geoffrey garrison

The John Huston film Freud the Secret Passion (1962) presented the discovery of psychoanalysis as a detective story in which Sigmund Freud, played by Montgomery Clift, descends into the darkest depths of the psyche.

A series of edits and erasures marks history of the film: the screenplay was based on a complex scenario written by Jean-Paul Sartre that was subsequently rewritten by a series of Hollywood screenwriters; further scenes were excised by the studio to make it acceptable to a broad audience; and nineteen minutes, including a key subplot, were edited out of the film when it was dubbed into German — Freud's mother tongue.

In 2004 and 2005 I composed a screenplay, Freud's Doppelgaenger, as a fictional dramatization of the production of Freud the Secret Passion and the downfall of its star, Montgomery Clift. For the nineteen-minute video based on this screenplay, I hired actors to reenact scenes from the plot.

The Director's Cut: Freud's Doppelgaenger, The Cut, and Deleted Scenes collects together all of the material I wrote while researching the John Huston film Freud the Secret Passion at the Jan van Eyck Academie. The feature-length screenplay Freud's Doppelgaenger tells the story behind the Huston film and the stories of various figures involved in the making of the film. Set in the nineteen-fifties, Huston is confronted with pressure from the studio to make a tantalizing picture as well as with opposing pressure from the Catholic church not to make the picture at all. The Cut is the screenplay for the short nineteen-minute video that I derived from the longer screenplay, and Deleted Scenes collects together a subplot from Freud's Doppelgaenger concerning the ill-fated marriage of Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller as well as Miller's troubles with the House Committee on Unamerican Activities.