Letter from Lillian Gish, New York, New York, to Edward Wagenknecht, 1960 September 20 : typescript signed.

Writing that she envies him and his finished draft of "Theodore Roosevelt", as she has spent a year and a half on her book on D.W. Griffith; mentioning the possibly of meeting with him to discuss Mark Twain, asking him how long he expects to be working on his book on Twain, and pointing out that she very close to Twain's good friend A.B. Paine and I might have stories of him for you", adding "I don't see how you can do Twain without Paine! (Poetry!) This was a great story of friendship between two men. They loved one another and he died in his arms."; explaining to him that the reason he was unsatisfied with "Play of the week's" televised production of (Truman Capote's play) "The grass harp" was that they were "only given ten days to do this delicate story", working sixteen, eighteen, and twenty-two hours days during taping; going on to write that Capote was in Spain and before that "in Kansas on, of all things, a murder story!"; expressing her hope that they send Wagenknecht to Granada in Spain for "the Washington Irving story", as she thinks it would prove a beneficial change for them; asking him if he has finished reading A.R. Fulton's book on film (i.e. Motion pictures : the development of an art from silent films to the age of television), remarking that "Your report sounds hopeful", and observing that Fulton would have gotten information on (Georges) Méliès from the Cinematheque in Paris, which "is full of astonishing things about pictures."; informing him that she starts rehearsals next week for (Tad Mosel's) "All the way home", and that they will open in New Haven in October and go from there to Boston, where she will see Wagenknecht and his family and procure them tickets to the show; mentioning that the reason he liked (the televised production of) "Miss Susie Slagle" better (than "The grass harp") "is that we had six weeks to film it."