Sartre, Churchill, Nabokov, Adorno, Huxley

What do they have in common?

They wrote screenplays that were never filmed.

Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1958, John Huston commissioned Jean-Paul Sartre to write a film treatment of Freud’s discovery of psychoanalysis. By Sartre’s admission, the script would have had a running time of seven or eight hours. Huston invited Sartre to his castle in Galway to work on a script of normal duration. It came out even longer than the original. “One can make a film lasting four hours if it’s about Ben Hur,” Sartre complained, “but the Texas public will not put up with four hours of complexes!” Huston ended up hiring a new screenwriter.

Winston Churchill. In Hollywood in 1929, Winston Churchill met Charlie Chaplin, who had long been plotting to make a film about Napoleon. Churchill proposed to write Chaplin a “Young Napoleon” screenplay, and reportedly sketched with great enthusiasm a scene in which Napoleon flies into a rage while taking a bath, and slips on some soap. Chaplin never made a Napoleon movie.

In 1934, Winston Churchill signed a £10,000 contract with Alexander Korda for a screenplay on the reign of King George V. Korda observed that the first draft, composed by Churchill in less than two weeks, was “really splendid,” but a bit heavy on politics. Churchill turned in a revised script in 1935. It was never filmed.

Vladimir Nabokov. As a struggling young writer in Berlin, Vladimir Nabokov once wrote a depressing screenplay titled The Love of a Dwarf (1924). The protagonist, a sexually frustrated London circus dwarf, has a one-night stand with the depressed, childless wife of a circus magician. The dwarf quits the circus and retires to a small town in the north of England, waiting in vain for the magician’s wife to join him. Eight years later, she turns up on his doorstep, announces that he has a son, and rushes away. The dwarf pursues her, but dies of a heart attack at her feet. To the gathering onlookers, the magician’s wife announces that her son died a few days ago. In 1939, Esquire printed a short-story version of “The Love of a Dwarf,” titled “The Potato Elf.” It was Nabokov’s first American publication.

Theodor Adorno. In Los Angeles in the 1940s, Frankfurt School philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer spent nearly six years working on a screenplay about prejudice. The final draft, titled Below the Surface, features a violent commotion on a subway car. A woman carrying a vacuum cleaner either falls or is pushed onto the tracks. A one-legged peddler tries to rally the passengers against a Jew who had jostled him. At the end of the film the audience is to be asked questions about the guilt or innocence of the Jew; other audiences might be shown a similar film in which the Jew would be substituted by a “Negro” or a “Gentile white-collar worker.” Below the Surface was batted around Hollywood for years, subjected to numerous scriptwriting consultations, and pitched to the likes of Jack Warner and Elia Kazan. It was never produced.

Aldous Huxley. In 1945, Walt Disney signed Aldous Huxley to write a screenplay for Alice and the Mysterious Mr. Carroll, a combination live-action and animated incorporation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with the biography of Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson). Dodgson, a beleaguered Oxford lecturer known as the Dodo, wrote Alice in Wonderland under the name Lewis Carroll. He and Alice take refuge in Wonderland from Alice’s cruel governess and Dodgson’s Tory vice-chancellor. These villains, who disapprove of “nonsense books,” must never learn that Dodgson and Carroll are the same person, lest Dodgson be barred from a coveted university librarianship. A series of fantastic adventures culminates with the resolution of the Carroll-Dodgson identity through a deus-ex-machina appearance by Queen Victoria. “It was so literary I could understand only every third word,” Disney said of Huxley’s script, which he didn’t end up using for his adaptation of Alice in Wonderland (1951).

Nor, presumably, for the current version.

This posting is based on the March-April issue of The Believer, reprinted in Salon.