ellauri150.html on line 471: Karl Tunberg (March 11, 1907 − April 3, 1992) was an American screenwriter and occasional film producer. His screenplays for Tall, Dark and Handsome (1941) and Ben-Hur (1959) were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and Best Adapted Screenplay, respectively. more…
ellauri150.html on line 476: The film's final onscreen writing credits created controversy when, in October 1959, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) awarded Tunberg sole screenplay credit, despite the objections of the film's director, William Wyler, who, in the film's commemorative booklet and elsewhere, claimed that Christopher Fry was more responsible than any other writer for the final screenplay. In response to Wyler's public outcries against their ruling, the WGA took out trade paper ads on November 20, 1959 in which they issued a statement reading, in part, "the unanimous decision of the three judges was that the sole screenplay credit was awarded to Karl Tunberg...The record shows the following: 1. Karl Tunberg is the only writer who has ever written a complete screenplay on Ben-Hur; 2. Karl Tunberg continued to contribute materials throughout the actual filming, and this material is incorporated in the final picture; and 3. Karl Tunberg alone did the necessary rewriting during the four months of retakes and added scenes. Mr. Christopher Fry himself was fully informed of the proceedings of the Guild. He has made it absolutely clear that he did not want to protest the decision of the Guild."
ellauri257.html on line 69: British-born director J. Lee Thompson (“The Yellow Balloon”/”The Passage”/”King Solomon’s Mines”) helms this bloody spectacular. It’s a serviceable large-scale epic that mainly goes wrong with a mushy subplot involving a miscast Tony Curtis as a Cossack wooing a Polish noblewoman, Christine Kaufmann (they were soon to be married in real-life after his divorce from Janet Leigh). It seems to be in genre form when showing hordes of Cossack horsemen flying across the steppes to do battle. It’s based on the novel by Nikolai Gogol and is written without wit or logic by Waldo Salt (former blacklisted writer) and Karl Tunberg.
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