Mark Steyn has a marvelous obit for Ernest Lehman, who passed away earlier this month:

Accepting an honorary Oscar at the 2001 Academy Awards, Lehman urged movie critics to ‘bear in mind that a film production begins and ends with a screenplay’. Just so. If William Goldman is more frequently posited as the archetypal consummate screenwriter, Goldman himself in his last book on the trade acknowledges Lehman as the ultimate movie pro, an author so versatile there’s no signature or style other than superb skill across all the genres: of his big films, North by Northwest is a brilliant original screenplay; The Sweet Smell of Success an unforgettable shot of pure vitriol drawn from his own short story; The Sound of Music an efficient adaptation so spectacularly successful it came to dwarf the original stage version; and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a fabulous one-off in which Lehman demonstrated that his skills of adaptation could be applied just as effectively to new dramatists like Edward Albee as to Rodgers and Hammerstein. He was the Hollywood musical’s last screenwriter (The King and I, West Side Story, Hello, Dolly!) and Philip Roth’s first (Portnoy’s Complaint). He did the glossiest romantic soufflés (Sabrina, with Humphrey Bogart and Audrey Hepburn) and a dark terrorist thriller (Black Sunday by Thomas Harris in pre-Silence of the Lambs days).

As Dave Johnston wrote on Monday, "Over the last few years, 'actors talking' seems like a lost art. And there’s no good reason at least one big studio hasn’t figured that out."