All About “All About Eve” Read online

  Like most treatments, Mankiewicz’s is a typical writer’s “workshop” where he lays out all his materials, from which he will soon extract and polish the actual script. What sets this treatment apart, however, is the degree to which Mankiewicz has already nailed down the structure of his screenplay. Even at this stage, the material is unmistakably Mankiewicz’s own; it bears his fluency, his wit, and also his excesses. It’s an excellent example of how to transform a well-tailored treatment into an even better script.

  Perhaps most surprising is the discovery that many of the film’s best lines—“Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night,” and “You can always put that award where your heart ought to be,” to cite two of the most famous—were already there at this early stage of All About Eve.

  Instructive, too, are the changes and omissions made either by Mankiewicz or Zanuck. For example, in the treatment Karen and Lloyd “wish Bill all sorts of bad luck” as he leaves to go to Hollywood. In the film Karen says, “Good luck, genius,” and Lloyd merely shakes Bill’s hand. Someone realized that most moviegoers would be confused by the theatre shibboleth “break a leg.”

  There’s even a whiff of deference to McCarthyism. In the treatment, Mankiewicz has Eve tell Margo, in a cab from LaGuardia after they’ve put Bill on the plane, that she—Margo—needs galoshes. Eve knows this because she has watched Margo’s comings and goings so closely. Referring to Eve’s surveillance, Margo quips, “You’re not on one of those congressional committees, are you?” This sly political reference must have given Zanuck the willies, for he slashed through it with a heavy pencil—markedly heavier than elsewhere—as though the House Committee on Un-American Activities were reading over his shoulder.

  At the end of the treatment, the young girl, Phoebe, doesn’t slip into Eve Harrington’s apartment as she was to do later, in both script and film. Rather, she calls out from the shadows near the entrance to Eve’s Park Avenue building. Eve invites her in for a drink. And the girl is not a high-school student but a young working woman who “worships Eve from afar.” Nor does Phoebe hold Eve’s award to her breast while bowing into an infinity of mirrors; that cinematic finale came later. The treatment ends as Addison DeWitt’s taxi “drives off and is lost in the lights of the city.”

  After incorporating various changes suggested by his producer, Mankiewicz delivered his first draft of the screenplay—dubbed the “temporary script”—to Darryl Zanuck on March 1, 1950. According to 20th Century-Fox’s records, Mankiewicz’s services as writer (for accounting purposes) terminated on March 24, 1950. Adhering to studio bookkeeping policy, Fox subsequently started Mankiewicz’s “assignment as director” at the beginning of April.

  Mankiewicz was luckier than most screenwriters: His scripts were lightly edited, if at all. (Unlike the writer who once told a companion at the premiere of a film he had written, “Shh! I thought I just heard one of my lines.”) In the case of All About Eve, the trajectory from treatment, through various drafts of the shooting script, to the actual film was uncluttered by compromise. In this sense, Eve “belongs” to Mankiewicz as a novel belongs to its author. He owns it as few studio directors ever owned their films.

  Zanuck, of course, served as “editor” to the Mankiewicz screenplay, as he had done on the treatment. After reading Mankiewicz’s lengthy first-draft “temporary script” in March 1950, he praised it highly but suggested some changes and cuts. Zanuck wrote in a memo, “I have tried to sincerely point out the spots that appeared dull or overdrawn. I have not let the length of the script influence me. I have tried to cut it as I am sure I would cut it if I were in the projection room.”

  The “temporary script” of March 1 ran to 223 pages. After Zanuck’s cuts and Mankiewicz’s own, the next—and final—version had slimmed to 180 pages. Most of the changes involve shortening or condensing.

  Overall, the “temporary script” is not radically different from the final version. But there are some intriguing changes. For example, the “temporary” has a five-page scene in Max Fabian’s limousine after Margo’s cocktail party. Karen and Lloyd ride with Max and they all talk about Margo’s outrageous behavior at the party. They also discuss Eve as a possible understudy for Margo. Karen and Lloyd urge Max to give Eve the job. Max demurs. It’s a long, chatty scene that stops the story dead.

