Pictures at a Revolution Read Free Page B

other, maybe we can get François Truffaut to direct it.
    â€œWe didn’t know how to write a screenplay,” says Benton, “so we wrote an extended treatment. We described a scene, including camera shots, and we’d write down what characters were talking about, but we didn’t put dialogue in.” Some of that writing took place in Esquire ’s offices, behind closed doors, but much of it happened after hours, with Newman or Benton sketching out a scene at home, then giving it to the other in the morning. “The next day we would talk about the scene, and say, no, that’s all wrong, and if David had written it, I would take it home and rewrite it, and if I had written it, David would redo it,” Benton recalls. They would work together into the night, with Flatt and Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys playing at full volume on the phonograph 14 and becoming, in effect, the sound track to their experience of writing the movie. “We had an enormous sense of freedom—and we didn’t have skill, which was a good thing,” says Benton. “If you have enough skill, when you get to a trouble spot, you can use that skill to skirt it, which can be dangerous. We didn’t know how to do that.” 15
    As they wrote, Benton and Newman tried to give themselves a crash course in both film technique and the gangster era. They’d return again and again to the Hitchcock retrospective, listening to what Bogdanovich, who at only twenty-four was about to publish a monograph on the director, had to say about the ways in which his movies were constructed. They would read and reread what Truffaut had written on the difference between creating shock and building suspense. Benton would leave the office to browse through used-magazine and old-book stalls on Sixth Avenue in the lower 40s, sometimes returning with treasures like the 1934 book Fugitives , written by Bonnie Parker’s mother, Emma Parker, and Clyde Barrow’s sister Nell Barrow Cowan, or vintage crime pulp magazines, including a 1945 issue of Master Detective that included photographs of Parker and Barrow and a story about how “adventure and bloodshed marked the Law’s long pursuit of the Barrows and their murderous molls.” 16 And as a touchstone, they kept returning to a sentence about Bonnie and Clyde from The Dillinger Days: “Toland wrote, ‘They were not just outlaws, they were outcasts,’” says Benton. “That line was what hooked us.” 17
    In some ways, Parker and Barrow were natural subjects for a movie. They were young—Barrow was twenty-five and Parker twenty-three when they were killed. They had a great hunger and flair for self-invention and self-promotion, taking photographs in which they posed as hardened outlaws as if they were playing dress-up and sending Bonnie’s doggerel about themselves to newspapers. And although Barrow’s record stretched back to his teens, their history together—a string of robberies that often led to murder, interspersed with periods in which they lay low—lasted only about a year and a half, ideal for the compressed narrative of a movie. Parts of their crime spree and relationship had already been appropriated for Fritz Lang’s 1937 pre-noir drama, You Only Live Once , with Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sidney, and 1958’s quickly forgotten The Bonnie Parker Story , which starred Dorothy Provine, had depicted a peculiar version of their lives that turned Clyde Barrow into “Guy Darrow.”
    Benton and Newman were interested in all the historical information they could get their hands on, but not in documentary realism. Already, they knew they were going to leave out certain unromantic details: Parker’s early marriage to another man, Parker’s and Barrow’s separate stretches in jail, and the fact that Parker was severely and disfiguringly burned in a car crash almost a year before she and Barrow were