Best Screenplay 1973

1927/28 through 1997

What do you think were the best screenplays of 1973?

American Grafitti (George Lucas, Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck)
7
18%
Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman)
9
24%
Save the Tiger (Steve Shagan)
0
No votes
The Sting (David S. Ward)
2
5%
A Touch of Class (Melvin Frank and Jack Rose)
0
No votes
The Exorcist (William Peter Blatty)
6
16%
The Last Detail (Robert Towne)
5
13%
Th Paper Chase (James Bridges)
0
No votes
Paper Moon (Alvin Sargent)
9
24%
Serpico (Waldo Salt and Norman Wexler)
0
No votes
 
Total votes: 38

ITALIANO
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Re: Best Screenplay 1973

Post by ITALIANO »

It's nice that European screenplays win so often in these polls - nice that "depth" seems to be generally more appreciated than "technique" here. And, of course, for decades Ingmar Bergman's movies were considered the epitome of depth. I remember my parents and their friends anxiusly waiting for the next Bergman movie - something that would be unthinkable today, in the era of internet, for any director. Yes, I know, some may look forward to the next Tarantino - but it's different, really. I have voted for Bergman once already - I might do it again (though I am not sure), and I know that Cries and Whispers is considered by many THE Bergman movie - it's certainly one of his most typical efforts. Still, this time I've chosen an American (a VERY American, I should say) script - American Graffiti. I know, the "mood" of this movie has been much imitated, so that seen today this movie may not "feel" as original as it may have been back then - but rarely has this mix of nostalgia, affection for the characters, subtle bitterness been so well, so sincerely conveyed. The Sting can only be a distant third.

In Adapted, I've picked The Last Detail, which is an intelligent little movie, written by a man who would soon become the most celebrated American screenwriter of his time. I'm not sure that this was truly deserved - unless one also consuders the movies Robert Towne is supposed to have worked on, but isn't officially credited for. But even just for some of his credits - this one, Chinatown, Shampoo - the appreciation is understandable, and The Last Detail is probably his best, freshest script. The other nominees aren't bad, either - though Paper Moon, the winner here, honestly drags a bit in the hotel episode. As for The Exorcist, it's not the piece of complete trash some seem to consider it - it may be rough, but it's quite entertaining, and, anyway, less rough than other examples of its kind.

I
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Re: Best Screenplay 1973

Post by Kellens101 »

Now, the haunting masterpiece of the year through my 15 year old eyes is Cries and Whispers. That film is truly great and one of the best of the 1970s. My 13 year old self was very moved, disturbed, frightened and entertained by The Exorcist and it sucked me in at the time. Last year, when I watched Cries and Whispers, American Graffitti, Last Tango, Paper Moon Nd Mean Streets, I thought "Hey, I obviously saw films in a different way then". All 5 of those films are the best of 1973 and if I had seen them at the same time as The Exorcist I definitely would've been less impressed even then. That's why revisiting films can always change a person's opinion for the good or for the bad. Those 5 other films are so great and so mature: Mean Streets with its energetic take on New York gangsters, Paper Moon with its zippy, hilarious and poignant Depression-era adventure, Americab Graffitti with its beautifully touching and funny depiction of teens in 1962 California, Last Tango in Paris with it's bracing and bold take on modern sexuality and Cries and Whispers with its painful and honest take on the depressing and emotional experience of dying.
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Re: Best Screenplay 1973

Post by Kellens101 »

True, but as a producer he was nominated for the Big Prize as well.
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Re: Best Screenplay 1973

Post by Big Magilla »

Blatty was more than the producer, he was the author.
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Re: Best Screenplay 1973

Post by Kellens101 »

In an Oscars book, I read a piece of tiny trivia that said "William Peter Blatty considered The Exorcist to be the finest film of 1973 and that it was robbed for Oscars". Well, of course he would say that! He was a producer! I wonder if he even saw the other films nominated. It was by far better than a Touch of Class but definitely not up to the level of the masterpieces of the year like Last Tango in Paris and Cries and Whispers. I agree that the film and its source material has trashy elements but it gripped me in such a way and haunted me that I have to appreciate some of it. Its thrilling and suspenseful, but I would never nominate it over the year's best films. It's funny, but two or three years ago when I first watched The Exorcist, I was blown away and left completely affected by this chilling and visceral story of possession. I thought it was a masterpiece and a great horror film. Now that I've revisited it more and seen the other films of 1973, my opinion dipped quite a bit. I agree that the plot is raggedly constructed and the subplots are dropped all of a sudden. There's a huge connective structure missing throughout and the script doesn't explore certain elements as much as it should. There still is stuff to be thrilled by, like the excellent performances by Ellen Burstyn and Jason Miller, the slow building tension of many of the scenes and a haunting, doom-filled atmosphere that really leaves you chilled. I would still rate it at about a 3 or 3 and a half star movie, but it surely isn't the masterpiece of the year I thought it was a couple of years ago.
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Re: Best Screenplay 1973

Post by Big Magilla »

Yeah, I know it's not the greatest analogy. Horror films in general have not done well with Oscar or for that matter other awards bodies. 1931/32's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Frankenstein, 1932/33's Invisible Man, King Kong and M, 1935's Bride of Frankenstein, 1945's Picture of Dorian Gray, 1960's Psycho and 1968's Rosemary's Baby all failed to receive Best Picture nominations. Finally one comes along that is not only nominated but within striking distance of winning and nothing happens. The genre didn't get any real respect until 1991's Silence of the Lambs.

