RISKIN, Robert.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. Filmscript marked "Final Draft". Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, directed by Frank Capra, starred Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur. Nominated for five Academy Awards in 1937, including one for Riskin for Best Original Story, the film won one Award for Capra as Best Director.Robert Riskin's collaboration with Capra was one of the most successful partnerships in 1930s Hollywood: "Riskin wrote most of Capra's best films and established what Capra like to chant endlessly about as 'Capra-corn'" (Henstell).The film is based on a short story by Clarence Budington Kelland, first published in 1935. Riskin's final draft is dated 10 December 1935 and shows some significant revision from the first draft of 23 August 1935. In the first draft, there are 239 pages of text, and 595 shots. The present script comprises 200 pages of text, and 439 shots."Robert Riskin was a very talented man with a fine ear for dialogue. That ear for dialogue was what really intrigued me about Riskin. People always sounded real when he wrote their dialogue, and I worshipped that" (Capra, p. 118).A script for the film was published within Six Screenplays by Robert Riskin, published in 1997. For that volume the editor Pat McGilligan noted that the texts for "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Lost Horizon were both 'reconstructed' from dated final drafts... Most of the emendations for these two scripts... came with respect to dialogue..." (McGilligan, p. x).

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