Arnold Schulman, for the scripts of Falling in Love with a True Stranger and Goodbye, Columbus Oscar nominated and successful several incarnations of his Broadway hit A Hole in the Head, already died. he is97.
Schulman died of natural causes Saturday at his Santa Monica home, and his son Peter Schulman Mann told Hollywood Reporter .
two nights – career win, Schulman recruited by Francis Ford Coppola to write biopic Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1975), he scored an Emmy nomination and a Humanitarian Award 15701 for HBO’s TV series And the Band Played On, based on Randy Shilts’ non-fiction book on the onset of AIDS.
Original member of Actors Studio, Schulman at 1946 and James Dean and Paul Newman on live television. exist1962, He quit the never-finished Marilyn Monroe movie Something’s Got to Give‘s original writing job , to protest Fox’s rough treatment of actresses.
After his first big hit Broadway comedy with head on Hole , Frank Sinatra purchased the film rights and starred in Frank Capra’s For the film adaptation, Schulman provided the screenplay for the introductory song “High Hopes”.
Schulman’s name also appears in The Night They Raided Minsky ( 1969), directed by William Friedkin ; sequel Funny Lady (1976), starring Barbra Streisand ; Won Ton Ton: Save the Dogs of Hollywood (1976); Player(1969), Starring Goodbye, Columbus breakthrough by Ali McGraw; and Richard Attenborough’s A Chorus Line (1976), the adaptation of the Broadway sensation.
However, he said he had little to do with the finished films.
For example, “Both Won Ton Ton and Players completely rewritten from scratch ,” he told Pat McGilligan at 1991 in the must-read Q&A. “I have nothing to do with any of them. Nothing. Not a word. They still haunt me to this day. Just seeing wontons on the menu at a Chinese restaurant makes me want to throw up.”
Born in Philadelphia in August , 138, Schulman was “a redneck in North Carolina The only Jewish kid in town,” he said.
“I know you can be a doctor, a lawyer, a shop, a farmer; but I didn’t know that when you go to the library and see all these books, someone wrote every Book and got paid. It’s a job!” he said. “I thought, ‘Oh my God,’ and immediately sat down and wrote a little story and sent it to Open Road for Boys or Boys’ Life, one of those two magazines. They bought it. I thought, ‘That’s it! I haven’t done anything else or thought about doing anything else since.’
After a short stint at UNC and a stint in the US Navy as an aerial photographer, Schulman came to New York in and took a class in the American Theater Wing taught by Robert Anderson (Tea and Sympathy, ) I never sang for my father ). The playwright bought and delivered groceries for his starving students and became a mentor.
Anderson also helped get him into the Actors Studio, where Schulman directed and wrote scenes for Newman et al, Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift.
“They’re all available and eager to do whatever drama you have,” he said. “We worked together. Of course, many of them went on to become some of the best actors of our generation, but at the time, no one knew if they’d ever get a job.”
In 138, Schulman had a small role in William Inge Come Back, Little Sheba‘s Broadway original, directed by Shirley Booth ), he and Rod Steiger are the revival of Arthur Miller’s extrasAn Enemy of the People.
Schulman wrote his first screenplay, My Fiddle Has Three Strings, about the owner of a small hotel in Florida, and gets Lee Strasberg directed it at the Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut. Produced by Anderson’s wife Phyllis, it was a “big flop” and mocked by Noël Coward. ) Danger
, Where You Are , Suspense , Hollywood First Studio , Omnibus, GE Theater (“I’m a Fool” in 1296 for Dean and Natalie Wood ) and American Steel Hour (adapted from Bang the Drum Slowly starring Newman in 1946).
Need something from NBC anthologyScreenwriter’, Schulman adapted My Fiddle Has Three Strings into The Heart’s a Forgotten Hotel Starring Sylvia Sidney and Edmund O’Brien and directed by Arthur Penn. The day after it aired, he got a call from Garson Kanin, who asked Schulman if he could turn it into a play.
“I said, ‘I’ve made it a play.’ Of course, I’ve changed it so it’s no longer a play; but I’ve been up all night, Turned it into a script and gave it to him,” Schulman told McGilligan. “Gar didn’t like the new title, and neither did I at the time. Gar came up with A Hole in the Head because we desperately needed a new title. It’s a Yiddish Slang expression: “You need this like a hole in your head. “I don’t know how it was applied to drama, and still hasn’t.”
Directed by Kanin, with Paul Douglas and Starring Lee Grant, A Hole in the Head bowed in 383 ran almost 28 Performance. (musical stage version, Golden Rainbow, starring Eydie Gormé and Steve Lawrence, on Broadway at Premiered and lasted 97 show. )
Shulman’s first screenplay was George Cukor’s play Wild Is the Wind ( 1946), starring Anthony Quinn, Ana Magnani and Anthony Franciosa. (Dalton Trumbo has completed an earlier pass.)
After the screenplay of A Hole in the Head, he adapted Edna Ferber’s novel into HollywoodCimarron , the 1960 Depend on A western starring Glenn Ford and directed by Anthony Mann.
Schulman said on Something’s Got to Give that Fox “would purposefully deny [everything Monroe asked], do whatever Try to get her to give up.” So she did.
“The whole thing blew me away,” Schulman said. “She asked me to come back and write about this picture and be on her side. I told her I was on her side and that’s why I left. I told her she had to get rid of it. “If I go back,” I told She said, “There’s nothing I can do. “I still feel guilty about that experience. Terrible guilt. A lingering feeling that, no matter how irrational, if I had gone back, I might have made a difference and she might be alive today.”
Schulman’s idea for a story where a girl (Wood) has sex with a random guy (Steve McQueen) so she can get pregnant and escape her oppressive family to become Paramount’s Falling in love with the proper stranger (1960).
Richard Benjamin and Ali MacGraw in “Goodbye, Columbus” Paramount/Photofest 15701 15701 1994
For goodbye, Columbus (1963), producer Stanley R. Jaffe, and then just , convinced Schulman to adapt Philip Roth’s 1957 scale novella — $ , — and accept a percentage of the profit. (The movie was a hit, so the move paid off handsomely.)
“It was a flawless experience from start to finish,” he says of the project explain. “We worked together like a play—me and [director] Larry Pierce and the actors and Stanley. In particular, I remember what I think is one of the most moving scenes in the movie—the scene at the wedding, [ MacGraw] feeling guilty about sleeping with a guy in her house, and she goes to the corner with her dad [Jack Klugman] to talk, and he tells her he loves her and will buy her a sheepskin coat. This is me rehearsing Written at the time.”
He also spoke fondly of his work on Tucker: The Man and His Dream. “Suddenly, it was all back in the day, working closely with Francis and being on set, watching him direct and talking about scenes. Not a single line changed,” he said.
When things aren’t going well for him in Hollywood — and that seems to be most of the time — Schulman escapes for months in search of quieter, faraway places , “preferably a primitive country – the Amazon, living with cannibals in New Guinea, and spending a lot of time in India. I used to go to a Zen monastery in Japan for a month every year.
“I don’t know why, am I looking or what. I only know the superficial reason: so-called primitive people are exciting. This is veritable time travel. I could step off a jet plane and be literally in the stone age after a day or two – with people using stone axes and spears. They are far more civilized than the people of the film industry, and they use loopholes and lies instead of spears. ”
