R.I.P.: David Rayfiel (1923–2011)
Screenwriter David Rayfiel died on June 22nd. From the NYT:
David Rayfiel, a screenwriter who in a long creative relationship with the director Sydney Pollack and Robert Redford collaborated on many of their most successful films, including “Three Days of the Condor,” “Out of Africa” and “The Way We Were, ” but usually chose to keep his work anonymous, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 87.
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Mr. Rayfiel’s name was unknown to the general public but led the list for many top directors, who came calling when their scripts demanded subtle touch-ups or a complete overhaul. Mr. Rayfiel excelled at bringing an amorphous role into focus with a sharp bit of dialogue or a restructured scene that illuminated a character’s inner life.
Most scriptwriters “write on the surface,” Mr. Pollack told The New York Times in 1985. “If they want you to know something about a character, they’ll simply have the character say it or have another character say it about him. David doesn’t do that. He writes elliptically, so that it comes out organically, the way you would know something about someone in real life.”
Mr. Pollack was so enchanted by one line of Mr. Rayfiel’s — “You think not getting caught in a lie is the same thing as telling the truth” — that he used it in four films: “The Slender Thread,” “This Property Is Condemned,” “Three Days of the Condor” and “The Interpreter.”
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Their first film collaboration was the 1965 drama “The Slender Thread,” with Sidney Poitier and Anne Bancroft. That movie’s principal screenwriter, Stirling Silliphant, adapted a Life magazine article by Shana Alexander about a young volunteer at a crisis center and the suicidal woman who calls him, and Mr. Rayfiel lent a hand. Because there was no money in the budget for extra writers, Mr. Pollack gave him an I.B.M. Selectric typewriter as payment.
The two worked together on two smaller films: “This Property Is Condemned,” a Tennessee Williams play adapted by Francis Ford Coppola, which starred Mr. Redford and Natalie Wood, and “Castle Keep.” They then settled into a creative groove with big pictures like “Three Days of the Condor,” “Jeremiah Johnson,” “The Way We Were,” “The Electric Horseman,” “Havana,” “Absence of Malice,” “The Firm,” “Sabrina” and “The Interpreter.”
“In those days, I thought I would write everything, Sydney would direct everything and Robert would act in everything,” Mr. Rayfiel told The Los Angeles Times in 2005.
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Mr. Rayfiel did his best work in a supporting role. “I don’t think I have a strong sense of story,” he told The New York Times. The Margaux Hemingway thriller “Lipstick,” one of the few scripts he wrote in its entirety, ranked low on his list of favorites.
What he did have a feel for, he said, was dramatic situations: “A moment when people speak, I know when it’s strong and when it’s not.”
Here’s a scene from the movie Three Days of the Condor:
http://movieclips.com/e/xGeBq/
Here is Rayfiel’s IMDB page.
Godspeed, David Rayfiel.