Irving Ravetch, Screenwriter of 'Hud,' Dies at 89
Matthew Kruk
September 21, 2010
Irving Ravetch, Screenwriter of 'Hud,' Dies at 89
By BRUCE WEBER
Irving Ravetch, whose playwriting career stalled on the brink of
Broadway but who became half of one of Hollywood's most successful
husband-and-wife screenwriting teams, creators of the Oscar-nominated
scripts for "Hud" and "Norma Rae," died Sunday in Los Angeles. He was
89.
The cause was pneumonia, his nephew Michael Frank said.
Mr. Ravetch and his wife, Harriet Frank Jr., met as young writers at MGM
and married in 1946 but did not begin collaborating until a decade or so
later, when they worked together on an adaptation of William Faulkner's
novel "The Hamlet." The novel deals with the corrosive relationship
between the tenant-farming Snopes family and the powerful landowning
Varner clan; in the hands of Mr. Ravetch and Ms. Frank, the film, titled
"The Long, Hot Summer" (1958), became the story of Ben Quick (a version
of the novel's grasping, exploitative Flem Snopes, played by Paul
Newman) and his incursions into the Varner family, whose patriarch
(Orson Welles) admires Ben's gumption and envisions him a proper suitor
for his daughter (Joanne Woodward).
There was not much left of the novel in the final film - "10 percent
Faulkner" was Mr. Ravetch's assessment - though Faulkner was said to
have liked it. But it established a template of sorts for the
screenwriting couple, who became known for adaptations that often
reshaped their source material.
Larry McMurtry's novel "Horseman, Pass By," for example, evolved into
"Hud" (1963), the antiheroic story of a greedy, charming, ruthless
cowhand (the title character, played by Newman), who was a minor
character in the book.
The factual spine of "Norma Rae" (1979), about the effort of a Southern
mill worker (Sally Field) to unionize her workplace, came from the life
of a real North Carolinian, Crystal Lee Jordan, whom Mr. Ravetch and Ms.
Frank discovered when producers brought them a copy of a book about her,
"Crystal Lee: A Woman of Inheritance," by Henry P. Leifermann. But among
their inventions was the sexual tension between Norma and the Jewish
union organizer from New York played by Ron Leibman.
"We have found, as screenwriters, we've often needed an outside story to
get us started," Mr. Ravetch said in an introduction to a collection of
their work. "It sparks us. It sets us in motion. In the end, we may
salvage only one or two elements - a character, perhaps, or a situation,
or a few strong scenes - and on this we build a whole new drama."
"The Long Hot Summer," "Hud" and "Norma Rae" were all directed by Martin
Ritt, a victim of the Hollywood blacklist who was known for socially
conscious films. Mr. Ravetch and Ms. Frank collaborated with him eight
times; their other films together were "The Sound and the Fury" (1959),
another adaptation of Faulkner; "Hombre" (1967), which starred Newman as
a white man who was raised by Indians; "Conrack," (1974), based on Pat
Conroy's memoir "The Water Is Wide"; "Murphy's Romance" (1985), a
May-December courtship tale set in the contemporary West, starring Ms.
Field and James Garner; and "Stanley and Iris" (1990), a contemporary
love story about two middle-age working-class people (Robert De Niro and
Jane Fonda).
Irving Dover Ravetch was born in Newark on Nov. 14, 1920. His father, a
Jewish immigrant who had fled the Russian pogroms, became a pharmacist
and, later, a rabbi. His mother, an immigrant from what is now northern
Israel, was a Hebrew teacher.
As a young boy, Irving, who suffered from asthma, was sent to Los
Angeles and its drier climate to live with an aunt. The family was not
reunited for five years. Mr. Ravetch attended Long Beach City College
and graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he
studied literature and acted in theater productions. He served briefly
in the Army but was discharged prematurely (and honorably) because of
his asthma.
Mr. Ravetch's survivors include his wife; a sister, Merona Ravetch
Frank, of Los Angeles; and a brother, Herbert Ravetch, of Calabasas,
Calif.
For the first 10 years of his marriage, Mr. Ravetch was a freelance
screenwriter, specializing in westerns, but his aspiration was to write
for the stage. He met Mr. Ritt in 1949 or 1950 when the director had
expressed interest in one of his early plays, though little if anything
came of it. In 1953 another of Mr. Ravetch's plays, variously titled
"Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang" and "A Certain Joy," was being
shepherded toward Broadway by the producer Kermit Bloomgarden, with
Walter Matthau as its star, when it was canceled on the verge of its
opening.
When Mr. Ravetch and Ms. Frank decided to collaborate, she was working
as a script polisher for different studios and writing comic short
stories for Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post and elsewhere. It was
their joining together, they both said, that shifted their focus to
ambitious material aimed at effecting change.
"Movies can't correct human injustice all by themselves, but they can
show it, they can touch you while showing it, and they can seed ideas
and wake up dormant minds," Mr. Ravetch said. "For a medium that began -
pretty much in my early childhood - as a few flickering images on a
nickelodeon machine, that's pretty powerful stuff."