The Crusader

A small man arrived cognito in Rome recently. Nobody recognized him despite the distinctive white-on-white shirt and the pale grey glistening tie. But within a few days he had turned the deep eyes of Vittorio De Sica from cordovan brown to a fatigued Chinese red.

This little man, whose name is Abby Mann, believes militantly that "a great screenwriter should be given the same consideration as a great playwright." By a great screenwriter he means Abby Mann. Passing through New York, Mann had seen a preview version of the editing job that Director De Sica had applied to the latest Mann screenplay--an adaptation of Jean-Paul Sartre's The Condemned of Altona. Mann was displeased. He typed out five single-spaced pages of complaint, leaped aboard a plane for Rome, and told De Sica to change the film or drop the name of Abby Mann from the screen credits. Last week, improbable as it may seem, De Sica completed his second week of all-night-every-night revision of the film, while Abby Mann sat on a stool beside him.

From a Barren Room. A young man of great energy, some talent, and no humility, Mann is currently the most active screenwriter in Hollywood. Since he won an Oscar last year for Judgment at Nuremberg, every Hollywood producer has been trying to sign him to write a script, and lucky actors whisper importantly to their friends that they have been cast "to do an Abby Mann." Later they whisper to Mann himself, saying what a great writer you are, darling. When a writer steps into that sort of atmosphere and is incautious enough to believe what the flatterers tell him, he is in danger of doing what Mann did at the Academy Award ceremonies a year ago. In a speech that was easily half as pretentious as the film, he told the audience how he had sat in his barren room in Manhattan and pondered what he could do for mankind. Suddenly it came to him: Nuremberg. He said he accepted the award not only for himself but for all intellectuals.

Researcher & Freedman. All this fustian unfortunately belies the actual writer inside--a hardworking, competent journeyman whose dedication to his profession is genuine. A Child Is Waiting is an original Abby Mann screenplay (actually based on an Abby Mann TV play) about retarded children. When Paramount Pictures insisted on using Hollywood kid actors instead of retarded children themselves, Mann emptied his bank account to buy back the option to the script. He wanted real retarded children to show how close to normal they are, or seem.

No amount of research is too much for him. He goes where the story is. A few weeks ago, he got on a freighter in Vera Cruz and rode with seven boring fellow passengers to Houston in preparation for his movie adaptation of Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools. In Rome, between sessions with De Sica, he popped around to Miss Porter's hotel room to confer with her on the script. In Mexico, he was also collecting impressions for his script of Children of Sanchez. Soon he will be in Georgia and Mississippi soaking up attitudes for his version of MacKinlay Kantor's Anders onville and William Faulkner's Light in August.

Abby Mann was born Abraham Goodman, the son of a Pittsburgh jeweler. At 36, he has all the work he cares to accept, since he has decided not to price himself out of the market by asking for more than $250,000 an adaptation --with a nibble or two at the gross. He has succeeded in his one-man crusade for screenwriter independence, at least for himself if not yet for others. Important actors like Spencer Tracy have threatened to quit if a word of an Abby Mann script is changed.

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