Video: In Virgin Territory

The battered leatherbound Talmud that Herman Wouk reads every morning provides instruction for almost everything in life. It failed him, however, when he faced something he had never before attempted: writing a television script. After turning out eight hefty novels and several plays, Wouk found that adapting The Winds of War to the small screen was something he could learn only by doing. Not even his five-year stint of writing radio gags for Comedian Fred Allen in the 1930s prepared him for the task, except that then, as now, he was writing for someone else. "I've come full circle, once again collaborating with someone more sophisticated, more professional than I am in terms of this medium."

That someone was Director-Producer Dan Curtis, whom Wouk describes as "a hero. He showed himself to be an expert storyteller." He also showed himself to be a stern tutor. Wouk proposed an introductory note as well as maps onscreen to illuminate the battle scenes. Curtis, recalls Wouk, "told me that viewers are bored by maps, and he shrugged off an introduction."

Wouk had already absorbed his first lesson in cinematic construction from the original scriptwriter, Jack Pulman. A key element in the novel was the ironic perspective of the apocryphal German General Von Roon, who narrated the historical passages. Pulman maintained that Von Roon's literary irony could not be preserved and that his insights ought to be dramatized in scenes showing world leaders in action. "It was a hell of a shock to me," says Wouk. But within a day Wouk had concluded that it was "a craftsmanlike stroke that cut to the heart of the matter."

Working with Curtis, Wouk quickly learned how stringent TV's narrative requirements are. "Only 15% to 20% of the material in the book is on the screen," he notes. "The film medium can say a lot more in a hurry. The attack on the refugees fleeing from Cracow to Warsaw was built sentence by sentence in the book in order to engage the reader's imagination. In a few seconds on the screen, however, you have flames, zooming planes, horses rearing, people falling."

One of Wouk's early miscues was constructing each evening's segment as a self-contained entity. "I was in virgin territory and tried to end each of the episodes with a cliffhanger," he says. "Curtis showed me that although you might break at a high point, it was really one flow of narrative, just like the novel."

Wouk still ended up writing scenes that Curtis never shot. "One I hated to lose was Hitler and Goring at the Eiffel Tower as they lowered the French flag and raised the Nazi one, and a bereft Frenchman looked on," says Wouk. Author-Adapter Herman Wouk "That was dramatic, I thought." On the other hand, Curtis occasionally requested material that had not appeared in the book; for example, in a scene where Newlyweds Byron Henry and Natalie Jastrow encounter some Nazis in a Lisbon restaurant, Curtis wanted to have Byron slug one of the Nazis, instead of simply walking out as he did in the book. Wouk objected that Byron would never do such a thing. Curtis shot it anyway. Says Wouk: "I laughed when he told me, and said I'd sue him. But when I saw it on the screen, I realized it was cinematically endurable."