I recently watched on television a fine documentary about epilepsy, which is not insanity. Its script was nominated for an Academy award, Anthony Quinn won an Oscar for his portrayal of Gauguin, Kirk Douglas thought it the best of his roles and Vincent Minnelli rated it the finest of the many pictures he had directed.) (But don’t get me wrong – Lust for Life is still a good picture.
And things of which I had been ignorant kept surprising me.
Walther, ordained by famed publisher Benedikt Taschen, to awaken me to the fact that I was familiar only with perhaps less than half of Van Gogh’s oeuvre. It took Van Gogh: The Complete Paintings, a splendid recent book by Rainer Metzger and Ingo F. Through him and various journals, including those of Vincent’s contemporaries Paul Gauguin and Emile Bernard, and also Vincent’s letters to Theo, I thought I came to know all of the paintings and preened myself on that assumption. MGM was a rich studio, and under executive producer Dore Schary, it had the wisdom to engage John Rewald, a European expert on Van Gogh’s work, as technical adviser. But I felt that Vincent’s frequent luminous letters to his brother Theo were a much truer quarry from which to draw, and I persuaded John Houseman, the film’s producer, that the screenplay should concentrate on that source. The best-selling book introduced the painter to America and was responsible for a great upsurge of awareness of this foreign painter. It started out to be based on Lust for Life, a novelized biography of Van Gogh written by the late Irving Stone. Years ago, I had the privilege of writing a screenplay for MGM about the life and work of Vincent Van Gogh.
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