By Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit that they deserve. In this installment: screenwriter Judith Rascoe, who penned Road Movie, Who’ll Stop The Rain, Endless Love and Havana.
The 1970s were a great time for cinema: young directors with new ideas were feted; exciting, against-the-grain actors and actresses were toplining films left, right, and centre; old genres were upended and re-juiced with skill and imagination; and even many of the Hollywood studios were run by artisans. The 1970s, however, were not a great time for women. Though many stunningly gifted and game-changing actresses emerged in the era, and there were plentiful fascinating female characters in the films of the day, sexism pervaded the film industry at every turn. There were pitifully few female directors and writers working at the top levels, so those that were now retrospectively deserve all the praise and attention that they can get. In the male-dominated American film industry of the 1970s and 1980s, Judith Rascoe was one of only a handful of successful female screenwriters, and she remains disappointingly under-celebrated today for her considerable achievements.
Judith Rascoe was born in 1941 in San Francisco, and attended Stanford University’s writing program. Early in her subsequent writing career, Rascoe’s work came to the attention of noted literary critic Mark Schorer, who wrote in Esquire Magazine that she was one of the most interesting young writers of the early 1970s. Rascoe moved to the UK, and spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar at The University Of Bristol, while also undertaking teaching jobs in England. Rascoe returned to the US and studied for a brief period at Harvard University, while also working as a reader for Atlantic Monthly. Continuing to write, Rascoe took an engagement at Yale University as a fiction instructor. From there, however, Judith Rascoe’s career took a decidedly different turn, with the writer literally plucked from academia and then suddenly transplanted into the world of American cinema.
Idiosyncratic producer, director and cult darling Joseph Strick (1959’s The Savage Eye, 1963’s The Balcony, 1967’s Ulysses) read Judith Rascoe’s story “A Lot Of Cowboys” and was so impressed that he asked her to write him a screenplay, which would eventually become Strick’s largely forgotten but truly fascinating 1974 curio Road Movie. “It was an incomparable way to learn screenwriting,” Rascoe told Obscure One Sheet in 2014. “Joe had an open call for many of the parts and told me to come to every reading: ‘You don’t learn anything from a bad performance, but you can learn everything from a good one.”
Rascoe crafted something truly out of the blue for her surprise cinematic benefactor, taking on a traditionally male-driven exploitation genre – the trucking film – and giving it a compelling female edge. Bewitching fleeting 1970s-era star Regina Braff (The Paper Chase, Below The Belt, The Great Gatsby) holds the screen with outlying flair as Janice, an unruly and unbalanced truck-stop prostitute who up-ends the lives of troubled independent truckers Gil (Robert Drivas) and Hank (Barry Bostwick) with shocking intensity. A strange character piece and a riveting depiction of America’s grungy highways and sleazy road stops, the gritty and starkly poetic Road Movie is now all but forgotten. This curious little film, however, marked a truly auspicious debut for Judith Rascoe, who arrives as a fully-formed cinematic storyteller here, setting up characters and situations in a gloriously unusual and original manner. It would begin a career in screenwriting which would yield several profoundly interesting projects.
From Road Movie, Rascoe was tapped to contribute to the screenplay for Sandy Whitelaw’s esoteric 1975 horror-drama Lifespan, in which a doctor experiments with a youth serum, and then reunited with Joseph Strick, penning the director’s 1977 adaptation of James Joyce’s Portrait Of The Artist Of The Young Man. Rascoe was then brought on board to adapt Robert Stone’s novel Dog Soldiers for director Karel Reisz, with the property eventually retitled Who’ll Stop The Rain. “I got involved because Robert Stone recommended me to Karel Reisz,” Rascoe told Money Into Light. “Bob knew I was a screenwriter living in Los Angeles. I had met him and his wife in London a few years before. Robert wrote the first draft of the screenplay, and he wasn’t happy with it. Karel neither. They decided it needed another go. Robert had had a terrible experience with his first film being made into a movie [WUSA, 1970], and so he was just edgy and pessimistic about the project at that point. And so I came in, and that was that.”
Not an easy novel to adapt, Rascoe finely elucidated the book’s themes and character beats, and the resulting 1978 film – in which Nick Nolte’s Vietnam vet becomes involved in a drug smuggling plot – is a quietly gripping and singularly unforgettable affair. Into the 1980s, Rascoe did uncredited work for director Roger Spottiswoode on his 1980 debut horror flick Terror Train (“I didn’t get credit, but I rewrote the script for that. That was a hilarious adventure from top to bottom in Montreal”), and then cogently and sensitively adapted the source novels for Franco Zeffirelli’s 1981 youth drama Endless Love and Wayne Wang’s 1989 comedy Eat A Bowl Of Tea.
Though establishing herself as a gifted re-shaper of literary material, Rascoe returned to self-devised creation with her next film, which would ultimately be the biggest and most high-profile of her career. Made on a huge budget and telling of pre-revolutionary Cuba, Sydney Pollack’s 1990 drama Havana was a box office disaster, and was viewed as a typical example of rampant studio bloat. A true epic made in the style of “old school” political-social history-fiction weaves like Exodus, and unquestionably influenced by Casablanca, Havana is actually a hell of a lot better than its truly tarnished reputation might suggest. There’s a real sense of sweep and romance in this tale of a gambler (Robert Redford) who gets drawn into the Cuban Revolution at the behest of a beautiful woman (Lena Olin), and Rascoe’s script (which was polished by Pollack’s regular go-to writer David Rayfiel) is well structured, while her characters have real depth.
Disappointingly, Havana remains Rascoe’s final feature screenwriting credit, though she did contribute to the 1992 telemovie Strangers, and served as a story editor on 2007’s Shake Hands With The Devil and 2010’s The Bang Bang Club. Adapting existing books for the big screen is a far more difficult task than some would give it credit for, and Judith Rascoe is a truly fine exemplar of this unsung art, while her original screenplays (not to mention her short stories and journalistic work) speak of a truly gifted creative force.
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs Michael Pressman, Peter Carter, Leo V. Gordon, Dalene Young, Gary Nelson, Fred Walton, James Frawley, Pete Docter, Max Baer Jr., James Clavell, Ronald F. Maxwell, Frank D. Gilroy, John Hough, Dick Richards, William Girdler, Rayland Jensen, Richard T. Heffron, Christopher Jones, Earl Owensby, James Bridges, Jeff Kanew, Robert Butler, Leigh Chapman, Joe Camp, John Patrick Shanley, William Peter Blatty, Peter Clifton, Peter R. Hunt, Shaun Grant, James B. Harris, Gerald Wilson, Patricia Birch, Buzz Kulik, Kris Kristofferson, Rick Rosenthal, Kirsten Smith & Karen McCullah, Jerrold Freeman, William Dear, Anthony Harvey, Douglas Hickox, Karen Arthur, Larry Peerce, Tony Goldwyn, Brian G. Hutton, Shelley Duvall, Robert Towne, David Giler, William D. Wittliff, Tom DeSimone, Ulu Grosbard, Denis Sanders, Daryl Duke, Jack McCoy, James William Guercio, James Goldstone, Daniel Nettheim, Goran Stolevski, Jared & Jerusha Hess, William Richert, Michael Jenkins, Robert M. Young, Robert Thom, Graeme Clifford, Frank Howson, Oliver Hermanus, Jennings Lang, Matthew Saville, Sophie Hyde, John Curran, Jesse Peretz, Anthony Hayes, Stuart Blumberg, Stewart Copeland, Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.
