AMONG THE CREATORS

GREENE AND ROUSE

Clarence Greene and Russell Rouse have been proving themselves a winning combination since they joined talent forces something over a score of years ago. Greene is the producer of their films; Rouse the director. They collaborate on story and screenplay, and in the instance of “The Oscar,” signed a third writer, Harlan Ellison, to work with them.

Together Greene and Rouse have been nominated for an Oscar for best story and screenplay written directly for the screen, “The Well,” and won an Oscar in the same category for “Pillow Talk.”

Their professional partnership – and personal friendship – has been unvaryingly amicable and in explaining the way they mesh in working together, Greene once described it as being “like a reflex.”

The team of Rouse and Greene (they alternate in which name comes first) began as writers of the screenplay for “Minstrel Man,” which starred the late Benny Fields, for the now defunct PRC. They were later responsible for a number of original stories and adaptations for that studio, which they frankly admit they would like to forget.

Their next affiliation was with producer-exhibitor Harry Popkin who gave them the chance to develop the provocative drama and Oscar nominee “The Well.” They next wrote and for the first time, co-produced “The Town Went Wild,” and after this the unusual screenplay, “D.O.A.,” which concerned a man who knew that he was dying, the victim of a murder plot, and who spent his last remaining hours on earth solving the crime.

It was after this that Greene and Rouse organized their own independent company, turning out such successes as “The Thief,” “Wicked Woman,” “New York Confidential,” “Unidentified Flying Objects,” “The Gun Runners,” “Fastest Gun Alive,” and “Thunder In The Sun.”

“Pillow Talk,” their Oscar-winning story and screenplay, was purchased from them by Universal-International Pictures for Doris Day and Rock Hudson at a time when the Rouse and Greene team were engaged in completing a television series commitment to write and produce “Tightrope,” and therefore could not film the comedy themselves.

Rouse and Greene had bought screen rights to Polly Adler’s life story, “A House Is Not A Home,” and give credit to Joseph E. Levine for the foresight and courage to finance and release a film in which the leading character, taken from life, had been a notorious madam.

“The Oscar” is the team’s second motion picture for Joseph E. Levine as executive producer, and ahead are four more, “The Minister and the Choir Singer,” the story of the Halls-Mills case; “Khadim,” an original story of modern-day slave trading; “Dream Merchants” from the Harold Robbins book, and a fourth still to be announced.