Book excerpt: Screenplays and scripts from the playwright of The Normal Heart. “A valuable showcase of an important writer’s early career.”—The Bay Area Reporter Larry Kramer has been described by Susan Sontag as “one of America’s most valuable troublemakers.” As Frank Rich writes in his Foreword to this collection of writings for the screen and stage, “his plays are almost journalistic in their observation of the fine-grained documentary details of life . . . that may well prove timeless.” The title work, the Oscar-nominated screenplay for Women in Love, is a movie “as sensuous as anything you’ve probably ever seen on film” (The New York Times). The screenplay is accompanied by Kramer’s reflections on the history of the production, sure to be of interest to any student of film. This volume also includes several early plays, Sissies’ Scrapbook, A Minor Dark Age, and the political farce Just Say No, illuminating the development of one of our most important literary figures. “Since his screenplay for Women in Love, Kramer has been a prophet of psychic health and catastrophe among us.” (from The American Academy of Arts and Letters citation). Women in Love “A visual stunner and very likely the most sensual film ever made.”—New York Daily News “Throughout Larry Kramer’s literate scenario, the Lawrentian themes blaze and gutter. The sooty mind-crushing coal mines that Lawrence knew like the back of his hand are re-created in all their malignance. The annealing quality of sex is exhibited in the most erotic—and tasteful—lust scenes anywhere in contemporary film.”—Time