Working With G.B.S.

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 165, 15 July 1939, Page 7 (Supplement)

Working With G.B.S.

WORKING with George Bernard Shaw is the best experience any screen writer could possibly have. He makes you really work and use your ingenuity. So declares W. P. Lipscomb, celebrated English scenarist. Before bringing liis typewriter from Kngland to the Universal lot, Lipscomb gained tbe honour and distinction of being the first scenarist to work with Shaw. He adapted the latter'e play, "Pygmalion, ,, for the screen. The lirst thinji Shaw said to him when they met was: "I am here to see you don't make a ines« of filming my play. They tell me 1 don't know anything about films. Neither do the people who make them. They are 30 years behind the times. "For .">(> years play critics have told me my plays are not proper plays." Shaw said. "The only thing about it is that my plays are still running after r>o years and everybody else's plays are dead. 1 was light about plays, maybe I'm right about films. "I believe that interesting ideas such as mine, with interesting characters and good photography, can be more entertaining than the so-called action pictures in which the action is not in the least interesting and effects nothing but exhaustion and eye strain."' After getting that blast from Shaw, Lipscomb went to work —and what work! But he turned out a script that pleased both Shaw and the public. That i« why he was taken l>ack by Hollywood to write the screen play for "The Sun Never Sets," which stare Douglas Fairbanks, jun., and Basil Rathbone with Virginia Field. Barbara O'Xeill. Lionel Atwill. C. Aubrey Smith, Melville Cooper and Mary Forbes. A little known fact about the title is brought to light by W. P. Lipscomb. While the saying is applied to the British Kinpire. it was first found in the writings of an Italian. In 1590 (Juarini wrote: l>i qiic'l miiiwren. n cui Nt> aiicn, quaiulo aimotta il sol tramunta. Translated, the passage from "Pastor Fido' , (commenting on the marriage of the Duke of Savoy with Catherine of Austria) reads: "'The proud daughter of that monarch to whom when it grows dark (elsewhere) the sun never sets." Vet Lipscomb, an Englishman himself, chose the words of an American. Daniel Webster, for the foreword to "The Sim Xever Sets." Webster's speech of May 7. 1834, does not contain the famous quotation, but Lipscomb felt that it best introduced the dramatic story of the heroic British Civil Service: — "A Power which has dotted over the surface of the whole <j]ol>e with her possessions and military poets, whose morning drum-beat, following the sun, and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth with the one continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of Kngland . . ." ♦V ♦ ♦ THE "EXTRA" GIRL SAYS . . "A seed}/ man seldom gets a chance to plant, kisses." ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ "Hratiti/ used to be skin deep, now it's knee high-."