Thirty vintage original photos (all black-and-white except for one), mostly 10 x 8″ (25 x 20 cm), overall very good+ or better.
Including photos of the playwright on set during rehearsals.
Vintage original 22 x 14″ (56 x 36 cm.) window card theatre poster, just about fine.
Poster for the opening night Broadway cast of this play, directed by Frank Corsaro, which included Bette Davis and Margaret Leighton. Although the play had a nine-month run, various actors (including Davis), left and were replaced. Hence this poster, with credits for the first cast, is scarce.
“An overwhelming explosion of history, beauty, charm and surprise”
– The New York Times, 2023
“One of the most important of its kind, showcasing a trove of rare books, maps, illuminated manuscripts, prints, photos and more.”
– The Wall Street Journal, 2024
Hollywood: Lomitas Productions, 1959. Vintage original film script, 11 x 8 1/2″ (28 x 22 cm.). Printed wrappers, mimeograph, brad bound, 173 pp. Light staining to wrappers, very slight chewing affecting extreme blank areas of a few final pages, overall very good+ or better. “Revised Screenplay” credited to Nathan E. Douglas (pseudonym for Nedrick Young) and Harold Jacob Smith, dated August 13, 1959. Sold with a spiral-bound album of fourteen (14) 7 x 10″ (18 x 26 cm.) black-and-white photos, all backed with heavy paper, outer glassine slightly worn, overall near fine.
The stage version of Inherit the Wind, co-authored by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (also known for their stage adaptation of Auntie Mame) was a popularly successful example of what is called a drama of ideas, a genre associated more with European playwrights like George Bernard Shaw and Bertholt Brecht than with the American theater. In the case of Inherit the Wind, the ideas literally put on trial are Darwin’s theory of evolution — and the freedom to teach it — versus the tenets of fundamentalist religion.
[Chattanooga, Tennessee: 1947]. Vintage original 8 x 10″ (20 x 25 cm.) black-and-white glossy silver gelatin print photo. Creasing at bottom right corner, near fine.
James Baskett started his career in New York as part of Bill Robinson’s theatre company. He was also featured in some all-Black cast films during the 1930s. Moving to Hollywood to find work, he auditioned for the voices of several animals for a Disney film. So impressed was Walt Disney that he asked to meet Baskett and cast him not only in the animal voices but as the lead of Uncle Remus in Song of the South. Disney campaigned for an Academy Award for him, and he was honored with a special award in 1948. He was not allowed to attend the premiere of the film in Atlanta, Georgia, as no hotel would rent him a room.
However, he was able to travel in the South to promote the film on radio, as in this rare photo showing him in costume and talking with a WDOD of Chattanooga, Tennessee, radio host. What appeared to be a promising career ended with his untimely death in 1948.
Photo is stamped by photographer John Goforth and pencil notation indicates that it is for a show Home Ed. Wed.
[Hollywood: MGM, 1964]. Vintage original 10 x 8″ (25 x 20 cm.) black-and-white print still photo, with mimeographed text on verso and photo agency sticker, fine.
Taken while director John Huston was shooting his adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ play The Night of the Iguana, in Mexico.
Hollywood: Paramount Pictures, 1956. Vintage original film script, quarto, mimeograph, brad bound, dated October 9, 1956. White pages dated 9/26/56, 10/9/56, 10/16/56 and 10/18/56. Blue pages dated 10/10/56, 10/11/56 and 10/31/56. Orange pages dated 10/10/56, 10/11/56, 10/23/56, 10/29/56 and 10/31/56. The script has bound-in first two pages of Paramount inter-office notes about changes to script, then a cast of characters (with only the three main parts already cast), then follows immediately to the screenplay, with no title page present. Extreme bottom edges of script lightly creased, overall very good+.
The gangster musical — a serious gangster drama with songs — was not a frequently produced Hollywood genre, but Hungarian-born director Charles Vidor had already made one very good one, LOVE ME OR LEAVE ME (1955) with James Cagney and Doris Day, before he partnered with actor/singer Frank Sinatra to make THE JOKER IS WILD (1956), a gangster musical biopic which tells the story of real-life nightclub entertainer Joe E. Lewis. (Sinatra and Vidor’s two producing partners were Lewis, himself, and Art Cohn, who wrote the biography of Lewis on which the movie is based). Charles Vidor’s best-remembered film, GILDA (1946), was another serious drama with songs, specifically Rita Hayworth performing the classic “Put the Blame on Mame.”
