This version didn’t work, nor was it true to the facts, so I did a second draft in which, at Lahr’s suggestion, I introduced him as a character writing the biography. I also introduced myself as another character writing the screenplay of the biography, hoping in this way to come to terms with my own hostile feelings about Orton. Not surprisingly this many-layered construction didn’t work either, though it was this version that in 1980 we took to a new company who were originally interested in making the film. Or making a film. Any film. I think they just fancied the idea of ‘making films’. They must have done because they professed to be pleased with this baroque script, even though it was about four hours long and largely incomprehensible. More shrewdly, they were banking on our selling them the rights so that they could then hack it to the shape they wanted. Fortunately at a late stage in the negotiations they let it slip that what they really had in mind was ‘an English Cage aux Folles’. At which point we beat a hasty retreat.

There the matter rested for four years until in 1984 Zenith expressed an interest. I dusted off the script, wincing at a good deal of it, and decided that what it really needed was a strong central narrator. Narrators don’t normally work on film – they’re a confession of some failure in the storytelling – but one that does is George Sanders as the critic Addison de Witt, who tells the story in All About Eve. So I wrote a third version, beginning as All About Eve begins at an awards ceremony with the tale being told by Orton’s agent, Peggy Ramsay. It’s basically that version with many additions and subtractions that is printed here.