Hollywood Tales

“John [Ford], dressed only in a bathrobe and chomping on endless cigars, dictated the script scene by scene. [Dudley] Nichols often found himself standing up and shouting to make himself heard. John’s typical response if they didn’t agree was that Nichols didn’t ‘understand the Irish temperment,’ or that he had ‘not firsthand experience with the Irish people’… When they finally did agree on a scene, Nichols wold write it down and John would go over it, making brutal cuts in Nichols’s dialogue.”

— from “What Happens Next,” Dan Ford [John Ford’s son] recalling script-writing sessions with his father and screenwriter Dudley Nichols on the movie The Informer