Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God by Nat Segaloff Page B

arts film. Originally, when I rewrote, I wrote Tiana’s part as the daughter of an important tong leader in San Francisco, a female Billy the Kid, a great martial artist, an absolute killer, and a tough little Chinese cookie who was appointed to be one of the bodyguards for this politician and to work with some snappy ex-CIA guys… . What happened was that Sam simply didn’t like what I did with the script. But United Artists did, so he accepted the script. When we got up to San Francisco, everyone started changing everything. I got so disgusted by the changes and the direction everything was taking, I walked off the film and refused to have anything to do with it… . They totally changed Tiana’s part, then cut out everything that she did.” Added Tiana, “The Sam Peckinpah experience still counts deeply in my battered psyche. It was my dream to act. First there were no parts for me, then I got an Oscar-winner to create them, but no acceptance!”
    According to Silliphant, he not only wanted to give Tiana a plum role he wanted to take a stand for her people. “I had taken the assignment because essentially it gave me a chance to say something about Asian points of view,” Silliphant later elaborated to a panel at the 1983 Manila International Film Festival. “And, as they got to the shoot, they began to change it around to kid Asians and make all kinds of racial slurs. I felt the film had become very racist. I was absolutely embittered about it and wouldn’t go to rehearsals and began to yell and scream. I tried to get my name off, and I couldn’t. Before you accept a contract, you specify that in the event the film is changed and dissatisfies you, you have a pseudonym that you can substitute, then it can be done. But when the studio hires you, they’re really hiring you too, for your name, and if you then say to the public, ‘I hate this picture,’ you’re damaging the film and they have a cause against you,. So it becomes a very interesting legal issue. The only way you can protect yourself is, in front, you say, ‘I have reservations about this. If it doesn’t work out, then I have the right to use a pseudonym.” I didn’t know that at the time.” [259]
    Despite strife on the picture, the Silliphants were so taken with the Northern California setting that they bought a house and moved there after the film wrapped. It was a bad choice; the house, purchased from real estate developer and philanthropist Mark Taper, was built on a land appendage overlooking the Bay called Strawberry Point. It turned out that it had been erected in violation of local environmental ordinances, and the Silliphants spent the next seven years in legal battles over zoning, access to water, the unhealthful condition of the house, and the sale itself. Eventually they sold it at a loss and moved back to Beverly Hills.
    The rewriting of The Killer Elite, perfunctory or not, rekindles the question of why Silliphant was offered so many novel-to-screen adaptations in his prime years when his reputation had been built by writing over one hundred television originals. He constantly pondered this, particularly whenever he had to tackle massive, big-budget mini-series projects Pearl (1978, three hours), The Brotherhood of the Rose (1989, four hours); like Mussolini: The Untold Story (1985, seven hours); and Space (1985, thirteen hours).
    “If it’s based on somebody else’s novel,” he told TV host Mike Douglas in March of 1975, “you read it, you absorb it, you try to find his intent. As you know, writing a novel and writing a film are two separate things. A novel has introspective passages, it has flashbacks when the guy was two years old that you can’t have in a film. So you have to extract from the book that central part of it which you think is the film that you and the producer want to make. If it’s an original, he doesn’t have to read anything, it comes out of himself. It’s much easier. Writing adaptations is the most