By Harry Haun
31 Jan 2011

	David Seidler

She was well along in years then, so he figured it wouldn't be a long wait. It was 28 years. She lived to be 101. By then, Valentine Logue had died, and Seidler was slow to jump back into the project. A cancer scare got his priorities straight in one quick hurry, and "I thought, 'Well, if you're not going to tell the Bertie story now, when are you going to tell it? I may not be around for that much longer.' So I started writing."

It turned into a two-pronged attack on the material — first as a screenplay, and then as a play. "I showed the first draft to my then-wife and writing partner of 30 years, Jacqueline Feather, and she said, 'Look, David, there's some wonderful things in there, but you're getting seduced by cinematic technique. You're just not getting to the core of the relationships. Why don't you — simply as an exercise — write it as a play? That will force you to focus because the tent poles of 'The King's Speech' will always be two men in a room. If you get that right, then you can hang all the other stuff like Christmas ornaments. So I wrote it as a play that achieved what she suggested, and, when I looked at it, I thought, 'Say, this isn't half-bad,' so I showed it to some friends who'd had careers on Broadway, and they raved about it."

Oddly, in trying to get the property on to the boards, it was the film version that took flight first. Joan Lane, the British producer who was interested in the play, had an assistant who lived a couple of blocks from Rush in Melbourne and, during her Christmas vacation, slipped a plot synopsis in his mail chute. Seidler, having been flatly turned down by Rush's Australian agent, was mortified by this tacky tactic, but six months later that same agent sheepishly notified him that Rush was keenly interested in this little film outline unofficially slipped to him over the transom.

What interested him was the role. "Geoffrey was always the person I wanted to play Lionel Logue. From the moment I started thinking about this seriously, it was always Geoffrey Rush. At that stage, I hadn't turned the play back into a screenplay, so, since the stage play was in far better shape than the script, that's what I sent to him. He said, 'I don't want to do the play, but, if it becomes a film, count me in.' Also — and this was crucial — he said, 'You may use my name.' Which was very generous. No money changed hands, no paperwork. His name really helped get momentum going. Finally, when I did get the screenplay written — which took two and a half weeks — he read it and said, 'I'm in. I'm attached now.' Again, no money changed hands."

	Harvey Weinstein
	photo by Joseph Marzullo/WENN

Rush's participation brought on board Harvey Weinstein as executive producer and Hooper as director. Firth was hardly first choice for king, according to the latter. "My initial reservations about Colin were that he was ten years too old and a big strapping lad of six-foot-two whereas the real king was slight and smaller and quite sickly-looking almost," Hooper admits, "but the more I thought about it, I thought the spiritual similarity was more important than the physical thing."

Seidler had Firth doubts, too. "I was concerned because Colin's face is the wrong shape. I don't think he looks much like George at all — but I realized nobody under 60 has the vaguest memory of what he looked like. Only stamp collectors know."

In researching George VI, the actor came up against the same blank walls that Seidler did. "So much is a mystery," Firth concedes. "The flow of information out of Buckingham Palace is nonexistent. If I play a role, I want to familiarize myself with that person's world, and their profession is a big part of that. If I play an airline pilot or a doctor, I'd probably want to hang out with a doctor or a pilot for a while to see what they did and ask them questions. You don't get to hang out with kings, and they don't help consult on movies. So your resources, by necessity, are secondary."

It helped not a whit that he'd played two stammerers in the past — a World War I vet in the 1987 film, "A Month in the Country," and at the Donmar Warehouse in 1999 in Richard Greenberg's play, Three Days of Rain. "It was different every time," insists Firth. "None of that helped. It was a different guy, with different dialogue, different issues, different ways of dealing with things so we had to start again. We had to find a way to make this sound authentic and have it be painful. The audience had to experience the pain and the discomfort and the frustration, not only his but the people who are rooting for him. That had not to be compromised."

What was helpful was drawing on the screenwriter's own personal history. "Colin did a lot of research, and he did a lot of questioning of me on what it was like to stutter, how it feels to be a stutterer," Seidler recalls. "We had a lot of long conversations about it. He asked some very good and probing questions about it."

Considering the conspicuous success Firth has had with George VI, you might think he'd be first in line for the stage version, but "no, they didn't actually approach me. David Seidler winked at me a couple of times. Best let someone else get a crack at it."

The play, left by the wayside when the screenplay caught film, is now in the court of lead producer Michael Alden, who's comfortably twiddling his thumbs, reviewing his options while the movie runs its course, winning awards and audience awareness for Bertie and Lionel. Alden says he has been besieged by co-producing offers from Broadway, West End and Australia. Exactly where it will first surface will depend on cast availability, but London looks the most likely — especially since it will directed by Adrian Noble, the RSC's artistic director who brought to Broadway A Midsummer Night's Dream and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

	Helena Bonham Carter and Colin Firth
	photo by The Weinstein Company

"The original idea was to have the play come to Broadway in March," says Seidler, "but the leading actors we approached for the roles all said, 'We'd love to do it, but we don't want to take on Colin and Geoffrey so close to the Oscars — in retrospect, quite rightly so. So it will probably be in the fall of 2011. By then, the film will have been out almost a year, and it becomes two separate things. There will be a discreet pause. If it goes to the West End first, that wouldn't displease me at all. It being such a British story, it should be a West End production coming to Broadway.

"There is a lot of things that are in the stage play that are not in the film and a lot of things that are in the film that are not in the stage play. Yes, it is recognizably the same piece, but there's a lot of different material. Such as: In the play, Lionel Logue, Winston Churchill and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang, act almost as a comic Greek chorus, which works extremely well on stage — but, in a film, it would be very theatrical so that all got expunged, and some of the best lines went with it."

Also, the cast of characters has been pared down to eight — Bertie and Lionel and their wives, Elizabeth and Myrtle (played in the movie by Helena Bonham Carter and Jennifer Ehle), Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin (Anthony Andrews), Winston Churchill (a Laughton-looking Timothy Spall) and David/Edward VIII, with Wallis Simpson as a walk-on. "There are no children in it because we didn't want child actors and the expense of nannies and everything, so the princesses [Margaret and the now-reigning Elizabeth] are not in the play at all.

"The other difference is the opening. The curtain goes up, and you see a large enamel bathtub with gilded legs. Out of the water appears a head. Bertie comes out of the water, an embryo as it were, and footmen rush in and wrap him in towels, and he's dressed. There he is, with plumes and braids and all. He looks at himself in the mirror, and he says, 'I look like a Christmas tree.' That's the first line in the play."

Seidler believes the movie will be a good advance-man for the play. "I had a conversation with Richard Price, who actually put up some of the seed money for this and for Mamma Mia!. He said, when the 'Mamma Mia' movie came out, he thought it'd really kill the box office for the play, but, no — it tripled it."

At 73, Seidler — interviewed weeks before his nomination was announced — figured, if nominated, he would be the oldest screenwriter ever in Oscar contention, but no again: "I think I'd now be the second oldest. The oldest is my idol, George Bernard Shaw, who, in 1939, at 83, was nominated and won for 'Pygmalion.'" When notified of the win, GBS proclaimed, "This award's an insult!"

Seidler laughs at this and promises, should he win, "I certainly won't say that!"

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