The following interview transcript with Jerome
Lawrence has been carefully broken down into
segments involving a variety of topics. Below
each segment is a link to the corresponding
video clip. Please attribute research sources to
Mike Wood, Interviewer and the William
Inge Center for the Arts.
|
|
Advice to aspiring writers:
“Write every day.” |
| |
Both Bob Lee and I teach – Bob’s at UCLA and I’m
at USC.
We’ve taught all over the world. But we
tell them
they’ve got to write every day. You can
take Sunday off, but you get in the writing
habit and as for myself, I go to sleep unhappy
if I haven’t written five pages a day. It’s a
happy habit. It doesn’t mean you write five
pages of a play every day. It might just be
five pages of a journal or five pages of a new
story idea or a character sketch for a play you
might not write for ten years, but you get
started.
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page |
|
|
Advice to aspiring writers:
Enthusiasm is key |
| |
We have many projects in the works at one time
and we concentrate on one, meanwhile gathering
material for another. We have a long list of
credits, but we always like to say the one we
like best is the one we’re working on at the
moment. It’s always such a joy that you wake up
in the morning and there’s work to do. The
whole point of writing is to have something in
your gut or in your soul or in your mind that’s
burning to be written. A play is a passion.
You’ve got to want to grab somebody by the –
everybody in the audience – by the shoulder and
say, “Listen
to me. Here’s something I have in my heart, in
my gut, in my head that I want to get across to
you.” And we often are accused of being overly
enthusiastic. I think enthusiasm is the answer
to passionate writing. Enthusiasm’s an old
Greek word which means God-filled, and if you’ve
got that hunk of “God” in you that is creative,
why get it out with enthusiasm, with passion.
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page |
|
|
Advice to aspiring writers:
Encourage your peers |
| |
You must be involved in mankind. And therefore,
I also say, “You must encourage your peers.”
The other people in the class, I insist that all
of their plays be put on by professional actors
and by professional directors, which we do every
year. I say, “Want all your other people’s
plays to be great – as good as yours or better,
because then the audience is going to be
involved all the time.” Every man’s flop
diminishes me, again to paraphrase Donne.
Therefore, our only competition is shoddiness.
Our only competition in the theater is boredom,
because if I’m bored with a play, if I’m
revolted by a play
on stage, with the Broadway prices,
especially today, I’m going to walk out and not
come back and pay that price again. People who
were bored before aren’t going to come see my
play when it comes around, when possibly they
might not be bored.
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page |
|
|
Advice to aspiring writers: Cheer for the Good |
|
|
You must not demand the failure of your peers,
because the more good things that are around in
film, in television, in theater--which is our
domain more than any other--why the better it is
for all of us. Every time I see a Rambo
or a terrible, disgusting, revolting violent
film or a cheap, vulgar play or a tawdry
television thing, I will turn it off and so will
the whole nation and the world turn it off. So
we must cheer for the good and the craftsman
alike and the hopeful.
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page |
|
|
Advice to aspiring writers:
Regional theater is the place to be |
| |
And the young playwright
has much more chance today because also theater
is where it belongs: all over the country. That
wasn’t in existence. When we started the only
regional theaters or out-of New York
theaters--resident theaters--that ever did new
plays – there were only three important
theaters: Pasadena, The Cleveland Playhouse, and
Margo Jones. And Margo Jones was the only one
who had a policy, an insane policy, a lot of
people thought, of only doing new plays. By
doing that she discovered Tennessee Williams,
she discovered William Inge, and thank God she
discovered us. Now, the only place new plays
are done are the regional theaters or in
England. The shows are not done in New York
first.
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page |
|
|
From Ohio
to New York |
| |
Bob Lee and I knew all about each other and had
never met. We were both from Ohio. Bob was
from Elyria, Ohio. You know the original Elyria
was a seacoast of…it’s Dubrovnik
now, it’s a Twelfth Night. But
this is Elyria, Ohio on the seacoast of Lake
Erie. And I was from Cleveland, just 28 miles
away. We went to school 20 miles apart, Bob at
Ohio Wesleyan and I at Ohio State. But we never
met. Then when we got into radio Bob was
working in New York and Hollywood and so was I.
