idea ·After Hours (1985)

The first half hour came from a radio monologue

The diner, the bagel paperweights, the $20 out the cab window: Joe Frank had broadcast them in a radio piece called Lies. The screenwriter admitted it decades later, and the settlement was about $30,000.

structure
spoken-language
atomic
authorship
plagiarism
screenplay

Joe Frank made late-night radio: long first-person monologues, part fiction, part confession, read over music. One of them, "Lies", aired in the early 1980s. In 1985 someone rang him and asked if he had seen After Hours. His widow, Michal Story, tells what happened next:

He went to see it and was struck that a lot of the details from the beginning were taken verbatim: the plaster of paris bagel-and-cream-cheese paperweights, the money blowing out of the window of the cab, and the girl who tells a story of having been raped. Joe threatened to file a lawsuit, and the filmmakers settled for about $30,000.

— Michal Story, in After Hours oral history outtakes (2023)

The screenwriter, Joseph Minion, does not deny it: "details from it unfortunately wound up in the first section of the script, and I got walloped for that in every way imaginable" (same source). Minion's script was called Lies when it reached Scorsese (Kelly, unpaged), later A Night in SoHo (sos 97).

The library tells the other half of the story without knowing it. Scorsese's first reaction to the script was to the opening: "I started reading it and really liked the first two or three pages. I liked the dialogue" (sos 97). Minion's teacher at Columbia, Dušan Makavejev, "had given it an A!" (sos 97). None of the books mentions Frank.

Frank himself drew a line. On a forum in 2007, as quoted on the Joe Frank Wiki, he said the opening was his "word for word", but that "the remainder of the film was the work of the writer."

Why it belongs here: the credit on a film is a legal fact, not a description of who made what. Compare the dispute over Mean Streets — the back room, where the argument is between improvisation and writing, and De Niro wrote in the margins. See After Hours — the diner.

Go on, then

scene After Hours — the diner A man alone with a Henry Miller paperback, a woman at the next table who knows the book, and a camera that pounces. Ten minutes that set up the whole night, and borrowed more than anyone admitted at the time.
scene Mean Streets — the back room Charlie tells Johnny Boy he has to pay. Johnny Boy tells him a story about a poker game, a raid and a man called Joey Clams, and loses the thread himself. Everyone agrees it's the heart of the film. Nobody agrees who wrote it.
idea Michael Powell wrote the ending The director of The Red Shoes, by then married to Scorsese's editor, saw a cut of After Hours with Scorsese's father, hated the ending, and suggested the one in the film. He also mentioned Kafka, whom Scorsese had never read.
idea Paul was nearly born on the West Side Highway One planned ending had Paul climb inside June to hide from the mob and be born again, naked, on a Manhattan street. David Geffen, who was paying, asked if they had lost their minds.
scene After Hours — back at work A plaster statue falls out of a burglars' van at dawn, cracks open, and the man inside walks through the gates of his office and sits down at his terminal. Rescue or sentence? The film was shot without an ending, and it shows the seams on purpose.
film After Hours (1985) A word processor goes downtown for a date, loses his last $20 out of a cab window, and cannot get home. Scorsese's comedy of paranoia, shot in forty nights for $4 million after Paramount killed The Last Temptation of Christ.