Even though the version released in 2000 was better, the original release, despite its flaws, was better than any of the nominees and that includes Cries and Whispers in my humble opinion.
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Re: Best Screenplay 1973

Post by Mister Tee »

I don't think The Exorcist analogizes well to those films you mention, if only for the fact they all have in common that they WON best picture, while The Exorcist lost (to a fairly weak competitor). Had The Greatest Show on Earth lost, as anticipated, to High Noon, it wouldn't be seen as any worse than Three Coins in a Fountain or Love is a Many-Splendored Thing, losing nominees of roughly the same vintage; it's its status as best picture winner that makes film history fans groan. Same with Around the World in 80 Days -- which has fallen harder, in fact, because it was also, inexplicably, the NY Critics' choice. (Broadway Melody I don't think belongs in the same grouping, because, by modern standards, any of the surviving 1929 nominees are near-unwatchable; this film's win is actually one of the better possible outcomes)

The Exorcist was a box office phenomenon, but it was never a critical favorite. I knew plenty of people -- film students then, since I was college age -- who viewed the film as trash; who, while they were hardly enthusiastic about The Sting, found it a more acceptable best picture winner. If many people are unenthusiastic about The Exorcist -- particularly as a piece of screenwriting -- they're right in line with opinions commonly held at the time.
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Re: Best Screenplay 1973

Post by Heksagon »

Big Magilla wrote:I hate to think that The Exorcist is one of those "you had to be there" cinema events that doesn't do much for later audiences. Do you guys really equate its success in its day with that of Broadway Melody, The Greatest Show on Earth and Around the World in 80 Days ?
Personally, I feel that The Excorcist has aged surprisingly well. The re-release in 2000 was well-received and I remember several of my friends being impressed by the film at the time, which came as something of a surprise for me, because they (unlike myself) were not at all interesting in classic films.

For me, the film is a mixed bag. Some parts of it are excellent, but at the same time the screenplay is so poorly structured and many of the themes are kind of there, but not properly developed. The prologue seems pointless, the build-up to the finale is not just long, winding and often moving nowhere (which was typical for horror films at the time), but it does a poor job at developing the characters or building up suspense, and many of the sub-plots are just dead ends. Rosemary's Baby, the much more austere Halloween and maybe even the highly clichéd Jaws all do a better job at structuring their story up until the end, but on the other hand, the climatic finale in The Excorcist is still more effective than any of these films, IMHO.

However these problems are just the same now as they were in 1973. The parts that were always the most effective - the finale and the effects in particular - have aged surprisingly well. It isn't at all like Around the World in 80 Days which sometimes feels like a walking corpse these days.
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Re: Best Screenplay 1973

Post by Kellens101 »

BJ, would you nominate it or give it any awards, even just technical ones?
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Re: Best Screenplay 1973

Post by The Original BJ »

Big Magilla wrote:I hate to think that The Exorcist is one of those "you had to be there" cinema events that doesn't do much for later audiences. Do you guys really equate its success in its day with that of Broadway Melody, The Greatest Show on Earth and Around the World in 80 Days ?
I don't. I think those movies are practically unwatchable. I think The Exorcist is just stupid.
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Re: Best Screenplay 1973

Post by Big Magilla »

I hate to think that The Exorcist is one of those "you had to be there" cinema events that doesn't do much for later audiences. Do you guys really equate its success in its day with that of Broadway Melody, The Greatest Show on Earth and Around the World in 80 Days ?
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Re: Best Screenplay 1973

Post by Kellens101 »

I find The Exorcist to be a very entertaining and suspenseful film that can never fail to thrill me or scare me. But, as a major Oscar candidate, I could never pick it. Especially not as Best Adapted Screenplay where it indeed is the weakest. I would give it wins for Sound, Makeup and Visual Effects though.
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Re: Best Screenplay 1973

Post by CalWilliam »

nightwingnova wrote:Can't believe that The Exorcist is in a tie for the win. I saw the movie just a few months ago and found the drama pedestrian, and the plot dull and incomprehensible at times.
Indeed. One of the worst winners in this category. I can only think of A Beautiful Mind, Slumdog Millionaire and Precious as worse choices.
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Re: Best Screenplay 1973

