Communists
List of international film people who were at one point members of a Communist Party (most of the Hollywood blacklistees never were ). Actors , directors , writers etc
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Born in his ancestral palazzo, situated in the same Milanese square as both the opera house La Scala and the Milan Cathedral, Luchino Visconti (1906 - 1976) was raised under the auspices of aristocratic privilege, theater and Catholicism. This triangulation of monuments would create an equally titanic filmmaker whose work remained stylistically sui generis through arguably the most impressive decades of 20th century filmmaking. The quietude of La Terra Trema (1948) is managed with an operatic virtuosity, and the baroque period pieces-for which he is best known today-clearly point to a noble upbringing. However, there is also a Gothic character to Visconti-embodied in the spired cathedral that overshadowed his childhood-that has remained largely unsung. The relationship between the Visconti family and Gothic architecture stretches back to the Medieval Era. In 1386, Duke Gian Galeazzo Visconti envisioned a cathedral in the heart of Milan, though it was fated to remain under construction for almost half a millennium until Napoleon ordered its completion in the 19th century. Just as his ancestor brought Northern Gothic architecture to Italy, so, in 1943, did Luchino introduce the groundbreaking cinematic genre of Italian neorealism to the peninsula. Doing away with sets, neorealist cinema was set in the raw environment of postwar Italy. In one sense anti-architectural in its desire to transcend the bonds of interior space, this same ambition is what makes the style a perfect cinematic analog to the Gothic. The Gothic is an architecture of exteriority: Throwing ceilings to the sky and opening walls onto the outside with large windows, the Gothic presents light as the manifestation of divinity within a place of worship. The mysticism of light, dating back to the pseudo-Dionysian theology of Abbot Suger of St. Denis Cathedral, translates well to the medium of light that is the cinema. In any Visconti work, lighting is intimately connected to set design: It is often seen in the gleam of curtains, the radiance of starlight or the glow of Milanese fog, where the director carries the religiosity of Gothic architecture into his realism. Visconti's religion (or should we say religions? For he was also a Marxist) adds an ethical weight, powerful and challenging, to his works. The term decadence, often associated with Visconti, only attains meaning through being in excess of contemporary mores. Neither the Catholic Church nor the Italian communists could accept Visconti's homosexuality, and a resultant displaced angst is plainly worn by his protagonists-monumental individuals who bear the full weight of their social milieus. While neorealism has come to be packaged with its own mythology-a new cinema for a liberated nation, the idea of a new "Italian" style-re-centering our historical gaze on the Gothic Visconti allows one's imagination to spread across a much larger plane of geography and time. From his cinematic apprenticeship with Jean Renoir in France-the very cradle of Gothic architecture-to his German trilogy, Visconti's style has always been one of cosmopolitan effort. This international flavor also matches the deeper etymological referent of the Gothic-the Goths, those barbarian invaders who toppled the Roman Empire. Among Visconti's formal signatures are many borrowings from foreign directors, including the particularly pronounced influence of Jean Renoir, Josef Von Sternberg and Elia Kazan. Global in scope, timeless in influence and architectural in spirit: This is the legacy of Luchino Visconti.- Writer
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- Actor
Pier Paolo Pasolini achieved fame and notoriety long before he entered the film industry. A published poet at 19, he had already written numerous novels and essays before his first screenplay in 1954. His first film Accattone (1961) was based on his own novel and its violent depiction of the life of a pimp in the slums of Rome caused a sensation. He was arrested in 1962 when his contribution to the portmanteau film Ro.Go.Pa.G. (1963) was considered blasphemous and given a suspended sentence. It might have been expected that his next film, The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) (The Gospel According to St. Matthew), which presented the Biblical story in a totally realistic, stripped-down style, would cause a similar fuss but, in fact, it was rapturously acclaimed as one of the few honest portrayals of Christ on screen. Its original Italian title pointedly omitted the Saint in St. Matthew). Pasolini's film career would then alternate distinctly personal and often scandalously erotic adaptations of classic literary texts: Oedipus Rex (1967) (Oedipus Rex); The Decameron (1971); The Canterbury Tales (1972) (The Canterbury Tales); Arabian Nights (1974) (Arabian Nights), with his own more personal projects, expressing his controversial views on Marxism, atheism, fascism and homosexuality, notably Teorema (1968) (Theorem), Pigsty and the notorious Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), a relentlessly grim fusion of Benito Mussolini's Fascist Italy with the 'Marquis de Sade' which was banned in Italy and many other countries for several years. Pasolini was murdered in still-mysterious circumstances shortly after completing the film.- Director
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- Editorial Department
Edward Dmytryk grew up in San Francisco, the son of Ukrainian immigrants. After his mother died when he was 6, his strict disciplinarian father beat the boy frequently, and the child began running away while in his early teens. Eventually, juvenile authorities allowed him to live alone at the age of 15 and helped him find part-time work as a film studio messenger. Dmytryk was an outstanding student in physics and mathematics and gained a scholarship to the California Institute of Technology. However, he dropped out after one year to return to movies, eventually working his way up from film editor to director. By the late 1940s, he was considered one of Hollywood's rising young directing talents, but his career was interrupted by the activities of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), a congressional committee that employed ruthless tactics aimed at rooting out and destroying what it saw as Communist influence in Hollywood. A lifelong political leftist who had been a Communist Party member briefly during World War II, Dmytryk was one of the so-called "Hollywood Ten" who refused to cooperate with HUAC and had their careers disrupted or ruined as a result. The committee threw him in prison for refusing to cooperate, and after having spent several months behind bars, Dmytryk decided to cooperate after all, and testified again before the committee, this time giving the names of people he said were Communists. He claimed to believe he had done the right thing, but many in the Hollywood community--even those who came along long after the committee was finally disbanded--never forgave him, and that action overshadowed his career the rest of his life. In the 1970s, as his directing career ground to a halt, Dmytryk recalled some advice once given him by Garson Kanin, and returned to academic life, this time as a teacher. From 1976 to 1981 he was a professor of film theory and production at the University of Texas at Austin, and in 1981, was appointed to a chair in filmmaking at the University of Southern California, a position he held until about two years before his death. During his teaching career, he also authored several books on various aspects of filmmaking, as well as two volumes of memoirs.- Director
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Jules Dassin was an Academy Award-nominated director, screenwriter and actor best known for his films Rififi (1955), Never on Sunday (1960), and Topkapi (1964).
He was born Julius Samuel Dassin on 18 December 1911, in Middletown, Connecticut, USA. He was one of eight children of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Samuel Dassin and Berthe Vogel. Young Dassin grew up in Harlem, and he attended Morris High School in the Bronx, graduating in 1929. After taking acting classes in Europe, he returned to New York. In 1934, he became and actor with the ARTEF Players (Arbeter Teater Farband), and was a member of the troupe until 1939. Dassin played character roles in Yiddish, mainly in the plays by Sholom Aleichem. But upon discovering "that an actor I was not," he switched to directing and writing. At that time, he joined the Communist Party of the United States, but left the party in 1939, he said, disillusioned after the Soviet Union signed a pact with Adolf Hitler.
Dassin came to Hollywood in 1940, and was an apprentice to directors Alfred Hitchcock and Garson Kanin. In 1941, he made his directorial debut at MGM with adaptation of a story by Edgar Allan Poe. Dassin's best directorial works for Hollywood include such criminal dramas as Brute Force (1947) starring Burt Lancaster; The Naked City (1948), one of the first police dramas shot on the streets of New York; and Night and the City (1950) starring Richard Widmark as a hustler in London who is caught up in his own schemes. While he was assigned by producer Darryl F. Zanuck to make the film, Dassin was accused of affiliation with the Communist Party in his past. Zanuck advised Dassin to "shoot the expensive scenes first, to hook the studio" so the film was finished and released in 1951. Dassin was reported to HUAC in a 1951 testimony by directors Edward Dmytryk and Frank Tuttle. That was enough to sink his career in Hollywood. Dassin was subpoenaed by HUAC in 1952 and eventually became blacklisted after refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
He left the United States for France in 1953 and struggled during his first years in Paris. He was not fluent in French, and his connections were limited. However, Dassin's low-budget film, Rififi (1955), famous for its long heist sequence that was free of dialog, won him the Best Director Award at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival. There, he met the Greek actress Melina Mercouri. Later, Dassin co-starred opposite Mercouri in his film Never on Sunday (1960), which won the Best Film Award at Cannes in 1960. At that time, the anti-Communist witch hunt in America was fading, and Dassin was accepted again. He received two Academy Award-nominations for directing and screen-writing for Topkapi (1964), starring Mercouri, Maximilian Schell, and Peter Ustinov. Dassin also served as member of jury at the Cannes and several other international film festivals.
