A screenwriter’s lot is not a happy one. You write all those scripts, most of which never get close to being made; you must deal with dim, philistine producers and deranged, egomaniacal directors who don’t necessarily know what they want but know that what you have written is not what they want; you must watch in impotent silence as idiot actors abandon your lines altogether and start ‘improvising’; you take the blame if the film is a turkey and see others take the credit if it’s a huge success; and you enjoy almost no respect from anyone else in the cinematic food chain, as you are only a writer. And what for? Only vast riches and the occasional Oscar nomination if you are very lucky, and the chance to direct your own script if you are even luckier than that.
I think it’s the lack of respect that gets me. Frederic Raphael won an Oscar for Darling (at the age of just 34), wrote countless novels including The Glittering Prizes, memorably rewritten by him for TV, and Richard’s Things, another splendid series from television’s golden age. Now in his mid-seventies, he is still working and having films made, but unlike his near-contemporaries Michael Frayn, Simon Gray and Alan Bennett, he has rather disappeared from view. They, of course, write plays, novels, scabrous diaries and door-stop volumes of faintly camp meanderings, while Raphael has long concentrated on the scripts, and in our culture screen- writing simply doesn’t have the same cachet. It must be very galling.
And it may be why he has taken to publishing volumes of his old notebooks, written 30 years ago, at the height of his fame and, one might guess, productivity. The present volume, the third, covers the years 1974 to 1976, during which Raphael wrote several films and both manifestations of The Glittering Prizes.
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