In a Jewish Cathedral
From The New York Times Magazine of Sunday, April 6, 1986—
"David Rayfiel's Script Magic" by Alex Ward
WHEN THE CALL came last year to revise ''The Morning After,'' Rayfiel was working on a screenplay about the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire for Barbra Streisand and Jane Fonda. He has now resumed work— as the principal writer, not the reviser— on that script. But chances are good that he will have further interruptions. Pollack will probably call and say, as he usually does, ''David, I need access to your brain.'' And Rayfiel will probably say, as he usually does, ''That's O.K., I'm not using it.'' He will revise another script, and be reluctant about taking credit for it.
''I guess it's like the medieval stonecutters who worked on the cathedrals,'' he says. ''There's all that elaborate work. The saints were carved by one guy, the cherubs by someone else. They didn't care about getting credit, they knew what they'd done. I'm like that. I'm the guy who does the cherubs.''
Related material:
Proginoskes in this journal and Abracadabra from the midnight of June 18-19.
See also Rayfiel's obituary in today"s Times .
For some quite different work, also from April 1986, see—