Post by nightwingnova »

Can't believe that The Exorcist is in a tie for the win. I saw the movie just a few months ago and found the drama pedestrian, and the plot dull and incomprehensible at times.
Last edited by nightwingnova on Sat May 30, 2015 6:15 pm, edited 2 times in total.
The Original BJ
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Re: Best Screenplay 1973

Post by The Original BJ »

The Original competition leaves quite a bit to be desired. I’m surprised no one has mentioned Last Tango in Paris as an alt. Do folks just not view it as a writer-centric movie? For me, Brando’s corpse-side monologue alone makes it worth citing way up on the list. And while Allen and Scorsese would go on to create far greater films down the line, Sleeper and Mean Streets were definitely exciting enough early efforts, and far better than some actual nominees.

I finally put myself through Save the Tiger for this poll, and it was indeed as dreary as I'd been led to believe. Actually, its most obvious sin is just that it's so BORING -- after the first fifteen minutes had past, I thought, my god, we've spent this whole time watching Lemmon get up in the morning? But as it went on, it somehow got worse, barely working up any plot momentum or finding any focus for its story, begging for sympathy for a character I found pretty loathsome, and handling everything related to the film's title with thudding obviousness. This won the WGA Award for Best Written Drama? Yikes.

A Touch of Class is a similarly miserable piece of writing. As I’ve mentioned before, if I hadn’t seen the quintessential ‘70’s movies before seeing this thing, I’d have assumed that filmmaking from this decade was hopelessly dated, given the way the movie incorporated superficial of-the-era elements with a totally stale story. And the biggest issue? It just wasn’t very funny. But how could it be, with such an unappealing couple at the central of its romance? That this managed the WGA Award for Best Written Comedy (over American Graffiti!) makes me want to recant my union membership.

Given the truly grisly nominees on the ballot, The Sting looks better just by proximity -- I didn’t anticipate the surprising ending, so I found the movie enjoyably engaging from a plot standpoint, and as a vehicle for two appealing stars to riff off one another, it has its charms. What it doesn’t have, though, is any depth to elevate it beyond an entertaining lark. Picking this for Best Screenplay would be like picking Speed for Best Screenplay of ’94 -- it might be a fun movie, even cleverly mounted, but when placed alongside the year’s most nuanced pieces of writing, it’s way outclassed.

One of the things this game has illustrated for me is that it can often be very tough to choose between strong screenplays that feature very different kinds of writing. And that’s my dilemma when faced with American Graffiti and Cries and Whispers, two very well-written films with radically different aims. A win for either would have pleased me thoroughly. But I only have one vote, so which movie gets it?

Of the two, American Graffiti is the one whose success rests most of all with its screenplay. It’s structurally ambitious, with a boatload of characters and plotlines criss-crossing each other, full of really funny dialogue (“I lost my wife too. Her name wasn’t Idy though, and it wasn’t in a flood.”), and possessing so many sensitive moments that, beneath all of the humor, mark the film as one of the best ever about growing up. And so many of these beats are realized with such graceful delicacy, like the moment when Dreyfuss goes to open his locker one last time and finds the combination has changed, or when the same character looks out the plane and sees the T-Bird below at the movie's end, that American Graffiti’s creators deserve a ton of praise for giving what is essentially a teen comedy a far greater emotional resonance than the slew of imitators it has inspired over the last four decades. As Mister Tee says, it also beautifully distills a time and place in American history in a way few films have ever been able to do -- its story takes place only a decade prior to its release, yet it illuminates an entirely different era. (Portions of Boyhood were literally filmed a decade ago, without remotely this level of disconnect.) I can certainly understand anyone’s impulse to choose this as the winner.

Cries and Whispers has more filmic elements jockeying for “best in show” position: Bergman’s exacting direction, the blistering performances, and especially the chilly cinematography. But that doesn’t mean the writing isn’t firing on a lot of cylinders too. This script has a very compelling structure, not simply with its use of flashbacks, but the way these flashbacks don’t so much fill in narrative details as provide insight into the characters’ grueling histories that have shaped their lives. And the relationships between the characters are hugely complicated -- the surviving sisters, for instance, are fairly awful individuals, yet they remain, if not sympathetic, at least recognizably human, in ways that feel painfully tragic. And then there's just the sheer power of the movie, the way it depicts the act of dying in a methodically detailed, deeply horrifying manner -- there's enough clarity in the script to give rise to plenty of theories about what the whole movie means, but also enough ambiguity that one can simply experience the story at a visceral level. For me, all of these strengths are writing achievements -- certainly not ONLY writing achievements, but ones that feel inseparable from the success of Bergman's overall vision. It's a close call, but I'll side with the Cries and Whispers camp on this one.
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