Lost Faulkner screenplay fo found hiding in plain sight
A PREVIOUSLY unpublished, fulllength len screenplay by William Faulkner has ha been discovered: a murder story so complete co experts say it could see him hit hi Hollywood again.
The 20th-century novelist and Nobel be laureate last co-wrote films in the Forties, Fo with his work being turned into in films directed by Howard Hawks and an starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren La Bacall.
But unlike To Have and Have Not and The Th Big Sleep, his latest production could co be the first to be shot in colour.
Prof Carl Rollyson, the author of a forthcoming fo Faulkner biography, spoke sp of his “utter excitement” in finding in it. He told The Sunday Telegraph: “Nobody “N knows about it, no film scholar, sc no Faulkner person.”
Titled Angel’s Flight and dating from the th Forties, it is a thriller about a juror called ca Vera Morgan who, in believing that th the wrong man has been convicted of murder, tries to exonerate him – only to be pursued by the real murderer.
Prof Rollyson can imagine Bacall as Vera Ve but, if Angel’s Flight were to go into in production today, he can see the Australian Au actress Cate Blanchett in the role, ro with British actor Ralph Fiennes as the murderer.
Faulkner, who died in 1962 aged 64, was wa a novelist and short-story writer whose wh masterpieces include The Sound
and an the Fury, a 1929 novel about a family’s fam decline.
He was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize Pr for Literature “for his powerful and an artistically unique contribution to the th modern American novel”. His films
‘Faulkner mentions that he and a screenwriter cooked up a story which they hoped to sell to Howard Hawks’
were we collaborations with other screenwriters. wr
Faulkner hoped that Hawks would direct dir Angel’s Flight, judging from a letter that he wrote to his wife, Estelle. Prof Pr Rollyson said: “Faulkner mentions that th he and Buzz Bezzerides, a screenwriter, wr had cooked up this story which they th hope to sell to Hawks. I’ve matched m up the dates. It couldn’t be anything an else. It’s not clear why Hawks didn’t buy it.”
He said the typed 94-page screenplay had been “hiding in plain sight” among other Faulkner material in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills, California.
Although catalogued correctly, it had been overlooked, partly because other biographers “simply didn’t look at Faulkner’s screen work with any seriousness at all”, Prof Rollyson said.
He added: “They bought what Faulkner said in interviews, that he wasn’t good at it.”
Prof Rollyson will include the discovery in his forthcoming biography The Life of William Faulkner: This Alarming Paradox, 1935-1962, which will be published by the University of Virginia Press in September.
In the screenplay, Vera is the only juror who thinks the accused Joe Trotter is innocent of murder, even though he had been found drunk in a room next to a man bludgeoned to death and has no alibi.
Prof Rollyson said the female protagonist is particularly interesting: “There’s so much written about all the male characters of Faulkner. People say he doesn’t understand women. Well, he does actually. This screenplay is a really good example.”