The Tennessee Williams Annual Review
Introduction to “Provisional Film Story Treatment of The Gentleman Caller (First Title)”
R. Barton Palmer
The unusual document published here for the first time holds interest not only as an early study for the play eventually produced on stage in 1944 as The Glass Menagerie but also as a witness to Tennessee Williams’s formulation of a “plastic theater”—and as an illustration of the author’s impatience with film industry practice at the time.
¶2
This undated version of “Provisional Film Story Treatment of The Gentleman Caller (First Title),” now housed at The Historic New Orleans Collection, was one of several produced in the six months Williams worked for MGM as a screenwriter in 1943. While it contains filmscript elements, the roughly drafted document is not a proposed script. It largely belongs to a production genre called a treatment—that is, a story summary, usually based on an already existing property, presented to a producer for approval to commission a filmscript. A treatment advertises the writer’s scriptwriting abilities, including his or her facility with dialogue, but also strays into areas normally left to others on the projected team (especially film editors). In contrast, a final filmscript, then as now, was generally the work of several authors, whose contributions and resulting credits were overseen by the Screenwriters Guild (as of 1939 the official union representation for Hollywood’s writers), which had developed a detailed code of practice.
¶3
Williams’s film treatment of The Gentleman Caller was intended to persuade MGM’s studio executives that the young writer should be contracted to produce a full, conventionally detailed version of the sample. It is in effect both an advertisement of self and a teaser designed to arouse interest in the story. Williams sent a version of the treatment to his agent, Audrey Wood, in May 1943, and while no formal submission or rejection correspondence has been located, Williams wrote in June to Wood of his intention to show it to the MGM executive Lillie Messinger (Letters 461, 465; Notebooks 392n612). MGM rejected the project—though the studio would later attempt, unsuccessfully, to claim rights to The Glass Menagerie based on Williams’s having been under contract while at work on the story.
¶4
But if what Williams generated for submission is for the most part a treatment (as opposed to a script), it is an idiosyncratic, even audacious, one, not only in form but also—and especially—in being based on his own original, unproduced play. Studio writers were not hired to generate original material: they were assigned their tasks, whether writing, rewriting, or producing a treatment for a presold property—namely, a project (a successful novel or play for the most part) whose filming rights had been purchased or optioned for a specified period of time.1 Williams, though new to screenwriting, would have known well what was expected of him (though he may not have anticipated how much he would dislike his assignments).2 While original scripts (that is, those not based on a preexisting work) were indeed purchased and produced in Hollywood, such scripts were almost always by scriptwriters or playwrights who were established professionals working with studio directors or producers.3
¶5
Williams was a younger member of the studio writing department, one who boasted little in the way of reputation when he penned, surely with small hope of success, his film treatment of The Gentleman Caller. One should not overstate the importance of the document presented here: this particular version is one of a number of sketches in the evolution of The Glass Menagerie (which emerged from Williams’s short story “Portrait of a Girl in Glass”), and many will consider it merely a curiosity, of interest primarily to scholars. Nevertheless, it has much to offer anyone interested in Williams or in the intersection of film history and drama. Glass Menagerie enthusiasts will appreciate meeting the elusive, pivotal Tom Wingfield Sr., who never appears in the final version except in a portrait that hangs over the mantelpiece but who features prominently in this text. Also intriguing is the fact that the treatment includes two different endings: a stage ending that offers more hope than Glass Menagerie’s somber “Blow out your candles, Laura—and so goodbye” (237); and, differing still more from Menagerie, a proposed film ending that the treatment promises “would deviate from the stage version ending or rather carry it further to a lighter and more cheerful conclusion.”
¶6
The play we know as The Glass Menagerie would eventually premiere in Chicago in 1944 and go on to win the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best American Play. MGM would subsequently lose a bidding war to Warner Brothers for the film rights,4 but what they would gladly have purchased in 1945 was not the property they were offered earlier by the playwright. Not only had the story changed substantially: more significantly, it was now a commercially successful, award-winning production, with demonstrated filmmaker and audience appeal.
¶7
The document’s hybrid form merits attention as well. In the 1940s film treatments were summaries rarely exceeding two thousand words or so, proposing a certain approach to a screen version of a presold property. Filmscripts, as noted above, differed substantially from treatments. Ever since the late 1920s, when sound technology enabled the addition of spoken dialogue, filmscripts had assumed a form similar to playscripts but with specific instructions to the director, camera operator, and technical crew. Filmscripts sometimes included storyboards, which were sketches, often elaborate, of the visual plan for each setup.
