Women in Love

And Other Dramatic Writings

Larry Kramer

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781555846695
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Guiones de cine

Screenplays and scripts from the playwright of The Normal Heart. "A valuable showcase of an important writer's early career."— The Bay Area Reporter Larry Kramer has been described by Susan Sontag as "one of America's most valuable troublemakers." As Frank Rich writes in his Foreword to this collection of writings for the screen and stage, "his plays are almost journalistic in their observation of the fine-grained documentary details of life... that may well prove timeless." The title work, the Oscar-nominated screenplay for Women in Love, is a movie "as sensuous as anything you've probably ever seen on film" ( The New York Times ). The screenplay is accompanied by Kramer's reflections on the history of the production, sure to be of interest to any student of film. This volume also includes several early plays, Sissies' Scrapbook, A Minor Dark Age, and the political farce Just Say No, illuminating the development of one of our most important literary figures. "Since his screenplay for Women in Love, Kramer has been a prophet of psychic health and catastrophe among us." (from The American Academy of Arts and Letters citation). Women in Love "A visual stunner and very likely the most sensual film ever made."— New York Daily News "Throughout Larry Kramer's literate scenario, the Lawrentian themes blaze and gutter. The sooty mind-crushing coal mines that Lawrence knew like the back of his hand are re-created in all their malignance. The annealing quality of sex is exhibited in the most erotic—and tasteful—lust scenes anywhere in contemporary film."— Time

Sissies’ Scrapbook

A Play in Two Acts

Sissies’ Scrapbook, my first play, began life as a screenplay. I’d just come back to America after ten years in London and was hibernating in the cold winter, in a Bridgehampton house, nervous, for some reason, about making reentry into the big city. I’d made Women in Love. It hadn’t made me famous or rich (Ken Russell, the director, got all the attention and the three-picture deal from United Artists); even worse, it hadn’t satisfied me. I had seen this coming for a while. I simply had not enjoyed making the film, and I found writing screenplays creatively unsatisfying. I thought for a while it was because I was not writing anything that meant anything to me—that is, that I had something invested in, like being gay. But adapting Yukio Mishima’s Forbidden Colors, a novel very much about homosexuality, had been only a little bit better. And no studio wanted to finance it when I submitted it. No, Women in Love had brought me no comfort, no sense of direction, of what to do with my life. And Ken Russell got to make his wretched movie about Tchaikovsky. (When this movie was screened for the UA executives, the lights came up and the chairman said: “Well, I guess Larry Kramer had more to do with Women in Love than we thought.”)

This realization—that making movies was not the creative outlet I’d hoped it would be—came as a surprise. Throughout the 1960s I had been very much in love with films. New York and London both had exciting film festivals that I attended vigorously. I came to love foreign films particularly. The movie that meant most to me was Jules et jim. Its sheer narrative virtuosity still impresses me. Truffaut uses a Narrator, an unnamed Narrator, to tell the intensely personal story. For whatever reason, this device is rarely used in films and plays. In writing both the screenplay and later the play of Sissies’ Scrapbook, I wanted to use an unnamed Narrator. Why not? In writing it I also threw in everything that was “meaningful” to me: young men, friends, Yale, homosexuality, fathers, and, of course, love. It certainly was based on the “real.”

I finished a draft of the screenplay, only to be confronted by the same problem I’d had with the Mishima: How was I ever going to get it financed? My new American New York agent was not hopeful. A friend read it and said it should be a play. I didn’t want to write a play. I was nominated for an Academy Award for my screenplay of Women in Love, threw Sissies into a box, called a guy I thought I was in love with, and bought a new Mustang for us to drive across country to Los Angeles for the awards. Falling madly in love along the way, of course. I didn’t win the Oscar; my coast agent told me I was “hot” and should cash in on it because it wouldn’t last long; the guy wasn’t in love with me and wanted to go home to Rome, I wanted him beside me even more; I accepted a screenwriting assignment I shouldn’t have to somehow keep him with me in our little Loretta Young cottage in Beverly Hills; he left anyway; and I wrote the fucking screenplay—the only thing I have ever written that I am truly ashamed of—and made more money from it than I’d ever made in my life, which I gave to my brother to invest. I returned to New York to turn Sissies into a play.

It wasn’t all that hard to do. Or so I thought. I had that unnamed Narrator walking around like a master puppeteer, and a set that no designer could ever embody unless we had the budget of My Fair Lady, and a cast of characters that, while not as large as A Chorus Line, still required a few more actors than any prospective producer would be happy to pay. My new New York agent didn’t like the play any more than my old New York agent had liked the screenplay version of it, but she had heard of a new place called Playwrights Horizons that tried out workshop-type things and got you a director, actors, a couple of weeks of rehearsal, and a two-week run before an audience. It was located in a dance studio in the old YWCA on Eighth Avenue, and you got one big gymlike room that you rehearsed in and built your set in and set up bleachers for your audience in. No critics had ever come because no critics had ever been invited. This was a workshop. You were supposed to learn from it. A young director was found for me by the managing director, Robert Moss, and since I knew plenty of agents and casting directors, a great cast was somehow assembled.

The experience was wonderful. The actors responded to my words; my director, Alfred Gingold, was not the monster Ken Russell had been; and there were no studio executives breathing down my back, pushing and pressuring and questioning every cent and comma. Everybody actually got along with one another. Maria Tucci even made us her special spaghetti. We passed out fliers everywhere we could, and one day the audience came. In fact, they came every performance and filled all those bleachers. They clapped a lot at the end. Most important, though, was that they cried. I had made people cry. I had actually written something that touched people enough to cry. That is a very heady experience for a writer (this writer, anyway), then and now. If this was theater, then I never wanted to make another movie again.

Ever mindful of “what comes next?” I tried to get The New York Times to send a critic before we closed. No one answered my calls or hand-delivered letters. In two weeks (all Actors Equity would allow) it was over. Maria made us some more of her special spaghetti and we all said good-bye. Oh, there had been a few people who said they had friends who were looking for plays to produce, but no one actually came forth. One of those who saw the play was the actress Sylvia Miles. One of her friends did call. His name was Michael Harvey. He was rich. He read my play and said he would produce it off Broadway.

He did produce it off Broadway. Everything that had been so right about the workshop production at Playwrights Horizon was awful or went wrong with the off Broadway production at the Theater de Lys on Christopher Street. Most of the original cast was not available, and I was not comfortable with many of their replacements. The set was awful. Alfred decided he was directing Harold Pinter, and we cut out not only the Narrator and a few of the characters, but much of the dialogue as well. Everything I have ever written depends a great deal for its effectiveness on my use (some would say abundant use) of language. But I hadn’t learned that yet. I went along with it. It was a very skinny script we opened with. We even had a new title: Four Friends. Michael rebelled against producing any...