Williams, Tennessee

Typescript constituting the draft of Oscar Saul's film adaptation of Tennessee Williams's drama, A Streetcar Named Desire annotated by Williams, Oscar Saul, and Elia Kazan, some 163 pages (11 x 8 1/2 in.; 280 x 217 mm), [Hollywood and Key West], [early 1950]; brittle and browned, chipping and marginal tears. Accompanied by: the transcript of a wire sent to the Screen Writers' Guild offering Oscar Saul the assignment to adapt A Streetcar Named Desire to the screen; Oscar Saul's final draft pasted together from the typescript draft, essentially becoming the shooting script; photocopies of some of Williams's correspondence containing production comments as well as an unproduced opening sequence later cut from the script.

Sam Staggs. When Blanche Met Brando: The Scandalous Story of "A Streetcar Named Desire,"  2006, pages 142-150.

From a ground breaking play to an exceptional movie. The screen adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire proved to be a project full of complexity involving a number powerful personalities. Williams wanted little to do with the film adaptation after spending years perfecting the actual play. He anticipated most of the work would be done by Elia Kazan as director and Oscar Saul as screen writer. Williams would play the role of supervisor and collect his $30,000 from the producer, Charles Feldman.

Oscar Saul's script once lost now found. In his book, When Blanche Met Brando, Sam Staggs asserts Williams wanted to play a passive role in the process, but he could not. After reading Saul's script, he wrote to Elia Kazan on 27 January 1950: "Oscar Saul has completed his script. I read half of it last night and became disheartened and thrust it under the bed. I had so hoped that I would not have to work at all on this Streetcar but it appears I shall have to take a hand in it." Indeed he did. The present typescript has extensive autograph emendations in the hand of Tennessee Williams with minor autograph additions, deletions, and insertions in the hands of Oscar Saul and Elia Kazan. In the end, Williams and Kazan soured on Saul's version of Streetcar. For Guild reasons, Oscar Saul's name was still attached to the film though his version on the screen play was effectively dropped. Staggs notes: "Saul's script seems not to have survived. Bits of it were probably incorporated in the published shooting script, but I searched in vain for the version in which he opened up the play to include Belle Reve and other locations outside the French Quarter." On the contrary, Saul's typescript survived and more than just bits were incorpoarated in the final shooting script. The present typescript clearly reveals Saul's collaboration with Williams and Kazan. It  provides valuable insights to the making of the final film version of A Streetcar Named Desire.