THE JOKER IS WILD’s screenplay was authored by Oscar Saul, best known for his screen adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE (Elia Kazan, 1951). Prior to that, his numerous movie credits included ROAD HOUSE (Jean Negulesco, 1948), a film noir with songs, and THE DARK PAST (Rudolph Maté, ’48).
Joe E. Lewis’s story begins in a 1929 Chicago nightclub where Joe is working as a singer. When he agrees to take a job at a nightclub owned by a rival mobster, the first club owner has his thugs assault him by slashing his face and throat, effectively ending his singing career, at least for a while. All of this occurs within the screenplay’s first 29 pages.
The completed film tracks Saul’s screenplay quite closely, with some rewriting toward the end. A couple of brief scenes not involving Joe appear to have been deleted during the editing process. After the throat-cutting incident, Joe disappears. Eight years later he is discovered by his best friend and former piano accompanist, Austin (Eddie Albert), working as a clown-nose wearing second banana in a New York City burlesque theater. Austin invites him to a charity benefit hosted by Sophie Tucker where he is forced to go on-stage and, too embarrassed to sing a complete song, he starts to tell jokes. The audience loves him, which leads to a new career as a nightclub entertainer specializing in comedy. In the meantime, there are relationships which start off well but go sour, first a society woman (Jeanne Crain) that falls apart due to Joe’s fear of commitment, then a marriage to a pretty chorus girl (Mitzi Gaynor). Eventually Joe manages to drive away both his wife and his best friend with his chronic alcoholism and gambling. The nightclub atmosphere and the character’s self-destructiveness oddly foreshadows Scorsese’s RAGING BULL.
Frank Sinatra, an auteur in his own right, co-produced THE JOKER IS WILD as a vehicle for his acting and singing talents shortly after his big comeback role in FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (Fred Zinnemann, 1953), which earned him an Oscar. Other outstanding films he made during this peak period included THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM (Otto Preminger, 1955), GUYS AND DOLLS (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1955), HIGH SOCIETY (Charles Walters, 1956), and PAL JOEY (George Sidney, 1957). Anti-heroes with self-destructive habits like heroin addiction (MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM), drinking (THE JOKER IS WILD), or gambling (A HOLE IN THE HEAD) were a Sinatra specialty during this era.
THE JOKER IS WILD gives Sinatra fans what they came to see, namely, Frank being Frank, telling jokes and singing songs, including the featured number “All the Way” which was not only a hit single, but won the 1957 Academy Award for Best Original Song. The screenplay is full of the kind of wisecracks that Sinatra excelled at delivering, for example, “Records, Austin. Records… You know records — those little black things that go round and round and round.”
Saul’s screenplay is to be commended for its anti-Hollywood ending. No last reel miracle or sudden epiphany arrives to rescue Joe from his downward spiral. THE JOKER IS WILD screenplay ends with Joe, alone on a street at night, talking to his “alter ego” reflected in a department store window. Joe’s last line in the screenplay, in response to his alter ego’s remark that he should head a clinic (for losers like himself?) is, “Well, happy occupational therapy.” The rewritten movie scene ends with Joe’s alter ego telling him, “You make everybody else laugh. How about making me laugh for a change,” to which Joe replies, “I’ll try. I’ll really try.”
Stuttgart: Anakonda Music, [1976]. Vintage original 31 x 21.25″ (80 x 54 cm.) German concert poster. Unfolded, fine.
Scarce poster for a concert by blues legend Memphis Slim in what was then West Germany.
“John Len Chatman (September 3, 1915 – February 24, 1988), known professionally as Memphis Slim, was an American blues pianist, singer, and composer. He led a series of bands that, reflecting the popular appeal of jump blues, included saxophones, bass, drums, and piano. A song he first cut in 1947, ‘Every Day I Have the Blues’, has become a blues standard, recorded by many other artists. He made over 500 recordings.
“He spent most of the 1930s performing in honky-tonks, dance halls, and gambling joints in West Memphis, Arkansas, and southeast Missouri. In 1940 and 1941, he recorded two songs for Bluebird Records that became part of his repertoire for decades, ‘Beer Drinking Woman’ and ‘Grinder Man Blues’. These were released under the name ‘Memphis Slim,’ given to him by Bluebird’s producer, Lester Melrose.
