Critics turned screenwriters: thumbs up?

July 9, 2006

The line separating journalist-critic and screenwriter-artist is hardly one of church and state. Throughout cinema history, movie critics such as Roger Ebert have sought to have a hand in the form they evaluate, and occasionally they succeeded, most notably when a group of writers at the French journal Cahiers du Cinéma -- Jean-Luc Godard , François Truffaut , Jacques Rivette , Eric Rohmer , and Claude Chabrol -- launched the New Wave in 1959 and changed the way the world was viewed. Here are some notable stateside examples:

John Ford's son-in-law Frank S. Nugent, the screenwriter of such classic Westerns as ``Fort Apache" (1948) and ``The Searchers" (1956), reviewed films for The New York Times in the 1930s.

James Agee was a film critic at Time and The Nation and worked with director John Huston on the script for ``The African Queen" (1951) and with director Charles Laughton on ``The Night of the Hunter" (1955).

Pauline Kael's quirky alternate for The New Yorker's film criticism column, Penelope Gilliatt, wrote the Academy Award-nominated screenplay for ``Sunday Bloody Sunday" (1971).

Newsweek '70s film critic Paul D. Zimmerman penned the screenplay to Martin Scorsese's ``The King of Comedy" (1983) and cowrote ``Consuming Passions" (1988).

Scorsese's love affair with the critics is clearly mutual; he got a writerly assist from longtime Time film critic Jay Cocks on ``The Age of Innocence" (1993) and ``Gangs of New York" (2002). Cocks also cowrote ``Strange Days" (1995) with James Cameron and did the script for ``De-Lovely" (2004).

Starting as a film critic at The Boston Phoenix and then Vanity Fair, Stephen Schiff went Hollywood with the screenplays for Adrian Lyne's remake of ``Lolita" (1997), ``The Deep End of the Ocean" (1999), and ``True Crime" (1999), cowritten with Larry Gross and Paul Brickman.

Though many are familiar with Paul Attanasio as a TV producer, he was also a film critic for The Washington Post in the '80s and wrote the screenplays for ``Quiz Show" (1994), ``Disclosure" (1994) , and ``Donnie Brasco" (1997), and he cowrote ``Sphere" (1998) and ``The Sum of All Fears" (2002).

HOWARD KARREN