Faulkner's Pharaoh Folly

[WILLIAM] FAULKNER was never officially released from his contract, but it was allowed quietly to lapse - on the vague understanding that when his novel [``Barn Burning''] was completed, he would come back of his own accord. And so he did - sort of. Eight years later, as a favor to Howard Hawks, the Nobel Prize winner agreed to serve time on an Egyptian epic called Land of the Pharaohs. Puzzling over the question of ``how a pharaoh talks,'' Faulkner asked Hawks: ``Is it all right if I write him like a Kentucky colonel?'' Hawks told him to go ahead, it didn't really matter, since the whole thing would surely be rewritten on the set.

- From `Writers in Hollywood'