SOURCE: "Script to Screen with Max Ophuls," in Film Comment, Vol. 6, No. 4, Winter, 1970-71, pp. 41-3.

[In the following essay, Koch, the screenwriter for Ophuls's Letter from an Unknown Woman, reminisces about meeting and working with the director to assert that Ophuls was not an auteur, but worked closely with his screenwriters and cinematographers.]

Howard Koch came to Hollywood from radio, where he had written the script of Invasion from Mars for Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre. His screenplays include The Sea Hawk, The Letter, Sergeant York, Mission to Moscow, Three Strangers, The Thirteenth Letter, Loss of Innocence and The Fox. His memoir of the shooting of Casablanca, for which he wrote the dialogue, appeared in The Persistence of Vision, edited by Joseph McBride.

Mr. Koch's complete filmography may be found in the Symposium section.

During Hollywood's heyday most film productions were put together as haphazardly as the combinations that turn up on the roll of dice. Occasionally, but not often, the lucky number came up. I was one of the few American writers with the good fortune to have worked with the late Max Ophuls. Although few of his European films had reached America, he had already acquired a European reputation as a sensitive artist. Today, a decade and more after his death, he is one of the most revered directors by filmmakers and critics on both continents.

I met Max in the early forties at the home of a friend. With his wife and school-age son, he had escaped from occupied France to Switzerland one step ahead of the advancing Germans. After several months he and his family managed to obtain passage to this country, joining the swelling number of refugee artists centered in New York and Hollywood. In a burst of philanthropic zeal the major movie studios opened their gates to these politically displaced writers, directors and actors, putting many of them on salary. But once having made the grand gesture, they did little to make use of their talents.

At the time I was writing for Warner Brothers. Most of the refugees I met there were either idle or assigned to develop story properties the studio had no real intention of producing. As time passed, many of them became depressed as they realized that the production heads lacked confidence in their ability to adapt to the demands of the American movie market; to put it crassly, they were not considered "box office." There were exceptions, of course, but most of the refugees eventually found that they were being treated as charity subjects and, when the war ended and patriotic fervor dimmed, the charity was dispensed with increasing reluctance and finally not at all.

At the time I met Max he had neither work nor charity but was living precariously on the last of what funds he had been able to salvage from Europe. I remember my first impression of him as a baldish Peter Lorre, with the same heavy-lidded, wide-set eyes and the same impish sense of humor. Our rapport was immediate. I can't explain why in the first hour of our meeting I knew that I wanted to work with him on a film. It wasn't his reputation since I was hardly aware of his European career. Besides, by then I had learned that a large reputation based on a director's previous record is sometimes acquired by the accident of indestructible material and an invulnerable cast. Moreover, many well-known directors outgrow any humility they might have had when they were less successful, although humility seems a particularly desirable trait in a medium reliant on cooperative talents.

Max was not lacking in self-confidence but he didn't look upon film narcissistically as a public mirror to display his virtuosity. He had a deep respect for what other talents contributed and, particularly, for the film's basic content as expressed in the screen play, a quality understandably endearing to a writer. This may come as a surprise to some critics who praise Max, and justly, as a superb stylist but, from my observation, his style was invariably related to content, never at its expense.

One of his attributes that impressed me was his sensitivity to English words, since English was not his language and he spoke it brokenly with little regard for grammatical construction. Nevertheless, his ear was attuned to the most delicate nuances and he was never satisfied with a word or a line of dialogue until it expressed the precise shade of meaning needed to convey the idea or emotion.

At times I suspected that he clung to certain verbal eccentricities because they enhanced his special brand of humor. One day we were going to the studio in his old, battered car. Max was a terrible driver: he couldn't keep his mind—or his car—on the road. Fortunately he never went fast so his accidents, while numerous, were never serious. On this occasion he was tail-gating another car which slowed down without Max noticing and we collided with its rear end. Max was out of his seat in an instant and, after a brief survey of the other car, he doffed his little Tyrolean hat to its occupants and blithely announced, "It makes no never mind." The other driver was apparently so intrigued with Max's quaint manners and expression that he didn't climb out to look at his bent bumper—and off we went scot free of all the bothersome details of exchanging names, addresses and insurance agents.

Before long, Anne (my wife) and I became close friends with Max and his family: Hilde, his wife, a handsome woman in her forties who had been a leading German actress; Marcel, his talented teenage son; and his attractive young mistress, a refugee painter from Nazi Germany. Like other displaced Europeans, Max had transplanted his continental sexual habits to America, dividing his time equitably between the two menages. Since Americans are not adept at this sort of thing, Max undertook to instruct me on some of the finer points. One of his rules that I recall is that cut flowers are properly sent to one's mistress as they are perishable whereas a plant, being more durable and therefore more economical, is the correct choice for one's wife. Although delicacy required that his wife and mistress be kept separately, we were part of the intimate circle that included both.

