Pictures at a Revolution Read Online Free Page B

result was a critical and commercial success that, in the spring of 1963, won both actresses Academy Awards and Penn a nomination for Best Director.
    But Penn’s luck soon started running cold again. His demoralizing experience on The Train indicated how little Hollywood capital his recent success had won him, and his return to Broadway resulted in two plays that ran for a combined total of eight performances after they opened. When the Bonnie and Clyde treatment landed on his desk, he says, he was trying to figure out what to do next, and “I was caught up in so many other projects, I just didn’t take it seriously. I was sent that movie, but it was not ‘that movie.’ Yet.” 30
    The rejection from Penn came so quickly that Benton and Newman may not even have known he saw their work in the first place. In any case, Elinor Jones wasted no time in trying to get a copy of the treatment to the director whom they had had in mind all along. This time, she used a different connection—her boss. 31 Lewis Allen and Truffaut already had a mutual friend in Helen Scott, a New York–born, Paris-raised former journalist and onetime Communist organizer whose remarkable résumé included everything from working as press attaché to the lead American prosecutor at Nuremberg to publicizing French films in New York. 32 Allen and Truffaut also had a mutual interest: Both men wanted to make a movie out of Ray Bradbury’s dystopian book-burning novel, Fahrenheit 451 , which Truffaut had already spent more than three years planning as his first movie in English.
    Allen was preparing for a trip to France in a couple of weeks to discuss the Bradbury project with Truffaut. Before he left, Jones asked him to bring the director the Bonnie and Clyde treatment and asked Scott if she would set the table for its arrival. Scott agreed and wrote to Truffaut, “You know my embarrassment about these things, but I read it last evening and to my surprise—and for the first time—I was extremely excited. It has every evidence of being excellent. The scenario is created for you…. It’s about Bonnie and Clyde—an authentic pair of young bandits who lived during the 1930s in Texas—the same period and locale as John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath…. May seem banal but for this ironic treatment…. At first I thought it was too American for you—but there are a thousand nuances that make it something special.” Scott urged Truffaut to have his wife, Madeleine Morgenstern, read Benton and Newman’s treatment and find someone to translate it into French for him. 33
    Allen, who was preoccupied with Fahrenheit 451 , either forgot to bring the treatment with him or never showed it to Truffaut, but Scott’s letter piqued Truffaut’s interest, even though his only knowledge of Parker and Barrow came from a comic strip called Un Ménage de Gangsters 34 that he had seen in a newspaper a year earlier. “Allen didn’t say a word about the script you described to me, Clyde Barrow,” Truffaut wrote to Scott just before Christmas, “but I managed to get some France Soir comic strips on the subject, very interesting. Now there would be an interesting part for Jane Fonda…. Maybe….” 35
    Elinor Jones mailed him the treatment without delay. Truffaut showed it to friends and colleagues and then asked Claudine Bouché, his editor on Jules and Jim , to prepare a translation. In early January 1964, the director wrote back to Scott, “I’ve had Clyde and Bonnie read by two or three friends here; everyone is enthusiastic and assures me I should make the film.” 36 Truffaut himself hadn’t read a word Benton and Newman had written—and if he had, he would have seen that the story whose title he still couldn’t get quite right looked nothing like a filmable screenplay. But Benton and Newman believed that the movies coming out of France