  Deleted, also, was a four-page scene in the Richards’ country house. Dialogue from this scene was saved, however, and added to the lines spoken in the car by Margo, Karen, and Lloyd.

  Elsewhere in the “temporary script” are such unpolished, rather pedestrian speeches as this, spoken by Addison to Eve: “What do you take me for? A talented newsboy like Bill Sampson? Or Margo—a gifted neurosis? Or Lloyd Richards—a poetic bank clerk? A refined Girl Scout—like Karen? Look closely, Eve, it’s time you did. I am Addison DeWitt. I am nobody’s fool. Least of all yours.”

  In the revision, Mankiewicz turned it into this trenchant exchange:

  ADDISON

  What do you take me for?

  EVE

  I don’t know that I take you for anything.…

  ADDISON

  Is it possible—even conceivable—that you’ve confused me with that gang of backward children you play tricks on? That you have the same contempt for me as you have for them?

  EVE

  I’m sure you mean something by that, Addison—but I don’t know what.

  ADDISON

  Look closely, Eve, it’s time you did. I am Addison DeWitt. I’m nobody’s fool. Least of all yours.

  Anyone comparing these two versions of the All About Eve screenplay would likely agree that the deleted passages were love handles on an otherwise shapely script. Since Mankiewicz, as screenwriter, was inclined to overindulge, we can assume that it was Zanuck who reduced Eve from 223 pages to a svelte 180 by toning the muscle and losing the flab.

  Zanuck, unlike the semi-literate moguls of Hollywood legend, was considered an astute judge of scripts, and his editorial suggestions were usually followed—even by Mankiewicz, who had enough power and prestige to buck the front office when necessary. While many of Zanuck’s suggestions at the time of the first draft of Eve were reflected in the revised shooting script, Mankiewicz disregarded one change that Zanuck recommended. “On page 32,” Zanuck wrote, “I think the use of my name in a picture I am associated with will be considered self-aggrandizement. I believe you can cut it with no loss.” The producer’s name occurs four times just after Bill Sampson, making his first appearance, flings open the door of Margo’s dressing room.

  BILL

  The airlines have clocks, even if you haven’t! I start shooting a week from Monday—Zanuck is impatient, he wants me, he needs me!

  MARGO

  Zanuck, Zanuck, Zanuck! What are you two—lovers?

  The in-joke stayed in the script. Gary Merrill and Bette Davis read their lines as written, their exchange was filmed, and the scene remained in the picture. To this day it gets a laugh, one reason being that it’s an early tip-off—although a red herring—to the movie’s gay subtext.

  Across town at Paramount, Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett, and D. M. Marshman, Jr., were also dropping names in their Sunset Boulevard screenplay. “Seems like Zanuck’s got himself a baseball picture,” sneers producer Fred Clark when he rejects one of William Holden’s Casey-at-the-bat story ideas. “I think Zanuck’s all wet,” says Holden, the failed screenwriter.

  By early April, Mankiewicz had finished revising the draft of his screenplay. The version that now emerged was the shooting script, identified on the title page as “Revised Final—April 5, 1950.” (This designation appears on Bette Davis’s copy of the script, which I consulted at Boston University, where her papers are deposited. Other members of the cast and crew would have used copies of the same version.)

  * * *

  Adam’s Rib

  From the Book of Genesis: “And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept; and he took one of his ribs, and closed up th
e flesh instead thereof.

  And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman.”

  The Book of Mankiewicz gives a similar account of Eve’s creation, only in this case it’s Eve Harrington. For Joe Mankiewicz, at a young age, also lost a rib. Many years later he told an interviewer, “I remember that in 1918 I was sick for a year during the famous influenza epidemic. I caught double pneumonia, followed by pleurisy, and they removed one of my ribs.”

  Mankiewicz’s sister, Erna, told Joe’s biographer, Kenneth Geist, that during surgery on her little brother the doctors inserted a silver rib to replace the one they had removed. Mankiewicz himself denied this, however, saying that if he had indeed received such a valuable substitute, “I’d have had a mortgage on it long ago.”

  The story is worthy of a zealous press agent. But Erna Mankiewicz was no fabulist. She was a schoolteacher who surely would have bridled at any attempt to fictionalize her brother’s life.

  * * *

  Much had happened to the material between Mary Orr’s “The Wisdom of Eve” and this completed version of the screenplay. Most obviously, it had grown from a prose work of fewer than a dozen pages into 180 pages of narrative and dialogue. Included in this metamorphosis was Mankiewicz’s recharacterization and expansion of Mary Orr’s characters—Margola Cranston, now rechristened Margo Channing; Karen Richards, Lloyd Richards, Eve Harrington, Miss Caswell—and his invention of half a dozen new ones: Addison DeWitt, Bill Sampson, the Old Actor at the Sarah Siddons Awards, Birdie Coonan, Max Fabian, and Phoebe. (Mankiewicz had also dropped a character from the story: producer-director Clement Howell, Margola’s English husband.)

  In Mary Orr’s story Karen Richards is the narrator. There she, too, is an actress, but Mankiewicz, in his script, has made her just a “happy little housewife.” Margola’s maid, who bears no resemblance to Birdie, is named Alice; she neither speaks nor is she described. Margola lives in Great Neck, Long Island, in a forty-room house called Capulet’s Cottage. In the story, Margola is not forty but somewhat older. Karen Richards says, “If she ever sees forty-five again, I’ll have my eyes lifted.”

  Mankiewicz kept not a line of dialogue from Mary Orr’s story, but he did retain what served him far better: the breezy, brittle tone. The story’s high-gloss opening sentences match Addison DeWitt’s lacquered narration at the start of the movie. We don’t know to what extent Mankiewicz consciously mimicked Mary Orr’s tone, but he must have recognized the story’s hard-edged irony as the right key in which to play his own composition.

  * * *

  Mankiewicz and Zanuck, while in basic agreement on the All About Eve screenplay, were not the final arbiters on all points, however. The imprimatur of Joseph Ignatius Breen, chief administrator of the Production Code, was necessary for this picture as for virtually every other one. Breen was, in effect, the head censor of Hollywood at the time, an ardent Catholic who had been director of Code Administration since 1933, first under Will Hays and, since 1945, under Eric Johnston.

  References to “the Hays office” and later to “the Johnston office” actually meant the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), which was created by the film industry in 1922 and whose grip tightened in 1934 after Catholic bishops formed the Legion of Decency and threatened to bar American Catholics from seeing all movies. (Some attributed this more rigid enforcement of the Code to Mae West’s racy on-screen dialogue and suggestive wiggles. Pauline Kael, for example, says that if West’s on-screen bosom-heaving and dirty songs “led to the industry’s self-policing Production Code, they were worth it. We enjoyed the crime so much that we could endure even the punishment of family entertainment.”)

  Breen and his minions were empowered to review scripts as well as films, suggesting changes at all stages and granting a seal of approval to films that met the standards of the Code. Only rarely would a producer buck the power of the Production Code by releasing a film without the requisite seal. Two famous instances of Code nonapproval are Howard Hughes’s The Outlaw in 1943 and Otto Preminger’s The Moon Is Blue ten years later.

  Familiar Code regulations included these: “Scenes of passion should not be introduced when not essential to the plot”; “Sex perversion or any reference to it is forbidden”; “The sanctity of the institution of marriage and the home shall be upheld”; and “Pointed profanity … or other profane or vulgar expressions … is forbidden.”

  Although the Code was not only fussy but also obsessive, its guardians often missed subtle suggestiveness, both verbal and visual. Screenwriters and directors knew this, and so a script usually included bargaining material—that is, scenes or bits of business and lines of dialogue that the moviemakers didn’t expect to get Production Code approval for, but that they included for trading purposes.

  Today All About Eve strikes viewers as “adult” in the sense that it is sophisticated, but in 1950 much of its dialogue stopped just short of raciness and some of its situations didn’t conform to Code standards of “good taste” (e.g., Bill, explaining to Margo why he didn’t immediately come up to her room: “I ran into Eve on my way upstairs and she told me you were dressing.” Margo: “That’s never stopped you before.”).

  Like the other studios, 20th Century-Fox employed experts to forewarn of anticipated problems when the script was submitted for Production Code approval. Colonel Jason S. Joy, Fox’s director of public relations, acted as ex officio liaison to Joseph Breen and the formidable script-vetters of the Johnston office.

  Colonel Joy was ideal for the job, since he himself had formerly worked in the Hays office. A native of Montana, he came to Hollywood in 1926 from the American Red Cross. He left the Hays office in 1932 to join the Fox Film Corporation—three years before it merged with 20th Century to become 20th Century-Fox.

  By the time of All About Eve, Colonel Joy was a gray-haired man in his sixties. With his conservative eyeglasses and loose-fitting business suits, he might have belonged to that multitude of character actors who played uncles and businessmen and politicians in movies and television shows. Even his voice, which was pleasantly staid, added to the typecasting.

  During Colonel Joy’s time at the Hays office, the Production Code lacked real teeth. Tolerant and enlightened, Joy did not have a large appetite for censorship, and his admonitions were frequently ignored. According to film historian Kenneth Macgowan, “Some producers played ball, some did not. Others sent in only parts of their scripts, and paid little or no attention to Joy’s criticism.”

  But the Code, and its enforcers, grew increasingly rigid under Breen, who blamed the Jews in Hollywood for just about everything. Writing to Father Wilfrid Parsons, editor of the Catholic publication America, in 1932, he characterized the Jews as “a rotten bunch of vile people with no respect for anything beyond the making of money. Here [in Hollywood] we have Paganism rampant and in its most virulent form. Drunkenness and debauchery are commonplace. Sexual perversion is rampant … any number of our directors and stars are perverts. Ninety-five percent of these folks are Jews of an Eastern European lineage. They are, probably, the scum of the earth.”

  Despite Breen’s anti-Semitism, he seems not to have singled out Jewish writers, directors, and producers for increased scrutiny. To Breen, perhaps, after years of stanching the corrupt ooze of Hollywood, there was neither Jew nor gentile but only a vast freemasonry of debauched pagans. Mankiewicz was Jewish; Zanuck was not. Breen’s fiery righteousness engulfed them both.

  Beginning in March 1950, a routine but surreal correspondence started up, first among those at 20th Century-Fox who were concerned with making All About Eve, and later between them and the resident censors at the Johnston office. Surviving letters and memoranda from these exchanges convey some of the difficulties that moviemakers faced. No one escaped the pinch of the Code straitjacket.

  On March 15, 1950, Colonel Joy delivered the Mankiewicz script to Joseph Breen. Two weeks later, in a letter dated March 30, Breen wrote: “We have read the final script
for your proposed production titled All About Eve, and wish to report that this basic story seems acceptable under the provisions of the Production Code.

  “However, we direct your attention to the following details: At the outset, we direct your particular attention to the need for the greatest possible care in the selection and photographing of the dresses and costumes of your women. The Production Code makes it mandatory that the intimate parts of the body—specifically the breasts of women—be fully covered at all times. Any compromise with this regulation will compel us to withhold approval of your picture.”

  This curious opening of Breen’s letter wouldn’t surprise us if it were addressed to Howard Hughes. After all, The Outlaw had made Jane Russell’s breasts notorious and wags were still joking that the title should have been “The Sale of Two Titties.” But Joseph Mankiewicz? Nowhere in the script was there a hint that décolletage might upstage drama. Nor was any female star in the cast known for cheesecake. It’s possible, of course, that Marilyn’s starlet reputation had preceded her. More likely, however, this mammary caveat was—to mix an anatomical metaphor—a knee-jerk reaction from Breen. It seems no one read the paragraph carefully, for in the party scene Marilyn ended up just about as strapless as possible.

  Next, Breen asked that on page 15 “the use of the word ‘sex’ be changed to something less blunt in the circumstances.” The offending line, spoken by Margo in the dressing room when she quotes the lady reporter from the South, was: “Ah don’ understand about all these plays about sex-stahved Suth’n women—sex is one thing we were nevah stahved for in the South!”