The Fact of Murder

An unfinished collaboration between Val Lewton and Mark Robson, The Fact of Murder is a film noir thriller written 1946-47.

Having scanned, proofed and transcribed a stack of Lewton-penned scripts I can safely say that the first six pages of the fragment were written by Robson and the remaining twenty by Lewton. The first six are tough going with lots of overblown description and no real sense of momentum. Robson writes like a director and puts in loads of camera direction and other technical details. The writing is interesting in that you can see the director thinking through a scene but as a narrative it's fairly tedious.

Lewton takes over at INT. NEW YORK MORNING TELEGRAM PROOF DEPARTMENT - NIGHT. All the phrases that I've come to expect in a Lewton script resurface in Fact as well as the interconnecting lines of dialogue that end with "--" and a tendency to forget to use a question mark at the end of a question. There's a scene toward the end of the piece set in a men's restroom which shows Lewton at his most Lewton.