Story and Early Screenplay
Shepherd originally wrote the story, upon which the film is based, in 1968 as one of a series for Playboy Magazine between 1966 and 1970. The stories were later published in Shepherd's collection Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories in 1971. Shepherd later described his stories as not based literally on childhood memories, "People are always trying to make me sound like I'm just writing what happened to me. You know, I'm a humorist and a filmmaker. I don't think my stuff is any more autobiographical than, say, Woody Allen's is - or anybody who is involved in making serious films."
Television comedy director John Rich wrote in his memoir that in the 1970s he commissioned Shepherd to write a screenplay from Hopnoodle's, as a possible series pilot episode for the ABC television network. Rich described the script as quite faithful to the story, but problems with management during production prevented that script from being released on American television.
Read more about this topic: Ollie Hopnoodle's Haven Of Bliss
Famous quotes containing the words story and/or early:
“Grief that is dazed and speechless is out of fashion: the modern woman mourns her husband loudly and tells you the whole story of his death, which distresses her so much that she forgets not the slightest detail about it.”
—Jean De La Bruyère (1645–1696)
“All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it’s your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)