Title: Providence (1977 film)
Content: John Gielgud as Clive Langham. Gielgud described his role as "a very tough, Augustus John kind of character, drunk half the time, lying in bed drinking white wine and throwing bottles about, and roaring a lot of very coarse dialogue." ; Dirk Bogarde as Claude Langham ; Ellen Burstyn as Sonia Langham ; David Warner as Kevin Langham / Kevin Woodford ; Elaine Stritch as Helen Wiener ; Cyril Luckham as Doctor Mark Eddington ; Denis Lawson as Dave Woodford ; Kathryn Leigh Scott as Miss Boon ; Milo Sperber as Mr. Jenner ; Anna Wing as Karen ; Peter Arne as Nils ; Tanya Lopert as Miss Lister 
Title: Providence (1977 film)
Content:  The producer Klaus Hellwig suggested to Resnais that he should make a film with the British playwright David Mercer. The two men met in London and, overcoming the obstacle that neither of them spoke the language of the other fluently, they began a series of discussions of drafts and redraftings which extended over a year. Mercer's original idea concerned the situation of political prisoners held in a sports stadium, symbolising a world in collapse. Gradually the outline shifted to the imagination of an aging writer seeking the material for a novel. Resnais proposed making the whole film into a metaphor of creation and disintegration; he also made extensive alterations 
Title: Providence (1977 film)
Content:  the chronology of the scenes as written by Mercer. The title of the film was also supplied by the producer, signifying both the name of the estate where the ageing novelist lives and also the controlling hand with which he arranges the fate of his characters. The name evoked further associations with the American city of Providence, the home of the fantasy writer H. P. Lovecraft whose gothic stories inspired some of the imagery in the film. The original intention was to shoot the film in the United States in New England but for reasons of cost this became impracticable. Certain exterior scenes were filmed in Providence and in 
Title: Providence (1977 film)
Content:  of imagination of a supposedly dying writer". In the UK, the film received a more varied reception, and it had a successful box-office run in London. David Robinson writing in The Times was troubled by the quality of the writing: "Resnais's visual creations ... seem very flimsily supported on the frame of David Mercer's script ...  the writing, again, is self-conscious, stiffly literary.  The dialogue is formal, and artificial ... And the pretensions of the text only increase suspicion that it is not about very much at all." A non-judgmental review in the Monthly Film Bulletin emphasised the many layers 
Title: Providence (1977 film)
Content:  Resnais described the film as a "macabre divertissement", insisting that he wanted it to be funny despite the darkness of its themes. He also said that one of the questions which the film poses is whether we are the people we think we are or whether we become what others make of us in their judgments. A central theme is the process of artistic creation: "[Providence] is a meta-film, a film about the making of films, a work of art about the fabricating of art works." Expanding this idea: "The film suggests some symbiotic relation between creator and created script.... The characters are [Clive's] creations, yet he speaks to them as if they were wilful children. Their 
Title: Providence (1977 film)
Content:  On the eve of his 78th birthday, the ailing, alcoholic writer Clive Langham spends a painful and sleepless night mentally composing and recomposing scenes for a novel in which characters based on his own family are shaped by his fantasies and memories, alongside his caustic commentary on their behaviour. His son Claude appears as a cold and unforgiving prosecuting lawyer, who revels in spiteful repartee. His second (illegitimate) son Kevin features as an idealistic soldier accused of the mercy-killing of an old man who was being hunted down. Sonia, the wife of Claude, shows sympathy with Kevin and seems eager to seduce him in protest at her husband's callousness. Clive also invents the character of Helen, as Claude's mistress, but she bears the features of Clive's dead wife Molly who committed suicide. Clive's imagination is also 
Title: Providence (1977 film)
Content:  contemporary ones. In the Oxford History of World Cinema it is described as "a magisterial and deeply moving incursion into the fantasies of a dying man". For the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, "The superb performances and Miklós Rózsa's sumptuous Hollywood-style score give the film's conceit a moving monumentality and depth, and Resnais' insights into the fiction-making process are mesmerising and beautiful." The artist Tacita Dean cited Providence as her favourite film, saying that "it deals effortlessly with the problems of enacting the fantasies of a writer’s imagination. It mixes places and time within single sequences to create an uncanny sense 
Title: Providence (1977 film)
Content:  structure complicated without being complex. For John Simon in New York it was an "unmitigated disaster" in which he criticised almost every aspect with the exception of John Gielgud's performance. Pauline Kael wrote a 2000 word review in The New Yorker which found fault with the contradictory structure, the stilted language, the artificiality of the acting, and the glacial directorial style of the film before concluding that all it amounted to was "the pain of a 'clever' English play". A short notice in Variety took a different view, referring to "an unusual visual tour-de-force ... offering dense insights into the 
Title: Providence (1977 film)
Content:  supplements the first by altering its effect, by denying its sometimes hostile paranoid proof but not by eradicating these altogether. The parts of the film open Providence up as a series of reflecting realities which, wound together, may offer something of the hesitance and doubt of mental process. In this sense, Providence may be seen as a precursor to the work of David Lynch in films such as Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Drive (2001)."Providence received five top-10 votes (three from critics and two from directors) in the 2012 Sight & Sound polls of the greatest films ever made.
Title: Outside Providence (film)
Content: Shawn Hatosy as Timothy Dunphy ; Amy Smart as Jane Weston ; Alec Baldwin as Old Man Dunphy ; Jon Abrahams as Drugs Delaney ; Jonathan Brandis as Mousy ; Adam LaVorgna as Tommy the Wire ; Jesse Leach as Decenz ; Gabriel Mann as Jack Wheeler ; Jack Ferver as Irving Waltham ; Richard Jenkins as Barney ; Mike Cerrone as Caveech ; George Wendt as Joey ; Eric Brown as English teacher ; Timothy Crowe as Mr. Funderburk 

Question: Who was the screenwriter for Providence?
Answer: David Mercer.