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Nunnally Johnson (1897-1977) |
American screenwriter, producer, and director, whose screen credits included The Grapes of Wrath (1940), directed by John Ford, The Woman in the Window (1944), directed by Fritz Lang, How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), starring Marilyn Monroe, Lauren Bacall, and Betty Grable, and The Three Faces of Eve (1957), starring Joanne Woodward. Several of Nunnally Johnson's screenplays were based on best-selling novels varying from Daphne du Maurier and A. J. Cronin to John Steinbeck and Erskine Caldwell. "You wouldn't know the place [Hollywood]. I don't know one-third of the people mentioned in Joyce Haber's column. And things move very fast here too. There is some fellow who produced one successful picture, Goodbye, Columbus, and some studio was so staggered by this overwhelming success that they made him the head of the studio. Do you remember when Zanuck used to produce two pictures before eleven a.m.? As for the other head of Paramount, named [Robert] Evans, in two years he has lost almost as much money as Vietnam has cost us. So it's not surprising that they're going to give him a raise." (from Nunnally Johnson's letter to Robert Goldstein, 21 October 1970, in The Penguin Book of Hollywood, edited by Christopher Silvester, London: Penguin Books, 1999, p. 523) Nunnally Johnson was born in Columbus, Georgia, the son of
James
Nunnally Johnson, a superintendent for the Central of Georgia Railway,
and Johnnie Pearl Patrick, an activist on the local school board. Johnson
was an avid reader from early childhood and he had an uninhibited sense
of humor, which he had inherited from his father. After graduating from Columbus High School in
1915, Johnson worked as a reporter on the Columbus Enquirer
Sun, then wrote for the Savannah Press, the Brooklyn Daily
Eagle (where he spent three years), and the New York Herald Tribune. Johnson's first marriage was to Alice Love Mason; they had one daughter. Mason was editor of the Junior Eagle. They divorced in 1920. Seven years later Johnson married again. His second wife was Marion Byrnes, whom he had met when she was on the staff of the Brooklyn Eagle – later he said that "marrying me was considered an occupational hazard for young girls working on the Eagle." (Screenwriter: The Life and Times of Nunnally Johnson by Tom Stempel, San Diego: A. S. Barnes & Company, 1980, p. 33) They divorced in 1938. There
Ought to Be a Law (1931) collected Johnson's short stories, which had appeared earlier in The
Saturnay Evening Post and other magazines. In 1932 Johnson went to Hollywood, and began his career as a
scriptwriter. His first solo screenplay credit came in 1934 on The
House of Rothschild,
based on George Humbert Westley's play about the famous banking family
at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Johnson's first salary was $300 a week. Cardinal Richelieu (1935) started Johnson's long association with Daryl F. Zanuck; he was probably the most succesfull producer Zanuck ever had. Their major achievement with the director John Ford was The Grapes of Wrath. Johnson's shooting script, based on John Steinbeck's radical novel, opens with a scene on an an Oklahoma paved highway in daylight: "At some distance, hoofing down the highway, comes Tom Joad. He wears a new stiff suit of clothes, ill-fitting, and a stiff new cap, which he gradually manages to break down into something comfortable. He comes down the left side of the road, the better to watch the cars that pass him. As he approaches, the scene changes to a roadside short-order RESTAURANT on the right side of the road. From it comes the sound of a phonograph playing a 1939 popular song. In front of the eatery is a huge Diesel truck labeled: OKLAHOMA CITY TRANSPORT COMPANY. The driver, a heavy man with army breeches and high-laced boots, comes out of the restaurant, the screen door slamming behind him. He is chewing on a toothpick. A waitress appears at the door, behind the screen." Nunnally avoided insistent statements of human dignity, but the end gives an uplifting tone to the story. "Whenever there's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there," says Tom Joad (Henry Fonda). Ma's (Jane Darwell) speech in the last scene has been criticized for sentimentality: "We keep a-comin'. We're the people that live. They can't lick us. We'll go on forever, Paw . . . cause . . . we're the people." ('The Grapes of Wrath,' in Simon Rose's Classic Film Guide by Simon Rose, Glascow: HasperCollins, 1995, p. 151) Shortly after 20th Cenury Fox had acquired film rights to A. J. Cronin's novel The Keys of the Kingdom, about missionary work in China during the early decades of the twentieth century, Johnson made a screenplay for Fox. It was a big-budget picture, in which Gregory Peck had his first important role as a humble priest. When Zanuck turned the script over to producer Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Johnson had already left the studio. He was surprised to hear that his friend asked for sole screenplay credit. The Writers Guild decided that the credit should go to both Johnson and Mankiewicz. The Bureau of Motion Pictures did not accept the script's negative image of US's ally in WWII, and in the finished film, Chiang Kai-Sheks's Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang, is shown in a positive light. "As a religious film, The Keys of the Kingdom is impressive; as a portrait of China, it is inaccurate war propaganda." (Twentieth Century-Fox: The Zanuck-Skouras Years, 1935-1965 by Peter Lev, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013, p. 80) Jesse James (1939), directed by Henry King,
was shot
in the new "perfected" Technicolor. The film had a strong sense of time
and place, anticipating The Gunfighter (1950),
starring Gregory Peck, who had his hair cut and had a mustache.
