The following interview transcript with Robert
E. Lee 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.
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Advice to aspiring writers:
Learn from failures |
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A friend of mine who
actually bought my very, very first script
before I even met Jerry Lawrence back in
Cleveland, Tom Lewis, who founded the Armed
Forces Radio Service and who took me into Young
& Rubicam to begin with, used to say, “I never
made a mistake in my life. You see I did a lot
of things I wish I hadn’t done, but I tried to
learn from them.” We have certainly, Jerry
Lawrence and I, have done a lot of things on the
stage that we wish we hadn’t done that have
failed, but I think we have learned more from
our failures very often than from our
successes. Of course, every play is a
masterpiece until it’s written.
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Advice to aspiring writers:
Sell your product |
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A great deal of Jerry’s and my time is spent at
the university. We teach at mutually
antagonistic universities. He is at USC and I’m
at UCLA. I think that there’s a great eagerness
on the part of students to go into theater. I
think there is a great gulf between the halls of
ivy and the commercial world outside and that
we’ve got to find a way to bridge that gulf.
One thing, we’ve got to teach our students to be
tough as nails. They’re gonna have to fight.
They’re going to have to sell as hard as they
sell soap or toothpaste in order to convey their
enthusiasm, their conviction about their
product, their play, to get people to put the
amount of money that is required to go into a
play. When we did Inherit the Wind it
cost, with sixty people in it, it cost 40 or
50,000 dollars. Today that play would cost five
million. Alright, a little inflated – four
million. Next year it will cost five million.
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Advice to aspiring writers:
A play is constantly changing |
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You know who writes a play? The playwright
doesn’t write a play. A play is written by the
people in the play. And it’s those people…now
the job of the playwright is to listen to those
people whom he has created or whom he has drawn
from history. And if Thoreau’s mother says, “I
want to say something now,” we’ll put it down.
Now the marvelous thing about playwriting; it’s
not like building a skyscraper or architecture
or working in permanent forms – it’s completely
fluid. You know the difference between a film
and the theater? Two words: print it. Because
when the director has finished his shots on a
scene, he says, “Okay, print it.” You can’t
make any more changes after that. He can cut
it, he can rearrange it, but he can’t add
anything to it, whereas a play is a constantly
changing, growing thing. Times change,
audiences change, climates change, and you’re
able to keep a play alive by continuing with a
new edition. I think the thirtieth edition
of…thirty-fourth edition of Inherit the Wind
has just come out, which contains changes which
we have made as a result of the change of the
times in which we live.
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Astronomy: Early Ambitions |
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I started out, you know, to be an astronomer.
There was no question in my mind that I was
going into astronomy. I had no thought of going
into the theater. That’s why I went to Ohio
Wesleyan, which was the fourth largest telescope
in the world at the time – visual telescope.
During the work that I was doing there, we
really made some of the first discoveries of how
many double-stars that there are in the
universe. Because we don’t realize that they’re
double stars, but they’re so close together and
they rotate so quickly around each other that it
was only by the analysis of the spectroscope,
spectroscopic evidence, that these binary stars
were discovered. And it was fascinating to me.
But then I got the idea that nothing ever
happened in astronomy, and so I turned to more
terrestrial stars here in Hollywood and on the
East Coast.
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Astronomy: Advances |
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When you think, for example, in the changes in
physics – the telescope that I worked with as a
young man is now…the observatory itself is now
in the bottom of a pool of smog, because
Columbus and Delaware are now totally smogged in
by traffic. The telescope was taken out of
there and moved to Arizona – the speculum – and
it got too foggy there to use, so they put in a
radio telescope. And the radio telescope took
up too much room and interfered with the golf
course, and so they have now taken down the golf
course, and the observatory dome is now the
clubhouse of the golf course. Now this, I
assure you, it will be a part of a play we have
down in the drawer there that will come out,
because it strikes me as very funny. But
actually you can see things with the…You see,
the visual spectrum is a very, very narrow part
of the electromagnetic spectrum and we’re now
able to look all the way from quasars to x-ray
stars to black holes. Tremendous things,
tremendous changes are taking place. And we’re
discovering things…it’s a very exciting time to
be alive. And I want to write about this. I
want to write about these conflicts, about these
discoveries, about these changes – how we can
welcome them, how we can fend off the dangers of
the change which might be nuclear war or
catastrophic weapons.