“After World War II, Slim began leading bands that generally included saxophones, bass, drums, and piano, reflecting the popular appeal of jump blues. Starting in late 1945, he recorded with trios for the small Chicago-based Hy-Tone Records. With a lineup of alto saxophone, tenor sax, piano, and string bass (Willie Dixon played the instrument on the first session), he signed with the Miracle label in the fall of 1946. One of the songs recorded at the first session was the ebullient boogie ‘Rockin’ the House,’ from which his band would take its name. In 1947, the day after producing a concert by Slim, Broonzy, and Williamson at New York City’s Town Hall, the folklorist Alan Lomax brought the three musicians to the Decca Records studios and recorded with Slim on vocal and piano. Lomax presented sections of this recording on BBC Radio in the early 1950s as a documentary, The Art of the Negro, and later released an expanded version as the LP Blues in the Mississippi Night.
“After 1954, Slim did not have a steady relationship with a record company until 1958, when he signed with Vee-Jay Records. In 1959 his band, still featuring Murphy, recorded the album Memphis Slim at the Gate of the Horn, which featured a lineup of his best-known songs, including ‘Mother Earth’, ‘Gotta Find My Baby’, ‘Rockin’ the Blues’, ‘Steppin’ Out’, and ‘Slim’s Blues’.
“Slim first appeared outside the United States in 1960, touring with Willie Dixon, with whom he returned to Europe in 1962 as a featured artist in the first of the series of American Folk Festival concerts organized by Dixon, which brought many notable blues artists to Europe in the 1960s and 1970s. The duo released several albums together on Folkways Records, including Memphis Slim and Willie Dixon at the Village Gate with Pete Seeger (1962).
“In 1962, Slim moved permanently to Paris, and his engaging personality and well-honed presentation of playing, singing, and storytelling about the blues secured his position as one of the most prominent blues artists for nearly three decades. He appeared on television in numerous European countries, acted in several French films and wrote the score for À nous deux France (1970), and performed regularly in Paris, throughout Europe, and on return visits to the United States. In the last years of his life, he teamed up with the respected jazz drummer George Collier. The two toured Europe together and became friends. After Collier died in August 1987, Slim rarely appeared in public, although he reunited with Matt ‘Guitar’ Murphy for a gig at Antone’s in Austin, Texas, in 1987.
“Two years before his death, Slim was named a Commander in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of France. In addition, the U.S. Senate honored Slim with the title of Ambassador-at-Large of Good Will.
“Memphis Slim died of renal failure on February 24, 1988, in Paris, at the age of 72. He is buried at Galilee Memorial Gardens in Memphis, Tennessee.
“He was posthumously inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1989. He was inducted into the Memphis Music Hall of Fame in 2015.” (Wikipedia)
Kurt Vonnegut (source) Final Draft Screenplay by Stephen Geller Universal City: Universal Studios, December 21, 1970. Vintage original film script, quarto, printed wrappers, brad bound, mimeograph, 134 pp. One page on pink paper dated 12-23-70, minor creasing to covers, NEAR FINE in VERY GOOD+ wrappers. 95 pp.
SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE, director George Roy Hill’s film adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s celebrated novel, was awarded the Jury Prize (Prix du Jury) at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival. Vonnegut himself was greatly pleased with the adaptation:
I love George Roy Hill and Universal Pictures, who made a flawless translation of my novel Slaughterhouse-Five to the silver screen … I drool and cackle every time I watch that film, because it is so harmonious with what I felt when I wrote the book.
As well he should have been, insofar as Stephen Geller’s screenplay ranks among the most masterful adaptations of a “difficult” novel ever committed to the screen.
Los Angeles-born screenwriter Stephen Geller, who also wrote the screenplays for THE VALACHI PAPERS (1972) and ASHANTI (1979), as well as writing and directing MOTHER’S LITTLE HELPERS (2005), was additionally a playwright and a novelist. His first novel, She Let Him Continue, was adapted to the screen as PRETTY POISON in 1968.
Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five presented enormous difficulties to any would-be adapter, due to its mixture of genres and forms. It is a metafictional semi-autobiographical work, based in large part on author Vonnegut’s experiences as a prisoner of war during World War II, and his traumatic first-hand experience of the bombing of Dresden where he was imprisoned. The novel is part fictionalized memoir, part anti-war novel, part satire, part essay and part science fiction. After a brief introduction, the novel, per se, begins like this:
Listen:
Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.
Vonnegut explains further:
Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day. He has walked through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1941. He has gone back through that door to find himself in 1963. He has seen his birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all the events in between.