Bob was at Young & Rubicam, I was at CBS; and we
knew all about each other and about each other’s
programs, but we’d never met. Finally in
January of 1942, right after Pearl Harbor, I had
written up a whole plan for CBS in the event of
war, and I was flown back. And Bob was working
on March of Time and other programs,
mostly as a director. And we met at a
restaurant downstairs at CBS in New York, looked
at each other, reached out and shook hands and
Bob said, “Let’s have lunch together.” And I
said, “Oh, that’s an old Hollywood line.” And
he took out a pocket date book and he said, “No,
let’s have lunch tomorrow.” And that day, at
lunch, we started writing radio plays together
just naturally, and by a fluke we’d written and
sold eight of them. All eight got on the air in
the same calendar week, and Variety had a
big headline, “Lawrence and Lee take over
Radio.”
We had an original radio drama on every major
dramatic show in radio and there was no
television then, so it was a big coup. And
right after that, as a result of that, as a
result of our friendship and Bob’s friendship
with Tom Lewis, and my CBS war plan, we were
asked…by that time we were back in Hollywood…we
were asked to go back by train to Washington to
help form Armed Forces Radio Service. That was a
great joy to do, to write and direct programs
for the troops all over the world.
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page |
|
|
WWII and
Radio |
| |
Our official title when we first formed Armed
Forces Radio Service, we were two
of the founding fathers. We were both
too young to be commissioned.
We were literally kids. So they made us
Expert Consultants to the Secretary of War.
Finally, everybody else was in uniform and we
weren’t, so we went ahead and volunteered and
took basic training and got into uniform. I was
lucky enough to get all over the map to North
Africa and Italy, with a
wire recorder. There were no tape
recorders then…doing stuff in the field which
was great. In fact I was sort of a war
correspondent, and Bob was a hot pilot. He was
in the Air Corps for a while, too. All
experience helps when you write.
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page |
|
|
Look Ma,
I'm Dancin' |
| |
And we had one musical on Broadway with Nancy
Walker, Look, Ma, I’m Dancin’! We were
very lucky in that instance, because we had
George Abbott, the great George Abbott as
director and Jerome Robbins who was the genius
choreographer of the age, who had really dreamed
up Look, Ma, I’m Dancin’!, or the basic
idea, the conception and who had choreographed
it.
And so we had a nice foothold. It wasn’t a big
hit. It was always what we called a nervous
hit, but it was a hit and it launched us on
Broadway.
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page |
|
|
Inherit
the Wind: The Genesis |
| |
All of the playwrights that the Inge Festival
honored have had tremendous war experiences.
John Patrick in India out of which came Hasty
Heart. Robert Anderson in the Navy. Sidney
Kingsley was writing The Patriots while
he was in Officer’s Training School,
I believe, simultaneously. It was a
great source of material. It was a war we were
all fighting with passion, and consequently we
all wrote with passion as a result. The
aftermath of the war is what inspired us to
write many of our plays. The whole reason for
our writing Inherit the Wind was that we
were appalled at the blacklisting. We were
appalled at thought control. We were appalled
at people being labeled “communists” or “pinkos”
just because they believed in food for the
hungry. So that was our motivation, to go back
into history to find a parallel situation where
there was thought control and there had been
terrible thought control in 1925 during the
Scopes trial, which became just the genesis of
Inherit the Wind. It has an exodus all
its own. But our whole motivation was the
blacklisting, McCarthyism, to write that play.
We used as a guideline two Santayana quotes, one
is a very famous one, so famous it’s almost
become a cliché: those who do not remember the
past are condemned to repeat it or to relive it.
