Tough Sledding for Ace Writer

When it comes to writing from personal experience, veteran screenwriter John Michael Hayes (“Rear Window,” “Peyton Place”) has gone the distance.

Like the main character Will Stoneman in Disney’s new release “Iron Will,” Hayes says he faced huge odds in getting his story to the big screen.

For Stoneman, 17, it is a treacherous, 522-mile cross-country dog sled race from Winnipeg, Canada, to St. Paul, Minn., in the dead of 1917’s brutal winter. For Hayes, 74, it was not only resurrecting a film career that had been in mothballs for 30 years, it was getting a project that he began in 1971 finally made.

Now a film studies professor at Dartmouth College, Hayes was one of the highest-paid screenwriters of his day, penning such other Alfred Hitchcock classics as “To Catch a Thief,” “The Trouble With Harry” and “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” plus “The Children’s Hour,” “Butterfield 8” and “The Carpetbaggers.”

Today, Hayes muses, “Hollywood has changed a lot and I guess you forget when you’ve been away for awhile.” He said “Iron Will’s” $17-million budget was “14 times what it cost to make ‘Rear Window’ (in 1954).” He says he would have preferred to see a big star in the film, but allows that “the story is the star of this picture.” As for Jeff Arch and Djordje Milicevic, who share screenplay credits, Hayes says they were brought in to “Disney-ize” the project.

The idea for “Iron Will” came from a 1917 newspaper article about a dog-sled race. Bing Crosby Productions hired Hayes to write the script in 1972. It would take another 21 years to get the movie made after it was optioned by several studios.

Before joining Hitchcock (“He was an enigma”), Hayes had been a newspaper reporter lured to radio drama in Cincinnati and eventually Hollywood in the 1940s. His film breakthrough came in 1952 from Universal Pictures with such films as “Red Ball Express,” starring Sidney Poitier, and “Torch Song” starring Joan Crawford. A year later he got the call from Hitchcock--who had been a fan of his “Suspense” radio program.

“He was working on ‘Dial M for Murder,’ his last picture for Warner Bros. Paramount told him he could come over there and make pictures if he could get a screenplay out of a little story called ‘Rear Window,’ ” says Hayes, noting he’s now working on a remake of the classic.

Hayes’ last major film was “Nevada Smith” in 1965. After signing a lucrative 10-year contract with Embassy Pictures--which did him no good after the studio was sold to Avco Pictures--he tried writing for TV but eventually gave up and moved to Hanover, N.H., home of Dartmouth, where he began teaching permanently in 1988.

But he never gave up on “Iron Will.” Said Hayes: “I wanted to tell a story about a young man against impossible odds, man against the elements.”