A filmíró Mészöly Miklós

A három burgonyabogár, Úton útfélen, Három burgonyabogár, Ami jön

Absztrakt

Miklós Mészöly the Screenwriter

Miklós Mészöly had a strong affinity for motion picture. This affection is present in both his prose and his theoretical work from a very early stage and gains its most subtle mise-en-text in his novel Film (1976). However, he never wrote any film scripts that were actually finished and produced and didn’t cooperate in adapting his own prose writings to the screen. Despite this fact, there is one screenplay written by Mészöly, which is preserved in the Hungarian National Film Archive, titled Úton, útfélen (roughly: Here and There, 1967). The director of this film would have been Zoltán Huszárik, but it was never produced as a finished movie. The starting point for this screenplay was an earlier short story by Mészöly, and after the rejection of the screenplay, he reworked the text two more times. This paper is a comparative analysis of these four versions of the same basic text. By this comparison, the paper outlines how Mészöly mastered new writing techniques through the practice of screenwriting, which helped him write one of his major works: Film.