Jules Dassin was married twice. He had three children with his first wife, violinist Beatrice Launer. His son, Joe Dassin, was a popular French singer in the 1960s and '70s, with such hits as "Bip Bip," "L'Eté Indien" and "Aux Champs-Èlysées." In 1966, Jules Dassin married Mercouri, an ardent anti-fascist who lost her Greek citizenship for opposing the junta, and the couple was living in Manhattan, remaining very active in their efforts to restore democracy in Greece during the dictatorship of the Colonels. After 1974, the couple returned to Greece, Mercouri became a member of the Greek Parliament, and Culture Minister of Greece. While living in Athens, Dassin was active in the effort to bring the 2500-year-old Elgin marbles of the Parthenon back to Athens from their current location at the British Museum in London. In this and other humanitarian causes, Dassin followed the last will of his late wife.
Jules Dassin died of complications caused by a flu, on April 1, 2008, at age 96, at Hygeia Hospital in Athens, Greece. He is survived by two daughters and grandchildren.- Director
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The son of a struggling businessman, Cy Endfield--born Cyril Raker Endfield--worked hard to be admitted to Yale University in 1933. While completing his education he became enamored with progressive theatre and appeared in a New Haven production of a minor Russian play in 1934. He was also profoundly influenced by such friends as writer Paul Jarrico, who was in Hollywood and who advocated liberal and leftist views. For several years Endfield worked as a director and choreographer with avant-garde theatre companies in and around New York and Montreal. He led his own repertory company of amateur players in performances of musicals and satirical revue at resorts in the Catskills.
Endfield had another string to his bow, having established a not inconsiderable reputation as master of the art of micro magic, particularly card tricks. In a circuitous way this brought him to Hollywood in 1940. There have been conflicting stories as to how he came to the attention of Orson Welles, who was known to have a long-standing fascination with magic. Endfield first met Welles in a magic shop, but it was his producer and business manager Jack Moss, himself a magician, who hired Endfield for the Mercury Theatre as a "general factotum". Moss wanted to enhance his own skills in order to confound Welles, who had engaged him in the first place as a tutor for performing magic on stage. In return for his expertise, Endfield was permitted to sit in on the making of Journey Into Fear (1943) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), learning valuable lessons in the process. By 1942 he was ready with his first film, a 15-minute-long documentary about the danger of rampant capitalism, entitled Inflation (1943). The witty little piece was a subtle attack on corporate greed and corruption and featured well-known actor Edward Arnold as a devil in businessman garb. An outspoken social critic, who had flirted briefly with the Young Communist League back in his days at Yale, Endfield was from the outset on a collision course with the establishment. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce banned his film as "excessively anti-capitalist" and kept it from public view for half a century.
Following wartime service, Endfield wrote several scripts for radio and television. He directed a number of short documentaries for MGM in 1946, and followed this with his motion picture debut, Gentleman Joe Palooka (1946), based on a popular comic strip character, shot in eight days at "Poverty Row" studio Monogram Pictures. He also directed a B-mystery, The Argyle Secrets (1948), from his own earlier radio play, followed by one of the better entries in the "Tarzan" series, Tarzan's Savage Fury (1952). Unfortunately, the picture did poorly at the box office. The reason for this, producer, Sol Lesser suggested later, was because Lex Barker (as "Tarzan") had been given too many lines to speak and "nearly talked himself to death". It was not until Endfield's harrowing indictment of mob rule, The Sound of Fury (1950), that he "arrived" as a director of note. That same year he helmed another independently produced minor masterpiece (on a budget of $500,000), the stylish and moody film noir The Underworld Story (1950). In this scathing attack on unscrupulous journalism, with the lead character being inherently unsympathetic, Endfield elicited one of the finest performances of his career from Dan Duryea.
The ideas and sentiments expressed in these films were ill-timed, in that they drew the attention of HUAC--The House Un-American Activities Committee, which was tasked with rooting out Communists and other "subversives" in the entertainment industry--which particularly denounced "Sound of Fury" as being un-American. Though never a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, Endfield found himself "named" as a sympathizer. Preferring to leave the country rather than inform on others to the FBI, he settled his affairs and left for a new career in Britain in December 1951. To avoid problems with distribution in the US, for the first few years he worked under pseudonyms (such as "Hugh Raker") and on two occasions allowed a friend of his, director Charles de la Tour, to act as a 'front'. He used his own name again for the offbeat action film Hell Drivers (1957). This uncompromisingly tough working-class melodrama featured Stanley Baker, with whom Endfield formed a production company in the 1960s. Baker eventually starred in six of Endfield's films, including the routinely scripted drama Sea Fury (1958) about tugboat sailors and the rather over-the-top Sands of the Kalahari (1965). From the late 1950's, Endfield became also increasingly involved in turning out television commercials. He also worked in the theatre again, directing Neil Simon's play "Come Blow Your Horn" at the West End.
Certainly the most visually impressive and successful of Endfield's films is Zulu (1964), the epic story of the Battle of Rorke's Drift in 1879 between a small contingent of British troops and a vastly superior force of Zulu tribesmen. The original story was penned by military writer John Prebble and Endfield had written the screenplay as early as 1959. After several abortive attempts, he was able to parlay his way into the offices of producer Joseph E. Levine in Rome and was finally given the go-ahead. Enhanced by John Barry's rousing score, "Zulu" is a supremely well-choreographed "battle ballet"--the battle scenes constitute well over half the screen time), with numerous lateral tracking shots of the main protagonists, which effectively draw the audience into the heart of the action. The social element is concerned with British imperialism and class structure, as two officers from different backgrounds are forced to pull together in order to stay alive. As the supercilious upper-crust Lt. Bromhead, Michael Caine, then relatively unknown, began on his path to fame with an excellent performance, alongside Stanley Baker. Historical incongruities apart, "Zulu" succeeded as pure spectacle, much in the same way as the big-budget Hollywood epics of the same period.
Endfield lost interest in filmmaking after shooting the anti-war movie Universal Soldier (1971). This was in part due to the fact that most of his films had failed to make much money. After the death of his friend Stanley Baker in 1976, Endfield devoted himself to his "technical period". He manufactured a gold-and-silver chess set as commemoration for a famous match between grand masters Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky in 1972 (only 100 were ever produced). In 1980 he invented the first pocket word processing system, the "MicroWriter", which had re-chargeable batteries and a 14-character LCD display.
In 1955 Endfield had co-authored a very successful book, "Cy Endfield's Entertaining Card Magic" (with Lewis Ganson), which had been well-received by amateur and professional magicians alike. In fact, one of his admirers, and occasional collaborators, was the famous micro magician Dai Vernon. Many of the sleight-of-hand routines in the book were developed by Endfield himself and related to the reader in a manner befitting a consummate storyteller. Endfield's passion for performing magic remained with him to the end. The multi-talented polymath resided in Britain until his death in April 1995.- Writer
- Script and Continuity Department
John Howard Lawson is not the most famous member of the Hollywood 10, those filmmakers who defied the House Committee on Un-American Activities' inquiry into alleged "Communist subversion" in the Hollywood movie industry in 1947, but he was the central figure of the group--the mind if not the heart and soul of the Communist community in Hollywood. One of the founders and the first president of the Screenwriters Guild (now called the Writers' Guild of America), the first and most aggressive of the Hollywood guilds, he was the Communist Party's de facto cultural commissar in Hollywood, particularly as it affected writers.
Technically, New York-based American Communist Party (CPUSA) cultural commissar V.J. Jerome was his superior but in the Hollywood hierarchy, Lawson arguably was second only to Gerhart Eisler in authority. Eisler was the "boss" in his role as an agent of the Moscow-controlled Comintern, and thus outranked Lawson, who was not a member of the secret quasi-military organization. Like Eisler, he was unquestionably under the discipline of Moscow, and thus, in essence, answerable to Joseph Stalin, the spider at the center of the web. When the party wanted a member to come to heel, Lawson enforced the ukase. (Eisler's brother, film composer Hanns Eisler -- a good friend of "Hollywood 19" member Bertolt Brecht, was deported from the United States after his own 1947 HUAC testimony. On his part, Brecht willingly testified before HUAC, told them nonsense, then decamped for East Germany, where he lived out the rest of his life under the aegis of the Warsaw Pact.)
Like the rest of the Hollywood 10, Lawson would be blacklisted by the film and television industries during the late 1940s and through the 1950s.