¶8
Even a cursory perusal of Williams’s treatment reveals a number of elements found in filmscripts (dialogue, character names and descriptions, accounts of action, details of setting, and so forth), and yet the text is otherwise not a script in any meaningful way, especially since it selectively summarizes elements of the proposed film that would need to be outlined in detail. It does, however, go into detail about camera shots, including pans, cuts, and dissolves.
¶9
Here and throughout his oeuvre, Williams devotes much attention to musical, lighting, sound, and camera effects. His concept of theatricality was shaped not only by the interaction of these elements in film but also by classic Hollywood cinema’s appearance of uninterrupted formal flow. The fluid quality of his scenes suggests discomfort with the conventional division of stage plays into discrete acts or scenes. In fact, at least in the early stages of his career, he seems to have been no more comfortable with conventional filmscript structure.
¶10
From his seat in the movie theater, films (and their construction) must have seemed at first to Williams more plastic than they actually were. Like all paying customers, he was encouraged to overlook a film’s essential discontinuity and pay attention instead to its flow—that is, the perceptual effect of so-called persistence of vision, which obscures the film’s assemblage from a myriad of separate elements.
¶11
Exposure to the nuts and bolts of creating a film would have taught Williams that the filmscript emphasizes the individual shot as an essential building block of a narrative unit of varying length generally known as the scene. Through the editing process, shots were (and are) ordered into sequences or scenes, largely following predictable patterns that by the 1940s had solidified into a number of flexible rules. In other words, the artistic medium of film, despite its appearance of fluidity, was at least as discontinuous as it was fluid, as would have become especially obvious to the young writer in the piecemeal and laborious process of shooting. He would also have learned that the scripts guiding the process were prepared according to a well-established recipe.
¶12
The classic Hollywood filmscript was customarily organized into one-scene-per-page units, each scene intended to produce a minute or so of completed film. This recipe made for convenience and speed while shooting, and it quickly became standard. The one-minute-per-page expectation also made it easy to calculate the length of the rough cut resulting from the first stages of editing. Each scene was conceived in terms of action (whose description was enhanced by the inclusion of didaskalia of various kinds, including transitions) as well as the dialogue assigned to characters, who were always identified by name. These forms of language were differentiated typographically, and other aspects of page layout (including typeface and size) became strictly standardized over time and remain so today. Each filmscript page featured a slugline head that designated whether the setup was exterior or interior; identified and described the location, sometimes in detail if props were of importance in the action; and established time of day.
¶13
Documents prepared according to such conventions reflected little sense of the cinematic flow that had originally attracted Williams to the medium. A standard filmscript does not tell a story but offers a plan for its telling, useful in both the shooting and editing stages of production. Not surprisingly, the scriptlike document here does not follow the recipe. Instead, Williams cherry-picks from the script elements, revealing along the way much about what he prioritized in stage drama and in cinema.
¶14
Williams’s concept of sculptural drama involved the playwright’s designing elaborate tableaux as if for the camera, much the way film directors construct their mise-en-scène.5 “Provisional Film Story Treatment of The Gentleman Caller (First Title)” usefully illustrates this fluid, multimodal concept of dramatic action and offers insight into Williams’s view, at least at this time, of the two mediums’ complementarity. By the time the project evolved as The Glass Menagerie, Williams would have designed for it a screen device on which images would be projected, such as the blue roses that will eventually be the nickname the gentleman caller bestows on Laura but that are not yet present in this version. The screen technique (described at length in the notes he penned for the first published version of The Glass Menagerie [132]) makes a good example of his productive blurring of the boundary between theater and film.
¶15
Williams worked for several frustrating months on projects assigned to him by the studio but eventually turned his full attention to his own Gentleman Caller project. His employment contract gave MGM the option to renew or drop him after a period of six months, and the studio, unable to use most of what he produced, chose to terminate him.
¶16
This initial experience with Hollywood left him jaded about the system and those who worked in it, a feeling that would endure for the rest of his life. The treatment of The Gentleman Caller might be an effusive, overenthusiastic evocation of story in words and images that likely elicited a snicker or two if and when evaluated by studio executives. And yet, the document presented here testifies to Williams’s enthusiasm for the cinema as an art form, even if he had no interest in obeying the conventions and rules by which Hollywood, producing a huge volume of celluloid entertainment every year, had learned to operate.
