FILM--IN THE BEGINNING ARE WORDS

The other day I read in an English journal a review of “Secret Honor,” which has just been seen there. This is the filming by Robert Altman of the Donald Freed one-character play, originally produced at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, in which Philip Baker Hall gives a tour de force portrayal as Richard Nixon.

It is a savage and angry text, a monologue of madness that has Nixon dictating a defense/confession onto tape, drinking all the while and descending at last into a sobbing hysteria.

It is a dazzlingly disturbing piece of writing and acting (however one regards the subject matter) and Altman did a clever job of giving the monologue visual variety by having the character seeming to work to a battery of video cameras.

But you’d have thought from the review that Altman did it all. Philip Baker Hall was identified only parenthetically as the actor who played Nixon, although his was a sustained bravura performance you will not see the likes of in several blue moons. The author fared no better in the review.

When a professional critic appears to know so little about the dynamics of film making, you don’t wonder that screenwriters have a low threshold of exasperation.

Even in a sophisticated time, there is still a presumption in the audience that the actors are making it up as they go along. It is a tribute to the naturalness of the actors, and, ironically, to the skill of the writers, that this should be so.

For the critics who know better, the trickier problem (never faced or acknowledged by the chap in London) is to be sure--or to guess--where the writer’s contribution ended and the director’s began. The Lubitsch touches, it is now evident, were not exclusively by Lubitsch.

William Friedkin has been duly honored for the car versus subway chase in “The French Connection,” as he should have been; it is brilliantly executed. But the chase was in the Ernest Tidyman script.

The credits as given don’t necessarily tell all. In the early days, producers and directors who couldn’t fill out a post card seized writing credits they didn’t deserve. But Howard Hawks, among many directors then and now, worked daily with writers, yet sought no credit for his contributions. (He valued writers and wanted them to keep working with him.)

It would be nice, when a good film comes along, to be able to read the script after you’ve seen it. (Not in advance; when you read a script first, you end up measuring the mental images you formed against what the director actually did.)

The reading time is a problem, and so is the availability of scripts, which have never been a widely published art form. What is also a problem is that scripts exist in as many versions as the preliminary drafts of a Keats poem. The various scripts of “Citizen Kane,” for example, continue to be studied like the Dead Sea Scrolls, for clues to the respective contributions of Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz.

Among current movies, it seems clear that the director, Roland Joffe, had a strong hand in the final text of “The Mission,” on which Robert Bolt has sole writing credit. It will presumably take a later scholar, with access to all the versions, to sort out who did what.

But the point now, as ever, is that there is text to begin with--and the words may even sometimes remain substantially unchanged by the director.

Occasional screenplays have been published (some of Billy Wilder’s and Ingmar Bergman’s, some for the Marx Brothers, Hitchcock and MGM classics). But there has evidently been no anthology of screenplays in something like a half-century.

“Best American Screenplays,” edited by Sam Thomas (Crown, $24.95, 538 pp.), is an eclectic gathering of honored work, from “All Quiet on the Western Front” (George Abbott, Maxwell Anderson and Dell Andrews) to “Arthur,” (Steve Gordon) and further including “Casablanca” (Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch); “Rebel Without a Cause” (Stewart Stern), and “On Golden Pond” (Ernest Thompson), a dozen unabridged texts in all.

Thomas, a veteran story analyst, writer, producer and director, is already at work on a second series, with hopes eventually of clearing the rights to some classic scripts (like Carl Foreman’s “High Noon” and John Huston’s “Treasure of Sierra Madre”) not presently available.

The print is testingly small, to allow for a liftable volume, but the reading is a pleasure and an illumination. In the beginning, you are made to realize anew, are always the words. Yet the texts do not diminish the role of the director, because the words did become the images that flash into mind as you read these pages.