Lawson was born into a wealthy family in New York City on September 25, 1894, the son of Simeon Levy and the former Belle Hart Lawson,who were Jews. He was named after the 19th century British prison reformer John Howard. With a strong desire to assimilate, Simeon changed the family name to Lawson so that his children would not experience anti-Semitism and had them join a Christian Church. However, John Howard Lawson would adhere to Jewish dietary laws all his life.
He matriculated at at Williams College, earning a bachelor of arts degree in 1914. (Oscar-winning director Elia Kazan, whom Lawson would deride as a "stool pigeon" for cooperating with the House Un-American Activities Committee, was also an alumnus of that small, prestigious private college located in Massachusetts' Berkshire Mountains.) He contributed to the school's literary magazine, served as editor of the year book and wrote his first play, "A Hindoo Love Drama," which attracted the attention of Mary Kirkpatrick, who would become his first agent.
After graduation, Lawson moved to New York and worked for Reuters while dedicating himself to drama. In 1914 he began a play he called "Atmosphere" that was entitled "Souls: "A Psychic Fantasy" when the 69-page-long typewritten manuscript was copyrighted on May 21, 1915. An innovative though talky melodrama, this effort was discounted by Kirkpatrick as non-commercial. It was never produced or published.
In "Souls", Lawson had experimented with using asides to the audience by his characters, which precedes the same use of the device by O'Neil in his 1926 play "Strange Interlude". (O'Neill got the credit for "reviving" the device, which had been used in venerable dramas; however, at the time of "Souls", O'Neil was studying dramatic writing at Harvard).
In the period of 1915-16, he wrote three more plays, "Standards", "The Spice of Life", and "Servant-Master-Lover". "Standards" and "Servant-Master-Lover" were optioned, the first by George M. Cohan and Sam Harris and the latter by Olivier Morosco, but both plays closed out of town due to bad reviews.
He became involved with the avant-garde dramatists and actors of Greenwich Village's Playwrights' Theater that would produce Eugene O'Neill's first play, "Bound East for Cardiff" (and their first production) in November 1916. Before Lawson could become a Broadway playwright, World War I intervened.
After the United States entered the war, Lawson volunteered to be an ambulance driver with the American Field Service in France, where he befriended another driver, John Dos Passos, who would establish himself as a proletarian writer before veering sharply rightward later in his career. After the cessation of hostilities, Lawson moved to Rome, where he edited a newspaper. When he repatriated himself to the United States, he once again took up the career of the Broadway dramatist.
As a playwright, Lawson was committed to the avant-garde, and he began using non-realistic play-writing techniques. His plays were subtle though unfocused attacks on the bourgeoisie. He was deeply affected by the protests surrounding the case of the imprisoned--and later executed--anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (who served as the basis for Maxwell Anderson's Pultizer-Prize winning play "Winterset (1936)"), which stimulated the development of his left-wing politics and radicalism.
Tutored in Marxism by the great critic Edmund Wilson, Lawson imbued his plays with Marxist ideas, including his Broadway debut, 1923's "Roger Bloomer". There were ten productions of Lawson's plays on Broadway from 1923-37, all originals, and a revival of his second Broadway play, 1925's "Processional". Though his plays have not been revived since 1937, he did exert an influence on Eugene O'Neill, whose play "Dynamo" is indebted to Lawson.
With the dawn of talking pictures, there was a demand for dramatists and in 1928 Lawson moved to Hollywood, where he established himself as a screenwriter. He helped establish the Writers' Guild of America in 1933 with fellow future "Hollywood 10" members Lester Cole and Samuel Ornitz, and served as the union's first president from 1933-34. It was in 1934 that Lawson joined the Communist Party. It would come to dominate his life as he became an important member of the small CPUSA community in Hollywood, then eventually its cultural czar.
It's ironic that Lawson would become an enforcer of party ukases, in that with the writing of his last plays produced on Broadway in the late 1930s, he had undergone a struggle between his own aesthetic choices and his commitment to communist ideology. In the 1940s, however, it fell to Lawson as a senior party apparatchik to enforce party discipline among screenwriters who were CPUSA members, making sure that they toed the party line and that their work adhere to the CPUSA's ideology, no matter how impractical that was in the Hollywood studio system, which was based on a collaborative factory paradigm in which individuals contributions were subsumed and muted by the mass nature of the constructed product.
As a screenwriter, Lawson was able to inject politics into several movies, including his most important film, Blockade (1938), a story about the Spanish Civil War. For his screenplay, Lawson was nominated for a Best Story Oscar. Seven years later, the Lawson-scribed movie _Counter-Attack (1945)_ (qv, paid tribute to the US-USSR anti-fascist alliance of World War Two. However, as befits a Hollywood screenwriter who is but one writer of many assigned to a film, his credited work typically ran to more innocuous fare, such as the hit Algiers (1938).
For his defiance of the House Un-American Activities Committee, he was cited for contempt of Congress. After exhausting his appeals (his legal strategy dictated by party lawyers), he was sentenced to one year in prison and fined, resulting in his "official" blacklisting in Hollywood. (In fact, he had been blacklisted immediately after refusing to testify.) Not long afterwards, Lawson went into self-imposed exile in Mexico, where he began writing books on drama and film making. During his exile, he wrote a screenplay for the early anti-apartheid film Cry, the Beloved Country (1951) under a pseudonym. His last screenplay, also written under a pseudonym, was The Careless Years (1957), in which a high school couple in love takes it on the lam for Mexico. He also became a lecturer in American universities, where he taught drama and film.
John Howard Lawson died in San Francisco on August 14, 1977, at the age of 82.- Vera Caspary was born on 13 November 1899 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. She was a writer, known for Laura (1944), A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and Laura. She was married to Isadore Goldsmith. She died on 13 June 1987 in New York City, New York, USA.
- The Oscar-winning screenwriter, Ring Lardner, Jr., will always be known for one of two things: that he was the son of one of the greatest humorists American literature has produced, and he was one of the Hollywood 10, the ten film-makers who refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) investigating subversion in Hollywood and were fined and jailed for the defiance.
The son of newspaper sports columnist and best-selling writer Ring Lardner, the future double Oscar winner was born on August 19, 1915 in Chicago, Illinois. Ring, Sr. (who was born Ringgold Wilmer Lardner) became famous for his "Saturday Evening Post" series, "You Know Me Al", fictional letters being sent from one baseball player to another. Mawell Perkins, editor-extraordinaire at the publishing house, Charles Scribners & Son, collected Lardner's columns and stories into publishable form (Ernest Hemingway, another Scribers writer, was a great fan) and they were a great success. Such was Lardner's renown, that 30 years after his death (while his son and namesake was still officially blacklisted), he was the first sportswriter inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, for meritorious contributions to baseball writing, in 1963.
On his part, Ring, Jr. became a reporter for the "New York Daily Mirror" after dropping out of Princeton. He moved West and became a publicist for producer David O. Selznick, where he met his future wife, who also worked for the producer. He also worked as a script doctor for Selznik, then went on to become a screenwriter, often working in collaboration.
During the Spanish Civil War, Lardner moved steadily left in his political thinking, and helped raise funds for the Republican cause. He joined the Communist Party and became involved in organizing anti-fascist demonstrations. Although his leftist politics were known to the studios, in the 1930s and early '40s, Hollywood did not shy away from hiring talented writers no matter what their political proclivities, and employed many known (as well as secret) communists.
In 1943, he and Michael Kanin won the Oscar in 1942 for their Woman of the Year (1942) screenplay. He wrote such great pictures as Laura (1944) for Otto Preminger and, in 1947, 20th Century Fox gave him a contract at $2,000 a week, making him one of the highest paid scribes in La-La Land. Ironically, at the time of this seeming triumph, his career and life were about to unravel.
When it was Lardner turn to be hauled before HUAC and asked, "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States?", he came up with a witty riposte.
"I could answer the question exactly the way you want, but if I did, I would hate myself in the morning". After the appeals process against HUAC's citations for contempt of Congress played out, Lardner was sentenced to a year in prison and fined. More importantly, he was blacklisted and could not find work in Hollywood except under pseudonyms for work "fronted" by others. After the blacklist was officially broken when Preminger hired Dalton Trumbo to adapt Leon Uris's novel "Exodus" for his 1960 production (Kirk Douglas then immediately hired Trumbo to write a screenplay for his upcoming Spartacus (1960)), the blacklisted writers slowly returned to work under their own names. Lardner was hired by producer Martin Ransohoff, who respected writers more than did the average Hollywood producer, to write the screenplay for The Cincinnati Kid (1965) under his own name. His comeback was complete when, in 1971, he won his second Oscar for adapting Robert Hooker's comic novel, "M*A*S*H" (1970) (ironically, due to director Robert Altman's improvisational style, little of Lardner's dialogue remained in the movie). His career, though, had been effectively aborted by the blacklist, and he only was credited with two more screenplays during his lifetime.
