Update: “The King’s Speech”

I noted a rather remarkable bit of business about the new movie The King’s Speech in this post:

After the Tom Hooper-directed Colin Firth-Geoffrey Rush film The King’s Speech came out of Toronto with strong Oscar buzz, United Talent Agency swooped in to sign the pic’s writer, David Seidler. It’s not unusual for the scribes of Oscar-bait film to get snapped up by major agencies. But Seidler is no flash in the pan. He’s 73 years old, and the effort to make the film dates back to before many of today’s top screenwriters were born. His script — covering King George VI’s race to overcome a stutter so he could rally his subjects in radio broadcasts as England fought Hitler’s invading forces in WWII — was subject matter that is woven through Seidler’s own life. While an eloquent speaker now, Seidler developed a debilitating childhood stutter he attributes to the shock of those early days of WWII. “I was a profound stutterer as a kid, and though we relocated to the US after the Battle of Dunkirk, it was the trauma of hearing the guns and bombs from that battle that triggered it. I could barely talk at times, but as the war progressed, we were allowed to listen to the radio and the King of England. He spoke badly, but I thought my goodness, if a king can be brave enough to speak like that on the radio, maybe there’s hope for me. He was always a hero to me.”

As if a 73 year-old screenwriter signing with a major agency like UTA isn’t enough, the story behind the story of The King’s Speech gets even better as this LA Times feature points out:

Seidler went on to overcome his stutter and become a screenwriter but never forgot about the king. He was particularly interested in how the king was treated by Logue, an Australian who earlier had counseled World War I soldiers suffering from shell shock, a version of what is now known as post-traumatic stress disorder. Logue, who was not a trained speech pathologist, would briefly surface in biographies — “Blips on the radar screen,” Seidler says — but details of his treatments remained secret. “The royal family does not like talking about the royal stutterer,” Seidler says. “It was swept under the carpet.”

In the mid-1970s, Seidler wrote the king’s widow, Queen Elizabeth, asking permission to tell the story. She wrote back saying that “The memory of these events are still too painful” and that she wouldn’t accede in her lifetime. “I thought, ‘How long am I going to have to wait? One or two years?’ She wasn’t that young,” Seidler says. But the Queen Mother famously lived until age 101, 28 years after Seidler had made his inquiry.

In the intervening years, Seidler had cowritten Francis Ford Coppola’s “Tucker: The Man and His Dream,” but his credits in television had slowed to a trickle. What’s more, he had lost contact with Logue’s son, who had his father’s papers. Rather than write “The King’s Speech” as a movie, he penned it as a play — and that’s when his luck took a dramatic turn for the better.

A staged reading of the play was presented in the London borough of Islington, and in the audience was Hooper’s mother, Meredith, who is Australian. “She’d never been to a play reading in her life and didn’t expect it to be much good,” Hooper says. But as soon as she left the theater, she rang her son, who was finishing the HBO miniseries “ John Adams.” “I’ve found your next movie,” she told him. It took Hooper several months to read the play, but when he did, he called his mother back to say, “You were right.” Says Hooper: “I thought it was one of the most personal films I could make.”

Around the same time, producer Joan Lane, who had helped organize the Islington reading, decided the part of Logue would be perfect for Rush, who had won the lead actor Oscar for 1996’s “Shine.” Seidler says he had been rebuffed by the actor’s Australian agent, so Lane dispatched an Australian associate to get the actor the script through any means possible.

“It was literally in a brown paper bag on my doormat,” Rush recalls. He read it and called his Los Angeles agent. He didn’t want to be in the play, but if it were turned into a movie, Rush was in. The film’s producers flirted with casting Robert Downey Jr., Ralph Fiennes or Paul Bettany as the king before Firth jumped in and started learning how not to speak. Then, just weeks before production was set to start, art director Leon McCarthy located Logue’s diaries, notes and letters — “Like the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Firth says.

It took three decades, but “The King’s Speech” finally had found its voice.

The King’s Speech has gotten a terrific response from critics and audiences at Toronto, Telluride, and other festivals, and looks to be an Oscar contender, likely for Seidler and his script. 

Colin Firth talks about the movie:

The movie’s trailer:

The movie’s IMDB site.

The King’s Speech opens in the U.S. and Canada on November 26.