Category: Writing

Still The Greatest Screenplay Never Made

4/28/2026

I am officially exhausted from dealing on social media with the far-right Trump enablers using a failed shooting to be what they consider a great marketing tool for an unnecessary mega-ballroom -- and for endlessly responding online to attacks on Jimmy Kimmel because they misunderstood a rude joke, including calls by Trump and the Mrs. that Kimmel be fired. Again. That didn't work out well the first time. And again, Kimmel won a Pulitzer Prize last week for his commentary after the first firing.

So, instead, I'll take a breaker and provide an update to an article I wrote a long while back about the current status of a what is perhaps the greatest unproduced screenplay, Harrow Alley, written in the early 1960s by Walter Brown Newman whose impressive credentials -- among many other works -- include The Great Escape, The Magnificent Seven and Cat Ballou. (Newman was a crusty sort, and took his name off a few films when he was unhappy with changes to his work, one of them The Great Escape). Calling Harrow Alley "the greatest" unproduced script isn't just personal opinion, but as the original article notes, it was voted that in a couple of polls.

For reasons too long to get into, a few weeks ago, I was scrolling through my archives and came upon this article, "The Greatest Screenplay Never Made,” which I’d written over a dozen years earlier (in fact, the first month this site started in January, 2013!), and realized there were a few things that should be added. One of those things is about that status of Harrow Alley in the intervening years, and the other is material that for the life of me I don’t know why I didn’t include in the original article. So, we'll address all of that.

(If you're interested in the full story, I recommend reading that original article. In fact, if you do, I added this material as an Update to that article itself, however thought it deserved this standalone piece, since it was improbable -- if I didn't do so -- that many people here would be going back to read something they had no idea had so many new material added.)

The current status is that whoever owns the rights to the movie at the moment – and it’s been hard to track down, though it might still be the George C. Scott estate…or not – Emma Thompson has been attached since around 2007 when she was hired to write a revision. (Around that time, the producer involved was Lindsay Doran, who had made such films as Sense and Sensibility, The Firm and Nanny McPhee. I haven’t seen that she’s still involved, however, so it strikes me as unlikely.) As of 2023, though, Emma Thompson was still with the film and working with a British production company, Bad Wolf, perhaps to develop it for TV. It’s unclear if it would be as a single movie or multi-part limited series…which would be encouraging since, given the original script’s length and effort over the years to trim it, a limited series would allow as much of the original material to be done as possible. Bad Wolf was founded in 2015 by former BBC executives Julie Gardner and Jane Tranter. In 2021, a majority interest in the company was bought by Sony Pictures TV.

I came across a very promising quote from Emma Thompson on the project – not promising because of any information about it being made, but about her screenplay revision. The original screenplay by Walter Brown Newman is so superb I’ve been wary about any efforts to rework it for current sensibilities. And while her quote supports my wariness, the full quote adds an encouraging twist. She said that the revision of hers that she did initially is not what it would be all these years later. “His is the great work — my revisions are neither here nor there,” she told Scott Foster on his Moviemaker website. “I must tell you that the version of mine which perhaps you found online is one that was produced many years ago for a company that wanted a happy ending, amongst other not entirely suitable things.” She added that although that 2007 revision she wrote was reverent to Newman’s version, Foster wrote that “the producers asked her to make a few dramatic changes to fill in his most cryptic 30 pages with explanatory light. They injected plot in the gaps where Newman wanted none.” So, it would seem that if and when Harrow Alley does get made – with Emma Thompson’s involvement – those less than reverent changes she was required to make will be gone, and the script will be close to Walter Brown Newman’s “great work.”

As for what I left out of the original article --

-- that’s my own, very-limited involvement trying to get the movie made. I was working at Universal Pictures in the mid-1980s, I worked at Universal Pictures in development, as an assistant to Bob Rehme who was the president of the studio. One day, I decided to pitch Harrow Alley to him – but knew if I was was too upfront about what the project was, it would likely scare him off. So, I first brought up that I’d come across a brilliant screenplay, and that it had long been considered in several articles and polls the greatest screenplay that had never yet been made into a movie, and that it was written by one of Hollywood’s great screenwriters who'd written movies such as The Great Escape, The Magnificent Seven and Cat Ballou, as well as the classics Ace in the Hole (co-written with Billy Wilder and Lesser Samuels) and The Man with the Golden Arm (with Frank Sinatra, about drug addiction) -- and that though initially it was a challenging topic, it wasn’t anymore, and would make a tremendous movie. Bob was very excited at this point, and anxiously asked me what the project was. I said it was called Harrow Alley, and – at this point, I had no choice but to dive in, hoping that I’d set things up well enough – it was about the Black Plague in 1665 and… Well, there was nothing else needed to say, since his face dropped, his body shrank, and it was like all the air had been sucked out of the room.

About 10 years later, I made another stab at getting Harrow Alley set up, though it was a far longer shot. With my friend Philippa Salisbury, we got a talented Hollywood financial expert to join us, and he budgeted the movie for workable cost. I had a copy of the budget for years – it was over 300 pages. After many years, there was no reason to keep it – but I did keep what is now one of my prize possessions (and I have absolutely no recollection how I came across it): a detailed blueprint for the London neighborhood of Harrow Alley that had been drawn for a prospective production of the movie – what year, I don’t know – designed and signed by Elliott Scott, the legendary art director and production designer whose credits include Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Dragonslayer, Evil Under the Sun, Labyrinth, The Pirates of Penzance, The Yellow Rolls-Royce and three Oscar nominations, among them one for Who Framed Roger Rabbit? We also came up with a semi-clever way to deal with long-standing studio concern of a 177-page screenplay: we retyped the script using a proportional Times-New Roman font that’s uses less space than the stand Courier. Our version came in at just 138 pages! (We knew it wouldn’t ultimately fool anyone, since they’d easily recognize the different font, but our hope was that the shorter length wouldn’t scare anyone off even before they read a word.) Alas, it was for naught. But we tried. And I’ve kept trying, if only to keep the name of Harrow Alley alive.

And so, still, the only remaining question is if a studio is ready to step up and finally make Harrow Alley.

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