Ring Lardner, Jr. was the last of the Hollywood 10 to die, passing away on Halloween, October 31, 2000, in New York City from cancer. He was 85 years old and had long outlived most of the witch-hunters who had tormented him. He was survived by his wife, Frances Chaney, and five children. - Writer
- Additional Crew
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Carl Foreman was born on 23 July 1914 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for The Guns of Navarone (1961), High Noon (1952) and The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). He was married to Estelle Barr and Evelyn Smith. He died on 26 June 1984 in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA.- Writer
- Actor
Dashiell Hammett was born May 27, 1894, in St. Mary's County, Maryland, to Richard Hammett and Mary Bond. He joined the Baltimore branch of the Pinkerton Detective Agency in 1915. He enlisted in the US Army's Ambulance Corps in June 1918 and was posted to a camp 20 miles from Baltimore, where he caught the flu, which developed into tuberculosis. He was invalided out of the army in July 1919 and returned to Pinkerton's. Hammett entered the veterans hospital near Tacoma, Washington, with tuberculosis in 1920. Upon his release he worked at Pinkerton's Spokane branch. Hospitalized again with tuberculosis, he met and courted a nurse, Josephine Dolan. In February 1921 he was moved to an army hospital near San Diego. After he was released he married a now-pregnant Josie in San Francisco. Hammett worked for the San Francisco branch of Pinkerton's, but left the agency in 1921 or 22 due to ill health. He took a writing course and sold droll vignettes to "The Smart Set" magazine during 1922, and some short stories to other magazines. He began to sell detective stories to "The Black Mask" from 1923. After the birth of the couple's second daughter in 1926, Hammett gave up freelance writing and became an advertising copy writer for the jeweler Albert Samuels, but left after six months due to ill health. Forced by his tuberculosis to live apart from Jose and the children, the marriage eventually broke up. Hammett supported himself through writing, chiefly for "The Black Mask", now under editor Joe Shaw. Hammett's long short stories were republished in novel form by Alfred Knopf. In 1929 Hammett moved to New York. After the success of his novel "The Maltese Falcon", he was engaged as a screenwriter by Paramount Pictures and moved to Hollywood, where he met Lillian Hellman. He returned to New York in 1931, where he wrote "The Glass Key". "The Thin Man" was published as a magazine serial in 1933. Hammett was encouraged by Hearst to write the "Secret Agent X9" comic strip, which ran from 1934-35, his last original work. In 1942 he re-enlisted in the army and was posted to the Aleutian Islands off of Alaska, where he edited The Adakian. When discharged in 1945, he returned to New York and became President of the NY Civil Rights Congress. In July 1951 Hammett was subpoenaed to testify on the Civil Rights Congress' bail fund, and was jailed for refusing to answer questions. Upon his release from jail, he was presented with a bill by the Internal Revenue Service for $111,000 in back taxes. In failing health, he lived off and on with Hellman. In 1961 he was admitted to New York's Lenox Hill Hospital, New York, where he died on January 10.- Writer
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Dalton Trumbo, the Oscar-winning screenwriter, arguably the most talented, most famous of the blacklisted film professionals known to history as the Hollywood 10, was born in Montrose, Colorado to Orus Trumbo and his wife, the former Maud Tillery.
Dalton Trumbo was raised at 1124 Gunnison Ave. in Grand Junction, Colorado, where his parents moved in 1908. His father, Orus, worked in a shoe store. Dalton, the first child and only son, was later joined by sisters Catharine and Elizabeth. The young Dalton peddled the produce from his father's vegetable garden around town and had a paper route. While attending Grand Junction High School (Class of 1924), he worked at The Daily Sentinel as a cub reporter. Of his early politics, a much older Dalton Trumbo told how he asked his father for five dollars so he could join the Ku Klux Klan, a mass organization after the First World War. He didn't get the five dollars.
While at university, he realized that his calling was as a writer. He worked on the school's newspaper, humor magazine and yearbook, while also toiling for the Boulder Daily Camera. He left school his first year to follow his family to Los Angeles. The family moved due to financial difficulties after his father had been terminated by the shoe company. In L.A., Dalton enrolled at the University of Southern California but was unable to complete enough credits for a degree. Orus Trumbo died of pernicious anemia in 1926, and Dalton had to take a job to become the breadwinner for his widowed mother and two younger sisters. Dalton Trumbo took on whatever jobs were available, including repossessing motorcycles and bootlegging, which he quit because it was too dangerous. Eventually, Trumbo took a job at the Davis Perfection Bakery on the night shift and remained for nearly a decade. Trumbo continued to write, mostly short stories, becoming more and more anxious and eventually desperate to leave the bakery, fearing that he would never achieve his destiny of becoming an important writer. During this time, he sold several short stories, written his first novel and worked for the "Hollywood Spectator" as a writer, critic and editor. His work also appeared in "Vanity Fair" and "Vogue" magazines. Trumbo's first novel, "Eclipse" (1934), was set in fictional Shale City, Colorado (a thinly veiled Grand Junction) during the 1920s and 1930s, with characters who resembled notable community members. One of its main characters, John Abbott, is modeled after Trumbo's father. Dalton had tried, perhaps unfairly he admitted later, to avenge his father on the town where he had failed.
In 1934, Warner Bros. hired Trumbo as a reader, a job that entailed reading and summarizing plays and novels and advising whether they might be adapted into movies. It lead to a contract as a junior screenwriter at its B-pictures unit. In 1936, the same year he of his first screen credit for the B-move Road Gang (1936), Trumbo met his future soulmate Cleo Fincher and they married two years later. Daughter Nikola was born in 1939 and son Christopher in 1940. A daughter was added, Mitzi, the baby of the family.
He wrote the story for Columbia's Canadian-made Tugboat Princess (1936), clearly influenced by Captain January (1936), which had been made into a silent in 1924 before being remade with superstar Shirley Temple, substituting a tugboat in the original with a lighthouse. His screenplays for such films as Devil's Playground (1937) showed some concern for the plight of the disenfranchised, but the Great Depression still existed, and social commentary was inevitable in all but fantasies and musicals.
After leaving Warners, he worked for Columbia, Paramount, 20th Century-Fox, and beginning in 1937, M.G.M., the studio for which he would do some of his best work in the 1940s. By the late 1930s, he had worked himself up to better assignments, primarily for RKO (though he returned to Warners for The Kid from Kokomo (1939)), and was working on A-list pictures by the turn of the decade. He won his first Oscar nod for RKO's Kitty Foyle (1940), for which Ginger Rogers won the Academy Award for best actress as a girl from a poor family who claws her way into the upper middle class via a failed marriage to a Main Line Philadelphia swell.
By the time of America's entry into World War II, Trumbo was one of the most respected, highest paid screenwriters in Hollywood. He had also established a name for himself as a left-wing political activist whose sympathies coincided with those of the American Communist Party (CPUSA), which hewed to the line set by Moscow.
Trumbo was part of the anti-fascist Popular Front coalition of communists and liberals in the late 1930s, at the time of the Spanish Civil War. The Popular Front against Nazism and Fascism was been torn asunder in August 1939 when the USSR signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. Many party members quit the CPUSA in disgust, but the true believers parroted the party line, which was now pro-peace and against US involvement in WWII.
Trumbo reportedly did not join the Party until 1943 and harbored personal reservations about its policies as regards enforcing ideological conformity. However, the publication of his anti-war novel "Johnny Got His Gun" in 1939 coincided with the shift of the CPUSA's stance from anti-Hitler to pro-peace, and his novel was embraced by the Party as the type of literature needed to keep the US out of the war. Trumbo agreed with the Party's pro-peace platform. The book, about a wounded World War One vet who has lost his limbs, won the American Book Sellers Award (the precursor to the National Book Award) in 1939. In a speech made in February 1940, four months before the Nazi blitzkrieg knocked France out of the war, Trumbo said, "If they say to us, 'We must fight this war to preserve democracy,' let us say to them, 'There is no such thing as democracy in time of war. It is a lie, a deliberate deception to lead us to our own destruction. We will not die in order that our children may inherit a permanent military dictatorship.'"
His speech was a rebuke to New Deal liberals. The Party began demonizing President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who hated Hitler and was pro-British, as a war-monger. The Party ordered its members to henceforth be pro-peace and anti-FDR in their work and statements. In June 1941, after Nazi Germany invaded the USSR, the CPUSA shifted gears to become pro-war, supportive of FDR's aggressive behavior towards Nazi Germany.