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Writing for radio: The Kate Smith Hour |
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Well Task Force was one of the first…I
wrote that for the Kate Smith Hour. And
it starred Paul Muni, who was later to star in
our Inherit the Wind. And I made a deal
with Ted Collins, who was the producer of the
show, to receive ten dollars for writing this
spot which seemed a very good fee at the time.
I mentioned this is some time ago. And then
when it came time to be paid the ten dollars,
Ted said, “Well I can’t pay you.” And I said,
“Well why not?” He said, “Well you’re an
employee of the agency, and that would be double
employment and we couldn’t…” So we finally
settled that Ted gave me one of his old
tuxedos. Now Ted was about the size—he was not
as large as Kate—but he was about the size of
the Graff Zeppelin. To cut down one of Ted
Collins’ tuxedos would have been more costly
than writing another script. My price on
scripts by the way went up after that. I think
the lowest fee I’ve ever been paid for a script
was Ted Collins’ tux.
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Bob and Jerry Meet |
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Jerry and I met in New York. We’d both been
called back from California where we’d been
working. The Japanese, if you may recall,
dropped some bombs on Pearl Harbor which
disrupted a number of people’s lives but which
managed to bring Jerry Lawrence and I together
because we were both brought back to New York to
do broadcasts about America’s participation in
the war. Jerry was writing a show called They
Live Forever for CBS, and I was working at
Young & Rubicam with Roy Larsen at Time
magazine on The March of Time which had
been brought to life again. It had been
suspended for a while, but this was the new
March of Time, and then Jerry and I started
working together, started writing.
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The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail: The impetus |
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We had been thinking about it for a long time
because we were very upset about the Korean
War. That’s another thing: a great deal of our
writing comes out of the news and about our
feeling about current events. And the
similarity between the Mexican War of President
Polk’s time and the Southeast Asian War were
remarkably similar. And Thoreau’s refusal to
pay one dollar tax to support a war in which he
did not believe was very much in keeping with
the spirit of the protestors of the Vietnamese
War, against the Vietnamese conflict.
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The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail: A different
format |
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Thoreau is in conflict with the law. Oddly
enough Thoreau has another difference in
that it. The play itself is at odds with the
laws of playwriting, because we have bounced all
around in that and thrown time into the trash
can and we’ve just let things happen as it
seemed wise for them to happen. It’s wonderful
how an audience will go along with you on these
things. It’s a great adventure.
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Margo Jones and the Dallas Theater |
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We were all of us discouraged by the theater as
long ago as when we were starting, because we
thought we weren’t going to be able to bridge
that gulf into the commercial theater, and it
was a crazy lady known as “The Texas Tornado,”
Margo Jones—not far from you in Kansas, a little
to the South—who first presented all of our
plays. And who proved to us that we could—Bill
Inge, Tennessee Williams, Lawrence and Lee—write
plays that would fill a need. And it was for her
honor, just as we now honor Bill Inge, it was in
Margo’s honor that all of us got together and
formed the Margo Jones Award to encourage
producers to take the gamble of doing new plays.
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Collaboration: "That's my line." |
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Writing is a very lonely business. I tried as a
teacher to get students to work together, and
often it’s very difficult because they want to
say, “That’s my line. I wrote that,” you know.
And a marvelous thing about working with Jerry
is that we really don’t know who wrote what.
Janet says she can tell. My wife says she can
look down at the script and tell which one wrote
which, but as we are writing it there is no
sense of proprietorship in the writing. It is
truly a collaboration as the theater experience
itself should be a collaboration. It’s a
collaboration with the director. It’s a
collaboration with the actors. It’s a
collaboration with the audience - and hopefully
for many years.