However, two years passed before there was the opportunity I sought for a working relationship with Max. It came about by accident. John Houseman, an old friend from Martian days, came to see me on the desert outside Palm Springs where we were then living. He brought with him a short story by Stefan Zweig entitled Letter from an Unknown Woman which he wanted me to dramatize for the screen. He had been engaged to produce the picture by Joan Fontaine and William Dozier, then husband and wife, who had formed their own company within the framework of Universal Studio. The tragic story, written in Zweig's lyrical prose, was in the form of a letter from a woman on her death bed to the bon vivant musician she had loved from girlhood and with whom she finally had a brief affair—only to discover in later years she was one of many and that he didn't even remember her name.

At first reading I was not impressed with the story as picture material. It was entirely subjective with only fragmentary incidents. Besides, it was in the highly charged romantic tradition of Vienna at the turn of the century—definitely not the kind of story Hollywood did well. Although I had respect for Houseman's taste, I foresaw the danger of sentimentality, a so-called "woman's picture" awash with tears. Then I thought of Max Ophuls. Possibly he could bring it off as he, like Zweig, was steeped in the romantic tradition. The upshot was that I agreed to write the screen play if the studio would accept Max as the director.

Fortunately, Houseman had seen Liebelei, Max's most admired European film, an exquisite piece of romantic nostalgia, also set in Vienna. He agreed that Max was ideal for Letter but he had to sell the idea of a foreign director they scarcely knew to Joan and Bill Dozier who, in turn, had to convince the Universal executives. Since Joan Fontaine was then their most important star, Dozier was able to obtain their somewhat reluctant consent.

At this point it was my function to plot a story line (continuity of scenes) that would carry the emotional progression of Zweig's story. Then followed the usual conferences with Max and Houseman and, after some revisions, with Joan and Bill Dozier. Everyone had criticisms and suggestions but, happily, no ego problems intruded so that each contribution could be accepted or rejected on its merits. At this stage, Joan's ideas in relation to the central character of Lisa were especially helpful, since she would be on the screen almost constantly and needed actable situations in which to convey her feelings for the musician at the three different periods in which he entered her life. It was a difficult role starting as the ardent, hero-worshipping girl of fourteen, then the young woman in her twenties when they had the affair, and finally the mature, love-crossed woman of middle-age. Joan Fontaine was one of the few actresses capable of making the intensely romantic Lisa a credible character and I still regard the performance she eventually gave as one of the most brilliant I've ever seen on film.

Up to now Max had made a few suggestions but stayed mostly in the background as he believed the creative process of constructing a dramatic story was in the writer's province. But once I had the first draft screenplay written, he became deeply involved, testing every line of dialogue and every image for period validity and nuances of character. Out of his own memories of Vienna came ideas for new scenes such as the one in which the lovers appear to be travelling together in a train compartment, gazing out the window at the exotic, foreign scenery which turns out later to be merely a rotating backdrop in one of the amusement concessions in Vienna's Prada.

In recent years I've read with some bewilderment statements of French film directors, such as Truffaut, identifying their methods with those of Max Ophuls whom they apparently regard as a sort of mentor and precursor of the New Wave. Yet these directors are among the chief exponents of the auteur theory, popularized by Cahiers du Cinema and Sight and Sound, which holds that a director "authors" a film on the set and later in the cutting rooms with some small assist from a "dialogue writer."

Since this practically dispenses with the screenplay as a basic ingredient in the creative process, it could hardly be further from Max's approach to picture making. No one could be more meticulous in the preparation of a script for its transition to the screen. I don't mean to suggest a slavish rigidity to what was written since, naturally, Max often improvised on the set; but these improvisations were in the nature of refinements, not basic changes in the story line or characterizations.

For the final polishing we went over to Catalina Island off the California coast. Max had a phobia about flying and this was his first flight. For the half hour in the air, he sat hunched over in one of the seats, refusing to talk or look out the window, resigned to imminent death in a fiery crash. When the plane landed safely, I'm sure to Max it was like a last-minute, unexpected reprieve.

During our stay in Catalina, I recall that Max kept repeating, "this script needs more air." At first I wasn't sure what he meant but in due course I came to realize that "air" referred to atmosphere, but in the broadest sense—that each scene must have a life of its own apart from its dramatic function in the story. And in this area Max was the acknowledged master. No scene that he directed ever existed in a vacuum and, in the case of Letter the detail of Viennese life in that period saturated the screen.

One example comes to mind. In the lyrical Prada sequence, the lovers are dancing in a deserted ballroom, oblivious to everything but each other. Since music was an obvious necessity, I had written in shots of a conventional, male orchestra playing while Lisa (Joan) and her lover (Louis Jourdan) waltzed. Max, recalling that women musicians were often employed in Viennese amusement parks, cast an all-female band. The scene was late at night and the women were desperately tired and the music they played between swigs of beer was equally tired. The humor of these frowsy women scraping their violins and wishing to God that these moon-calf lovers would stop dancing so they could go home, counterpointed the lyrical mood and added period flavor (air).