Shortly after the German invasion, Trumbo instructed his publisher to recall all copies of "Johnny Got His Gun" and to cease publication of the book. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the German declaration of war against the U.S. catapulted the U.S. into both the Asian and European theaters of World War II, the book - always popular with peace-lovers and isolationists who opposed America's involvement in foreign wars - suddenly became popular among native fascists, too. However, it proved hard to get a copy of the book during the war years.
Trumbo joined the CPUSA in 1943, the same year Victor Fleming's great patriotic war movie A Guy Named Joe (1943), with a Trumbo screenplay, appeared on screens. In 1944, Original Story was a separate Oscar category and David Boehm and Chandler Sprague were nominated in that category for an Academy Award. Trumbo's screenplay was overlooked. Like other communist screenwriters, he proved to be an enthusiastic writer of pro-war propaganda, though except for the notorious pro-Stalin Mission to Moscow (1943), few films displayed any overt communist ideas or propaganda. One that did was Tender Comrade (1943) , which Trumbo wrote as a Ginger Rogers vehicle for RKO. Directed by his future Hollywood 10 comrade Edward Dmytryk, it depicted a mild form of socialism and collectivization among women working in the defense industry. He also wrote the patriotic classic Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) for M.G.M., which was based on the Doolittle Raid of 1942.
Trumbo voluntarily invited FBI agents to his house in 1944 and showed them letters he had received from what he perceived were pro-fascist peaceniks who had requested copies of "Johnny Got His Gun", then out-of-print due to Trumbo's orders to his publisher. He turned those letters over to the FBI and later kept in contact with the Bureau, a fact that would later haunt blacklisted leftists, urging that the F.B.I. deal with them. His actions conformed to the CPUSA policy of denouncing anyone who opposed the war.
In 1945, the last year of the war, MGM released the Margaret O'Brien / Edward G. Robinson vehicle, Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (1945), penned by Trumbo. Robinson was a future member of the Hollywood "gray-list" with those, like Henry Fonda who were suspected of leftist sympathies or for being Fellow Travelers, but who could not be officially blacklisted. Drawing on his own rural childhood, it was a picture of a young girl's life on a farm in rural Wisconsin. The year 1945 was crucial for Trumbo and other Hollywood party members in terms of the CPUSA's desire to have their work reflect the party's ideological agenda.
HCUA was originally created in 1934 as the Special Committee on Un-American Activities to look into the activities of fascist and pro-Nazi organizations. Then popularly known as the McCormack-Dickstein Committee, the Special Committee on Un-American Activities exposed fascist organizations, including a planned coup d'etat against President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the so-called Business Plot. Later on, it became known as the House Un-American Activities Committee or the Dies Committee after the new chairman, Martin Dies. HCUA originally was tasked with investigating the involvement of German Americans with the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.
HCUA became a standing committee in 1946, still tasked with investigating suspected threats of subversion or propaganda that attacked "the form of government guaranteed by our Constitution." The focus was solely on the communists and their allies, so-called Fellow Travelers who made common cause with communists during the War Years. Fellow Travelers was a loose term that seemed to embrace many liberal FDR New Deal Democrats.
HCUA subpoenaed suspected communists in the entertainment industry. Trumbo's screenplay for Tender Comrade (1943), which concerned three Army wives who pool their resources while their husbands are away fighting was denounced as communist propaganda. However, writer-producer James Kevin McGuinness, a conservative who was a friendly witness before HCUA, testified that left-wing screenwriters did not inject propaganda into their movie scripts during World War II. McGuiness testified "[The movie industry] profited from reverse lend-lease because during the [war] the Communist and Communist-inclined writers in the motion picture industry were given leave of absence to be patriotic. During that time...under my general supervision Dalton Trumbo wrote two magnificent patriotic scripts, A Guy Named Joe (1943) and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944)."
Appearing before HCUA in October 1947 with Alvah Bessie, Herbert J. Biberman, Lester Cole, John Howard Lawson, 'Ring Lardner Jr' , Albert Maltz, Adrian Scott, and Samuel Ornitz, Trumbo - like the others - refused to answer any questions. In a defense strategy crafted by CPUSA lawyers, the soon-to-be-known-as "Hollywood 10" claimed that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gave them the right to refuse to answer inquiries into their political beliefs as well as their professional associations. One line of questioning of HCUA was to ask if the subpoenaed witnesses were members of the Screen Writers Guild in order to smear the SWG. It was a gambit played by the Committee as it knew that which of the 10 were in the unions, and it knew which were communist. As Arthur Miller has pointed out, HCUA left the Broadway theater alone, despite the fact that there were communists working in it, because no one outside of the Northeastern U.S. really cared about theater or knew who theatrical professionals were, and thus, it could not generate the publicity that HCUA members craved and courted through their hearings.
HCUA cited them for contempt of Congress, and the Hollywood 10 were tried and convicted on the charge. All were fined and jailed, with Trumbo being sentenced to a year in federal prison and a fine of $1,000. He served 10 months of the sentence. The Hollywood 10 were blacklisted by the Hollywood studios, a blacklist enforced by the very guilds they helped create. Trumbo and the other Hollywood 10 screenwriters were kicked out of the Screen Writers Guild (John Howard Lawson had been one of the founders of the SWG and its first president), which meant, even if they weren't blacklisted, they could not obtain work in Hollywood. Those who continued to write for the American cinema had to do so under assumed names or by using a "front", a screenwriter who would take credit for their work and pass on all or some of the fee to the blacklisted writer. Later, as one of the Hollywood Ten, Trumbo claimed for himself the mantle of "Martyr for Freedom of Speech" and attacked, as rats, those who became informers for HCUA by naming names. In 1949, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., wrote in The Saturday Review of Books, that Trumbo was in fact NOT a free speech martyr since he would not fight for freedom of speech for ALL the people, such as right-wing conservatives, but only for the freedom of speech of CPUSA members. The anti-communist Schlesinger, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard historian, thought Trumbo and others like him were doctrinaire communists and hypocrites. In response, Trumbo wrote a scathing letter to The Saturday Review to defend himself, characterizing himself as a paladin championing free speech for all Americans under the aegis of the First Amendment, which the Hollywood 10 claimed gave them the right to refuse to cooperate with HCUA.
After his blacklisting and failure of the Hollywood 10's appeals, the Trumbo family exiled themselves to Mexico. In Mexico, chain-smoking in the bathtub in which he always wrote, usually with a parrot given to him by 'Kirk Douglas' perched on his shoulder, Trumbo wrote approximately thirty scripts under pseudonyms and using fronts who relayed the money to him. His works included the film noir classic Gun Crazy (1950) (AKA Gun Crazy), co-written under the pseudonym Millard Kaufman, Oscar-winning Roman Holiday (1953) (with screenwriter Ian McLellan Hunter as a front), and The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell (1955) for director Otto Preminger and upon which blacklisted Oscar-winning screenwriter Michael Wilson also worked).
At the 1957 Academy Awards, Robert Rich won the Oscar for best original story of 1956 for The Brave One (1956). Rich was not present to accept the award, which was accepted on his behalf by Jesse Lasky Jr. of the Screen Writers Guild. When journalists began digging in to the background of the phantom Mr. Rich, they found out he was the nephew of a producer. Suspicion then arose that Rich was a pseudonym for the blacklisted Trumbo.
Though Hollywood has always been inundated with writers, Trumbo, even while blacklisted, was prized as a good writer who was fast, reliable and could write in many genres. Despite being a communist, Trumbo's favorite themes were more in the vein of populism than Marxism. Trumbo celebrated the individual rebelling against the powers that be.
With rumors circulating that Trumbo had written the Oscar-winning The Brave One (1956), it triggered a discussion in the industry about the propriety of the blacklist, since so many screenplays were being written by blacklisted individuals who were being denied screen credit. The blacklist only worked to suppress the prices of screenplays by these talented writers. In 1958, Pierre Boulle won the Oscar for the screenplay adapted from his novel The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), which was unusual since Boulle could not speak nor write in English, which may have been the reason he did not attend the awards ceremony to pick up the Oscar in person. It was immediately realized that the screenplay had likely been written by a blacklisted screenwriter. It was - Michael Wilson and Carl Foreman.
Kirk Douglas hired Trumbo to write the script for Spartacus in 1958. In the summer of 1959 Otto Preminger hired Trumbo to write the script for Exodus. On January 20, 1960, the New York Times carried the story that Otto Preminger had hired Dalton Trumbo to write the script for Exodus, and that he would start shooting in April. On August 8, of the same year Kirk Douglas announced in Variety that Trumbo had written the script for Spartacus. Both pictures opened in the winter of 1960.
