Evolving From Screen to Stages

Curtis Kenyon is an 89-year-old relic of the old Hollywood, a name far below the title on films from half a century ago that pops up now and then on cable movie classics channels.

But Andy Kenyon is convinced that his father has a big future ahead of him. The son, a corporate headhunter who helps law firms recruit talent, is devoting himself to hunting up producers from a new generation to examine the never-seen body of work for screen and stage that his father, who lives in Sherman Oaks, has produced in his 70s and 80s.

The campaign has netted its first small success: Stages, a nonprofessional storefront theater company housed in a strip mall in Fullerton, is mounting the premiere production of “Natural Selection.” Curtis Kenyon’s light comedy is a battle of wits between a quirky but charming British professor and a young Southern woman who looks to Genesis for the truth about the origin of species.

The professor invades her small town to uphold the theory of evolution against the young woman’s dad, a politically ambitious Bible Belt tycoon who is bribing the local university with a $10-million bequest-on the condition that it create a chair of creationism.

Long ago, Kenyon put words in the mouths of Tyrone Power and Lucille Ball, Bob Hope and Clint Eastwood, Red Skelton and Cornel Wilde.

His screen credits include “Lloyds of London,” an epic about the origins of the British insurance company; the western dramas “Tulsa” and “Two Flags West”; the Bob Hope comedy “The Princess and the Pirate”; and “Seven Days’ Leave,” a 1942 musical vehicle for a young Lucille Ball.

He also wrote for the television series “Rawhide,” “The Untouchables” and “Hawaii Five-O” and served from 1959 to 1961 as president of the Writers Guild of America, west.

But Hollywood no longer cares about a screenwriter who earned his first major credit in 1936 and was once part of John Ford’s regular bridge foursome.

Andy Kenyon is trying to change that.

“He’s written some things that are fairly spectacular,” said the younger Kenyon, who rates the five scripts his father wrote over the past 15 years as his best work. There probably will be no more, he said. About two years ago Curtis Kenyon broke his hip, and his son says that a subsequent stroke during surgery has taken a toll. “[His personality] is still there, but the brilliant mind with the quick wit is largely not there.”

The son sat in during a recent interview in Curtis Kenyon’s apartment in Sherman Oaks. “Andy knows my history better than I do,” the father said with a smile each time he drew a blank that needed filling in. He sat in a wooden rocking chair and told how he was born into showbiz as the son of two stage actors. His mother, Evelyn Moore, played leading-lady roles opposite John Barrymore and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., he said.

Family connections and approval for “The Magnificent Fraud,” a play he wrote while in his teens, landed Kenyon a $50-a-week staff writer’s job at 20th Century Fox in the early 1930s.

His big break came when studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck assigned him a story outline about Lloyd’s of London and Kenyon returned with a highly developed treatment instead.

Kenyon held a succession of jobs heading the story departments at Paramount, Warner Bros. and MGM, editing, tweaking scripts and overseeing such hits as “The Wild Bunch,” “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Bullitt.” One script he tried to veto was “The Green Berets,” John Wayne’s 1968 homage to U.S. special forces in Vietnam.

“I was anti-Vietnam. Very strongly,” Kenyon said.

One of Kenyon’s best friends in Hollywood was screenwriter Frank S. Nugent, whose credits include the John Ford films “Fort Apache,” “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,” “The Searchers” and “The Quiet Man.” Kenyon and Nugent collaborated on the stories for “Tulsa,” a 1949 picture about the Oklahoma oil business, and “Two Flags West,” about former Confederate soldiers who become Indian fighters in the U.S. Army.

Andy Kenyon says his father used to cite “Two Flags West” as his best work, although he would gripe that a romantic sequence improperly placed in the final product hurt its structure. Such frustrations led Kenyon to forsake films for television in the 1950s. “The principal reason I switched was I was disgusted by the way screenwriters were dealt with in Hollywood,” he said.

In his last big job, Kenyon served for several years as the story editor on “Hawaii Five-O.” After that he went back to his screenwriting. . But he had no takers.

“He thought, ‘People will come to me because of my reputation,’ and they didn’t,” Andy Kenyon said. “They didn’t care.”

The senior Kenyon says he got the inspiration for “Natural Selection” after reading Richard Dawkins’ 1986 book, “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design.”

“I’m very interested in science and a great believer in science, and not necessarily in religion,” he said.

Although Stages is not on the scouting itinerary of Hollywood studios, Andy Kenyon hopes the little, nonprofessional theater’s mounting of “Natural Selection” will draw attention to his father’s later works.

Curtis Kenyon’s other scripts from the past 15 years are screenplays. “An Absence of Angels” is a not-quite-finished piece speculating he afterlife; “Sheila’s Child” is a science-fiction story about the outcome of a cloning experiment combining a human and a chimpanzee; “Silvertip” concerns a Montana trail guide mauled by a grizzly bear who sets out to exact revenge on the beast; and “Calamity Jones,” co-written with his former wife, Joyce Kenyon, is about a man who can foresee disasters.

Having gotten “Natural Selection” to Stages, where producer Brian Kojac was looking for something that would appeal to older audiences, Andy Kenyon aims to pull as many strings as he can to aid in the rediscovery of his father.

“I sincerely think there’s a chance this play can move up” to more prominent productions, said the son. “It’ll bring to light several other things he’s written in the last 15 years. You’ve got this guy in his 80s....”

He didn’t have to finish the thought, because he knows that Hollywood’s rediscovery of an aged, forgotten talent would be a script that could practically write itself.

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“Natural Selection,” Stages, 400 E. Commonwealth Ave., #4, Fullerton. Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 5 p.m. Ends Aug. 18. $13. (714) 525-4484.