{"id":9041,"date":"2018-03-20T05:00:11","date_gmt":"2018-03-20T09:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=9041"},"modified":"2018-06-28T13:31:04","modified_gmt":"2018-06-28T17:31:04","slug":"james-ivory-screenwriter-a-primer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/james-ivory-screenwriter-a-primer\/","title":{"rendered":"James Ivory, Screenwriter: A Primer"},"content":{"rendered":"

With his Best Adapted Screenplay win for Call Me by Your Name<\/i>, James Ivory received some long-overdue recognition from the Academy. (He also became, at 89, the oldest winner in any category in Oscar history.) His prior nominations \u2013 all in the Best Director category \u2013 were for A Room with a View <\/i>(1985), Howards End <\/i>(1992), and The Remains of the Day<\/i> (1993), three of the films that defined Merchant Ivory Productions in the public\u2019s imagination. Together with producer Ismail Merchant and frequent screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Ivory became synonymous with sumptuous literary adaptations, but he began honing his writing chops decades earlier, co-authoring three of the four features Merchant Ivory produced when they were based in India in the 1960s.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Following the success of their initial outing, 1963\u2019s The Householder<\/i>, written for the screen by Jhabvala based on her own novel, Ivory and Jhabvala collaborated on the story and screenplay for their follow-up, 1965\u2019s Shakespeare Wallah<\/i><\/b>. Where The Householder<\/i> centered almost entirely on Indian characters, depicting the turbulent first year of marriage between an inexperienced college lecturer and his young wife, Shakespeare Wallah<\/i> follows a traveling theater company whose English actor-manager finds to his dismay there isn\u2019t as much demand for the classics in post-colonial India as there used to be.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ivory and Jhabvala based their scenario\u2019s Buckingham Players on the real-life troupe headed up by Geoffrey Kendal and Laura Lidell, who play fictionalized versions of themselves, and featuring their teenage daughter Felicity, making her screen debut as its impressible ing\u00e9nue, Lizzie. The film doubles as a coming-of-age tale for her since she falls for idle rich Indian Sanju (Shashi Kapoor, the husband in The Householder<\/i>), who already has a lover in stuck-up Bollywood actress Manjula (future Merchant Ivory standby Madhur Jaffrey), who demonstrates the power of film over Shakespeare by upstaging a performance of Othello<\/i>. And she\u2019s not the only one troubled by Lizzie and Sanju\u2019s relationship, as one of Ivory\u2019s deep-focus shots reveals one of the Indian actors in Kendal\u2019s troupe is plainly holding a torch for her. Rather than force the issue the way Manjula does, though, he chooses to keep his feelings to himself.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Ivory and Jhabvala collaborated again on 1969\u2019s The Guru<\/i><\/b>, which looks at the collision of Eastern and Western values, this time through the medium of music. Michael York plays a pop sensation called Tom Pickle (yes, Tom Pickle) who travels to Bombay to take sitar lessons from a master, only to find there\u2019s more to Indian music than learning how to play the instruments. In this, he\u2019s shown up by spiritual seeker Jenny (Rita Tushingham, a fixture of British films throughout the \u201960s), who takes Tom\u2019s sitar teacher Ustad (Utpal Dutt, one of Buckingham\u2019s patrons in Shakespeare-Wallah<\/i>) as her personal guru in spite of the fact that she can\u2019t play a note.<\/span><\/p>\n

Along with the East\/West contrast, The Guru<\/i> includes its own variation on the scene where a serious artist is upstaged by a flashy entertainer. Here it\u2019s Ustad who is upset by the screaming fans his inattentive disciple attracts. Meanwhile, Jenny\u2019s resolve is tested when she learns her guru isn\u2019t quite the holy man she expected. Finding out he has two wives (something permitted by his religion, but taboo in the culture she comes from) just doesn\u2019t gibe with the image she had of him.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The contrast between manufactured image and stark reality is even more pronounced in 1970\u2019s Bombay Talkie<\/i><\/b>, again co-written by Jhabvala and Ivory. Jennifer Kendal (Felicity\u2019s older sister) stars as Lucia Lane, a serial divorc\u00e9e and famous author who travels to Bombay to get the inside scoop on its film industry. (It\u2019s said her previous book was about Hollywood, so the speculation is her next will be about its Indian counterpart.) While observing the filming of a spectacular dance number atop a giant typewriter (neatly echoing her profession), Lucia becomes smitten with leading man Vikram (Shashi Kapoor, her real-life husband), conveniently ignoring the fact that he\u2019s a married man. Meanwhile, she is pursued by cynical screenwriter Hari (Zia Mohyeddin), who\u2019s resentful of all the attention Vikram gets while he toils in obscurity.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fame is a double-edged sword, however, as Vikram discovers when he\u2019s forced to sign on with a disreputable producer (played by The Guru<\/i>\u2019s Utpal Dutt) when his fortunes take a tumble. No matter how popular you are today, there\u2019s always somebody waiting in the wings, ready to replace you at a moment\u2019s notice \u2013 or a fickle producer\u2019s whim. Witness the scene where Vikram attends a recording session for one of the musical numbers he\u2019s going to be pantomiming in playback and spies his virtual double in the booth across the way. That sort of thing can\u2019t inspire too much in the way of job security.<\/span><\/p>\n

After Bombay Talkie<\/i>, nearly two decades passed before Ivory received another screenplay credit, but he still found ways to keep his hand in. In addition to writing the narration for various Merchant Ivory documentaries (something he had experience with going back to his first short, 1957\u2019s Venice: Theme and Variations<\/i>), he also came up with the idea for 1972\u2019s Savages<\/i>, the team\u2019s first American adventure, hashing out a treatment with George Swift Trow and Michael O\u2019Donoghue (later of National Lampoon<\/i> and Saturday Night Live<\/i>), but leaving the actual scripting duties to them.<\/span><\/p>\n