Trumbo wrote many more screenplays for A-list films, including Lonely Are the Brave (1962), The Sandpiper (1965), Hawaii (1966) , and _Fixer, The (1968). In 1970, he was awarded the Laurel Award for lifetime achievement by the Screen Writers Guild. He made a famous speech that many saw as a reconciliation of the two sides of fight. In 1971, he wrote and directed the movie adaptation of his famous anti-war novel, Johnny Got His Gun (1971). His last screenwriting credit on a feature film was for Papillon (1973), in which he also had a cameo role.
A six-pack-a-day smoker, he developed lung cancer in 1973. Two years later, the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (which had supported the black list), Walter Mirisch, personally delivered a belated Oscar to Trumbo for his The Brave One (1956) script, now officially recognized by AMPAS as his creation. Eighteen years later, AMPAS would award him a posthumous Oscar for Roman Holiday (1953).
Dalton Trumbo died from a heart attack in California on September 10, 1976. At his memorial service, Ring Lardner Jr., his close friend and fellow Hollywood 10 member, delivered an amusing eulogy. "At rare intervals, there appears among us a person whose virtues are so manifest to all, who has such a capacity for relating to every sort of human being, who so subordinates his own ego drive to the concerns of others, who lives his whole life in such harmony with the surrounding community that he is revered and loved by everyone with whom he comes in contact. Such a man Dalton Trumbo was not."- Writer
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Maurice Rapf, the Hollywood screenwriter who became one of the pioneers of cinema studies, was born on May 19, 1914, in New York City to producer Harry Rapf and his wife, Tina Uhfelder Rapf. Harry Rapf was one of the founders of Metro-Goldwyn Mayer and an Oscar-winner for producing MGM's first musical, The Broadway Melody (1929), an early talkie smash and the winner of the studio's first of many Academy Awards for Best Picture. Unlike his father, Maurice never won an Oscar; his most significant achievement as a screenwriter arguably was Song of the South (1946) for Disney, which he disowned, while his most significant "achievement" as an activist, arguably, was to be blacklisted that same year for his Communist sympathies. But he left a lasting legacy through his union activities and as a film professor.
Harry Rapf was Hollywood royalty, having worked his way up from minstrel shows and vaudeville to become an independent movie producer in 1916, when son "Maury" was but two years old. At the tender age of three, Maury was enlisted as a child actor to play "war orphans, street urchins and assorted brats," according to a 1990 memoir published in Dartmouth's Alumni Magazine. Maury Rapf's career as an actor soon ended, cut short by the exigencies of schooling.
Rapf pere was hired by indie producer Lewis J. Selznick in 1919, and then moved on to Warner Bros. in 1921, where as a producer he and young screenwriter Darryl F. Zanuck turned World War I veteran Rin Tin Tin, a German Shepherd saved from the trenches of the Western Front, into an international superstar. When MGM was created from the 1924 merger of Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures and Louis B. Mayer Productions, Harry was brought onboard to share central producing duties with Louis B. Mayer and his protégé Irving Thalberg. The career change necessitated a permanent shift of the Rapf family from New York to southern California. Rapf was given the job of overseeing the production of the "programmers" that were the bread-and-butter of the studio, pictures starring such box office heavyweights as Marie Dressler and Wallace Beery. With a keen eye for talent, Harry Rapf earned the credit for discovering Joan Crawford (I)' in the chorus line of Broadway's "The Passing Show of 1924." Rapf was invited by Mayer to be one of the 36 founders of his brainchild, a company union called the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences that was intended to fight off unionization by the crafts.
Maury, as the son of Harry, grew up in Los Angeles, trolling the studios, sets, offices and streets of the Culver City production facilities, one of the privileged "Hollywood Princes," like his good friend Budd Schulberg, son of Paramount boss B.P. Schulberg. Maury used to bully Loews theater owners to get into the movies for free, citing his father's status at Loew's MGM subsidiary. His first screen credit was for writing the story of the Jackie Cooper vehicle Divorce in the Family (1932), which was produced by his father. He was 18 years old.
Like Budd, Maury went to Dartmouth College, and like Budd, he went to the USSR and flirted with communism. Again, like his good friend, he eventually joined the Communist Party. Rapf and Schulberg reportedly were the inspirations for F. Scott Fitzgerald's Hollywood Princess Cecilia Brady, the daughter of the villainous studio boss Pat Brady, in his unfinished last novel "The Last Tycoon."
While matriculating at Dartmouth in bucolic small-town Hanover, New Hampshire, Rapf was an exchange student at the Anglo-American Institute in the USSR. Muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens, a Communist, had proclaimed, "I have been over into the future and it works" after a trip to the Soviet Union. Steffens' enthusiasm inspired thousands of other progressives to visit the future themselves, and those visitors included Schulberg and Maurice Rapf. The Soviets gave foreign visitors tours of fake "Potemkin" villages. Schulberg had been impressed by what he saw, as had Rapf, whose own tour had been sponsored by the National Student League and had included future double-Oscar winning screenwriter and Hollywood Ten alumnus Ring Lardner Jr., who would serve nine months in jail for daring to have unpopular beliefs a decade-and-a-half after that visit.
After attending the Institute, Rapf made a trip to Germany in 1934, at a time when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party were consolidating their power over all aspects of German life after terminating democracy with extreme prejudice the year before. It was a bold move for someone of the Jewish faith, especially one only 20 years old. His personal experience of Nazi Germany convinced him that Communism was the best bulwark against Naziism. He joined the U.S. Communist Party (CPUSA) and was an active member throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s. He remained a committed member, where others such as Elia Kazan dropped out due to disillusionment with the Party after the 1939 Non-Aggression Pact between the USSR and Nazi Germany, that set up the two totalitarian tyrannies' invasion and partition of Poland.
"The thing that most impressed me and probably made me a communist was that anti-Semitism was illegal in the Soviet Union," Rapf would later claim, "and that the Soviets were very anti-fascist, which the US was not."
"Making movies was the family business, and with parental help, it became mine as well," Rapf said in his 1990 memoir. As a college boy returned to his family's studio, he co-wrote We Went to College (1936), They Gave Him a Gun (1937) and The Bad Man of Brimstone (1937) for his father's production unit, which had been one of several set up by Mayer as a "college of cardinals" to replace the ailing central producer Thalberg, and also to dilute his power. Harry Rapf's power at MGM had been on the wane since he suffered a bad heart attack in 1933, which is likely why his son eventually sought employment at other studios.
Along with Budd Schulberg, Maurice was one of the founding members of the Screen Writers Guild (since renamed the Writers Guild of America), the screenwriters trade union, which is ironic in his light of the ongoing attempts of his father's generation to put a stop to unionization of the movie industry. With the Guild duly accredited as the screenwriters' bargaining representative with the studios, a formal system of pay and credit was instituted to protect the rights of writers. Rapf became a secretary of the SWG, while his friend Schulberg served on the Guild council.
Rapf became a busy and serious screenwriter, working on many movies, typically in the action genre. He helped develop the story for the political thriller Sharpshooters (1938) for 20th Century-Fox--where production was headed by the progressive Zanuck, his father's old Rin Tin Tin collaborator--and then bounced over to Columbia for North of Shanghai (1939). Rapf (Dartmouth, '35) received credit for indie producer Walter Wanger's Dartmouth-based college love story Winter Carnival (1939), on which he replaced F. Scott Fitzgerald (Princeton, '16) as the collaborator with fellow Dartmouth alumnus Budd Schulberg, after the great writer of "The Great Gatsby" went off on one of his Brobdingnagian boozing binges. By the time that film was released, he was working as a staff screenwriter for Warner Bros.
According to a memoir published by screenwriter Malvin Wald, when he was first employed by Warner Bros. Rapf was made his collaborator after another collaborator changed an original story of his beyond all recognition. When Warners screenwriter-in-chief John Huston invited Rapf to join the Writers Table, Rapf's collaborator was invited as well. Wald found Rapf to be a "considerate and patient teacher," who was concerned with his young protégé's professional well-being. Eventually, the writing team lost one producer, and then their replacement producer was fired, and their contracts were terminated by studio chief Jack L. Warner. Wald couldn't complain, as under Rapf's tutelage he had learned the business and even had qualified for membership in Rapf's Screen Writers Guild.
