The Shop On Main Street - Screenplay

Screenplay

The screenplay had a bilingual Czech−Slovak history. The screenwriter Ladislav Grosman (1921–1981) was born and grew up in Slovakia. He became proficient in Czech after he moved to Czechoslovakia's Czech-speaking part in his late twenties, where he worked as a correspondent and editor in the Prague bureau of the Slovak newspaper Pravda published in Bratislava, and later in the Slovak Book bookstore in Prague. Grosman published his precursor to the screenplay, the short story "The Trap" (Past), in Czech in 1962. Only three of its themes made it into the film. He subsequently reworked and expanded it, still in Czech, as a literary-narrative screenplay published in 1964 under the title "The Shop on Main Street" (Obchod na korze), which already contained the film's storyline, although not in the usual (American) screenplay format. He then reworked it into a shooting script with Slovak dialogues in cooperation with the film's designated directors Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos. The only other language in the film is Yiddish (sometimes misidentified as German) limited to several lines that Mrs. Lautmannová mutters to herself. Her Hebrew reading from the siddur is indistinct.