A similar situation arose a decade later when Ivory, Jhabvala, and Merchant all pitched in on 1983\u2019s The Courtesans of Bombay<\/i>, a docudrama that marked the feature directing debut of Merchant (who had made a half-hour short under the Merchant Ivory banner in 1974). Harking back to their Bombay films, Courtesans<\/i> is a portrait of the Pavan Pool compound, which is home to female singers and dancers who support their families by plying a completely different trade after hours. Made for the UK\u2019s Channel 4, the film alternates between three narrators: the property\u2019s genial rent collector (and actual owner), a former resident played by actress Zohra Sehgal (who had previously appeared in The Guru<\/i> and later had a role in Merchant\u2019s The Mystic Masseur<\/i>), and a frequent visitor played by Saeed Jaffrey, whose connection with the team went back to narrating Ivory\u2019s 1959 documentary The Sword and the Flute<\/i> and the Merchant-produced 1961 short The Creation of Woman<\/i>. (The latter was the first film for which Merchant was nominated for an Academy Award. The second was 1985\u2019s A Room with a View<\/i>, which earned nominations for all three of Merchant Ivory\u2019s pillars and Jhabvala her first of two Oscars.)<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Jhabvala didn\u2019t feel equipped to tackle the milieu of closeted homosexuality in Britain\u2019s upper classes in Maurice<\/i><\/b>, the team\u2019s next E.M. Forster adaptation, so that chore fell to Ivory and Kit Hesketh-Harvey. A distant echo of Call Me by Your Name<\/i>\u2019s overt gay romance, the relationships in Maurice<\/i> are more furtive since homosexual acts at the time were criminalized to such a degree that Ivory and Hesketh-Harvey invented a character whose life is ruined when he propositions the wrong laborer, to serve as an object lesson for James Wilby\u2019s Maurice and his college chum Clive (played to lip-biting perfection by Hugh Grant). While the latter retreats into a conventional and presumably passionless marriage to preserve his standing in society, Maurice tries going to an American hypnotist (played by Ben Kingsley) who tells him \u201cEngland has always been disinclined to accept human nature\u201d and suggests he move somewhere homosexuality isn\u2019t a crime. Prefiguring the later film\u2019s setting, it\u2019s telling that one of the alternatives he suggests is Italy, but Maurice finds happiness closer to home with a rough-and-tumble groundskeeper played by Rupert Graves.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Ivory\u2019s next writing credit \u2013 shared with Jhabvala \u2013 was on 1998\u2019s A Soldier\u2019s Daughter Never Cries<\/i><\/b>, based on the Kaylie Jones novel, a thinly veiled depiction of her relationship with her father here renamed Bill Willis and played by Kris Kristofferson. The film is divided into three sections, each named for a different male figure in the life of Charlotte Anne Willis (played by Leelee Sobieski as a teenager), the daughter of the title who\u2019s told on multiple occasions she can never cry, but waits until the final part (subtitled \u201cDaddy\u201d) to call him on it. The other two cover the period when Willis is living as an expatriate in Paris, with \u201cBilly\u201d covering the introduction of Charlotte Anne\u2019s adopted younger brother into the family and \u201cFrancis\u201d encompassing her friendship with an opera-mad American. The cast also includes Barbara Hershey, Jane Birken, Jesse Bradford, and Isaach De Bankol\u00e9, reflecting the caliber of actors Merchant Ivory was able to attract in the years following the twin successes of Howards End<\/i> (1992) and The Remains of the Day<\/i> (1993).<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Even more star-studded, however, was 2003\u2019s Le Divorce<\/i><\/b>, which roped in Kate Hudson, Naomi Watts, Leslie Caron, Glenn Close, Sam Waterston, Stockard Channing, Thomas Lennon, Bebe Neuwirth, Matthew Modine, and Stephen Fry. A frothy romantic comedy based on a novel by Diane Johnson (Kubrick\u2019s co-writer on The Shining<\/i>), Le Divorce<\/i> found Ivory and Jhabvala working in a lighter mode than usual, but still keeping things relatively grounded. While Watts\u2019s Roxeanne realistically deals with the fallout of her broken marriage to a cad who wants a quickie divorce in spite of the fact that she\u2019s carrying their second child, Hudson\u2019s Isabel blithely takes up with an older man who showers her with expensive gifts while stringing along an artist her own age who offers something more fulfilling. The main engine of the plot, however, is the contentious wrangling over a painting that has been in Roxeanne and Isabel\u2019s family for generations and which could fetch a high price at auction if it turns out to be a La Tour, which it does.<\/span><\/p>\n

With their international stars and million-dollar budgets, A Soldier\u2019s Daughter<\/i> and Le Divorce<\/i> seem far removed from Merchant Ivory\u2019s humble beginnings scraping together financing in Delhi and Bombay, but they traffic in the same themes of cultures in collision and the role of the artist in society. Similarly, the convention-defying same-sex attraction of Maurice <\/i>finds its counterparts in the doomed love affairs between English women and Indian men in Shakespeare Wallah<\/i> and Bombay Talkie<\/i>. And all of these films look ahead to Call Me by Your Name<\/i>. Whether it\u2019s Armie Hammer\u2019s Oliver fretting over whether he\u2019s \u201cruined\u201d his host\u2019s teenage son and worrying they may pay for what they\u2019ve done, or Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet\u2019s Elio experiencing disillusionment comparable to Lizzie in Shakespeare-Wallah<\/i> or Jenny in The Guru<\/i>, or Michael Stuhlbarg\u2019s Samuel pining for the love he might have had under different circumstances (much like Clive does at the end of Maurice<\/i>), Call Me<\/i>\u2019s characters reveal their fragility and humanity in ways Ivory has been doing consistently for six decades and counting.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

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With his Best Adapted Screenplay win for Call Me by Your Name, James Ivory received some long-overdue recognition from the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":463,"featured_media":9042,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,1399],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/463"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9041"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9041\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}