In the early 1940s Rapf bounced between Paramount, Budd Schulberg's father's old studio, and 20th Century-Fox, which was headed by 'Joseph Schenck', the brother of Loew's Inc. President Nicholas Schenck, the "capo di tutti capi" of MGM. Rapf even made a house call as a script doctor at Poverty Row for Republic Pictures' Call of the Canyon (1942). He eventually wound up at Walt Disney & Co., which would prove to be his final home studio. It seems ironic that his longest stint in a studio, even longer than the professional association he had with his father's, was at Walt Disney, as the eponymous owner had the reputation as being perhaps the most vociferous anti-Communist in Hollywood.
In 1944 Walt Disney offered Maurice a chance to rewrite a script based on Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus stories. Rapf was worried that writing for an animated film would hurt his career, as it was considered a kind of ghetto in Hollywood, and he also expressed his anxiety over the racism in the stories. Disney assured him that the film would be a live-action feature, and that he was being hired to expressly cut the racism out of the script, although what he likely was looking for in hiring Rapf was political cover from the left. Rapf accepted the job and did the rewrite while waiting for a commission from the U.S. Navy.
After working on the "Uncle Remus" screenplay, he and fellow communist (and fellow companion on the 1934 trip to Russia) Ring Lardner Jr., helped co-write the animated short Brotherhood of Man (1945), which was co-produced by the United Auto Workers labor union and United Productions of America (best known for its postwar "Mr. Magoo" cartoons) and released by the U.S. Navy. When the "Uncle Remus" movie eventually was released after the war, Rapf expressed his dismay that the film, now entitled "Song of the South," failed to rid itself of its residual racism. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People denounced "Song of the South" for perpetrating racial stereotypes.
At Disney Rapf wrote an early draft for an animated feature film based on the fairy tale "Cinderella," for which he would receive no credit. The last film he worked on at Disney was the slice-of-Americana So Dear to My Heart (1948). He left Disney under a cloud of suspicion, as the movie moguls had agreed at the Waldorf Conference--a film industry summit meeting called after the 1947 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) had the Hollywood Ten indicted for contempt of Congress--to fire any suspected Communists they had in their employ. Rapf was subpoenaed to testify before the HUAC, but was excused because he was ill with the mumps.
Ironically, the communist Rapf got along well with the right-wing Republican Walt Disney, whom he categorized as a personally modest perfectionist, and both enjoyed arguing politics. Disney told Rapf that he became a Republican when, as a boy, a gang of young Democrats pulled down his pants and coated his testicles with hot tar. Contrary to the now-accepted caricature of Disney as a racist reactionary, Rapf wrote in his 1999 autobiography "Back Lot" that Disney was neither a Red-baiter nor an anti-Semite.
"I never knew anyone in the Party - in all the years I was associated with it, which was a long, long time - who was seeking anything but humanistic goals. Certainly there was never any attempt on the part of the people I knew to overthrow the government of the United States . . . We did believe in class struggle. I still believe in class struggle," Maurice Rapf was quoted in the book "Tender Comrades."
Marx described class struggle as the conflict between capital (the bourgeoisie) and labor (the proletariat). While capital and labor do have common interests, as the proletariat must sell its labor for wages and the bourgeoisie must expend capital to obtain labor, one class' individual interests inevitably lead to conflict with the other class, as capital seeks to enhance its surplus by commiserating labor. Marx theorized that class struggle and its attendant conflict would last for as long as capitalism survived, and would only be overcome when the extreme polarization of the classes into the very rich and the very poor eventually triggered an revolution that would destroy the capitalist system. In an organic historical process Marx considered `scientific,' capitalism would be replaced by a socialist system in which the proletariat controlled the state via the "the dictatorship of the proletariat," which meant a workers' democracy, not Soviet-style totalitarianism. The struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat would respond to the laws of entropy, and the classes themselves would atrophy, as well as the state, as the raison d'etre of the state was to serve as a bulwark for the ruling class' power. Thus, a classless, stateless society known as communism would be ushered in.
The metaphor of two entities that paradoxically share a common interest, but whose individual interests put them into conflict with each other, fits the conflict between studio bosses and the Hollywood "creative" community quite well. The history of Hollywood from the mid-1920s and up through the mid-1930s, and again after World War II, was a "class struggle" between the studios and the various crafts over wages, working conditions, and ultimately unionization when the company union that was the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences could not or would not protect the interests of the crafts. This paradox also was a metaphor for Sigmund Freud's Oedipal conflict (itself a metaphor), that set privileged "Princes of Hollywood" like Budd Schulberg and Maurice Rapf against the interests of their fathers, all self-made men who rose to the top through a combination of cunning and ruthlessness, who once established, tried to buy respectability through the ostentatious consumption of goods and people, be they respected writers like Fitzgerald, James Hilton or William Faulkner, or stars and starlets alike, like Clara Kimball Young, Norma Talmadge and Marilyn Monroe.
B.P. Schulberg and Harry Rapf were doers, while their more artistically inclined sons Budd and Maury were observers, but observers who had carried the gene for action. After observing that something was rotten in the state of Hollywood, they were determined, like Hamlet, to do something about it. Indeed, Schulberg's Oedipus-like blow against the Hollywood system that nurtured him, "What Makes Sammy Run?", his excoriating exegesis of studio executive Sammy Glick, was credited by Schulberg himself with terminating his father's career in Hollywood. Schulberg makes no bones about it in "Sammy": the old type of Hollywood-hustler/immigrant-Jew who made the motion picture industry and believed in assimilation with society at large while indulging their gross individual appetites embarrassed him. The Party went so far to censure him publicly for anti-Semitism after the novel was published in 1941. Schulberg dated his own disillusionment with the Party to the time he refused the order of the CPUSA dramaturge, future Hollywood Ten member John Howard Lawson, to submit to Party discipline with his novel.
As history developed in fact, not theory, the dictatorship of the proletariat proved to be a legal justification by which tyrants imposed a totalitarianism over their subject peoples. Democracy for the post-War communist activist often meant ensuring a unanimity of interests in which one interest, that of the Party, could veto and thus gain control over all other competing interests. In the 1930s and 1940s Joseph Stalin and his NKVD spent almost as much time eliminating fellow socialists, leftists and fellow travelers as it did in fighting fascism, and indeed, had been fascist Germany's ally in the opening days of World War II.
Cold War documentation now indicates that the Hollywood Ten's legal defense of aggressive non-cooperation (rather than just taking the Fifth Amendment) was dictated from the Soviet Union via CPUSA, which Moscow partly financed, and that screenwriter and Hollywood Ten blacklistee Lawson was the CPUSA point man in Hollywood, reading members' work and demanding emendations (that none of the Hollywood Ten sang in 1947 was considered a brave act, but now seems to be an expression of party discipline). Of course, how effective this party discipline was for getting out communist propaganda can be called into question, as so many movie industry writers of every political stripe were used by the studios to write, rewrite and then rewrite a rewritten script. Indeed, one scoffs at the exaggeration of many charges of certain Hollywood professionals being "red" or "pink" or a "fellow-traveler," such as those leveled against outspoken progressive Burt Lancaster, whose swashbuckling movies of the early 1950s contained the thematic element of the oppressed rising up against their oppressor. Yet Lancaster's business partner, former CPUSA member Harold Hecht, in friendly testimony before HUAC told of how, when he was employed by the Works Progress Administration's National Theater Project, he was commanded by CPUSA to fire Party critics and retain Party members when the organization's budget was cut and layoffs were immanent. To his credit, Hecht did admit that CPUSA did not have inordinate influence in the National Theater Project, as had been claimed by anti-Communist zealots in Congress before the war, so there was no real interference with Party members, as Elia Kazan noted in his justification of his own friendly testimony before HUAC; it just seems like it never was very effective in actually creating communist propaganda (the sole exception is often cited as Warners' 1943 release Mission to Moscow (1943), which was in fact made at the request of the U.S. government, a pro-Russian potboiler written by future blacklisted screenwriter Howard Koch that put forth the Soviet dictator's show trials of the late 1930s as having been undertaken to rid the USSR of real and potential spies for Nazi Germany. The "leader" of this Nazi Fifth Column, the chief culprit behind all this skulduggery was, of course, Stalin's nemesis Lev Trotskiy, who had been murdered in Mexico in 1940 by an NKVD assassin on Stalin's orders. Many progressives, including educator John Dewey, who ran an inquiry, were fully aware at the time of the purges that the show trials were staged productions whose victims confessed to improbable if not downright impossible crimes. Stalin was imposing a cruel and implacable dictatorship on the Soviet Union, in effect consolidating his grip on the USSR through the judicial murder of his old Bolshevik and Menshevik allies to eliminate potential rivals and any possible challenge to his monopoly on power, real or imagined.
