NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE ).- Harriet Frank Jr., who collaborated with her husband, Irving Ravetch, on provocative screenplays that explored the social conflicts and moral questions of postwar American life in movies like “Hud” and “Norma Rae,” died Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 96.
Her death was announced by Michael Frank, her nephew.
To film industry peers and moviegoers who paid attention to the credits, the wife-and-husband team of Harriet Frank and Ravetch, who died in 2010, stood out among Hollywood’s most successful and literate script writers. The two generated 16 screenplays from 1958 to 1990, many inspired by the works of William Faulkner, William Inge, Larry McMurtry, Elmore Leonard and other best-selling authors.
Frank and Ravetch dramatized the charms of a brawling, arrogant Texas rogue (Paul Newman) in “Hud” (1963); the struggles of a teacher (Jon Voight) against the effects of poverty and racism on black children in a South Carolina island school in “Conrack” (1974); and the union fight of a worker (Sally Field) against labor injustices in a North Carolina cotton mill in “Norma Rae” (1979).
“Salvation is not an abstract concept — it’s a three-year contract,” Vincent Canby wrote in his review of “Norma Rae” in The New York Times. “These are sentiments that Martin Ritt, the director, and Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr., his screenwriters, understand and fervently evoke in their often stirring new film.”
The moment of truth in the actual battle for a union took place in a J.P. Stevens textile mill in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, in May 1973, when Crystal Lee Sutton (her married name at the time was Jordan), who was about to be forcibly removed by management men, stood up on her worktable with a scrawled “UNION” sign and slowly turned to show fellow workers. One by one, the roaring mill machines shut down until the vast room was silent.
“Norma Rae,” based on Henry P. Leifermann’s 1975 book, “Crystal Lee, a Woman of Inheritance,” and “Hud,” from the 1961 McMurtry novel “Horseman, Pass By,” together won five Academy Awards. Both Frank-Ravetch screenplay adaptations were nominated for Academy Awards. For “Hud,” they won screenwriting awards from the New York Film Critics Circle and the Writers Guild of America. (They never won an Oscar.)
Although not a major commercial success or an award winner, “Conrack,” adapted from Pat Conroy’s autobiographical novel, “The Water Is Wide” (1972), was a memorable portrayal of a young teacher’s struggle to bring hope to the children of poor black families on an isolated sea island where the Gullah dialect rendered his name as Conrack and where fears of the outside world seemed insuperable.
Collaborative page-to-screen adaptations are opaque to the public, and often hard to achieve, given the complexities of reducing a book to two hours of plot, character and dialogue. But Frank and Ravetch were nearly ideal partners. They debated every scene and sentence, took liberally or lightly from source materials, and wrote screenplays that were largely works of their own invention.
“It’s really a pure collaboration in the sense that we get together, we talk out the problems at great exhaustive length, we do some kind of an outline together, and every word is really thrown up in the air for approval — from one to the other,” Ravetch told Patrick McGilligan for his book “Backstory 3: Interviews With Screenwriters of the 60s” (1997). “The script is not so much written as it is talked onto the page.”
They knew and loved books. They adored the films of Ettore Scola, Vittorio De Sica, Marcel Pagnol and Ingmar Bergman. They believed character was more important than plot, wrote pauses into the action to let audiences linger over ambiguities and poignancy, and thought that scripts should aspire to literature and that films should carry the weight of novels.
They met as young writers in training at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, were married in 1946 and wrote westerns and light comedies separately for a decade before they began to collaborate. Once they started, their focus shifted to more ambitious projects, exploring moral issues and unfolding social changes.
Studios like 20th Century Fox and Paramount recognized their talents and gave them wide latitude to alter books and articles whose rights the studios had purchased. Thus Hud, a minor character in McMurtry’s novel, became the film’s title character and dominant anti-hero, a symbol of the rapacious greed and materialism that the screenwriters saw spreading in America.
Frank and Ravetch took similar liberties with three stories by Faulkner that were condensed into “The Long, Hot Summer” (1958), with Newman playing an unscrupulous and ambitious drifter who stirs up family passions and trouble in a Mississippi town. “Possibly 10 percent of Faulkner is in that movie,” Ravetch told McGilligan.
“Faulkner was uniquely gifted,” Frank added, perhaps assuaging the guilt. “Also, because he had been a screenwriter himself, he was a very tolerant man where other writers were concerned. He knew what laboring in the field was like. He was very realistic about letting go of his work.”
Harriet Frank was born Harriet Goldstein in Portland, Oregon, on March 2, 1923, one of three children of Sam Goldstein, a shoe store owner, and Edith Frances (Bergman) Goldstein, who went by her middle name. Harriet and her brothers, Peter and Marty, attended schools in Portland.
Harriet’s mother, a Berkeley-educated lover of literature, had a Portland radio program, “Harriet Frank — Speaking Frankly.” She not only changed the family name to Frank; she also changed her own given name to that of her daughter, becoming Harriet Frank Sr., and making her teenage daughter Harriet Frank Jr.
The family moved to Los Angeles in 1939. Harriet Frank Sr. became a story editor for MGM, reading books and advising which ones, or which parts, might make good movies. Harriet Frank Jr. and Ravetch both attended the University of California, Los Angeles, but graduated in different years and did not know each other there.
With her mother’s help, Frank was hired as a screenwriter trainee at MGM, where she met Ravetch. They married and discovered on returning from their honeymoon that they had been fired. They went to Warner Bros., where he became a screenwriter and she wrote dialogue for romances and westerns.
In addition to screenwriting, Frank wrote scores of stories for The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s and other magazines, and two novels: “Single” (1977), about four women finding and losing love, and “Special Effects” (1979), about a movie studio story editor who keeps her equilibrium when all those around her are falling apart.
Frank, who lived in Laurel Canyon in the Hollywood Hills, is survived by a brother, Marty.
Throughout their careers, Frank and Ravetch had a close working relationship with Ritt, who had been blacklisted in the anti-Communist witch hunts of the 1950s. He directed eight of their films. Besides “The Long, Hot Summer,” “Hud,” “Conrack” and “Norma Rae,” they were “The Sound and the Fury” (1959), another Faulkner adaptation, about the decline of a once-proud Southern family; “Hombre” (1967), which starred Newman as a white man raised by Indians; “Murphy’s Romance” (1985), which starred Field and James Garner in a courtship tale of a middle-aged divorced woman and a widowed grandfather; and “Stanley & Iris” (1990).
Based on the novel “Union Street” by Pat Barker, “Stanley & Iris” is a romantic drama that tackles the problem of adult illiteracy in America through the story of Iris (Jane Fonda), a widow, who discovers that her new friend, Stanley (Robert DeNiro), has a secret: Like 32 million other adults in the United States, he has never learned to read. She teaches him.
“There’s no easy way to describe ‘Stanley & Iris’ without making it sound too noble and worthy to be much fun,” Canby wrote in The Times. “Yet ‘Stanley & Iris’ does not condescend. It’s as honest and direct and entertaining as the considerable talents of everyone involved can make it.
“Not the least of these talents are Harriet Frank Jr. and Irving Ravetch, the writers.”
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