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page |
|
|
Inherit the Wind: Rejection |
| |
Nobody would do it. As a matter of fact
one…when our agent had given up, our New York
Agent, we took it to a Hollywood agent and
thought, “Well, maybe it’ll be a film.” And
this lady agent came to my beach house which I
had then, and tossed the script into my
fireplace and said, “Burn it. It’s no good,
nobody will ever do it.” Well, when I directed
the twentieth anniversary production of
Inherit the Wind, which started about four
years after that—and we were writing others
plays in between too—but I was doing the
twentieth anniversary production, there were
computers then, and Dramatist Play Service and
our agents in New York
who had given up on it, put all the
material in the computer and came up with the
startling fact that this play that this film
agent had told us to burn had never been off for
a single night in all those twenty years. It
had been on somewhere in the world in 33
languages every single night of the week since.
So we always tell our students, “If you have a
play and somebody tells you to burn it, and
you’re passionate about it, don’t burn it. Hang
on to it.”
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page |
|
|
Inherit
the Wind: Fact vs. Fiction |
| |
Part of the inspiration for doing Inherit the
Wind was a parallel situation with a very
great playwright, Maxwell Anderson. I’d done my
masters thesis comparing two of his plays,
Gods of the Lightning which he wrote with
Harold Hickerson, and then Winterset ten
years later. They were both about Sacco and
Vanzetti but the first one was a pretty dull
play, because it was more or less a
documentary. Ten years later he took a poet’s
license to write a play, not using the same
names – he called them Bartolomeo Romagna,
instead of Sacco. Burgess Meredith starred in
it on Broadway. And we realized when we came
across the Scopes trial material, that we were
not going to be literal, that we were going to
be poets and playwrights. Therefore we combined
three lawyers who
had been at the trial: Dudley Field
Malone, Arthur Garfield Hayes, and Darrow into
one character. We couldn’t therefore call him
Darrow. We called him Henry Drummond.
Everything else about the play is fictional.
One critic said, “What’s so great about this
play? They just took the trial transcript.” We
didn’t. There are two or three lines that we
couldn’t leave out. They were just too fatuous
and funny. For example, Bryan really did say,
“I am more interested in the Rock of Ages than I
am in the age of rocks.” We had to use that.
But practically everything else in the play is
original. We don’t always tell people that.
William O. Douglas, the Supreme Court Justice,
shook our hands after the performance of a play
of Inherit the Wind in Washington and
said, “I’m so glad you boys used Darrow’s famous
speech, “Progress has never been a bargain. You
have to pay for it.” And he said, “Oh, that was
such a prophetic speech when Darrow talked about
pollution, you know. ‘Mister you may conquer
the air, but the birds will lose their wonder
and the clouds will smell of gasoline.’” Well
Darrow never made that speech, we wrote it. But
Darrow could have made it or should have made it
or might have made it because it was a synthesis
of everything he believed. Same
way with the “Golden dancer” speech. We
use that now as an indication to our students of
how if you look behind the paint, if you dig out
the lies, if you look below all the surface, the
shiny surface, why it’s the subject matter of an
infinite number of plays because you have to
look beneath the surface of the lies and the
deceits of your parents, of your family, of your
friends, of your government, of your church, but
particularly of yourself. And if you can reveal
what you’ve been kidding yourself about, that is
of infinite value in writing plays.
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page |
|
|
Inherit
the Wind: A Long Run |
| |
Inherit the Wind,
which nobody wanted to do on Broadway, it was
years before we could get it on, until Margo
Jones and the unlikely city of Dallas discovered
it. Then it exploded to life and there hasn’t
been a night since then that it hasn’t been on
somewhere in the world. Last week if you were
in the neighborhood you could have dropped in on
a performance in Buenos Aries, in West Berlin or
in Zimbabwe. And it’s been translated into 33
languages. That makes it all worthwhile.
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page |
|
|
Auntie Mame:
An Adaption |
| |
We had read the galleys of Auntie Mame
because we had the same agent as Patrick Dennis,
who had written the book. Patrick Dennis
himself tried to make a play out of it and it
turned out to be a 320 page play that he
wouldn’t cut or change and I’m told, though we
never read it, not a very good play. He was a
very wonderful and funny man and when we took it
over he had all kinds of blessing for us and he
was wonderful. And everybody said, “It’s
impossible.” And when we finally got Rosalind
Russell to do it, she was told by a lot of
people, “You mustn’t do it; it’ll be a disaster
because it’s not a play. It’s just a whole
bunch of little sketches. And it’s not a novel
or anything with any storyline.”
