Best Screenplay 1968

[The Original BJ]

I agree that Weekend would have made for the most exciting alternative under Original, though, like even the best options here, that is more a director's vision than a writer's.

Hot Millions is certainly the easiest to discard -- it's the one movie here that isn't much watched today -- but I don't rate it at the level of the terribly unfunny nominated comedies of the '50s and '60s. The plot is actually pretty well worked out, with some clever planting and payoff that makes the climax of the movie fairly amusing. I didn't think the writing had a ton of zip along the way, but you can see why the script would have been cited here.

I imagine if you'd spent much of your year watching movies like The Lion in Winter and Star!, Faces would come as a kind of tonic -- here was something so much more authentic and raw than the bloated white elephants of late '60s cinema. But viewed today, it doesn't feel as fresh, and so it's a lot easier to be bothered by things like the general dramatic shapelessness, and seemingly endless scenes of people shouting at each other.

The Producers has a very funny concept, and moments along the way that are very funny -- my siblings and I still get a kick quoting the "I'm the concierge" segment, most everything involving Lorenzo St. Dubois ("but my friends call me LSD") is a hoot, and the "Springtime for Hitler" sequence (even after numerous times seeing various incarnations on film, stage, and stage-to-film) remains a comic showstopper. But...it also has decent size chunks that just aren't quite as funny, and for me the film isn't as much of a laugh riot in the moment as its best jokes are in retrospect.

I can certainly understand enthusiasm for 2001: A Space Odyssey -- it's my favorite movie of the year as well, and I would never discount the strength of the movie's imaginative foundation in terms of its overall success. But it really seems like a stretch as Best Screenplay, given that so many of the things I think of as key elements in film writing (dialogue, plot, characters) are utilized so minimally by 2001. It's so much more a great visual and aural moviegoing experience than a great script, for me.

The Battle of Algiers is also a movie that's probably more of a directorial triumph than a scripted one, as much of what I remember from the film are the tense, brilliantly staged set pieces rather than the dialogue or narrative invention. But it's a pretty gripping piece of work, and more reliant on its writing than I think 2001 is. In particular, I think the film does an excellent job at allowing the audience to sympathize with the violent revolutionaries, while at the same time helping us understand the point of view of the French commanders, painting both sides as human despite their differences. The script is a key element in giving the film such a complicated and detailed point of view on recent history, and for that, I give it my vote here.

[Kellens101]

My votes go to 2001: a Space Odyssey and Rosemary's Baby, two amazing masterpieces and two of the greatest films of the 1960s and ever. My omissions for this year are Petulia(yes BJ, a peculiar film, but a dazzlingly unique one that is pretty underrated), Belle de Jour, Pretty Poison(also a little-known film that is pretty great), The Good, The Bad and the Ugly(was it eligible this year?), Hour of the Wolf, Weekend, and oh what the hell, The Party(don't judge), just a hilarious film that I absolutely love.

[The Original BJ]

I think a lot of the better Adapted Screenplay options were left off the list. Others have extolled the virtues of Belle de Jour and Pretty Poison, which are superior to most of the slate. I'm also fond of the very peculiar Petulia, which I saw in film school and haven't heard anyone really talk about since.

I've mentioned I'm not really the biggest Neil Simon fan, but I have to admit The Odd Couple is probably his most archetypal work, and it was successful at a base level simply because, unlike some of his more tiresome later efforts, this one was actually funny. Of course, by the time I got to it, there certainly wasn't anything that seemed very fresh about the premise -- the idea that opposite types could clash in outrageous ways has been mined plenty in the years since, and even at the time, I can't imagine folks found it especially inventive. (Barefoot in the Park is essentially the same premise, only with a married couple.) Plus, there's my usual "filmed play" issue when it comes to voting under screenplay.

Oliver! is definitely one of the better musicals of the '60's -- despite a lot of fun and a happy ending, there is still enough of a Dickensian sense of gloom that hangs over the picture to make it not feel too saccharine. I credit Carol Reed with a lot of this, but I guess I'd have to extend the praise to the adaptation as well, for opening up the musical in ways that feel filmic, and for being smart about which songs wouldn't be missed. (Though, as in the musical, I have to wonder if anyone alive really needed ALL of those verses of "As Long As He Needs Me.") Still, voting for the screenplay, when so much of it is just the songs preserved intact, would be too much.

The Lion in Winter was more obviously "written," with all of those verbose sparring sessions between Hepburn and O'Toole, but, not to sound like a broken record, it was also a filmed play, and not an especially imaginatively adapted one either. And, as I said in the Best Picture thread, I have issues with the material too -- it seemed to me that Goldman decided to present history by way of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, with a lot of bitchy marital squabbling that felt completely anachronistic given the subject matter. The script presents ideas not much deeper than the notion that royal figureheads fought just like you! I find the writing attention grabbing at times, but way too thinly conceived a piece to honor.