Consequently, both the book and the screenplay based on it skip about in time in almost random fashion. The novel and film’s closest cinematic precedents are the time-fractured storylines of D.W. Griffith’s INTOLERANCE (1916) and Orson Welles’ CITIZEN KANE (1941), along with the time-scrambled meta-narratives of French New Wave director, Alain Resnais, notably his 1968 science fiction film, JE T’AIME, JE T’AIME, which the movie of SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE resembles in multiple respects.
Like Kurt Vonnegut, theater and film director George Roy Hill (1921-2002), was a veteran, having served as a Marine Corps transport pilot in World War II and later recalled to duty as a night fighter pilot in the Korean War. Following World War II, Hill studied James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and “Finnegans Wake” at Trinity College, Dublin — which surely must have influenced his approach to SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE. After establishing himself as a Broadway theater director, Hill’s first film directing job was an adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ PERIOD OF ADJUSTMENT (1962), which he had directed on the stage. His most acclaimed movies, prior to SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE, were THE WORLD OF HENRY ORIENT (1964), the epic HAWAII (1966), and the mega-popular BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (1969). THE STING, his 1973 follow-up to BUTCH CASSIDY, earned Hill the Academy Award for Best Director. Hill’s greatest gift as a director, shown to fullest advantage in SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE and THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP (1982), was his casting and directing of acting ensembles.
Vonnegut’s book is a groundbreaking literary tour-de-force, intentionally rambling and digressive. A case can be made that Geller and Hill’s movie adaptation improves it, giving the story a tighter, more organized narrative structure, and greater depth of characterization.
Most of the changes from novel to film — at least from a screenwriter’s perspective — would have to be considered improvements. For example, Billy’s antagonist, the twisted revenge-obsessed Paul Lazzaro (played by Ron Leibman in the film) is introduced far earlier in the screenplay than he is in the novel. His promise, ultimately fulfilled, to murder Billy (Michael Sacks) is one of the things that gives the story an arc, making it more than a collection of random moments. In the novel, the aliens from Tralfamadore who abduct Billy are described as “two feet high and green and shaped like plumber’s friends”. In the screenplay, they are invisible fourth-dimensional beings — all the better to observe Billy from a perspective outside of time.
The central incident in the book, from which all moments radiate outward, is the tragic firebombing of Dresden. Almost any film as well-executed as this one depicting that incident at length could not help but make the experience more visceral than just reading about it. In the novel, Billy’s best friend, the impeccably decent, middle-aged teacher, Edgar Derby, is executed by the Germans for picking up a teapot from the bombing rubble. In the movie, Derby is executed for picking up a tiny Dresden porcelain figurine that miraculously survived the bombing, a symbol so apt and ironic that Vonnegut should have thought of it himself (though, in Vonnegut’s defense, the book’s description of his friend being shot for picking up a teapot was based on something that actually happened).
Most of the movie’s brilliant editing was pre-planned in the screenplay. For example, on page 3 alone, we cut from Billy at his typewriter in upstate New York in 1971, to Billy under a geodesic dome with his starlet paramour, Montana Wildhack, on the planet Tralfamadore sometime in the future, to Billy on a Belgian battlefield in 1944, and back again to upstate New York. Many of the cuts indicated in the screenplay are based on visual/thematic associations, as when a shot of a soldier’s boots in 1944 cuts to a shot of Billy’s shoes on his honeymoon in 1947. Sound editing cuts are also indicated in the screenplay as in the montage sequence described above where the sound of Billy typing cuts to the sound of a machine gun firing on the battlefield.
Differences between the screenplay and the completed film are minor, mainly some trimming of the dialogue. Other scenes are elaborated upon in the film’s staging as when Billy, dressed like a scarecrow, and the other captured Americans first enter Dresden. In the film (but not in the screenplay) he is joined by local children who march along with him as though he were a clown in a parade.
While the screenplay and movie are scrupulously faithful to the events and language of Vonnegut’s book, the book’s characters and dramatic situations required fleshing out. As Vonnegut himself notes at one point in the novel:
There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces.
Thus, the novel’s personae, some of them hardly more than abstractions — like the old German commandant, Billy’s overweight wife Valencia, and even Billy’s dog Spot — become fully realized characters in Geller’s screenplay and Hill’s film. And their fates, described with ironic detachment in Vonnegut’s book, become unexpectedly moving when played out on the screen.
Numerous good or great movies have been made from books that were of average or worse quality (think VERTIGO or TOUCH OF EVIL), but rarely does an arguably great work of literature become an even better film. Orson Welles’ THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS may be one example, and so, arguably, is Stephen Geller’s and George Roy Hill’s adaptation of SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE.