All Time Best Pictures--#5

One way to study your craft as a screenwriter is to look at scripts that are considered the best of the best—this is why we’re making our way through the list of, according to the WGA, the top ten screenplays of all time.

This week, we’re halfway there with #5 on the list, All About Eve [1950] by Joseph Mankiewicz. The script came from a story—supposedly true—in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1946 titled The Wisdom of Eve. An Austrian actress starring in the Broadway play, The Two Mrs. Carrolls, told the short story writer, Mary Orr, about a girl who stood outside the stage door for months wearing a red coat. Finally, they invited her backstage and she became a secretary. Then when the production closed down for some recasting, the young woman read opposite people who were trying out for parts, and the actress’s husband and everyone else thought the young woman was remarkable, so she now had a part in the production. She then set about to steal the star’s husband.

Mankiewicz, at this time, was working on an idea about how far an actress will go to win an award, so he combined his idea with the short story and All About Eve was born.

The 1950 trailer from the film is different from our ideas of trailers these days. It begins with a Newsweek writer supposedly interviewing Bette Davis, who plays the lead, Margo Channing, the older actress in the film, on just who Eve is. And you don’t really get the story about what the film is, instead you get some bits of dialogue from, mostly, the women in the film. Take a look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGw_IrlApGM

One of the most interesting things about the film is its incredibly clever dialogue—and most of it comes from the women in the film. Mankiewicz famously talked about how incredible it was that an actress was seen as over the hill when she reached 40. He then proceeded to write a film about just such an actress whose understudy basically tries to take her life.

The film won the award at the Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Award that year. And it was a big hit with audiences.

The other interesting thing about the film is that, 70 years later, it’s still fresh. Most films of that age seem stilted or overly dramatic… so much so that you kind of wonder how people could have liked them so much. But not All About Eve. The sharp, fast-paced dialogue, the quick cuts in the script… everything combines to make this film as much fun to watch [more!] than any film out today.

Ask yourself, what stereotypes do we have today that need exploring? Just as Mankiewicz explored the plight of an actress in her 40s in an unforgiving world, if you were going to expose a prejudice in today’s world, what would it be? And how could you make a film that’s both dramatic and funny in uncovering that stereotype?

It’s a tall order—but, then, most good stories are born when we go beyond what’s expected to showcase what’s true.

Copyright © Diane Lake

05Apr20

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