03-05-2016, 07:22 PM
R.K. Locke Wrote:"KosiÅ„ski was friends with Roman Polanski, with whom he attended the National Film School in Åódź, and said he narrowly missed being at Polanski and Sharon Tate's house on the night Tate was murdered by Charles Manson's followers in 1969, due to lost luggage. His novel Blind Date discussed the Manson murders.[4] KosiÅ„ski was also friends with Wojciech Frykowski and Abigail Folger. He introduced the couple."
Kosinski also wrote (many would say plagiarized) the book Being There, which was the basis for the classic Peter Sellers film of the same name. The finale of the movie is interesting:
Peter Sellers was also, of course, in the TV movie A Carol for Another Christmas, written by Rod Serling and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, the co-writer of Citizen Kaneand uncle of RFK's press secretary Frank Mankiewicz.
***
It was Herman J. Mankiewicz, Joe's brother, who co-wrote CITIZEN KANE
with Orson Welles. The Mankiewicz family keeps lying about the credit,
claiming Herman wrote the film entirely by himself. Frank Mankiewicz's recent posthumously
published memoir repeats that lie. Frank was Herman's son. Robert Carringer's research into
the script drafts of KANE has shown that the shared credit is accurate.
Wellesnet.com has run commentary on this endless controversy, which
should have been settled by Carringer's research. I wrote about the controversy in Film
Heritage in 1971 and again in 2009 for the section on screenwriting
in the Harvard University Press book A NEW LITERARY HISTORY OF AMERICA,
eds. Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors.