How Collaborative Was Their Project : Movies: Philip Dunne, screenwriter for ‘How Green Was My Valley,” recalls conflicts and compromises with director John Ford and producer Darryl Zanuck.

James Pepper’s small, adventurous Santa Teresa Press in Santa Barbara, which in 1987 produced a handsome edition of Orson Welles’ unproduced original script, “The Big Brass Ring,” has now brought out a commemorative edition of Philip Dunne’s script for “How Green Was My Valley.”

The film, produced by Darryl F. Zanuck and directed by John Ford, was one of 43 titles Fox released in 1941--a list that included “Blood and Sand,” the Glenn Miller orchestra in “Sun Valley Serenade,” two Charlie Chans and a Laurel and Hardy (“Great Guns”). The Ford film won five Oscars, including best director and best picture--over “Citizen Kane.”

The book is a terrific addition to the filmgoer’s shelf, not only for the script and the stills but for a long and instructive essay by the script’s author on the making of the film.

Characteristically, Dunne notes wryly, the admiring, 700-word review in Time magazine mentioned John Ford and the cast, but ignored the fact that a writer had been involved, leaving the clear impression that all the creative decisions had been Ford’s alone.

“Since the critic admits that in the ‘Beginning Is the Word,’ Richard Llewellyn’s novel, this is not pure auteur theory, which holds that the movie springs full-armed--like Pallas Athena from the brow of Zeus--out of the cerebrum of its director, but it will take nothing away from my cherished friend John Ford’s brilliant direction to say that the review, like so many others, gives a completely false impression of the movie’s conception.”

What follows is a revealing essay on the way a major studio operated in the Golden Age of Hollywood. Fox was “a benevolent imperium,” Dunne says, “with Zanuck, no Caligula or Nero, its all-powerful Augustus.” Writers wrote for Zanuck, not for the directors. Dunne never even met three of the directors who did scripts he had written. Only a handful of directors had consultation rights on a script in process. One was Ford.

There had been two previous scripts, one by Liam O’Flaherty, another by a studio writer, both unsatisfactory and both emphasizing the labor-management conflict in the Welsh coal mining community where Llewellyn himself was raised. Zanuck now envisioned a four-hour color version that would be the studio’s response to “Gone With the Wind.” Dunne wrote his first draft script at breakneck speed in July and August of 1940.

But war then made filming in Wales impossible. Zanuck now asked Dunne to cut the script in half. Zanuck had borrowed William Wyler from Goldwyn as director, and Wyler and Dunne went off to Arrowhead Springs to redo the script. The focus had changed from the labor strife to the family, but Llewellyn’s episodic story, covering years, was hell to condense to two hours.

Then Zanuck found a young English actor, evacuated from wartime Britain, who had been tested for “The Yearling” at MGM and found too English but been urged to try for a part in “How Green Was My Valley.” Looking at Roddy McDowall’s test, Dunne says, gave him and Wyler the solution to the script: “This Huw should never be permitted to grow up.”

Their script, at last marked “Final,” went to the Fox money men in New York, who rejected the project because of its remaining pro-union point of view (de-emphasized as it was) and their fears of Wyler’s reputation for extravagance. Sets were already being built on the Fox ranch in Malibu and Zanuck, in love with the project and furious, threatened to make it if he had to take it to another studio.

Zanuck prevailed and in January 1941 called Dunne to his office to meet Ford, who was going to make the picture in lieu of Wyler. That was nearly Dunne’s last consultation with Ford on the film. Even at what was known as “the writer’s studio,” the set was off-limits to the writer. (Zanuck rarely showed up at cameraside either.) Ford had made some changes, most of which Dunne endorsed, including a sequence in which McDowall sings to his father, fatally trapped in the flooded mine.

Dunne has what is probably the ultimate word on the writer-director division and the auteur theory that enshrines the director above all. “I have never claimed . . . that the writer as an individual is more important than the director--though in some cases this may be true--but that the writing of any movie, including the contributions of the producer, the director and your Aunt Sally, is more important than the staging thereof. No director can make a good movie out of a bad script, though there have been many occasions when a bad director has butchered a good one, usually by rewriting it.”

The great trick of the great directors, like Ford and Wyler, “is to reveal no trick at all, to completely efface themselves while exploiting to the full the capabilities of the camera.” The greatest compliment paid to a director or a writer as you watch a film, he adds, is to forget they exist.

There were some rude surprises when Dunne saw the finished film, good scenes left on the cutting room floor, a new interpretation of a scene in which the family is not cool but servile to the boss who comes calling. Sara Allgood’s reading of an important character was disappointingly flat.

But the 12 nominations and five Oscars, and the critical and audience acclaim everywhere, were more than compensating. In 1941, a film that said it was right for labor to organize (with the caveat that it use its powers responsibly) was dangerous doctrine. Zanuck, Republican though he was, caught flak from it. Autocrat as he may have been, Zanuck had what the founding movie fathers tended to share, a passion about movies and a shrewd instinct about what they could be made to say and do, even as they turned a profit.

Dunne, the son of the great political humorist Finley Peter Dunne, quotes some lines from Llewellyn’s novel: “For there is no fence nor hedge round Time that is gone. You can go back and have what you like of it--if you can remember.” Dunne remembers.