For Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (1972), the producers wanted to move beyond the existing stage musical by returning to Christopher Isherwood’s fragmented 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin. The novel’s Berlin episodes had no conventional linear structure, so Jay Presson Allen was tasked with diagramming and shaping the material into a workable screenplay. Allen spent roughly ten months on the project, but she and Fosse reportedly got along badly from the beginning. She later described Fosse as so depressed that it could take two hours to get him into the proper frame of mind to work, and she believed he disliked the central character, Sally Bowles, which helped drain much of the original story’s humor. Fosse and the producers remained dissatisfied with the screenplay’s final form. Because Allen had other commitments, she handed the script to her friend Hugh Wheeler, who completed further work. Despite the difficult collaboration and the loss of much of Allen’s version, she received an Academy Award nomination for the adaptation, making the production an example of how a credited screenwriter’s contribution could be reshaped behind the scenes by a director and replacement writer.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 1970s
Jay Presson Allen and Bob Fosse Clash Behind Cabaret
Cabaret / 1970s
For Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (1972), the producers wanted to move beyond the existing stage musical by returning to Christopher Isherwood’s fragmented 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin. The novel’s Berlin episodes had no conventional linear structure, so Jay Presson Allen was tasked with diagramming and shaping the material into a workable screenplay. Allen spent roughly ten months on the project, but she and Fosse reportedly got along badly from the beginning. She later described Fosse as so depressed that it could take two hours to get him into the proper frame of mind to work, and she believed he disliked the central character, Sally Bowles, which helped drain much of the original story’s humor. Fosse and the producers remained dissatisfied with the screenplay’s final form. Because Allen had other commitments, she handed the script to her friend Hugh Wheeler, who completed further work. Despite the difficult collaboration and the loss of much of Allen’s version, she received an Academy Award nomination for the adaptation, making the production an example of how a credited screenwriter’s contribution could be reshaped behind the scenes by a director and replacement writer.
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