William Peter Blatty's Lost Screenplay Collection
About this book
Viva Las Vegas. How naïve could I be? My comedic premise was that Elvis was hired as a Vegas casino lounge act because the booker was certain he was so loud and annoying he would drive the gamblers out of the lounge and to the tables. The “Colonel” was not amused.One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was written in 1968 for Kirk Douglas who was to play McMurphy. I met with Ken Kesey and crafted the script to be as faithful to the novel as I could possibly make it, which was not the case with the film made years later with Jack Nicholson. That this script with Kirk in the lead wasn’t made is perhaps the biggest heartbreak of my literary career.Mastermind was a spec script with the lead character emulating my Inspector Clouseau from A Shot in the Dark, the second film in The Pink Panther series. The key to the fun with Clouseau was his sensitive sense of dignity, so I created Japanese Inspector of Police Hoku Fat with that same essence in mind. The new head of ABC Films and his assistant met with me in my office at Warner Brothers to tell me — are you sitting down? — that “Inspector Clouseau isn’t good enough anymore. You need a serious theme. We suggest Youth versus Age.” With rewrite money and a three month stay in Tokyo where the film would be shot on the line, I replied that I “couldn’t be a party to the destruction of my material.” I was fired. Worse befell ABC Films: the rewritten screenplay to this day can only be seen on Kuwaiti Airways.Handcarved Coffins is based on a vaguely plotted, unfinished novella by Truman Capote with Michael Cimino set to direct. I gave it a plot but Michael wasn’t satisfied and my screenplay languishes somewhere in the ether just above Laurel Canyon.Demons Five, Exorcists Nothing is entirely based on my novel of the same name and is built around the making of a film very much like The Exorcist. I think of both the novel and the screenplay as “A Christmas Carol for Hollywood.”