It is my pleasure to introduce you to Walter Donohue who is teaching our Screenwriting Course on 8th & 9th November at Townhouse, Spitalfields. We have a few places available. Email spitalfieldslife@gmail.com to book

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Walter Donohue typing out edited script pages on set for ‘Orlando’ in St Petersburg, 1992

 

Introduction by filmmaker Joel Coen –

‘Not only is Walter a steady friend and a discerning intellect, he has also carved out a space in the movie business that no one else really occupies. In the theatre you would call it a ‘dramaturg’—a creative advisor to the director, both from a literary and a production point of view. This position doesn’t exist in the movie business. At least not officially. I can’t say that there aren’t legions of people who are eager to analyse and offer an opinion, but I will say that there are precious few that are so consistently right. You might call Walter a ‘movie whisperer’.’

Here is Walter Donohue’s own account of his extraordinary transatlantic journey to London where he has worked in theatre and film as a director, producer, editor and publisher for half a century –

‘In May 1967, I was on the verge of graduating from the theatre department of the Catholic University of America in Washington D.C. and start a job as an assistant director at Arena Stage when the Vietnam War suddenly escalated and all us guys were immediately eligible to be drafted. What the hell was I going to do? The only way out was to stay in school. I applied for a Fulbright scholarship to go to Bristol University and study theatre but I did not get the award and I was facing the prospect of being sent to Vietnam, so I contacted Bristol directly and ended up going anyway. Five of my fellow students were drafted and two died in Vietnam, so it really was a matter of life or death.

When I finished my degree, I hoped I would be able to jump into regular employment as a theatre director but that turned out to be difficult because directors had to be members of the union, which was reluctant to let in an American. I figured I had no alternative except to return to America but then, out of the blue, I heard that that Charles Marowitz needed an assistant at the Open Space Theatre in London. Some British people had tried the job and could not get on with him, so they thought that perhaps an American might stand a better chance.

For Charles, actors were just objects to push around on the stage. He did not seem to give much thought to the inner lives of the characters. In 1972, I was assistant director on a production of Sam Shepard’s The Tooth of Crime, and when Charles left town to do his version of Hamlet in Denmark, I took over and worked with the actors.

I asked Sam, who was living in London, to come in and watch a run-through, which he absolutely hated. He felt that the actors were moving around in a way that had nothing to do with the dramatic situation they were meant to be playing. ‘But that’s how Charles directed it,’ I said. ‘OK,’ said Sam, ‘I don’t want anything to do with this. I’m going home.’

Obviously, the production should somehow embody his intentions as a playwright, so I sat him down, asked what was wrong and we set about re-blocking the entire play. The actors clearly felt a sense of relief. We were all so pleased with ourselves, but when Charles got back into town and watched what we had done, he threw out all our work.

While Sam was still living in London, I set up a production of Cowboy Mouth, which Sam had co-written with Patti Smith. It was in a small, basement theatre, just Sam, me, and the two actors. No sense of hierarchy, no egos—just commitment to the vision of the writer.

I spent ten years as a theatre director focussing entirely on new writing. I had not realised at the time that the interactions I had with playwrights gave me the skills that came to fruition when I was asked to work at Channel 4. David Rose who had been head of drama at BBC Birmingham offered me a job as his assistant.

This was before Channel 4 began broadcasting. David and I imagined that as soon as we opened the door to our office, scripts would come pouring in, but that did not happen. People just did not know about it, so we scrambled to start commissioning scripts. I thought we should commission novelists. The first I approached was Neil Jordan, he had a script to hand—what became Angel. We also commissioned Angela Carter to write the screenplay of her version of Red Riding Hood, The Company of Wolves, which ended up becoming Neil’s next film after Angel.

Eventually people started sending their scripts to us. If I liked them, I would forward them to David, and if he liked them, they would come back to me because they always needed work. I became involved in the production of various films from their inception, which included going with David to the sets and watching these films being made, then looking at the various cuts with David when the films were in postproduction.

I encouraged David to support Paris, Texas, partly because Sam Shepard was the writer. Paris, Texas winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes really put Channel 4 on the map. I was sort of the script editor. Wim and Sam began with a stack of paper with the basic scene descriptions on them: Scene 1: Travis walking through the desert. Scene 2: Travis walks into a bar. That’s all they wrote, all the way to the end. Once they had done that, they went back and filled out each scene. Scene 1: Travis walking through the desert. Stops. Drinks from a carton. Throws it away. Walks off. Scene 2: Travis goes into a bar to find something to drink. He eats some ice and faints. That kind of thing. Wim and Sam felt that the best way to conceive the film on paper was to represent the story in terms of what was seen, not what was heard. Because Channel 4 was the main financier, I spent a week with Wim in Los Angeles because Sam, at that stage, was beginning to send the dialogue. Then I visited Berlin when Wim was in postproduction.

When we were looking for novelists to commission, I came across a thriller called In the Secret State by Robert McCrum. I thought he was the new Le Carré, so I went to meet him. It turned out he was working at Faber as its editorial director and he introduced me to the chief executive, Matthew Evans, who immediately said I should come work at Faber. I said I was not interested in publishing, I wanted to work in movies so he said, ‘Listen, British films only shoot at certain times of the year because of the weather. I will give you a desk and typewriter and a telephone, and can you start building Faber’s film list. When you are not here, when you’re working on a film, someone else from the company will look after things.’

In the beginning, most of the film books never made money. But then, in 1994, we published the screenplay of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, and it sold more than a hundred thousand copies. Tarantino had never gone to film school, so every eighteen-year-old thought they could be a filmmaker if they watched enough videos. But what gave Tarantino’s films their impact was their original structure and the music of the dialogue—which meant that neophyte filmmakers needed to read screenplays. They became teaching tools, of a kind, and in the wake of Pulp Fiction there was a huge spike in the sale of screenplays, as well as our interview books with filmmakers.

If I look back, the thing that is consistent, whether I was working in the theatre or at Channel 4 or at Faber, it is all more or less the same thing – dealing with writers, helping them get their work out there. I certainly enjoy the process. When a writer sends me their scripts, my response is based entirely on instinct, honed over the years. And I never made statements, I never imposed anything. I only ever asked the writers questions, to see if I could draw out from them anything that would clarify their intentions. Given the diversity of the filmmakers who approached Channel 4 for money, the best approach was just to respond to the originality of the writers.’

Walter Donohue, Jeanne Moreau and Wim Wenders filming in Australia in 1991