Hey, you are here in this forum to learn and to develop yourself.
Well, I was working with Jerry Bick in the beginning. Elliot Kastner of course was the executive producer, and Jerry was the producer, and with Brian Hutton, who was to be the director.. . .And Brian was having problems himself at that time. And Brian got a brilliant idea how to solve the plot problem. I kept telling him, I don’t think it’ll work because I think . . . well, I didn’t think, but Brian didn’t understand the discipline and the structure of the mystery story. . . .. . .And this brilliant idea was very clever, the only trouble was it killed you right at the top of page one. You were dead right there. Well, I thought maybe I’m wrong so I’ll go ahead and do it, and so I wrote a script. And it didn’t work.. . .Well, we threw out quite a lot of characters and we started off with Terry and the death of Sylvia. And his idea was that Terry had pre-planned the whole thing. He’d murdered his wife himself knowing that Roger Wade would be blamed for it. In other words, you had people coming out of boxes and saying words because they had to, otherwise the plot didn’t work. And a plot that’s built that way never works: you’ve just got puppets and nothing builds. So I sent it in and I didn’t like it very much, and I had done something with the ending I’ve forgotten, because the ending in the book is inconclusive, everybody felt, and I did something . . . and Brian said no, hell, I’d rather have Marlowe shoot him himself. So I said well, fine, that at least I do like, so let’s have Marlowe shoot him. So that’s where that came from. And then there was a hiatus, some problem that had nothing to do with me, I don’t know, way up at the production top, and Brian had another commitment and had to leave the film. So we sat for quite a while on the shelf, and so then they got Bob Altman. And Bob Altman was cutting Images at that point and he was in London so I scooted over to London again . . . And we had jam sessions, he and Jerry Bick and I met for a week and got it all thrashed out, and I’d go to a hotel at night and pound on a borrowed typewriter until I got the notes all down and would go back the next day and do the next segment. And we got everything all thrashed out and then I came home and did the script, and that was that. And some of the touches like the cat, the opening with the cat, were Bob’s, and the ending, where he dances away to . . . that was Altman’s, and the first time I saw that in the projection room I looked at it and “What in the . . . is going on here?” And he said, “You know, the whole thing is a farce, you can’t play it straight, everybody knows, so you play it off as a joke.”
"because the ending in the book is inconclusive"
A waste of time. The movie is better than the book, people here say.
It's about time this will be released on R1.
