John Collier (writer) - Other Media

Other Media

In the succeeding years, Collier traveled between England, France and Hollywood. While he did continue to write short stories, as time went on he would turn his attention more and more towards writing screenplays.

Max Wilk, who interviewed Collier for his book Schmucks with Underwoods, tells how, during the 1930s, Collier left the home he owned in England, Wilcote Manor, and traveled to France, where he lived briefly at Antibes and Cassis. The story of how Collier wound up going to Hollywood has been mistold sometimes; but Collier told Wilk that, in Cassis,

"I saw a fishing boat I rather liked, and I wanted to buy it. They wanted 7000 francs. And I wondered where on earth I could find that much money. And would you believe, right then, some little girl came riding up on a bicycle to hand me a telegram.... It was my London agent wanting to know, would I go to Hollywood to work for eight weeks, at $500 per week? ... And I went out to California, and they were waiting for me. Delightful experience. A picture called Sylvia Scarlett, at RKO. George Cukor was the director. I'd scarcely seen a motion picture in my life; I didn't know a thing about screenwriting. In point of fact, it was something of a mistake. Hugh Walpole had told George I'd be right for the job. George thought Hugh was talking about Evelyn Waugh."

The film Sylvia Scarlett starred Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Brian Aherne, and Edmund Gwenn; it was the comic story of a widower, his daughter Sylvia who disguises herself as a boy, and a con man; Collier's collaborators on the script were Gladys Unger and Mortimer Offner. Wilk writes that the film was considered bizarre at the time, though, decades later, it enjoys a cult following.

Collier landed in Hollywood on May 16, 1935, but, he told Wilk, after Sylvia Scarlett he returned to England. There, he spent a year working on Elephant Boy for director Zoltan Korda.

"Korda took me into a projection room, and we sat there watching hours of film that had been shot in Burma... without the advantage of any script! Just a director with his crew, shooting film of elephants. So we saw elephants coming this way, elephants going that way, charging, retreating... Endless elephants! And there were some shots of a little boy, about three feet tall, a charming little creature. That would be Sabu. ... Korda and I saw all this huge amount of film, and after about three hours of it, he began to utter hideous cries! What could he possibly do with all this goddamned film?"

Collier suggested a way to make the footage cohere into a story and to make "a star out of that little boy, Sabu." After these two unorthodox starts to screenwriting, Collier was on his way to a new writing career.