[ilds] Mankiewicz on Durrell

[James Gifford]

Hello all,

I'm reading through a new collection of Joseph Mankiewicz interviews, 
and I saw these references to Durrell, which I though might interest the 
list, especially after the discussion of the various film versions and 
potential film version of Durrell works during OMG XIV in Victoria.

When asked about making /Cleopatra/, Mankiewicz says it wasn't so much 
his disappointment with the final product as it was the lost opportunity 
of doing /The Alexandria Quartet/ that disappointed him, something he'd 
wanted to have as the culmination of his career.  As he puts it:

"[...] all our todays contain many yesterdays. And the most wonderful 
representation of this in literature is Lawrence Durrell's /The 
Alexandria Quartet/ ... and I bought it for the screen, and after a year 
of really hard work, I had a treatment. I had licked the problem of time 
and space continuum. When I was finished with the treatment I wrote on 
the frontispiece, 'I'm happy this treatment cannot be read by anyone who 
has not read all four volumes of /The Alexandria Quartet/.' The result 
of that was that no one at Fox read the treatment [...]. [Richard] 
Zanuck read it, he got it, and he thought it was wonderful. Then I take 
the treatment to Paris ... to Durrell. I buy him a bottle of cognac and 
I say, 'You're going to read this!' And he read right through it.
    [....] When Durrell finishes he says to me, 'I really never thought 
anybody could do this.' Here I sat with his blessings, ten thousand 
minutes of potential film that I know I could squeeze so it would work, 
six hundred double spaced pages ... and I get this phone call from 
Charlie Feldman. Skouras is in big trouble. They're making this film of 
/Cleopatra/ and everything is falling apart. He's already spent $9 
million and he hasn't got anything to show for it. We need you, he tells 
me. And I had a decision to make. And I must tell you that I look back 
on my choice with great sadness ... not because I chose to do 
/Cleopatra/, but because by the time I was finished everything fell 
apart at Fox and /The Alexandria Quartet/ never made it to the screen. 
My one great disappointment? That's it." (199)

Mankiewicz follows it up with comments on Cukor's /Justine/ and his 
sense of its mediocrity. That's from Jeff Laffell's interview with 
Mankiewicz.

Andres Sarris repeats much the same sentiment much more briefly:

"what galled him the most about the whole /Cleopatra/ debacle was that 
he lost the opportunity to do /Justine/, a Mankiewicz dream project to 
end Mankiewicz dream projects, a twentieth-century literary work of the 
first magnitude systematically embellished with all the appurtenances of 
ambiguity and multiplicity of viewpoint to which its ideal director had 
dedicated himself time and again in his films." (31)

Gary Carey rounds this out at the mid-point in the time-period of the 
interviews, but it again corroborates the tenor of the discussion:

"Mankiewicz's most ambitious, and hopefully 'definitive,' involvement 
with the flashback was to have been /Justine/, his adaptation of 
Lawrence Durrell's /The Alexandria Quartet/. He says of this unrealized 
project:
	'It became necessary for me to withdraw from /Justine/, and I consider 
that the greatest disappointment of my career. [...] I was ecstatic 
about the film possibilities of the /Quartet/; within them lay the most 
difficult, but potentially the most gratifying, challenge I had ever 
faced as a writer-director. I had been working on it for many months 
(there are still, in my files, a couple of hundred pages of screenplay 
Fox never even requested to see) when I was approached by Spyros Skouras 
and my (then) agent Charles Feldman.  Would I suspect my work on 
/Justine/ to take over a very expensive, very sick movie Fox had just 
closed down in London? [....]
	'You see, I had solved the two major problems of incorporating all four 
volumes of tthe /Quartet. into one viable film structure. [....] This 
was my answer to Daedauls and that simple little labyrinth he whipped up 
for the Minotaur'" (86-7)

To this, there's another quick addition that corroborates others:

"'The other reader of my screenplay that I know about was Lawrence 
Durrell. I sat opposite him in a hotel room in Paris, keeping him from 
food and drink and even the toilet, until he had read it from start to 
finish. Larry expressed his delight; he wsa most congratulatory. I 
suppose, eventually, I shall have to make do with that much; not, after 
all, inconsiderable praise. But I do wish it had all been otherwise--and 
that I'd been able to finish /Justine/. I cannot help feeling that if 
ever I were to summon up enough talent to make a definitive film about 
anything, this would have been it--for me at any rate." (87)

---

So, there it is.  The worsening of the situation we all didn't know 
about.  Durrell was working on the failed Cleopatra project while 
Mankiewicz was working on his /Quartet/ film, and when /Cleopatra/ fell 
apart, probably right around the time Durrell met up with Mankiewicz to 
read the script, he got bribed away to save /Cleopatra/ and the better 
film they both wanted never came to be...

Having read Durrell's script for /Cleopatra/ and having seen a photo 
spread of the Mankiewicz short script during OMG XVI in Victoria (some 
may recall the discussion of the film), this seems to round out the 
picture.  I think Durrell's /Cleopatra/ would have been exciting, and 
Mankiewicz's /Quartet/ would have been inspired.  But, alas...

There's plenty more material in this delightful collection of 
interviews, and the book is well worth reading on its own.  Hopefully 
I've sent a few more readers its way:

Dauth, Brian. Ed. /Joseph L. Mankiewicz: Interviews/. Jackson: 
University of Mississippi, 2008.

Best,
James