"I'm sorry," Gene said.
"Sorry?!" I replied. "Good Lord, I'm proud that you even tried!"
I took a long look at the semi-screenplay, which had, at the time, the tide Dark Carnival, sat down, and spent the next five years turning it into a novel, published in 1962 as Something Wicked This Way Comes.
Fifteen years later, the novel turned itself back into a series of screenplays for various producers and directors at Paramount and 20th Century Fox, each time being passed over and forgotten. At one time Sam Peckinpah signed on as director.
"How will you do it, Sam?" I asked.
"Rip the pages out of your book and stuff them in the camera," he replied.
"Correct," I said. For, as you read this novel you can witness the scenes. It cries out to be photographed.
And it finally was, with Jack Clayton directing and Disney producing, almost thirty years after Gene Kelly's Invitation to the Dance.
Without his invitation to that screening, this book might never have been born. When it was published in 1962, Gene Kelly got copy Number One.