So I think we managed to give it some
structure. We made the first act of a
fast-living woman who is saved from just being
trivial by the arrival of a little boy in her
life, her nephew. And then in the second act
the reverse happens. She saves him from having
his life locked in a safe-deposit box.
So we gave it a real structure. We decided the
play had to say something too, as the book had
in any case. And it’s a diatribe against
prejudice, against anti-Semitism, against living
the constricted life…living the full life. By
the time it became a musical one of the biggest
songs in it was “Open a New Window Every Day.”
In other words, live fully. Don’t
live just a one-track life.
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page |
|
|
Auntie
Mame: The Actresses |
| |
Rosalind Russell was our first Auntie Mame
on Broadway, at the Broadhurst, that wonderful
theater. And then she went to Hollywood to do
the movie version of it, and Greer Garson took
over for her, and then when Greer Garson left,
Bea Lillie took over just for a short while
before we all went to England, we went to
Manchester and Oxford and then into the Adelphi
Theatre on the Strand in London. Meanwhile
Constance Bennett was doing it, starting in
Chicago. Eve Arden was doing it on the West
Coast, Sylvia Sidney was bussing - trucking it,
Shirl Conway was at all the musical tents and
then to Australia, and the line of ladies who
played Mame would go on and on and on. Thank
God.
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page |
|
|
Mame: A Musical |
| |
Everybody would come out of the play and say,
“Geez, that’s a great musical.” And then
somebody would say, “Wait
a minute. There’s no music in it.” But
it really took the shape of a musical to start
with. So we had the sense to take an option on
the musical rights ten years later, and I
happened to be in Egypt on a round-the-world
trip when Bob phoned me. I became very popular
when they said, “There’s a call from Hollywood
for Mr. Lawrence in the hotel in Cairo.” Bob
said, “Look, this is the day our option’s up.
Should we pick it up?” He said, “I don’t think
we should do it again.” And I said, “We’re not
going to do it again. We’re going to do it
better. Wait till I get back to New York and
we’ll try to get Jerry Herman to do it.” So we
all decided together that we were going to write
it as a musical right from scratch, and
de-cartoon it any way. In other words, make the
musical more real than the play had been. So
that when the eleven o’clock song came, “If you
walked into my life today,” where she says,
“What did I do wrong?” it had more depth of real
feeling and emotion than the play had. So we
tell our students that. If you’re going to make
a musical, don’t cartoon it from the play. Make
it better than the play. Have a reason for
making it sing. Steve Sondheim and Mary Rogers
always say there are subject matters that are
“why musicals.” Why do it as a musical? People
have always asked us if we ought to make an
opera or musical out of Inherit the Wind,
and we say, “No way.” And we even put it in our
wills. In no instance is there to be a musical
or opera of Inherit the Wind because it
doesn’t sing. It’s an intellectual play.
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page |
|
|
Mame: Angela
Lansbury |
| |
Everybody said, “Of course you’re going to use
Rosalind Russell in Mame.” But we said,
“No. We can’t do it again.” So she claims she
was asked, but she never was, and she got kind
of mad at us and started to say nasty things
about us. But we auditioned everybody and saw
everybody and everybody said, “No,
Angela is a second banana. She’s not a
leading lady. Don’t use her.” But Bob Lee and
Jerry Herman and I believed in Angela very, very
strongly. We’d seen her in a flop that Steven
Sondheim wrote called Anyone Can Whistle.
She was wonderful. And she was. She was
sensational. It made her a star, just as
Inherit the Wind made Tony Randall a star.
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page
|
|
|
The Night
Thoreau Spent in Jail |
| |
The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail
is my particular favorite. Bob and I wrote it
sitting with yellow pads right on the shores of
Walden Pond. And we read it again because we
were reaching to the past for a parallel.
