Includes One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Handcarved Coffins, and Viva Las Vegas

Lost Screenplay Collection [Signed, Numbered]

Blatty, William Peter; Ken Kesey; and Truman Capote

Notes: A collection of five early 1960s screenplays written by William Peter Blatty, the writer best known for The Exorcist (both the novel and the screenplay). In the early 1960s, he wrote comics novels that did not sell well, and screenplays, a medium he would work in for fifty years. For this collection, he pulled five screenplays out of his files:

1) Viva Las Vegas (1962). An early draft of the Elvis movie;
2) One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (no date); an early, uncredited draft of a film based on the Ken Kesey novel;
3) Mastermind (1969), a Japanese American mystery film, which starred Zero Mostel as Inspector Hoku Ichihara (this movie was finally made in 1970 but not released until 1977; Blatty chose to use a pseudonym in the credits);
4) Handcarved Coffins (1985), an unproduced screenplay based on Truman Capote's novella of the same name, which was not published until Music for Chameleons in 1980;
5) Demons Five, Exorcists Nothing (2012), an unproduced screenplay set during the filming of a horror film very similar to the Exorcist.

This five-volume set was published in an edition of just 390 copies. It has not attracted the attention of Elvis, Kesey, or Capote collectors.

Edition + Condition: First edition (first printing). A fine set of five volumes in a very near fine slipcase. Signed by Blatty in Viva Las Vegas.

Publication: Baltimore, MD: Lonely Road, 2018.

Item No: #361692

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