Stone, Peter, 1930-2003.Yale School of Drama
PhD in literaturePeter Stone, Award-Winning Writer of '1776,' Dies at 73
By RICK LYMAN
New York Times, April 28, 2003
Peter Stone, whose sophisticated wit in films like "Charade" and zeal for historical accuracy in Broadway musicals like "1776" helped him become the first writer to win an Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 73 and had homes in Manhattan and in Amagansett, on Long Island.
The cause was pulmonary fibrosis, said his wife, Mary.
"I'm a political person, although I don't mean that in the Washington, D.C., sense," Mr. Stone said in a 1997 interview. "I'm interested in the dissemination of information."
Even in his most urbane comedies, Mr. Stone — a former broadcast journalist and the son of a history teacher — struggled to pack in the historical details that so fascinated him.
In a 1969 review of the musical "1776," Walter Kerr wrote in The New York Times: "The show makes you feel smarter than you used to be, which is a gracious thing for librettist Peter Stone to have arranged, and smarter without having had to slave for it."
Mr. Stone, whose Oscar came for an original screenplay — for the 1964 Cary Grant comedy "Father Goose," an award he shared with S. H. Barnett and Frank Tarloff — was actually more widely known for his adaptations.
In 1969 he adapted for the screen the musical "Sweet Charity," which had itself been adapted from Federico Fellini's "Nights of Cabiria" (1957). He also adapted the George Bernard Shaw play "Androcles and the Lion" for NBC television in 1967, Billy Wilder's "Some Like It Hot" (1959) for Broadway as the musical "Sugar" (1972) and John Godey's novel "The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three" for the movies in 1974.
Twice he worked on adaptations of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn classics, transforming George Cukor's "Adam's Rib" (1949) into a 1973 television series starring Ken Howard and Blythe Danner, and George Stevens's "Woman of the Year" (1942) into a 1981 Broadway musical starring Lauren Bacall.
Mr. Stone's father, the history teacher, had moved his family to Los Angeles in the 1920's, where he became a producer and screenwriter at Fox Studios, specializing in cowboy movies starring Tom Mix.
After attending Bard College and the Yale School of Drama, Mr. Stone worked in Paris as a writer and news reader for CBS radio and television.
His first writing jobs outside of journalism were in television. In 1956 he wrote an episode for the "Studio One" series. His Emmy came for a 1962 episode of "The Defenders," a highly regarded series about a father-and-son team of lawyers that often delved into social issues.
On Broadway he was not initially so successful. He wrote the books for two musicals, "Kean" (1961) and "Skyscraper" (1965), neither of which did well at the box office, although they were critically praised. Not until "1776" did he have a major stage hit, but by then he was already a celebrated screenwriter.
"Charade" (1963), his first screenplay, was a major success for the director Stanley Donen and its co-stars, Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. It was not until the next year, though, and "Father Goose" that he received his first and only Oscar nomination. Some felt that the honor was, in part, a delayed tribute for the overlooked "Charade" script.
Mr. Stone, who sometimes wrote under the pseudonym Pierre Marton, tried to duplicate his "Charade" success with other convoluted but less successful thrillers like "Mirage" (1965) and "Arabesque" (1966), both starring Gregory Peck. After his success with "1776," he began to spend more of his time on Broadway efforts.
He was nominated six times for a Tony and won three of them — best musical for "1776" and best book of a musical for "Woman of the Year" and for "Titanic" (1997), a $10 million blockbuster about the sinking of the famous ocean liner.
In recent decades he worked only sporadically in film, with his credits including "Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?" (1978), with George Segal and Jacqueline Bisset, and "Just Cause" (1995), starring Sean Connery. Both are adapted from novels.
In 2002 he took the pseudonym Peter Joshua for his part in the script for "The Truth About Charlie," a remake of "Charade" that was a box-office flop.
Mr. Stone, who had perhaps his greatest successes writing the books for musicals, always felt that it was an underappreciated art.
"A book is a concept and a structure, and dialogue is the smallest part," he once said. "You can have the best score in the world, but if the book is weak, it won't work. On the other hand, if the book is good, it can carry a mediocre score."
Besides his wife, he is survived by a brother, David, of Los Angeles.
Peter Stone, writer for Broadway, movies, TV, dies at 73
Newsday
April 27, 2003, 5:55 PM EDT
NEW YORK -- Peter Stone, who wrote the words to Broadway musicals like "1776" and "Woman of the Year" and films including "Charade" and "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three," has died at age 73.
