Background
Lehman, Ernest was born on December 8, 1915 in New York City.
( Best known as the basis for the classic film starring T...)
Best known as the basis for the classic film starring Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster, and soon to be a major Broadway play, Sweet Smell of Success is a dark and gripping novella about media manipulation and the will to get ahead―by any means necessary. Lehman scathingly depicts the dark side of success through the twisted relationship of Sid Wallace, an ambitious publicist, and Harvey Hunsucker, a powerful and vindictive gossip columnist, fashioned after Walter Winchell. As scandals are manufactured and reputations ruined for sport, the story spirals downward toward one last, savage act of revenge. As brutally honest as Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, Sweet Smell of Success is one of the most enduring and provocative stories in the literature of show business.
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(Student Facsimile, 250 pages SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS (1957...)
Student Facsimile, 250 pages SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS (1957) Full Movie Shooting Script LOOSE LEAF UNBOUND NO BINDER.
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(North By Northwest. 1958 Shooting Script. screenplay [Stu...)
North By Northwest. 1958 Shooting Script. screenplay [Student Facsimile] LOOSE LEAF UNBOUND EDITION NO BINDER.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00B3XFL5C/?tag=2022091-20
( The first publication of the screenplay for Alfred Hitc...)
The first publication of the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's romantic thriller Made in 1959, North by Northwest is one of Alfred Hitchcock's most beloved thrillers, an enticing cocktail of suspense, comedy, eroticism, and danger. In the film, Cary Grant is a suave but stiff-necked executive who finds himself mistaken for a United States intelligence agent and, as a result, is forced into a series of life-threatening encounters with the villainous James Mason. Grant's consolation is that he also becomes involved with the elegant female spy played by Eva Marie Saint. But the game of international intrigue is played for high stakes --and in high style: in the film's classic sequences, Grant is chased across cornfields by a crop-dusting plane and, later, is forced to climb the slopes of Mount Rushmore's National Memorial to escape his pursuers. The screenplay is the work of one of the most versatile and successful American screenwriters, Ernest Lehman, who provides an Introduction that explores the process of collaborating with Hitchcock on the film. Also the author of the screenplays for such different films as Sweet Smell of Success and The Sound of Music, Lehman managed in this work to combine witty wordplay and thoughtful suspense in such a way that North by Northwest stands as the epitome of Hitchcock's elegant, entertaining thrillers.
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Lehman, Ernest was born on December 8, 1915 in New York City.
He went to City College in New York, and then he worked for a while for a show business publicity agency. That’s where he saw and heard the world of Sweet Smell of Success (57, Alexander Mackendrick), which began life as a novella by Lehman and grew eventually into a screenplay where he shared credit with Clifford Odets. The novella and other short stories won offers from Hollvwood—one story sold in the late forties and became The Inside Story (48, Allan Dwan).
Lehman was in Hollywood by the early fifties, where John Houseman found him “prickly but stimulating,” loved his work, and hired him for Executive Suite (54, Robert Wise). Next, he had a baptism of fire-by-collaboration, working with Billy Wilder on Sabrina (54). For The Ling and I (56, Walter Lang), he displayed a very different talent, that of taking a war-horse from one medium and making it work in another. The script for Somebody Up There Likes Me (56, Wise) is Lehman’s favorite, because he felt he had got at things left unsaid in boxer Rocky Grazianos autobiography.
As years pass, nothing dates in Sweet Smell of Success: the vision of ordinary corruption is still as fresh as a warm corpse. The only tiling blurrv in die film—the bond between Hunsecker and his kid sister—was always blurry. It is a terrific and important movie, with fabulous dialogue.
Lehman then did North by Northwest (59, Alfred Hitchcock), his only original script. No one ever found Hitchcock an easy master, but Lehman handled him very well, no matter how frustrated he felt. The end product is a sublime mix of farce, chase, and layered character—the sense of Grant’s advertising man as a kid who has to find maturity in a hurry is marvelously embedded in the headlong action. Only movies could make such gos-samer seem as solid as American distance.
From the Terrace (60, Mark Robson) was strictly routine; and West Side Stony (61, Wise and Jerome Robbins) was a test case for not getting in the way. The Prize (63, Robson) is a very entertaining movie.
At this point, Lehman negotiated his hot record into the job of writer-producer and he deserves great credit for turning a potential menagerie into the verv effective Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (66, Mike Nichols). He then wrote and produced the successful but hardly interesting Hello. Dolly! (69, Gene Kellv). Failure came in large and loud with Portnoy’s Complaint (72), which he also directed personally. In hindsight, Lehman admitted that he had missed the quality of Philip Roth’s book by selecting onlv a part of it for film.
His only other credits are Family Plot (76, Hitchcock), a fascinating idea that doesn't click; and Black Sunday (77, John Frankenheimer), a knockout setup that didn't win an audience.
Since then, Lehman has worked as a novelist and was a columnist for American Film magazine in the late seventies. He was given an honorary Oscar in 2001.
( Best known as the basis for the classic film starring T...)
( The first publication of the screenplay for Alfred Hitc...)
(Student Facsimile, 250 pages SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS (1957...)
(USED VERY GOOD CONDITION, TIGHT SPINE, CLEAN PAGES, COLLE...)
(paperback book 496 pages)
(North By Northwest. 1958 Shooting Script. screenplay [Stu...)
Freelance fiction writer and journalist for national magazines. Producer, writer: (films) Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, 1966, Hello, Dolly, 1969. Writer: (films) Executive Suite, 1954, Sabrina, 1954, King and I, 1956, Somebody Up There Likes Me, 1956, Sweet Smell of Success, 1957, North by Northwest, 1959, From the Terrace, 1960, West Side Story, 1961, The Prize, 1963, The Sound of Music, 1965, Family Plot, 1976, Black Sunday, 1977.Writer, producer, director: (film) Portnoy's Complaint, 1972. Author: (novels) The French Atlantic Affair, 1977, Farewell Performance, 1984, Screening Sickness and Other Tales of Tinsel Town, 1982, (novellas) The Sweet Smell of Success, The Comedian. Monthly columnist American Film magazine.
Member Writers Guild American West (president 1983-1985).
Around the age of sixty, Ernest Lehman seemed to have stopped doing scripts. Of course, he may have been writing away (like Bills Wilder) on screenplays that are smart, funny, and beautifully constructed, only to be told that no one has the patience for movies like that any more and, anyway, what does he know about what kids want? So the kids are deprived, too, and everyone misses Lehman’s subtle way of getting us to grow up.
Married Jacqueline Shapiro, 1942 (deceased 1994). Children: Roger, Alan. Married Laurie Sherman, 1997.
1 child Jonathan.