Rachel, Rachel would be my runner-up, though it's a fairly distant one. Some of the writing is definitely compelling -- Rachel is a well-rounded character, and her relationships with the other players (especially Estelle Parsons) feel sensitively realized. And the incorporation of flashback and fantasy elements are inventive, and practically essential to livening up a mostly quiet story about a woman's careful journey out of her shell and into the world around her. But it's such a small piece of work, an insightful enough character study but not really enough of a journey from beginning to end for me to rate it extremely highly.

But Rosemary's Baby gets my vote, no questions asked. I'm not really a huge horror fan (sorry, Eric) -- so much of what passes for the genre, at least in mainstream cinema, strikes me as effective enough at eliciting jumps, but fails to really get under my skin. But not Rosemary's Baby -- both times I've seen the movie, I sat in absolute dread as the events on-screen unfolded. The concept, of course, is obviously based in a frightening idea, but the way Roman Polanski slowly teases out information, keeps the storyline feeling completely off-center (a lot of that due to the jet-black sense of humor that keeps cropping up), and probes so emotionally into the psyche of a woman gradually learning that she's living a nightmare, makes the film one of the all-time greats in its genre. It's a horror film that's frightening, yes, but also very smart, and even oddly moving. I'd have voted for it easily over any of the Best Picture nominees, and I think it clearly merited this prize.

[ITALIANO]

I realize now that my enthusiasm for The Battle of Algiers has made me make a mistake - I voted for it though I have never seen one of the nominees. So please delete my vote.

Only you can change your vote. No one can delete it. I suggest you leave it as is. You can always change it to Hot Millions after you see it in the unlikely event you find it a better screenplay than The Battle of Algiers.

Ok

[Big Magilla]

I realize now that my enthusiasm for The Battle of Algiers has made me make a mistake - I voted for it though I have never seen one of the nominees. So please delete my vote.

Only you can change your vote. No one can delete it. I suggest you leave it as is. You can always change it to Hot Millions after you see it in the unlikely event you find it a better screenplay than The Battle of Algiers.

[ITALIANO]

I realize now that my enthusiasm for The Battle of Algiers has made me make a mistake - I voted for it though I have never seen one of the nominees. So please delete my vote. I mean, I honestly doubt that Hot Millions is a better script than Algiers, but Peter Ustinov was a witty, intelligent man, so who knows? Otherwise, it's an easy choice - Faces has some interesting things (the Lynn Carlin part especially) and it's far from banal, but can also be frustrating and unfocused at times, and The Producers, seen today, is alternatively very funny and very dated. 2001 is probably the only valid alternative - this is clearly a movie with a vision, and not just a director's vision, a writer's vision too. But The Battle of Algiers is THE political movie par excellence - the kind of political movie that only two European communists (Southern-European communists, to be more precise) could conceive and write. Which means (even if you don't agree with their political ideas): a masterpiece, a committed, detailed, profound portrayal of a society, a people, a whole nation, with no heroes except people themselves. Few movies have so realistically portrayed a city (not just a city under siege) - made it come alive, given it a personality, an identity. Few movies have embraced the cause of a country without sounding rhetorical or condescending. And few movies made in the 60s are still so relevant in 2015, and should be seen and studied by anyone who wants to understand what's happening today in a certain part of the world, and why this has such a strong and sometimes violent impact on OUR part of the world. It belongs to a cinema which doesn't exist anymore, so some may not "get" it. But this doesn't mean that it's not great, and a great script.

I'm not so tough on The Lion in Winter - I find some of the dialogue quite brilliant, though, of course, far from profound. But it's true that the actors make it seem better than it actually is, and it's probably very faithful to the stage play it is based on, so I can't vote for it. There is I think a pleasant care and affection for its characters in Rachel, Rachel - and some perception about human lives and American small-town life. But Rosemary's Baby isn't just a very good script, and still a very effective one - it's also a very rare chance in these polls to vote for a thriller (and a very good one), and thrillers are a field which Americans are masters of (yes, I know, in this case the writer is Polish, but it IS a very American movie). My pick, obviously.

[Mister Tee]

1968 was the off-year between the revolution-starting 1967 and the bountiful 1969. But, given the options available, the writers did a pretty decent job of culling the wheat from the chaff.

Inside Oscar lists Godard’s Weekend as eligible this year, and that’d be the most obvious candidate for inclusion under original, but Godard was way off the Academy wavelength.