Stone won an Oscar, an Emmy and three Tony awards for his writing, including Tonys nearly 30 years apart for "1776," a musical about the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and "Titanic" in 1997.
He died Saturday at New York-Cornell Hospital of pulmonary fibrosis, said Maury Yeston, a close friend who collaborated with him on three shows, including "Titanic."
Stone's best-known work included the television drama "The Defenders" and the Cary Grant-Audrey Hepburn film "Charade." He also wrote the screenplay for the musical "Sweet Charity" and the 1974 drama about a hijacked New York subway, "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three."
For Broadway, Stone revised the musical "Annie Get Your Gun," originally produced by Rodgers and Hammerstein in the late 1940s, for a revival that ran more than 1,000 performances before closing in September 2001.
Stone, with co-writers S.H. Barnett and Frank Tarloff, won an Oscar in 1964 for "Father Goose," the World War II comedy starring Grant as a man who watches Japanese spy planes on a deserted South Seas island.
He won Tonys for writing the books to the musicals "1776" (1969), "Woman of the Year" (1981) and "Titanic" (1997). His Emmy was for "The Defenders."
In an interview with The Associated Press in 1997, when "Titanic" became a surprise hit, Stone offered advice to creators of musicals on facing the public.
"You listen to the audience," he said. "The audience is wrong individually and always right collectively. If they don't laugh, it isn't funny. If they cough, it isn't interesting. If they walk out, you are in trouble."
For "1776," producer Stuart Ostrow asked Stone to sort out historical material that had been gathered by composer Sherman Edwards. So Stone laid out index cards marked with bits of information, eventually stringing them together for the book.
The result was a musical built around the declaration's signing, with John Adams emerging as its hero.
Stone is survived by his wife, Mary Stone. His funeral was to be private, and a memorial on Broadway would be planned, Yeston said.
Copyright © 2003, The Associated Press
American screenwriter and playwright Peter Stone holds a doctorate in literature. He began writing successful plays and scripts for films in the 1960s. His debut screenplay, Charade (1963), won him immediate acclaim; it is based on a novel he co-wrote. The following year, he and a collaborator shared an Oscar for their screenplay for Father Goose. Occasionally Stone uses the pen name Pieffe Marton
Screenwriter
• The Truth About Charlie (2002)
• Just Cause (1995)
• Silver Bears (1978)
• Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? (1978)
• The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)
• 1776 (1972)
• Skin Game (1971)
• Secret War of Harry Frigg (1968)
• Sweet Charity (1968)
• Arabesque (1966)
• Mirage (1965)
• Father Goose (1964)
• Charade (1963)
Source Writer
• The Truth About Charlie (2002)
Story
• 1776 (1972)
INTERVIEW WITH PETER STONE
Story and BookPETER STONE (Bookwriter). Titanic is his 14th B’way production, with three Tony Awards (six nominations) to his credit. His musicals 1776 and The Will Rogers Follies, both won the Tony, and NY Drama Critics Circle Awards. He won another Tony for his musical Woman of the Year. His other B’way credits include the musicals My One and Only, Sugar, Two By Two, and his collaboration with Erich Maria Remarque on the play Full Circle. The author of more than two dozen feature films, he won an Academy Award for his screenplay, Father Goose, the Edgar (Mystery Writers of America Award) for his film Charade, and the Christopher Award for the screen adaptation of his own musical 1776. Among his other films are The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3, Mirage, Arabesque, Sweet Charity, Skin Game, Who’s Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? And most recently, Just Cause. Writing for TV he won the Emmy Award-the only writer ever to win the Tony, Oscar and Emmy-for an episode of the acclaimed C.B.S. series The Defenders. He has been president of the Dramatists Guild, the national society of playwrights, composers and lyricists, since 1981.
You write for theatre, the movies and television. What interests you most about writing for the theatre?
Well everything. I am a theatre writer. I was born in a film environment. My father was involved in film, my mother, to a lesser extent, I grew up in Hollywood in the ’30s and ’40s when it was very much a film town, much more than now. And I for some reason was drawn to the live theatre. I don’t know why that should have been since Los Angeles had no theatre. I used to have to go down on the Wilshire bus, downtown, they had one legitimate house, the Biltmore, and it took forever to get downtown. And there were musicals at the Philharmonic Hall where the orchestra was... they were all of them second even third flight road shows from New York but I was enchanted by it and totally hypnotized by the whole concept of live theatre. I don’t know why, given where I grew up and how I grew up. But something about the stage, the immediacy and the risks of it, whatever it is, it was amazing. Later on I came to understand and articulate something that I perhaps wouldn’t have understood then but maybe instinctively felt, the difference between film and theatre in terms of the audiences participation. And that has to do with suspension of disbelief. And that’s a very strong thing in my work and in my writing, in my whole method. To recognize that the audience comes there and fulfills their part of the contract, which is to suspend their disbelief. It’s a wonderful phrase because it’s a double negative ... they don’t come there to assume belief, they come to suspend their disbelief.