Under the supervision of Max and an Austrian technical advisor the sets were so authentically Viennese that few people who saw the film could believe they were built on a Hollywood stage. The shooting under Max's assured direction went ahead smoothly, with all of us—Max, Joan, Dozier, Houseman and myself—very happy with the daily rushes. Only one incident that took place near the end of the shooting schedule marred the working relationship between the star and the director.

Max was born in Alsace-Lorraine which is either French or German depending on which side won the last war. His temperament reflected both national backgrounds. Generally, he seemed much more French than German but on occasion a Prussian trait was exposed—mostly in regard to women. While shooting one scene Joan objected to some direction he gave her and Max made the mistake of accusing her of "behaving like a star." Joan walked off the set and stayed off for two days. It took all Houseman's diplomacy to bring her back to finish the picture.

The shooting ended on schedule, a rough cut was made, then a final cut or one we thought was final. We all felt good about the result and a vacation was in order. Anne and I went East; Max and his family stayed in our house on the desert.

Our departure was a mistake. While we were away, the studio executives came into the projection room with their sharp knives and slashed away at the film to "make it move faster." Since they are mostly occupied with the business end of picture making, this is their one opportunity to be "creative" and also to exercise their authority over the film's real creators.

When Max and I returned to the studio, we were told that twenty minutes had been taken out of the film's running time. We ran the re-edited print in shocked silence until it was over and then we exploded. Instead of "moving faster" the picture now seemed interminable.

Something we learn from experience is that clock time and screen time have little to do with each other. As long as his interest is held, clock time doesn't exist for the viewer. Two hours in a movie house may seem short while twenty minutes may seem to drag on forever depending on the extent to which the audience is involved in what is happening on the screen.

Letter from an Unknown Woman, by its nature, required slow pacing and minute attention to evocative detail. What the studio heads had done was to strip much of the flesh from the bones of the story. Since the film had very little plot in the usual sense, and since its highly romantic premise was difficult to sustain, it would only work if the audience were so caught up in its spell that they were willing to suspend their disbelief for the duration of the show.

I have a theory, perhaps debatable, that any story, however slight, will hold an audience so long as the motivations and actions of its characters are credible in relation to the circumstances surrounding their fictional lives. In its abbreviated version Letter had preserved the story incidents but had lost the ambiance which gave credible life to its characters. As a result, the film was shorter in actual minutes but, in failing to convince the viewer and hold his interest, it seemed much longer.

Houseman agreed with our objections but it took all his powers of persuasion to keep Max from invading the inner sanctum of Universal's top brass and telling them exactly what he thought of them—which, of course, would only have made them more obdurate. When the Doziers finally threw their weight on our side, we were able to replace the cut footage and reinstate the original version.

However, a film is never safe from tampering until it's "in the can," meaning ready for distribution and, even then, it can be so mishandled that it never reaches its intended audience. The sales department of Universal regarded Letter as a foreign film which in those days meant art but no box-office. It was tossed out on the market with almost no advance advertising and no attempt to publicize its special qualities. Even with good reviews it didn't survive long enough to find its American audience and the studio wrote it off as a complete loss of the eight hundred thousand it cost to produce.

By the sheerest accident it was resurrected in Europe. Universal had sold the British rights to a third-rate English distribution chain that didn't even have a releasing outlet in London. It happened that one of the editors of the prestigious Sight and Sound was visiting a small town where Letter was playing. Since the film had not been shown in London and he had never heard of it, he thought it must be one of Hollywood's "B" pictures. But he had great respect for Joan Fontaine and decided to see it anyway. Apparently he was so impressed by the film and shocked by its treatment that he began a one-man crusade on its behalf. Sight and Sound took up the cause and soon it was playing long runs in London and the other European capitols. Since then it has become one of the standard revivals at Britain's National Film Theatre.

As for Max, he and his family returned to France where they were able to reclaim the home the Germans had appropriated. He made a number of films there, the most successful being the first, La Ronde, and perhaps the most discussed his last, Lola Montes.

When Anne and I arrived in Paris in the early fifties, our former roles were reversed. This time we were the political refugees from McCarthyism in America while Max was the host at the peak of his career. With his shepherding we saw Paris not just as tourists but as part of the French scene. From movie studios to his favorite cafes and restaurants we lived in Max's reflected glory with the musical theme of La Ronde following us as we made the rounds.

Before we left England where we had spent the previous five years, Max called me on the phone. He had exciting news. The Thomas Mann heirs were granting him the rights to make a film of The Magic Mountain. Would I come back to France as soon as the project was set up and do the screenplay? Another film with Max and a chance to dramatize a great novel! He had my answer in a split second.

A few months later came word of Max's sudden death. We were stunned. We couldn't believe it because we didn't want to believe it. Anne was even angry at him. "He had no right to die."

In later years we again visited Paris but Max was not there and it wasn't the same. To us Max was Paris and Paris was Max.