The films that did turn up on the original list were all at least worthy (including my two favorites of the year, neither of which made the best picture list). Hot Millions is the most conventional of the group, but I found it a decently amusing small piece – closer in sensibility to the Ealing comedies of the 50s than to the Ross Hunter smarm-fests we’ll get to in the late 50s/early 60s.

As I’ve argued here before, I think many people’s favorite Cassavettes film is whichever they first saw – before they concluded his style was never going to evolve. For me, that was Husbands, but for writers of the time it was Faces, a film which in fact finished a very close second for best picture at the NY Critics that year. By the time I got to the movie – sometime in the 90s – I was fully over Cassavettes, and the glancing moments of “truth” weren’t enough to overcome my boredom over endless drunken rants.

I’ve never really known what to say about The Producers. I didn’t get to the film till late 1970, and, as I mentioned in the 1969 thread, by then most of the best jokes were spoiled for me. There are a few lines I treasure (the immortal “What about the actors? They’re human beings” “Oh yeah? Have you ever eaten with one?”), but, undoubtedly because of the spoilage, I’ve never found the film the laugh-riot so many do. As far as the plot: I thought the “oversell shares counting on a flop” premise was pretty ingenious…until I saw an old B-movie called The Falcon in Hollywood which used virtually the same idea. I wonder if Brooks was familiar with it.

2001: A Space Odyssey is the year’s landmark film, and it easily got my best director vote (and my phantom best picture vote). But it’s really stretching the idea of screenplays being “more than dialogue” to award this film for its script. The concept is of course audacious, but long stretches of the film are wordless (and not exactly plot-driven), and, in the one on-ship section where narrative takes over, the characters (with the obvious exception of HAL) are as bland as can be. 2001 is a great work in spite of this, because of Kubrick and Trumbull’s collaboration. But I could never view it as a great screenplay.

The Battle of Algiers is the most satisfying of this group for me in script terms. Not that it, either, features sparkling dialogue (though the terse colloquiums among the revolutionaries are memorable) but because the narrative is strong and often (as in the passing-through-checkpoint scenes) unbearably tense. The film does flirt with tipping over from observation to advocacy, but, for the most part, it puts us in the mind-set of an oppressed people who’ve been frustrated repeatedly at the lack of political change and are now ready to use any means to gain their goals. This is a very powerful film, possibly the best, most close-in view of an intra-country rebellion any fictional work has managed. It gets my vote with ease.

Pretty Poison stands out as omittee on the adaptation side because it was the NY Critics winner in the screenplay category. Belle du Jour could also have turned up here, and I’m fond of both The Fixer and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, as well. The writers could have upgraded their slate with one or another of these. What they did offer wasn’t horrible, but it could have stood improvement.

The weakest, for me, is the winner, The Lion in Winter, about which I’ve written so much in other threads I can hardly muster the energy to go through it again. In brief: I think Goldman’s play (a Broadway flop in 1966) is shallow at best – historical personages exchanging bitchy dialogue, not all of which is that clever. The filmmakers somehow concluded the way to play this material was with deadly seriousness -- as if some Shakespearean depth might emerge. A pair of great actors in the leads helped disguise the pointlessness a bit, but they couldn’t, in the end, make the film terribly interesting. I’m confounded by how many people seem to rate this film high; last time I tried to watch it, I couldn’t get through half an hour.

Musicals don’t generally win in this category, and Oliver! doesn’t break the mold enough to defy precedent. But it’s a very well-crafted adaptation of both Dickens’ original and Lionel Bart’s variation. If there was one thing Dickens excelled at, it was providing engrossing plots, and this version makes full use of that even while streamlining he narrative. The characters are also quite strong, and even Fagin is rendered sympathetically enough one doesn’t register the full outdated ethnic stereotype. Again, I’m not voting for the film here, but it’s one of the few musicals that merits such a nomination.

If Neil Simon’s playwriting career can be said to have had a pinnacle, The Odd Couple is probably it. He started out essentially writing jokebook plays – Come Blow Your Horn and Barefoot in the Park are funny (the latter especially), but have the depth of a potato chip. Later on, he decided he understood the human condition enough to churn out a group of “serious” plays; unfortunately, his observations didn’t run very deep, and, isolated scenes aside, these plays were a chore to sit through. In The Odd Couple, he came closest to achieving equilibrium: the play wasn’t deep, but the essential relationships at the core rang more true and hit home far more than those in Barefoot. And the jokes were VERY funny, delivered beautifully, by Matthau especially (though the poker players and the Pigeon sisters were also memorable). Simon is not remotely as important a writer as his long track record would suggest, but in this one case he merited attention.