How did you get into writing musicals?
Well that was quite by accident. But I was very interested in the theatre and that aspect of it, because In film you don’t have to suspend disbelief. You are drawn into reality, the camera and the close ups, it brings you in. And reality has never been quite as important to me as the appearance of reality. So I went back east to college, to a very small school upstate, to Bard, where I could actually work a little in the theatre, and then I went to Yale Drama after that and then I went to Europe and I was there for thirteen years. I didn’t work in the theatre there but I did work on some scripts...
In l961, at the beginning, I had seen a play in Paris when I lived there, by Jean Paul Sartre called Kean, about the English actor and I was very taken with it. But that was it, that was all. And when I got back here my agent became a producer of a musical to be written called Kean, because Alfred Drake was his client and Alfred Drake wanted to do it. Alfred Drake was at that time —and maybe also at this time, though he’s no longer with us— the finest acting singer or singing actor we have. You’ve seen him in Oklahoma, and later Kiss Me Kate. He was a very powerful figure on stage and I was also Broadway... my dream was to get something some day onto Broadway... and I was asked, because I knew the play and I spoke French, would I do this. And I said sure.
Then I went to Frank Loesser who I knew and I said how do you write a musical? Where do songs go? And he said, well when you get to that point in the scene when articulate language is no longer possible and you have to start using interjections. That’s where songs go. "Oh" "Gosh" "Gee" "Go on" That’s why you have so many good songs starting, "Oh...what a beautiful morning," for example. That’s when songs go in, at the emotional high point of the scene. Then he talked about lead in, how to lead into a song... he said the language of song is poetic, the language of the book is prosaic and so you have to make a transition before the song starts otherwise the song will come in very harshly and in another language and on another level. You do this by increasingly the language a little bit... or you can also increase the emotional language which is the same thing. You don’t just do that, you have to lead into it. It becomes second nature after a while. But you have to work it out at the beginning.
Another important thing he told me is that you have to tell two hours of story in one hour because the score is not advancing the story, and so there’s a shorthand that you use. Work with the composer, not ahead of him or behind him because if you work with him he’s not going to be breaking your heart by taking your best scene and turning it into a song. And also, he had a word that he kept using, the word was level. You all have to be on the same level. If you’re all on the same level the show is probably going to work, given that you know what you’re doing. But if you’re not on the same level, no matter how expert you are, the show is probably not going to work. If it’s a comedy, you’re on the same level of comedy, if it’s a fantasy, that you’re on the same level of fantasy. You have to be doing the same show. It sounds stupid. But the word level is very understandable once you’ve been there and done it. It’s style and content together.
How did you come to write Titanic? Was it a project which had interested you for a long time?
Well I had an idea to do it and Maury Yeston had an idea to do it simultaneously. We didn’t exchange the ideas right away, we were working together on Grand Hotel. He came in to put in some songs, I came in to straighten out the book a little bit. And while we were working on that, we were sitting, and suddenly, I don’t remember how it came out, but he said he was thinking about doing a show about the Titanic and I said that’s remarkable, I’d been thinking about it too. And I’d done a lot of reading on it, and I thought it would make a great idea for a musical, and he thought it would make a great idea for a musical. And we both said, lets join forces and do it. We sat down and decided on the level of the show. What was it going to be. Who was going to be the central figure in the show. And it was quickly decided that the ship was going to be the central figure, we weren’t going to invent any character. There’d been a lot of movies, and there was one play that we know, and there was some television stuff. And they were all about fictitious romances and other stories that took place against the background. That we knew we didn’t want to do. What we were after was the truth. The real story, and we wanted to tell it about real people. And that was immediate. And so we both started to work together and separately reading a lot about what happened.
How much research was involved in this project?
There are a lot of books, but only about three of them are really valuable. And you get the story very soon. And I put together with a researcher everything that happened on that ship. And cross filed it on the computer. And ended up with four books actually. That were about different aspects of the story. One about the people, one about minute by minute schedule of the ship. One about the background. One about the inquiries that happened later. And we had a complete picture of everything we wanted to us. We used about a tenth of it, but we had everything. Although when we first started we had about a quarter of it in the thing.