Historical material for the screenplay – Johnson worked with the
writers without credit – was
assembled by Rosalind Shaffer and Jo Frances James. Originally the
script had been written for John Wayne by William Bowers and William
Sellers, but Wayne turned it down. The director Henry King praised
Johnson's uncredited work. When Johnson saw the mustache he said to King: "I don't know, Henry, do you think we should put a mustache on Peck? You know, he's our leading man..." King replied: "I just had him as general in Twelve O'Clock High. You can't change his clothes from a uniform to this Western outfit and be the character." (Henry King Director: From Silents to Scope, based on interviews by David Shepard and Ted Perry, edited by Frank Thompson, Los Angeles: Directors Guild of America, 1995, p. 156) Moreover, Zanuck objected the ending, in which Jimmy Ringo (Peck) is shot in the back by a young punk, who wants to be the fastest gun. Zanuck was right: the public did not want to see Peck as a real thing, but in 1970, Action, the magazine of the Directors Guild of America, selected The Gunfighter among the best dozen Westerns of all time. Walter Kaufman once argued that The Gunfighter is the measure by which all Westerns would be judged. Johnson's cooperation with John Ford in Tobacco Road (1941),
based on Erskine Caldwell's novel, resulted in a bowdlerized version of
the book. The Hays Office allowed only to hint at the novel's
sexual themes. Before these films Johnson produced and wrote Rose
of Washington Square
(1939), a dramatic musical. Johnson's lines for Al Johnson, singing
again a medley of his songs, supported skillfully the story: "This is your song. It was
born just for you. Sing it and they'll never forget it or you." In The Woman in the Window, the director Fritz Lang fought over the end of the film. Killing off the hero was a far from common practice in the Forties and the nightmare situation of Prof. Wanley (Edward G. Robinson) turns out to be a dream. Everything starts innocently: "I'm not married. I've no designs on you. One drink is all I require", says a beautiful model (Joan Bennett) to Wanley. After accepting the invitation an intangible network starts to surround the professor and threatens to destroy his life. "I was warned against the siren-call of adventure." The Moon is Down (1943), produced by Twentieth
Century Fox
Film Corporation, is considered among the best of the Resistance films.
It was shot on the set of How Green Was My Valley.
Johnson based his script on John Steinbeck's play about a Norwegian
village resisting the Nazis. Like so many other scriptwriters, actors,
and directors, Johnson
also started to produce films and in 1943 he formed with Gary Cooper,
William Goetz and Leo Spitz International Pictures. Their venture
was not a success. The first release of International Pictures
was Casanova Brown
(1944), directed by Sam Wood, starring Gary Cooper and Teresa
Wright, and advertised as "The Greatest Romantic Comedy of All
Time!" Johnson's script was adapted from an old stage farce, The Little Accident. "A tremendous
amount of talent went into a childish film," said
Bosley Crowther in his review. (New York Times, September 15, 1944) In The Desert Fox (1951), directed by Henry Hathaway, Johnson made a sympathetic portrait of the German Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, who died in 1944 (it was forced suicide at Hitler's command). Considering that the film was realized only some years after the war, it was an unusual project. The screenplay was based on the biography by Desmond Young. Park Avenue (1946), the musical adaptation of
Johnson's
short story 'Holy Matrimony,' was Ira Gershwin's last
Broadway. Eventually a flop, it run 72 performances. In
the 1950s Johnson tried his hand in directing. The schizophrenia drama The
Three Faces of Eve (1957) won Joanne Woodward an Academy Award. Night
People (1954) marked Johnson's debut as a director and continued his cooperation with Gregory Peck - it had started in 1944 from The Keys of
the Kingdom.
