So I’m posting my screenplay, Tabula Rasa, onto a website that requires you to include the names of three movies to which your screenplay is similar. I was stumped … until my friend Kathe mentioned The World of Henry Orient.

Of course, I thought. It had never occurred to me until that moment that there was any resemblance between my screenplay and this overlooked gem.

The World of Henry Orient (1964) is that rarest of rarities, a Hollywood girl-buddy film. To judge by its advertising you would assume it’s a Peter Sellers film, but in fact Sellers’ role is secondary to that of its adolescent leads. It takes a lot to upstage Peter Sellers, but Tippy Walker and Merrie Spaeth pull it off.

Gil (Spaeth, the blonde) and Val (Walker, in the mink coat) are upper-class Manhattan teenagers who have a crush on Henry Orient (Sellers), a self-important, womanizing concert pianist. Here, they trade broken-family fantasies:

The girls pursue Henry as he in turn chases Mrs. Dunworthy (Paula Prentiss), and the paranoid pianist thinks the girls are spies sent by his lover’s husband. Eventually, Val’s mother gets involved (Angela Lansbury in full Manchurian Candidate mode), and she becomes convinced that Orient has actually seduced her daughter.

On Thanksgiving, Val is in hiding at Gil’s:

The screenplay was co-written by Nunnally Johnson (The Man In The Grey Flannel Suit, The Dirty Dozen) and his daughter Nora who wrote the novel on which it was based. Nora Johnson confessed to having had a teenage crush on — of all people — Oscar Levant.

United Artists bought the script for Hayley Mills and Patty Duke, but after they passed someone decided to beef up the title role for Sellers. As it turns out, he’s the weakest thing in the movie; one can sense his distress that the teenagers are stealing the movie out from under him. The story gets a bit bogged down in soap opera but rights itself at the end.

This was one of George Roy Hill’s first features, and one suspects he had a lot to do with the strong performances from the girls. Of course, he went on to offer such guy-buddy films as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting. Hill later directed a Broadway musical based primarily on the novel — Henry, Sweet Henry — with music and lyrics by Bob Merrill and choreography by Michael Bennett.

Walker and Spaeth went on to do intermittent TV work; Elizabeth “Tippy” Walker even spent a year on Peyton Place (but then so did every actor in southern California). She appeared in the title role of what sounds like a truly awful Love Story knockoff, Jennifer On My Mind, and today she runs an art gallery in New Haven.

Merrie Spaeth ended up working for the FBI under Reagan. Nowadays she runs a PR firm in Texas, having married a lawyer who ran for Lieutenant Governor (and lost) on the same ticket with George W. Bush. She worked on the campaigns to discredit John Kerry and John McCain in the Presidential elections, which she later told the National Review was “the biggest mistake, at least one of the top five, of my life … I regret being involved in any way.” Somehow I find this more depressing than if she had died of a heroin overdose or if they’d had to drag the river to find her body. Gil would have seen right through them …

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