«The script is inane, vacuous, pompous, unreal, unbelievable – and dull»
Joe Swerling, the man who knew how to take a story and tell it
A meeting was called in Cohn’s office [about Ladies of the Evening, i.e. Ladies of Leisure].
Harry Cohn resembled Mussolini. In fact, he was an admirer of the Fascist leader and modeled his large office after the dictator’s. On one side of Cohn’s desk was a screen that led to a door of a steam room. On the other side was a screen that went to various dressing rooms where Cohn could visit with his stars.
During the meeting in Cohn’s office, someone started to read aloud Capra’s script in a singsong voice; no one appeared to be listening. Cohn was telephoning, looking out the window, writing on a pad. At the end of the reading, Cohn asked for reactions. Everyone thought the script was great. Capra was sitting next to Cohn and was clearly pleased. One of the newly hired writers, a newspaperman and playwright from New York who hadn’t yet been introduced to Capra, said he thought the script was «terrible; [that] it was the worst piece of drivel he had ever heard in his life».
«The piece stunk when Belasco produced it as [a play]», the writer said. «And it will stink [as a movie]. The script is inane, vacuous, pompous, unreal, unbelievable – and dull.»
Capra looked at the writer and saw «a squat, heavy-set, seething young man, furiously chain-smoking strong White Owl cigars … His thick glasses so enlarged his watery blue eyes he looked like a mad white owl himself». Jo Swerling had been brought out from New York by Columbia Pictures under a six-week contract and had been at the studio for only a couple of weeks. Swerling read aloud from the fifty notes he’d made about Capra’s script. Silence followed. After the meeting, Cohn called out Swerling’s name; he was sure he would be fired.
Swerling looked at the man who had been sitting next to Cohn. «Meet Mr. Capra», Cohn said. «It was his script you were criticizing.»
Cohn asked Swerling if he thought he could improve Capra’s script.
Swerling, a playwright, said he could.
[…]
Swerling took Capra’s script and went to his hotel, locked himself in his room, and «pounded out a rewrite story of the plot he heard» as he would «a newspaper yarn with a longer deadline than usual». He interrupted his writing «long enough for [only] black coffee, sandwiches and brief snatches of sleep». Five days later Swerling brought his revised pages to the studio. Capra thought they were «magnificent – human, witty, poignant».
Swerling knew how to take a story and tell it.
Victoria Wilson, A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940, Simon & Schuster, 2013.