All About Eve a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The film has been selected by the American Film Institute for many of their 100 Years lists. When AFI named Bette Davis #2 on its list of the greatest female American screen legends, "All About Eve" was the film selected to highlight Davis' legendary career. The Writers Guild of America has ranked the film's screenplay as the fifth greatest ever written. The film opens with the image of a fictitious award trophy, described by DeWitt as the "highest honor our theater knows: the Sarah Siddons Award for Distinguished Achievement." The statuette is modelled after
All About Eve provided numerous suggestions for improving the screenplay. In some sections, he felt Mankiewicz's writing lacked subtlety or provided excessive detail. He suggested diluting Birdie Coonan's jealousy of Eve so the audience would not recognize Eve as a villain until much later in the story. Zanuck reduced the screenplay by about 50 pages and chose the title "All About Eve" from the opening scenes in which Addison DeWitt says he will soon tell "more of Eve ... All about Eve, in fact." Among the actresses originally considered to play Margo Channing were Mankiewicz's original inspiration, Susan Hayward, who was rejected by