In 1934, not long after “talkies” were first invented, Director Howard Hawks sat down with novelist William Faulkner in front of a new voice-recording machine and wrote two screenplays in one weekend.

Hawks read a bit of narrative action from a Faulkner short story into the voice recorder to set the scene — and then Faulkner performed all the dialogue which he had not included in his tight short stories. 

Faulkner spoke as all the characters in each scene. Soon, he was doing both – dictating the action lines and creating new dialogue, voicing the conversation in his mind’s eye. 

On Monday, a stenographer typed up all the audio tapes. Then those pages were reformatted by script assistants. From 1934 to 1954, William Faulkner worked on around 50 films.