How long did it take from first conception to first draft to opening night?
My first drafts are always immense. But then I’m a ruthless cutter of my own material so the first draft was probably four hours. Then we cut... it was a question of cutting and condensing. Cause we had a lot of characters. The characters were all real. In certain cases we condensed three or four characters into one because we, obviously, can’t deal with twenty three hundred people. So we choose. A lot of them are themselves. I mean, the Irish girls, there were three girls named Kate. Those are their real name. But the characters are more than that.
Anyway, it took about five years from the time we started. It wasn’t five years spent on Titanic. I did Will Rogers, and that took a lot of time. And he did his Phantom... and so we were not continually working on it.
When I finish a first draft, I’ll get some feedback. I try to keep my wife very objective. So I don’t let her see too much. I don’t want her to see the show before we have it fairly ready. She doesn’t come to a first preview or a reading or a workshop. I need her reaction very much. She’s very good about it.
What is your work day like when you’re writing a new show?
My work day is very disorganized, as it always it. We’d plan a meeting, and at the end of that meeting we’d plan the next meeting. And sometimes it was in the morning... a lot of this happened in a Chinese restaurant on second avenue and we’d sit there sometimes till four in the afternoon over our tea and fortune cookies. A lot of it was worked out there. And when we needed a piano, we’d work either here or at his place. Or we’d start here and then go to the restaurant. We had very few disagreements. Nobody got ahead of anybody. We figured out where the songs went and how they went and all the rest of it.
What is it like once you go into rehearsals? Did you make any changes during the rehearsal process?
There were enormous changes, I mean very monumental changes that took place. Especially after we started the production. Richard Jones had his own concept. For the most part we were all in agreement its just that he was very, very — he was ahh... I guess... rather... stark about it. He had very definite ideas, he had a concept, he had a whole way of making it look, and short of violating what it was we were after, we would go with it.
Is your job over after opening night?
Your job is over, that doesn’t mean you’re not terribly involved in the show. There will be casting changes, and I’m very interested in that. I’m interested in stopping in and seeing that its running okay, that it isn’t getting sloppy and losing its place or its footing. I look in and see how the audience is reacting.
Peter Stone is the only writer ever to win the Tony, Oscar and Emmy. He is the author of fifteen Broadway productions, with four Tony Awards (seven nominations) to his credit. His latest musical, TITANIC, won five Tonys (out of five nominations), including Best Musical and Best Book. His musical 1776 won the Tony, N.Y. Drama Critics Circle and Drama Desk Awards (the London production won the Evening Standard Award for Best Musical) and has been revived on Broadway in 1997. He won another Tony for his musical WOMAN OF THE YEAR. His musical, THE WILL ROGERS FOLLIES, won the Tony and Grammy as well as the N.Y. Drama Critics and Drama Desk Awards. His other Broadway credits include the musicals GRAND HOTEL, MY ONE AND ONLY, SUGAR, TWO BY TWO, KEAN, SKYSCRAPER, and his collaboration with Erich Maria Remarque on the play FULL CIRCLE.
FEATURE FILMS: He won an Academy Award for his screenplay, Father Goose, the Edgar (Mystery Writers of America Award) for his film Charade, and the Christopher Award for the screen adaptation of his own musical, 1776. In all, five of his films earned nominations for Best Screenplay from the Writers Guild of America. Among his more than two dozen features are The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3, Mirage, Arabesque, Sweet Charity, Skin Game and Who's Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? His most recent film was Just Cause with Sean Connery.
TELEVISION: He won the Emmy Award for an episode of the acclaimed CBS series The Defenders, also nominated for Best Episode by the Writers Guild of America. His other TV credits include the pilots for sixteen network series, four network and cable feature films and his collaboration with Richard Rodgers on the NBC musical special of G.B. Shaw's Androcles and the Lion.
He has been president of the Dramatists Guild, the national society of playwrights, composers and lyricists, since 1981.
Biography
Peter Stone is an acclaimed Tony- and Oscar-winning writer who began in TV and moved to motion pictures and the theater. The son of a schoolteacher-turn-motion picture producer, Stone was raised in L.A. and after heading East for schooling began his career in live TV. He went on to script such well-received motion pictures as "Charade" (1963) and "Father Goose" (1964, for which he won an Academy Award) and has provided the book for several Broadway musicals, notably "1776" (1969) and "Woman of the Year" (1981).