Upon meeting the actor, Johnson though that he wasn't very bright
simply because he didn't have much to contribute to a sparkling
conversation. On the other hand, Johnson was not an actors director
like Henry King but Peck got along fine with him. A few people could
match Johnson's impromptu wit. Peck
admitted: "When I get mixed up with Nunnally Johnson or Herman
Mankiewicz or Ben Hecht, I am struck dumb." ('Cinema: Leading Man,' Time, January 12, 1948) Shot in Germany, Night People
captured the atmosphere of a city still
scarred by the war. Johnson described the the cloak-and-dagger yarn to Time
magazine as 'Dick Tracy in Berlin.' Bosley Crowther wrote that the picture ". . . is first-rate
commercial melodrama—big, noisy, colorful and good . . . the skillful and wily Mr. Johnson
manipulates his pieces with such speed and such trickery in some places
that you may well be confused . . ." ('Gregory Peck Stars in 'Night People' at Roxy -- Story Was Shot in Berlin' by Bosley Crowther, The New York Times, March 13, 1954) Johnson was not a virtuoso
director but he had professional competence and the ability to visualize and create new ideas from thin
air. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956)
was based on
Sloan
Wilson's novel about a Madison Avenue executive, Tom Rath, trying to
solve
his marital problems and cope with his guilt complex about a wartime
affair. Wilson, a WWII veteran, taught English at the University of
Buffaly. Rath's character, played by Gregopy Peck in the screen
adaptation, touched a nerve in the American psyche. Johnson's script
was faithful to Wilson book. Jennifer Jones was cast in the role of
Betsy Rath, a homemaker, but the Fox department trumpeted the reunion
of the stars of Duel in the Sun (1946), a western and a totally different story: they die together at the end. Johnson's greatest box office hit in the 1950s was How to Marry a Millionaire, directed by Jean Negulesco, and starring Marilyn Monroe, Betty Grable, and Lauren Bacall. Johnson's script was based on the plays by Zoe Akins, Dale Eunson, and Katherine Albert. The story depicted three women who rent an expensive New York apartment and set out to trap millionaires. A syndicated television show based on the picture, created in 1958 by the 20th Century-Fox, lasted only a season. After giving up direction, Johnson wrote a few more screenplays, most notably The Dirty Dozen, based on E. M. Nathanson's novel and directed by Robert Aldrich. In the story twelve convicts, serving life sentences, are recruited for a commando suicide mission. This nihilistic war movie had many imitations, such as The Devil's Brigade, A Reason to Live, a Reason to Die, etc. The Dirty Dozed ended Johnson's career which spanned 40 years, from the last years of the silent film to the age of the Aquarius. Nunnally Johnson died in Hollywood, California, on
March
22, 1977. He was married to former leading lady Dorris Bowdon, whom he
met in 1940 when she was starring the John Ford film The Grapes of
Wrath.
The news of their marriage was announced on the radio by Walter
Winchell. Groucho Marx often visited the Johnsons'. Their friendship
went back
when Johnson worked in New York. Nora Johnson, his daughter, has
written about her family in Flashback: Nora Johnson on Nunnally
Johnson (1979) and Coast to Coast: A Family Romance
(2004), in which she tells that in the 1930s her father "turned down a
certain Civil War novel because he thought nobody would go and see a
picture about two people named Scarlett and Rhett." (Ibid., p. 2) For further information: 'Nunnally Johnson,' in The New Georgia Encyclopedia Companion to Georgia Literature, edied by Hugh Ruppersburg, John C. Inscoe (2007); Coast to Coast: A Family Romance by Nora Johnson (2004); 'Johnson, Nunnally,' in The Film Encyclopedia by Ephraim Katz (1994); The Letters of Nunnally Johnson, edited by Dorris Johnson and Ellen Leventhal (1981); Screenwriter: The Life and Times of Nunnally Johnson by Tom Stempel (1980); Flashback: Nora Johnson on Nunnally Johnson by Nora Johnson (1979) Selected bibliography:
Selected films (as screenwriter, director or producer):
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