Company Town : Hollywood Combs Script Repositories for Good <i> Old</i> Talent

In Hollywood these days, it’s not just talented young writers who are being pursued. It’s dead ones as well. With the competition for good scripts heating up, talent agents and producers are combing through studio vaults and libraries for unproduced gems from the past.

“It’s very much of an archeological expedition,” says Creative Artists Agency’s Jon Levin, who has researched everything from old production logs to the memoirs of Hollywood legends. “There are only so many movies that were made every year, and a number of more scripts that were developed. So chances are there are good (unproduced) works.”

Levin’s most significant find so far is a 30-year-old “Don Quixote” project by the late Waldo Salt, who won Academy Awards for “Midnight Cowboy” and “Coming Home.” Warner Bros. is developing the movie in conjunction with Arnon Milchan’s New Regency Productions.

Former Sony Pictures Chairman Peter Guber was another big advocate of lost scripts. As a result of his encouraging producers to rifle through Hollywood’s vaults, Sony’s Columbia Pictures unit is exploring the possibility of making “A Nice Place to Visit,” an unproduced 1961 comedy by Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon. Sony also released the video of “Twenty Bucks” this year. The low-budget film was based on a 49-year-old screenplay written by Endre Bohem.

Scenario, a New York-based quarterly magazine, publishes unproduced scripts as a regular feature. And several talent agencies and studios have assigned executives to unearth lost works, which are partly in vogue as a result of companies cutting back on the amount of money they spend to develop new material. Libraries are another big repository for screenplays.

But the road from the dust bin to the fast track isn’t always paved in gold.

Reading tens of thousands of scripts that may have been rightfully consigned to the junk heap is an intimidating task. Rights issues often have to be resolved. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Margaret Herrick Library, for one, keeps a tight lid on unproduced scripts out of liability concerns. There is no master list of titles, and researchers are forced to sign agreements stating that the screenplays will not be copied or otherwise appropriated.

Academy library director Linda Mehr says it’s “not appropriate” for the library to be used as a clearinghouse for material that could be exploited. “We’re not a shopping agency for people looking for unproduced scripts,” she said. “People go to agents for that.”

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That helps explain a massive misunderstanding between the academy library and the Paul Kohner Agency that has caused a potential mother lode of material to remain hidden away.

Kohner, which once represented such renowned writers as John Huston, William Wyler and Billy Wilder, donated about 65 boxes of material to the academy in 1981, much of it unproduced. Paul Kohner died in 1988. Irene Heymann, a longtime agency executive who supervised the donation, says she was subsequently told that the unproduced scripts had been destroyed.

“There was an awful lot missing when we got back the inventory that I know I had given them,” she said. “They said they were unproduced pictures, and they couldn’t keep them because of copyright complications--that the ones that were unproduced had been shredded.”

Gary Salt, another Kohner agent who was there when the scripts were donated, said the library continued to tell visitors over the years that the scripts were not available.

“We started out clearly thinking they were going to put them into the collection,” Salt said. “Several years later, people called, knowing we were the source of the scripts and wanting duplicates. We asked why. They said, ‘Because the academy disposed of them.’ ”

Indeed, an academy thank-you letter to the Kohner agency that is dated shortly after the donation says that “a portion of the unproduced scripts will be destroyed” to “avoid potential problems” in accordance with conversations between the agency and the library.

Mehr, who came on board a year after the Kohner donation, was asked recently if the library had destroyed any of the material, and emphatically denied it. “There’s no basis for that,” she said. “Our policy is not to destroy things. I’d be outraged if that were the case. There is no way we would have ever gotten rid of those scripts. We hold on to those things dearly.”

Sure enough, Mehr subsequently launched a search for the missing unproduced Kohner scripts and found them last week, sitting in 34 boxes inside the academy’s remote storage facility. She describes the storage area as a place for “things that are not supposed to be seen . . . a no man’s land.”

After nearly 14 years, neither side can say exactly what’s inside, though a partial list found by the library contains references to an Orson Welles project called “The Dreamers” and an unproduced script that at one time was supposed to star Jane and Henry Fonda.

Heymann says it’s possible there are unproduced works by former clients such as Huston and Wilder. Salt says the collection also included Jean Paul Sartre’s massive original “Freud” screenplay.

What happens next is anyone’s guess. The prospect of hordes of people descending on the library in search of lost treasures offends Mehr’s scholarly sensibilities. Plus, she says nothing will change until the Kohner agency formally authorizes the release of the scripts.

Heymann says she’ll be happy to do so, but there have been misunderstandings before, not to mention the thorny liability issue. “I think they should put them into their records and let people see them if they want to,” Heymann said last week. “That was the idea of our gift to the academy in the first place. Gee, we might also have a higher tax write-off . . . .”

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NBC chief Robert Wright confirms in this week’s issue of Newsweek that merger talks are still being held with Ted Turner’s Turner Broadcasting. Wright says Turner and NBC have complementary programming and that Turner is the one “orchestrating” the talks.

But Wright also indicates that Turner’s powerful partners, Tele-Communications Inc. and Time Warner Inc., still have reservations. Turner has been stymied by his partners in the past, but he remains adamant about acquiring a network to add to CNN and his other assets. Time Warner was separately engaged in serious discussions about acquiring a piece of NBC earlier this year.

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As expected, Seymour Stein has been named president of Elektra Entertainment. He will report to Elektra Entertainment Group Chairman Sylvia Rhone. In a related move, Elektra parent Warner Music has acquired a minority stake in the Sub Pop record label, whose artists include Velocity Girl. Sub Pop music will be affiliated with Elektra.