In a Lonely Place: Revisited (2003 Video) User Reviews

"Just do the book, Dix . . . "

[oscaralbert · 8/10 · 29 March 2014]

. . . the potential director for screenwriter "Dixon Steele's" (=Humphrey Bogart) proposed script exhorts his "loose cannon" colleague, in a clip shown during this 20 minute, 24.17-second Featurette for IN A LONELY PLACE (1950). Famed 8 MILE director Curtis Hanson, the host, presenter, and sole "talking head" for IN A LONELY PLACE REVISITED (2002), notes the irony of this screen exchange. Novelist Dorothy B. Hughes actually had written a book called IN A LONELY PLACE, which adapter Edmund H. North and screenwriter Andrew Solt changed Willy-Nilly on the fly. The book is told from the victims' point of view, according to Hanson, and the Dixon Steele character really IS a serial sex killer. In Hollywood's version of this story, Steele is a ticking time bomb, but NOT a murderer, on the technicality that he hasn't killed anyone YET-- despite his hair-trigger temper. Hanson says the original shooting script concluded with a scene in which Dixon DOES kill Laurel. Though this ending was filmed, it was never tested for advance screening audiences. Hanson believes movie makers need to be free to use novels as jumping off points. Perhaps a best-selling book title will attract scads of film fans to see a flick with a totally difference plot, tone, and set of characters from the printed tale (think the Demi Moore version of THE SCARLET LETTER). This is totally opposite to GONE WITH THE WIND producer David O. Selznick's "Picturization" philosophy, articulated in a famously demeaning set of phone-book-length memos to director Alfred Hitchcock during the filming of REBECCA one year after GWTW. Selznick's tyrannical rants constituted the beginning of the end of the Hollywood Studio System and "Picturization," as Hitchcock was joined by many other big name directors and stars in forming his own production company, with a philosophy of "book be damned." IN A LONELY PLACE, from Bogart's own Santana Production Company, is an early example of this brave new world. Curtis Hanson does a good job in explaining this shift in Tinsel Town thinking.