Rachel, Rachel has a slightly musty feel to it – yet another sad story about a lonely spinster – and the film is more notable for the Woodward performance, and even the Newman direction, than for particularly brilliant writing. But it’s an honest piece of work, and I have to consider it the runner-up in this category.

But my easy choice is Rosemary’s Baby, which is far more fun than anything nominated for best picture this year. Polanski’s adaptation of Levin’s novel is extremely faithful (I remember reading that certain parts of the script consisted of pages pasted direct from the novel), but he gives it a human element that takes the story beyond the penny-dreadful. The core of the story’s appeal (beyond SATAN!) is the lost-at-sea feeling women can have when experiencing something as life-altering as pregnancy, and Polanski – who’d already explored the female mind in Repulsion – made sure that element was front and center. He also provided wonderful side characters, none more vivid than Minnie Castevet, which gave Ruth Gordon the capper role of her long career. 1968 American films didn’t offer much, but in the realm of fantasy/horror, it did extremely well, which makes it appropriate that Rosemary’s Baby take one of the top writing prizes.

[Big Magilla]

This is as good a place as any to pause and reflect on the effect of changing times on the Writers Guild.

When the Guild began giving out annual writing awards in 1949 for films released in 1948, the awards were divided by genre, not original/adapted. The concept of original screenplay vs. adapted didn't exist as we know it today either within the Guild or the Academy until years later. When the Academy Awards began in 1927/28 there was an award for Best Original Story which meant the outline or concept for a film based on a new idea and an award for Screenplay which meant the dialogue, camera movement, stage direction, etc. The screenplay could be written by the story writer or writers often including the director. There was no distinction between those writing the screenplay based on an original story or one adapted from a book, published short story or play although you have to get all the way to 1939 to find nominees in both categories for the same film - Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

With the 1940 awards the Academy added a category for Story and Screenplay for those films for which the story and screenplay were written by the same person or persons. It wasn't until the 1956 awards that the Original Story category was dropped. From then on writers of the original story who differed from those who wrote the screenplay could be included in the original screenplay award.

The initial Writers Guild categories were as follows:

The Robert Meltzer Award (Screenplay Dealing Most Ably with Problems of the American Scene)
Best Written American Musical
Best Written American Drama
Best Written American Western
Best Written American Comedy

By 1968, the Meltzer award had long since disappeared as had the separate award for westerns. They also added a new category this year for Best Written American Original Screenplay. With the 1969awards the word "American" was dropped from the award's title and the categories were divided between original and adapted as follows:

Best Drama Written Directly for the Screen
Best Comedy Written Directly for the Screen
Best Comedy Adapted from Another Medium
Best Drama Adapted from Another Medium

It wasn't until the 1984 awards that awards by genre were scrapped and the Guild fell in line with the Academy's thinking since 1956 that there should be one award for original screenplays and one award for adapted screenplay.

Personally I prefer the concept of giving writing awards by genre as there is more of a distinction between writing comedy and drama than there is between adapting a story, book or play although each is different in its own way. A play has to be opened up for a film, a book has to be condensed and a short story has to be expanded.

Anyway in this last year of the Guild's awards by genre regardless of source and the first year in honoring original screenplays, here's a salute to the films the Guild nominated but the Academy didn't:

The Brotherhood
Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell
Finian's Rainbow
Funny Girl
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!
Petulia
Star!
Yours, Mine and Ours

[Precious Doll]

Original

A very mixed bunch with two great choices 2001 & The Battle of Algiers. I choose Algiers as the genius of 2001 has more do with the direction than the screenplay.

Adapted

The Loin in Winter is my choice here, with the only other possibility being Rosemary's Baby. The other 3 were all good but hardly award worthy.

Omission abound this year: Pretty Poison, The Killing of Sister George, Petulia, Vixen, No Way to Treat a Lady & The Swimmer, plus a host of foreign films for which years they are actually eligible I do not know.

[Big Magilla]

Original

Faces is a film I didn't like then, don't like now.

Oscar winner The Producers and Hot Millions had their moments, but they are also-rans for me this year.

2001; A Space Odyssey is an easy pick for me, although I should probably watch Battle of Algiers again.

Adapted

Planet of the Apes, The Subject Was Roses and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter are films that I'd have been happy to see nominated here, but there are no slugs among these nominees.

The Odd Couple is probably the weakest of the nominees, but it's a fairly decent Neil Simon comedy.

Rachel, Rachel doesn't hold up today but it was well regarded at the time.

Oliver! is not only a good musical, but it's also one of the best versions of Dickens' Oliver Twist.

Rosemary's Baby is a terrific adaptation, but my favorite here is the Oscar winner, The Lion in Winter which provides great dialogue for the film's half dozen main characters.

[Kellens101]

What were the best screenplays of 1968?