Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God Read Online Free PDF Page B

shot — no dialogue — just the measurements of how much dialogue and where he wanted it. He left its content to me, since there is no dialogue in the entire short story. It’s all introspection and the memory of horror and the writer didn’t want to spoil it with dialogue. Lotsa luck, screenwriter. ‘Give me an inch of dialogue right here.’ I went away and wrote what I still consider a rather neat piece of work, but lo and behold Hitch decided to shoot a movie, and his presence was denied to us. [Arthur Hiller directed it].”
    For Hitchcock, Silliphant also wrote the classic “The Crystal Trench” from A.E.W. Mason’s haunting short story about a young couple who go mountaineering. The woman’s fiancé is killed when he falls into a trench in the ice. Out of love and loyalty to him, she remains single over the decades that it takes the slow-moving glacier to reach the foot of the mountain and deposit his perfectly preserved body. When it does, he is wearing a locket. She opens it. Inside is the picture of another woman. The grotesquely chilling episode was broadcast October 4, 1959.
    In today’s world, when everybody seems to be writing scripts, it’s worth noting that, years ago, good, solid, fast script writers were hard to find. Silliphant was one of them. “Back in the ‘50s and ‘60s thirty (or so) of us were writing eighty-five percent of prime-time TV,” he reported. “I don’t know if I can explain why this was, it just was. Whether you were freelance or staff, it seemed essential, in order to meet the deadlines.” And there was another, more pragmatic reason: money. “Dean Martin was signed to guest star in a Rawhide episode and my agent got me the assignment to write for Dean. This was the first time I was ever paid $10,000 to write a one-hour show. We’re talking back in the time when $4,500 was considered top money for an hour episode. I may be wrong, but this could have been the highest per-hour episode fee paid up to that time for a Hollywood-based TV show.”
    It may seem strange to struggling screenwriters, or to those who are aware of current industry scruples, but there was a time when film and television producers actually wanted to read material and had story departments constantly on the lookout for it. Silliphant entered the game at that exact moment when TV was desperate for scripts and even more desperate for grown-ups (Silliphant was in his mid-thirties at this time) who could churn them out quickly. “At the time there was an obverse Greylist,” he later remarked. “There was a prevailing policy at the studios not to hire the bright young blokes all the studios are now searching for. I don’t believe that age — whether the writer is young or old — is an issue. Only the work matters. There are millions of old coots who can only write mediocre material and millions of young minds who can’t do any better. If anything, the odds are in favor of the younger guys simply because they are writing for a medium which can seldom tolerate ‘excellence’ — a medium which only wants ‘hot’ or ‘trendy’ or ‘best seller’ — and we all know that those requirements can only be met by mass appeal comic strips disguised as motion pictures.”
    During this period, Silliphant also wrote the script for the feature film, Damn Citizen, based on a true story of corruption in Louisiana and told with a semi-documentary style popularized years earlier by Louis de Rochement. Universal-International Pictures sat on it for a year and then dumped it into a few theatres on March 1, 1958.
    One of the stranger collaborations — strange in that it was not a collaboration — occurred with Nightfall (1957), an atmospheric crime thriller directed by Jacques Tourneur. Tourneur had distinguished himself as a genre filmmaker with Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943) at RKO and was prepping Curse of the Demon (1957) when Columbia handed him Silliphant’s script of Robert