Something from the past would help illuminate
the present for us. And it was right at the
height of the Vietnam War. And there was
Thoreau, protesting another illegal, immoral,
undeclared war: the war against Mexico. And so
we went back and realized that his protests, his
literal invention discovery of civil
disobedience was so important to everything that
followed. Gandhi carried around a copy of
Civil Disobedience in his pocket, in South
Africa before the whole subcontinent of India
was freed. Martin Luther King swore by Civil
Disobedience, non-violent dissent… your
right to dissent without
using bullets or rocks or burning down
buildings. That was the passion. That was the
motive for us to make us write it, and it turned
into the most widely produced play of our time
without every being on Broadway, because it went
all over the country and all over the world. It
was presented even in the Soviet Union. It’s
just recently been translated into Mandarin.
¹¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page
|
|
|
Margo
Jones and the Dallas Theater |
| |
In honor of the fact that Margo Jones started
Tennessee Williams and William Inge and us and
many other playwrights, we started an annual
award, and it’s been given every year for almost
thirty years now to a producer, not a
playwright, who does the most to help new plays
and new playwrights. Many, many people have
gotten this award and Bill Inge and Tennessee,
until their deaths, were on the judging
committee every year.
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page
|
|
|
Writing
Solo |
| |
We’ve written a lot of things separately. We
don’t write prose together. Bob and I have each
had a number of books separately. Bob wrote the
first book on television. He was the
Nostradamus of television. With a forward by
Dr. Lee DeForrest, who’s the father of
broadcasting. And I wrote a biography
of Paul Muni called Actor.
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page
|
|
|
Collaboration |
| |
In
dialogue we love to play out all the scenes
together, and it’s great, and it never gets
lonely. And actors tell us that they feel it’s
playable dialogue because it’s already been
played, let’s say. We always talk it out, and
then we do it to a tape recorder after we draft,
and sometimes we throw it out and write it
again. Until we hear one that
really sounds alive and full of love and
passion and theatricality, we don’t use it. And
we have a rule-of-thumb. We call it the UN
veto. And when we told the Russians and the
Chinese
about this– we’ve been all over the world
with our plays and cultural exchange things –
they
said, “Oh that’s better than the UN.”
It’s kind of like two houses of Congress. It’s
a system of checks and balances between us. We
always say that writing, you have to wear two
hats. You write something and then you put it
down and you put on another hat and look at it
as a critic. You have to be your own critic.
Well, we figure we’re each other’s critics right
as we go along. And we argue a lot, we yell a
lot, we scream a lot, but our UN rule is very
simple. We say, “You can always say no to
anything: a comma, an idea, a whole basis or
premise for a play, a speech, a character,
anything – you can say no to it. But it has to
be a positive no.” By that I mean, if I say no
to something Bob comes up with, I then have the
obligation to come up with something better that
he’ll say yes to. So you cannot just be
negative, and I think that keeps the creative
juices going. And I tell my students, “When you
write yourself, you’ve got to do that. If you
reject an idea, just know that some better one’s
going to come along.” And if you’re a
craftsman-like playwright who works at
something, you know that every time there’s a
problem you’re going to come up with something
better
that’s gonna solve it. And it works even
better when there are two people. We have a
book we’re writing about collaboration which we
call “the anatomy of collaboration” and the
title is Which One Can’t
Spel? The reason for that is that
everybody thinks if you’re a team, one of you
has to be a total idiot who can’t even spell his
own name. He can’t even speak a coherent
sentence. That’s not true. You should only
have a partner who you respect as much as you
respect yourself. Otherwise, forget it.
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page
|
|
|
A Dose of
Laughter |
| |
Norman Cousins calls a daily dose of laughter
“internal jogging” and that’s why we try to make
all our funny plays serious and all our serious
plays funny, because the audience demands that
wonderful grace of laughter – the therapy of
laughter. The Santayana quote that we use all
the time is, “the young man who cannot weep is a
savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a
fool.” The first half of that quote implies
that you must always find the breaking point,
the vulnerability point of every human being,
man or woman, the point where you weep. But
mostly, all of us are foolish to go through all
of life and not have the saving grace of
laughter put down all the problems of our
worlds, whether it is plague or illness, or the
threat of annihilation of the planet.
¹
56K (Dial-up)
¹
100K (Broadband)
Top of Page
|
| |
|
|
|
