Films
The Broadway success of The Seven Year Itch led to the successful 1955 film directed by Billy Wilder and starring Marilyn Monroe. The plot was altered so that the husband (Tom Ewell) only fantasizes about having an affair.
Axelrod's next stage hit was Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, a Faustian comedy about a fan magazine writer (Orson Bean) selling his soul to the Devil (in the guise of a literary agent) to become a successful screenwriter. It ran for more than a year on Broadway in 1955–56 and received much attention in the national press thanks to its star, Jayne Mansfield. It was adapted for a film, but 20th Century Fox had director/screenwriter Frank Tashlin change the story to a satire on television advertising and throw out all of Axelrod's characters except Rita Marlowe (with Mansfield recreating her stage role). Axelrod was contemptuous of the 1957 movie, saying he didn't go see it because the studio "never used my story, my play or my script."
In 1959–60, Lauren Bacall starred in his comic play Goodbye Charlie which ran for 109 performances, followed by a film with Debbie Reynolds. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Axelrod was one of the best paid writers in Hollywood, and he was nominated for an Academy Award for his 1961 adaptation of Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. He was highly regarded for his adaptation of Richard Condon's novel for director John Frankenheimer's Cold War thriller The Manchurian Candidate (1962) starring Laurence Harvey and Frank Sinatra. Axelrod, who co-produced, considered it his best screen adaptation. After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963, the movie was taken out of circulation and wasn't re-released until 1988, when it became a box office hit and was deemed by critics to be a classic of American cinema.
Axelrod wrote the original screenplay for How to Murder Your Wife (1965), directed by Richard Quine with Jack Lemmon, Verna Lisi and Terry-Thomas. In 1966, Axelrod directed Lord Love a Duck, and two years later, he directed The Secret Life of an American Wife (1968). After a decade hiatus, he returned to films in 1979, providing the screenplay for an unsuccessful remake of The Lady Vanishes. Subsequent contributions include the scripts for Frankenheimer's The Holcroft Covenant (1985) and The Fourth Protocol (1987).
Read more about this topic: George Axelrod
Famous quotes containing the word films:
“Does art reflect life? In movies, yes. Because more than any other art form, films have been a mirror held up to society’s porous face.”
—Marjorie Rosen (b. 1942)
“Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t.”
—Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930)