Walk a Little Faster, 1971-09-15

Typed memo and synopsis regarding Walk A Little Faster. Universal City: MCA, September 15, 1971. A typed Inter-Office Memorandum addressed to George J. Santoro from Coles Trapnell on the subject of Walk A Little Faster by Leslie Halliwell. The memo states: 'Somehow or other this got sidetracked. The author brought it in when he was visiting the studio early last month and, as I recall, you wanted it to have "courtesy coverage." Halliwell told me that he had deliberately imitated the Hitchcock films in his plot. It's a fair effort for a first try at a novel, and in the early sequences, before the author has to start unraveling his mystery and explaining things, he manages quite a bit of suspense. But by and large it is just a little too amateurish to be of strong interest to us. Mike Ludmer, incidentally, has also read the script and passed. I find myself pretty much in agreement with Lewis Clay's comment on the attached synopsis.' Clay's comment, dated September 14, 1971, states: 'This story starts out quite interestingly, then sags in the middle and falls completely apart in denouement. The witchcraft angle is handled amateurishly with none of the suspension of disbelief needed for acceptance. The fact that there is so much back story and that most of it is irrelevant doesn't help either. No publisher is mentioned.' Attached to the memos is an 3 page synopsis of Walk A Little Faster (dated September 14, 1971, but which, to the best of our knowledge, was unproduced).