The recent discovery of two "lost"
television scripts by Nobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner (1897-1962),
is good news for Faulkner scholars, the announcement coming just in time for
international celebrations of the author's 100th birthday.
Faulkner is remembered most for his modernist
fiction, but he was a pioneer in the early days of television, says William
Furry, a former graduate student at the University of Illinois at Springfield,
who recently uncovered the missing teleplays with help from professional
archivists in New York City and at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
Last November Furry was in New York to view early television adaptations of
Faulkner’s short fiction at the Museum of Television and Radio, and while
there tracked down the only teleplays ever written by the Mississippi author,
scripts that were previously believed lost or destroyed.
The teleplays, "The Brooch" and
"Shall Not Perish," were written for the Lux Video Theatre, a
television series produced during the early 1950s by the J. Walter Thompson
Company and sponsored by the Lever Brothers Company of New York, which
manufactured Lux, a popular beauty soap. Originally a thirty-minute dramatic
television series broadcast on CBS (in the fall of 1954 the program moved to
NBC and expanded to a sixty-minute format) Lux Video Theatre aired from
1950-1957.
Working with Lever Brothers archivist James Taylor,
Furry traced the teleplays to the J. Walter Thompson Company archives, where
they had been housed for the last ten years in the special collections library
of the William R. Perkins Library at Duke University. The scripts were on
microfilm and had not been catalogued into the general collection.
Furry, who recently finished his master's thesis on
the television adaptations of Faulkner’s short stories, had been searching for
the teleplays for two years at major libraries and Faulkner collections around
the country. Furry contacted Taylor on a hunch after initial inquiries at the
Museum of Television and Radio, Duke University, and several other television-
history repositories turned up nothing.
"No one had ever asked to see the scripts
before," Taylor told Furry. Taylor speculated that because the scripts
were in an advertising archives and not in a television or literary
collection, no one working in Faulkner research had stumbled upon them. Duke
University special collections archivist Ellen Gartell confirmed Taylor's
theory. "It is always exciting for us when a scholar discovers valuable
documents within this vast collection of microfilm," Gartell said.
"This is a real find."
The finding of the teleplays is a significant
contribution to Faulkner research, says Dr. Robert Hamblin, director of the Center
for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University in Cape
Girardeau, Missouri. "You're onto a good topic," Hamblin said,
"truly original research that will help fill out the Faulkner
record." Hamblin has written and lectured extensively on Faulkner’s
Hollywood film career. Together he and Louis Daniel Brodsky are editors of the
multi-volume Faulkner: A Comprehensive Guide to the Brodsky Collection
(1984, University Press of Mississippi). Hamblin said he knew of Faulkner’s
adaptation of "The Brooch," but was unaware that Faulkner had
adapted his 1943 short story, "Shall Not Perish," for television.
Other scholars have overlooked the latter work as well. Although Gene Phillips
writes authoritatively about "The Brooch" teleplay in his 1988 Fiction,
Film, and Faulkner: The Art of Adaptation (1988, University of Tennessee
Press), the teleplay for "Shall Not Perish" isn't even mentioned.
Faulkner scholar Diane Brown Jones, author of A
Reader's Guide to the Short Stories of William Faulkner (G. K. Hall, 1994)
and professor of English at North Carolina State University in Raleigh,
likewise hailed the discovery as noteworthy. For her Reader's Guide
Jones painstakingly researched the critical and documentary history of both
"The Brooch" and "Shall Not Perish," and included
commentary about television adaptations of all his stories, including the two
adapted by Faulkner himself. But Jones said she was unaware of the scripts'
existence at the time she wrote her book, and expressed surprise and delight
the teleplays were discovered in a university library fewer than thirty miles
from her home.
According to Furry the scripts have never been
published. (An earlier draft of "The Brooch" teleplay was sold to
the University of Mississippi earlier in the decade by Joan Williams, a
protégé of Faulkner’s who was given a mimeographed copy of the script on the
set. Although the two scripts a quite similar, there were subtle changes in
dialogue and stage direction up until the program was broadcast.)
"The Brooch,"
first published in Scribner’s magazine in January 1936, was dramatized
on Lux Video Theatre on April 2, 1953. According to some accounts, Faulkner
dashed off the script in less than forty-eight hours and earned $1,000. Both
Jones and Phillips mention that the script for "The Brooch" was a
collaboration with Lux Video Theatre editors Ed Rice and Richard McDonagh,
although only Faulkner’s name appears on the actual script. This attribution
is consistent with all Lux Video Theatre productions, says authors Connie
Billips and Arthur Pierce in their Lux Presents Hollywood: A Show-by-Show
History of the Lux Radio Theatre and Lux Video Theatre, 1934-1957 (1995,
McFarland Publishers). According to the authors, Lux Video Theatre producers
and editors were seldom if ever credited on air for their work. Just how much
of the script was written by Faulkner isn't known. The actual teleplay bears
only minor editorial changes.
Critics were not kind to the television version of
"The Brooch," which Faulkner completely rewrote to placate the
self-censoring producers of Lux Video Theatre. The original story, which tells
of a "mama's boy" (Howard) whose marriage to a high-spirited woman
(Amy) is destroyed by his controlling mother (Mrs. Boyd) ends tragically with
Howard's suicide. As suicide was not an appropriate topic for general
television audiences in the 1950s, however, Faulkner reworked the story so
that the young man and his wife confront the meddling mother, take control of
the unhappy situation, and live, presumably, happily ever after. The cast
included Dan Duryea as Howard Boyd, Sally Forrest as Amy, and Mildred Natwick
as Mrs. Boyd.
The short story "Shall
Not Perish" was first published in the July-August 1943 issue of Story
magazine. Faulkner was paid $25 for the story, which had been rejected by
eight other magazines prior to publication. Faulkner’s teleplay of "Shall
Not Perish," which aired on February 11, 1954, and starred Raymond Burr
and Fay Bainter, earned him $1,500. As with "The Brooch," Faulkner
rewrote the story to satisfy the producers, updating its World War II setting
to the Korean War era and making several plot revisions. The story's patriotic
title and theme comes from the last line of Lincoln's "Gettysburg
Address." To play up the Lincoln connection, the program aired on the eve
of the 145
th
anniversary of Lincoln's birth.