Stone's theatrical work began in 1958 when his play, "Friend of the Family", was produced in St Louis. By 1961, he had written the book for the unsuccessful Broadway musical "Kean". His second venture, "Skyscraper" (1965), also didn't fare well at the box office. His first real success was "1776", an unlikely but powerful musical about the creation and signing of the Declaration of Independence. Winning the Tony as Best Musical, it had a healthy run on Broadway and was a modest success in London. Stone adapted Clifford Odets' "The Flowering Peach", about Noah and the ark, as a musical vehicle for Danny Kaye, with a score by Richard Rodgers. He later adapted the classic 1959 Billy Wilder film "Some Like It Hot" as "Sugar" (1972), which earned mixed reviews, and turned the 1942 Tracy-Hepburn comedy "Woman of the Year" into a 1981 star vehicle for Lauren Bacall. His polish of the book for "My One and Only" (1983) helped solidify Tommy Tune's reputation and Stone reportedly did uncredited work on Tune's staging of "Grand Hotel" in 1990. He and Tune again collaborated on the award-winning "The Will Rogers Follies" in 1992 and Stone wrote the poorly reviewed "Titanic" in 1997.
In motion pictures, Stone was a success almost immediately. His first produced screenplay, "Charade" (1963), which he also novelized, was a mystery with romance that paired Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. It offered more twists, turns and surprises than one might think a movie could hold as a bevy of unsavory characters try to discover where Hepburn's deceased husband hid $250,000. Oddly, Stone won the Academy Award for his next screenplay, "Father Goose", again starring Grant as a beach bum-turned-lookout for the Australians during World War II who doubles as a guardian of schoolgirls. Although the 1964 film was well-received, it garnered neither the critical acclaim of "Charade" nor the box office success. Stone continued to excel at adaptations, with the musical "Sweet Charity" (1969) and "The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3" (1980), based on the mystery novel about a nefarious gang who hijack a subway train. Later came "Why Would I Lie?" (1980), which put Treat Williams as a social worker trying to unite a youth with his ex-con mother. Stone took a long sojourn from the big screen until "Just Cause" (1995), which starred Sean Connery as a famed law professor trying to prove Blair Underwood innocent of a crime for which he was convicted.
The writer's small screen work dates back to an episode of "Studio One" (CBS, 1956), and also includes episodes of "The Defenders" (CBS, 1961-62). Stone was involved in the creation of the TV adaptation of "Adam's Rib" (ABC, 1973-74), a sitcom based on the 1949 Tracy-Hepburn classic, and "Ivan the Terrible" (CBS, 1976), a short-lived but witty series with Lou Jacobi as the head of an extended Moscow. Stone also adapted George Bernard Shaw's "Androcles and the Lion" (NBC, 1968) and penned "Grand Larceny", a 1989 syndicated TV-movie about a female master thief. Stone has also appeared on talk shows and retrospectives, and was a frequent panelist on the PBS show "The Week in Review".
Turner Movie ClassicsINTRODUCTION
The name Peter Stone may not have a familiar ring to it but you've probably heard of some of the films based on his screenplays like Charade (1963), the Hitchcock-like thriller starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, or Father Goose (1964), for which he won the Oscar for Best Screenplay, or 1776, the popular 1969 Broadway musical that he penned and later adapted for the screen in 1972. Stone, who holds a doctorate in literature, graduated from Yale University and established himself as a writer for the stage and screen in the early sixties. Among the many successful plays he wrote for the Broadway stage are Kean (1961), Skyscraper (1963), and Two by Two. In 1963 he began his Hollywood screenwriting career with Charade and would go on to pen several more suspense thrillers like Mirage (1965) and Arabesque (1966). Stone, who sometimes uses the pseudonym Pierre Marton, also dabbled in television as well and won an Emmy Award in 1963. He even tried his hand at acting, making a cameo appearance in an elevator scene in Charade and playing a supporting role in Far From the Madding Crowd (1967).
TCM's mini-tribute "Written by Peter Stone" opens with Charade which ties in perfectly with the current remake The Truth About Charlie featuring Mark Wahlberg in the Cary Grant role and Thandie Newton in the Audrey Hepburn part. Our other two features are Father Goose, a romantic comedy set in the Pacific during World War II and starring Cary Grant as a grizzled beachcomber coerced into rescuing a stranded schoolteacher and her pupils, and The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three (1974), a heist thriller that takes place in the New York subway.
