ahead of ourselves; no need to reach for the dustpan and brush just yet. Who are these brilliant, pugnacious visitors? All are writers, the majority American. Most began as journalists, making an art, as Dean’s subtitle has it, of “having an opinion”; some then went on to write acclaimed novels, and other kinds of books. Most of their names are well known: Hannah Arendt, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Mary McCarthy, Dorothy Parker, Susan Sontag, Rebecca West. Others, at least for British readers, may be less familiar: Janet Malcolm, whose singular, often controversial interviews appeared in the New Yorker; Pauline Kael, once the same magazine’s acerbic film critic; Renata Adler, the reporter whose home was also there until she put the literary equivalent of a bomb under her career. Dean gives each one about the same amount of attention, although it’s clear that she enjoys the company of some more than others. The playwright Lillian Hellman and the novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, however, she collides with so fleetingly, they appear before the reader like gatecrashers or, more likely, additions to the guest list so embarrassingly last minute she can hardly bear to do much more than pour them their first sidecar.
What unites them, besides their trade and their talent? Dean talks, in her preface, of their remarkable achievements in a world that “was not eager to hear women’s opinions about anything”; of the way they roundly defied expectations. But there’s also the adjective of her title: sharp. People did not always respond favourably to the “sting” of their words. What would have seemed daring and deeply smart coming from a man appeared only haughty, inappropriate and unkind when served up by a woman. Such taking of offence is, of course, somewhat odd when you think about it, because their other problem of perception had to do with gravity. How, after all, was anyone (for which read: any man) supposed to take them seriously? Some (Ephron, Parker) were in the business of jokes; others wrote about sex and marriage (Ephron again, McCarthy). Malcolm was into (how very dubious) psychoanalysis. Didion, in her tiny dresses, her wrists like clay pipes, was just so much surface and “swank”. Dean, a journalist herself, sympathises with all this; her book – though these are my words, not hers – is for any woman who has ever silenced a dinner table by being just a little too quick, too knowing, too mocking. Am I allowed to say that I have more than once done just that? Maybe I am. Another thing her subjects have in common is that they tend not to go in for false modesty or, indeed, modesty of any kind. “I hear you’re the new me,” McCarthy is supposed to have said to Sontag at a party in the late 60s. For all of these women, “me” really was a thing worth being.
American author Dorothy Parker circa 1935. Photograph: Getty Images/Hulton Archive
It’s only possible here to give you the merest glimpse of these creatures: their valour, their victories. I can never get enough of Rebecca West, who saw, early on, her fellow critics for exactly what they were (“There is now no criticism in England. There is merely a chorus of weak cheers, a piping note of appreciation… a mild kindliness that neither heats to enthusiasm nor reverses to anger”). Her struggle to hide her emotional anxieties behind her intellectual confidence always moves me. McCarthy strikes me again and again as someone whose supposedly difficult nature is just another part of her great appeal. Her impertinence, if that’s the word, on the page – “There are but two qualities [these books] share, and the first is a splendid, sickening mediocrity” – makes me feel slightly giddy, even now. And her long, collaborative friendship with the far more serious Arendt speaks volumes. Ephron, author of what is surely one of the most splendid books about the end of a marriage ever written, is as cheering as new shoes, although she’ll be with you far longer. From Malcolm, we learn once more that if you keep quiet and let a certain kind of man talk on long enough, he’ll quietly hand you the rope, and likely tie the knot to boot. “Writers are always selling somebody out,” said Didion famously, a line I would like to have printed on a T-shirt.
Dean’s book is far from perfect. She skims where she should dive; her tone is unvarying, with the somewhat dispiriting result that her essays are considerably less distinctive than the women they portray. (If you really want to read about Sontag over a short distance, I would refer you instead to Terry Castle’s brilliant essay about her, collected in The Professor and Other Writings.) Above all, I’m resistant to the way she struggles with what she clearly regards as her subjects’ disappointing attitude to feminism. It’s not only, as she notes herself, a question of historical context. Like so many others right now, she seems to have forgotten that, even five years ago, you would have been hard pressed to get many, if not most, women in the public eye to call themselves feminists. Nevertheless, this is a great and worthy project: a primer for those for whom these names are new; a sustaining reminder for those already familiar with them. You put it down feeling steadier, more determined. Sharp women everywhere, I tell you: be pointy and proud.
• Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion by Michelle Dean is published by Fleet (£20).
