Dear Mr. Beckett - Letters from the Publisher: The Samuel Beckett File Correspondence, Interviews, Photos by Barney Rosset

Author:Barney Rosset [Rosset, Barney]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781623160708
Publisher: Opus Books
Published: 2016-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

Today it would be so much easier—more possible to achieve the desired efforts. The technology is now on our side. A group of very talented people found a challenge, did the best they could with what was at hand.

Barney Rosset on The Five Grove Film Scripts

Four Star Television, a TV product company, came to us. It was a very successful company, at least partially owned by Charles Boyer and Dick Powell, who was a famous singer-actor of the time. Like Sinatra. The two had formed a television production company, and they made a highly successful series, The Rogue. This was in the early Sixties. Then Powell died and they put an eccentric Irishman, whom we met, in charge of the company. And he liked Beckett. Jason Epstein, then at Random House, introduced us to him. We met him in the Gotham hotel. He financed our Beckett film, but soon thereafter we never saw him again.

And Four Star disappeared, went out of business. Both Boyer and Powell had died, but we already had gotten the money. Each writer received $20,000 for a screenplay. And though Genet didn’t do work for us, I got Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, Ionesco and Pinter. They all did it. The only ones who turned us down were Günter Grass and Genet. But it was just at the wrong period. It was a time when we thought that somebody would finance Beckett and Pinter, Ionesco. But this was before PBS. The networks talked to us, but they wouldn’t go for it.

We asked Genet if he would write a film for television, and he said, “You can come talk to me if you want.” So Fred and I went to London to see if we could get him to write a script. We get there, and … it was extraordinary. He lectured us for a half an hour. “You want to make it for that video? That TV?” He gave this lecture like an orator in front of an audience of a million people, with these huge gestures, all about the nature of television, which he was totally against. He walked behind the television and said, “Where are the people? Like, what’s behind the TV? Where are the actors? There are no actors there!” And he was right, of course—I know I didn’t argue with him. I was afraid of him. He was a sort of a frightening person when he got angry, and he didn’t like this idea one bit. So, no, he wouldn’t do it.

Jean-Luc Godard just would have taken the money. He was a different kind of crook. Godard would have said, “$25,000? Okay, I’ll do anything you want.” He gave you a treatment and then threw it away the minute he got the money. I hung out with him in Paris for a while around that time, and he was a creep. But instead, Genet told us off. Jean Genet was a thief, but he was a real thief. He was a thief from the inside out.

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