Note on the Text
¶17
The original text is a twenty-page typed carbon-copy document bound in a blue Liebling-Wood binder, housed in the Fred W. Todd Tennessee Williams Collection at The Historic New Orleans Collection (MSS 562, 2001-10-L.574). It is presented here with minimal intervention, since its irregular, thrown-together appearance offers information to the reader about Williams’s approach to the form as well as his creative process and his state of mind while composing the text. Williams’s idiosyncratic capitalization, punctuation, and hyphenation have been preserved.
¶18
Because this version is designed for a general audience and is not an edition for textual scholars, a few standard typesetting conventions have been followed, for ease of reading. Text Williams underlined in the typewritten original has been rendered here as italics. The spacing between words and lines and the appearance of dashes have been regularized according to standard US conventions, and a few typographical errors and stray punctuation marks have been silently corrected. This version uses a long-line ornament and a short-line ornament to approximate Williams’s use of long and short lines to separate sections in his typescript. No attempt has been made to reproduce the exact appearance of the original lines, merely their relative placement in the document. No attempt has been made to duplicate page breaks of the original. Williams separated the treatment into three parts, each of which has its own part-title page, which sometimes contains additional text. This version indicates part separations with extra line spaces and reproduces all text on the part-title pages. Five typed asterisks appear at the end of the original document and are reproduced here.
Notes
At The Historic New Orleans Collection, Mark Cave, senior curator and oral historian, and Margit Longbrake, senior editor, are due thanks for their suggestions and assistance.
1 The film history of A Streetcar Named Desire provides examples of the process: Once the play’s success had been established (Streetcar debuted to rave reviews on Broadway in December 1947 and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1948), Paramount commissioned a treatment but declined to proceed. Charles Feldman subsequently purchased the screen rights to the play for his production company and even tried his own hand at a treatment before turning it over to the team that would create the now-famous 1951 film with Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh. Feldman’s approach to the play turned it into a somewhat ordinary melodrama, and it was thankfully abandoned; the director, Elia Kazan, worked instead with a script written by the playwright in collaboration with the seasoned screenwriter Oscar Saul (Palmer and Bray, ch. 4). For substantial discussion of the changes proposed by Feldman in his treatment of Streetcar and of the Production Code Administration’s similar suggestions for the Williams and Saul script, see Palmer and Bray, ch. 3.
2 E.g., in a May 1943 letter to his agent, Audrey Wood, Williams makes clear his feelings about his first assignment from MGM, which was to rewrite an existing script for a Lana Turner vehicle: “[T]he script I have to work with [. . .] contains every cliche situation you’ve ever seen in a Grade B picture. They want me to give it a ‘freshness and vitality’ but at the same time keep it ‘a Lana Turner sort of thing’. I feel like an obstetrician required to successfully deliver a mastodon from a beaver” (Letters 450–51; see Palmer and Bray 19–21).
3 Charles Brackett, for example, teamed with the director Billy Wilder during the 1940s and ’50s to produce original scripts for a number of studio productions, including The Emperor Waltz and A Foreign Affair, both 1948. Many writers, however—even such famous ones as F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner—were discouraged or even forbidden by the studios from working on their own material.
4 Menagerie would eventually be versioned for the screen by the screenwriter Peter Berneis, in collaboration with Williams.
5 In 1943, Williams wrote of Sergei Eisenstein’s film Alexander Nevsky, “Its pictorial drama and poetry of atmosphere, a curiously powerful blend of passion and restraint, an almost sculptural quality, had excited me very deeply and made me wonder if it were not possible to achieve something analagous to this in a poetic drama for the stage” (Notebooks 306n501).
Works Cited
Palmer, R. Barton, and William Robert Bray. Hollywood’s Tennessee: The Williams Films and Postwar America. U of Texas P, 2009.
Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie. The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, vol. 1, New Directions, 1971, pp. 123–237.
——. Notebooks.Edited by Margaret Bradham Thornton, Yale UP, 2006.
——. The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Volume 1, 1920–1945. Edited by Albert J. Devlin and Nancy M. Tischler. New Directions, 2000.