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Collaboration: A panoramic quality |
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If Jerry and I were identical in our tastes,
there would be no reason for me to put up with
him or for him to put up with me. But because
we have a binocular vision – he sees one thing,
I see another, we combine them and – this gives
it, what we have to write, perhaps more of a
panoramic quality than many of our writers. We
are writing about our times, about the problems
of our times. We are living in an enormously
exciting, rapidly moving times, and it is the
job of the playwright, like the submarine
captain, to run up the periscope and look around
and see what’s up there – to see if anything is
coming, see what’s ahead of us. We do not live
in an ivory tower. We live in the top of a,
perhaps a moisin tower, from which we can look
out and see the city, see the landscape, and let
out our observation to say, “We have seen this,
and we want to share it with you.” Now the
student must be infused with an observation. He
must be either possessed by something from
within him, or from something he has experienced
and observed and feels so strongly about it, be
so angry about it or so impassioned about it or
so moved by it, that he will write a play which
conveys that to other people. Oh boy, it sounds
pompous doesn’t it? But I don’t mean to sound
pompous. It really isn’t pompous, it’s a
business. You sit down, you try to create
something which will fulfill a need, a hunger.
There are hungry people out there. And they’re
hungry in their minds, not in their stomach.
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Collaboration: The audience
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We have too much lumber in our theater. We
should use more of the imagination of the
audience. We should collaborate, not only with
one another, not only with our directors and our
actors and our scenic designers and so on and so
forth, but with our audience. And realize that
the audience is prepared to supply all sorts of
imaginative contributions.
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Using technology: Modem |
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But Jerry lives in Malibu, which is thirty miles
from here, and I don’t drive. It’s a bit of a
throw for him to come out here and then work a
day and then drive the thirty miles back. So,
we use this trusty computer with a fast modem
and we’re able to exchange pages in just a few
seconds and also to chat on the keyboard with
the modem. And the modem goes over a regular
telephone line.
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Using technology: Dictation |
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Then of course, also one other thing Jerry and I
do very often is to dictate. You can dictate
back and forth and then put it on a mini
cassette, or even sometimes we’ll go up in the
sun by the pool and dictate, then I transcribe
it usually, or Jerry does on computer. I simply
don’t know how Shakespeare got along without all
these things and wrote twice as many plays as we
have. But he didn’t write as many television
shows I don’t think. But he wrote some pretty
good stuff.
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Using technology: Computer |
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I’ve never found the computer particularly
creative. There is no joke button on this
computer, nor has it…I’ve never known it to type
a good line which I hadn’t thought of first.
But nevertheless the computer is useful as a
tool, but it must be very important that you
consider it only as a tool. Sometimes I get so
fascinated with what I can do with a computer
that I spend more time fooling around with the
computer and moving boxes about when I should be
spending that time working on character. But,
the screen is very clear and it’s marvelous to
have the copy instanta, right there and
ready to deliver. And we have a duplicating
machine over here so we can run off copies and
presume that we’ll have it on Broadway tomorrow
afternoon, hopefully.
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Writing routine |
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Hugh Herbert, who wrote my wife’s Broadcast
series Corliss Archer, said, “You don’t
write, you rewrite,” and that is certainly
true. Then you go beyond that, and you sell.
You convey the enthusiasm you feel for something
to someone else. And those are all things which
are part and parcel of writing. Ray Bradbury
says he gets up every morning and writes a
poem. I don’t know, I suppose that’s sort of
like calisthenics and I admire Ray for it. I
try to work in the mornings and spend the
afternoon taking care of office matters. It’s
a…writing is a many, has many folds. It’s a
multifaceted diamond, and all sides of it have
to be polished. And the actual setting of the
first words, the words for the first time on
paper, are not the entirety of it. Jerry has
more, I suppose, more persistence, more drive
sometimes than I do. I’m inclined to get
sidetracked into the technical side alleys of
things and so that’s one of the things that
makes it a good partnership, I think. I hope.
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Whisper in the Mind |
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Now we’re looking at that subject, while we’re
on that subject, with Norman Cousins which is
our first experiment in a trilaboration. Did
Jerry mention anything about Norman? Well, it’s
a very interesting situation because Norman is
one of my most respected friends, but Norman is
not basically a playwright. Norman is a
marvelous author, a marvelous speaker, a
marvelous thinker. He has a great pair of
binoculars for scanning the panorama. But we
have been able, I think, to take some of the
vision that Norman has and put it into a
dramatic form which will be exciting on the
stage. And that’s our next play. Martha Scott
is producing it.
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