The Red-baiting and McCarthyite witch-hunt must be understood in the context of the intense backlash against the New Deal from the political right wing that gained strength when Harry S. Truman assumed the presidency, and which gained more momentum when Truman unexpectedly won the 1948 presidential election, thus keeping the Republicans out of power for four more years. The GOP was taken over by reactionary isolationists and anti-interventionists, who wanted to isolate America from the rest of the world and its "harmful" influences. It was an ancient theme, as old as the Republic itself, when George Washington in his farewell address cautioned his new country against becoming entangled in foreign alliances. Like Metternich at the Congress of Vienna, who wanted to turn post-Napoleonic Europe back to the status quo antebellum of monarchies that could suppress the spreading liberalism that threatened to upset the old social equilibrium that Napoleon had knocked off kilter, many Republicans and conservative Democrats wanted to return the United States to its inward-looking self, and Washington, DC, back to the swampy, sleepy Southern town it had been before the war. It's always impossible to turn back the clock, though, and Truman was determined to contain Soviet communism while at the same time avoiding World War III.
Many pre-war proto-fascists of the old Nazi-financed German-American Bund and the Roosevelt-hating America First isolationists were quick to launch a crusade against the USSR and especially its American supporters after World War II's end made the necessity for an anti-Axis alliance a moot point. They were joined by many others, including some converts whom had once been enthusiastic New Dealers, such as newspaper columnist and radio personality Walter Winchell, who had grown older, wealthier and more conservative, and turned into a Red-baiter. In addition to providing "legitimacy" to anti-Semitic outbursts by the old prewar proto-fascists who were how hopping onto the anti-Red bandwagon of the radical right, the anti-Communist witch-hunt of the late 1940s and early 1950s can be seen as a "payback" by conservatives, both the dyed-in-the-wool variety like studio boss Walt Disney and the Johnny-come-latelies like Winchell, against liberals who were enjoying a 20-year run in power through the Roosevelt-Truman administrations. The country that most Americans had known and grown up with had changed dramatically, and there was a great deal of anxiety in the country that could be, and was, exploited by ruthless power-seekers. Attacked by the hard left via the Progressive Party, dedicated New & Fair Dealer Truman was forced to shift right himself, as did many liberals desiring to survive the onset of the political winter for progressive politics in Hollywood and the country at large. The studio bosses, themselves ruthless power-seekers, made common cause with the inquisitors for the sake of their bottom lines, already being ravaged by a postwar recession and soon to fall victim to an even more insidious "foreign menace"--television.
Anthropology holds that social phenomenon such as witch-trials are a type of homeostatic device to regulate the stress building up in a community by discharging excess pressure to eliminate the strain that could wreck the community. By directing the community's anxieties against a scapegoat that is then destroyed, the community purges itself of the dangerous buildup of psychic stress. Many people were sincerely concerned about the future welfare of the United States and the direction the country was headed in, while certain others were not but used the social distress as a vehicle for self-aggrandizement. There was an element of the show-trial in the HUAC hearings of 1947 and the early 1950s, in which conservatives sought to destroy the left and its leaders grasped for recognition and power.
Through a wide network of informers put together by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the American Legion and the California Assembly's own Un-American Activities Committee, HUAC believed it had a good idea who was or had been a member of CPUSA. It had been said that by the early 1950s, when almost all of the Communist networks that had been active in the US during World War II had been broken up by the FBI or terminated by Moscow soon after the war (afraid its operatives might get caught), there were more FBI agents in the CPUSA than there were authentic, card-carrying Communists. The Alien Registration Act of 1940, a.k.a. the Smith Act, had been used to destroy CPUSA by banning the knowing or willful advocating, abetting, advising, or teaching the necessity, desirability or propriety of overthrowing the government of the U.S. or any of its subdivisions by force or violence, or by assassination of its officials. It also outlawed the printing, publishing, editing and distribution of materials advocating violent revolution, and made it a crime to organize, help or make attempts to organize any group advocating the same.
By outlawing "advocacy," a class of speech seemingly protected by the First Amendment, Congress had deliberately cast a wide net in which it caught many writers and performers with progressive tendencies, including lifelong Republican Henry Fonda and old liberal warhorse Edward G. Robinson, both of whom effectively were "graylisted" out of films for almost a decade and were forced to make their living in the theater, in which no blacklist existed. Interestingly, despite the theater being a form of communication and the new medium of television rapidly evolving as the most potent form of mass communication ever, many members of the gray- and blacklist (those who refused to testify before HUAC) could find employment. Those two media did not have the labor troubles that Hollywood did, nor the likely level of organized-crime affiliation that had been exposed during the extortion trial of International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees President George 'Calypso' Browne (also a vice president of the American Federation of Labor) and his right-hand man, Chicago mobster Willie Morris Bioff, shortly before the war that had led to the imprisonment of industry bagman Joseph Schenck of 20th Century-Fox (interestingly, the studios' initial payoff to the mob was done in the Waldorf-Astoria hotel where, a decade later, the movie moguls would agree to impose the blacklist). The movie magnates and Hollywood craft unions, whose members were dunned 2% of their wages for a "strike fund" that was channeled back to Bioff's "Outfit" (the old Al Capone mob) in Chicago, paid the mob as much as $15 million to ensure labor peace, in a symbiotic relationship the skirted the fine line between bribery and extortion. The federal government eventually broke up the Hollywood racket, in no small part because Screen Actor's Guild president Robert Montgomery had initiated an investigation of the situation. A Chicago tax court tackling the case ruled that the studio bosses "knowingly and willingly paid over the funds and in a sense lent encouragement and participated with full knowledge of the facts in the activities of Browne and Bioff." The moral rot of Hollywood was all pervasive. Sammy Glick was every bit as rotten as Budd Schulberg had warned.
Event though he was excused from testifying and did not defy the Committee, Maurice Rapf, after being called by HUAC (thus indicating industry knowledge of his connection to CPUSA) was subsequently blacklisted in accordance with the movie magnates Waldorf Statement. Rapf was done in partly due to his association with fellow unapologetic Stalinists like Lillian Hellman, a HUAC unfriendly witness, but more likely due to his militant support of labor unions during a time when Hollywood was besieged with labor troubles and the studios liked to tar union activists as "Red" in order to deliver Hollywood into the hands of more amenable (and bribe-able) mob-controlled unions. Disney was known to be an implacable foe of unionization, and although the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organization (separate entities until 1955) fought Communists and had been purging them from their member unions for years, the charge of being a secret Red remained a potent weapon in the studios' anti-labor arsenal for years to come.
Now blacklisted and thus technically unemployable as a screenwriter, Maurice Rapf left Hollywood and began a new life across the border from Hanover, New Hampshire, in Norwich, Vermont. He was one of the founders of The Dartmouth Film Society in 1949, the first college film society in the US. Like many blacklisted screenwriters who chose to remain in the country and pursue their craft, Rapf had to use various fronts to market his work. He also worked in the production of industrial films and television commercials in New York City, functioning as a writer, director and producer. In addition to these labors, Rapf was a movie critic for the mass-circulation periodicals `Life' and `Family Circle.'
It was in these years that his old friend and fellow Hollywood Prince Budd Schulberg forever tarnished his crown when he appeared as a friendly witness before HUAC on May 23, 1951, and named names. One of the 15 names he named was Maurice Rapf. Schulberg told HUAC that CPUSA tried to dictate changes to "What Makes Sammy Run?" so that it conformed to the Party line. He was ordered to talk to John Howard Lawson, their generalissimo of the arts in Hollywood, who asked him to submit an outline so that Lawson could vet his novel, a request Schulberg ignored. At a meeting with V.J. Jerome, the CPUSA theoretician whom former "Daily Worker" managing editor and blacklistee Howard Fast termed the Party "cultural czar", Schulberg was told "my entire attitude was wrong; that I was wrong about writing; wrong about this book; wrong about the Party . . . I remember it more as a kind of harangue. When I came away I felt maybe, almost for the first time, that this was to me the real face of the Party." Schulberg, once again playing Oedipus, proved determined to slay another patriarch.
In 1966 Maurice Rapf was hired by Dartmouth College as an adjunct professor to teach about the cinema. In 1976 he was promoted to full professor with the portfolio of establishing Dartmouth's new film studies program. As a professor, he was prized for his honesty; many of his students, after having established themselves in the business, would return to him for critiques and advice on their film projects. In 2000, he published "All About the Movies: A Textbook for the Movie-Loving Layman," based on his 30 years of teaching at Dartmouth. That book was published a year after his 1999 memoir, "Back Lot: Growing up with the Movies," an insider's look at the movie business.
An autobiography, the special strength of "Back Lot" is that Rapf's experiences are gained from first hand experience. He experienced the evolution of the American film industry from silence to sound, from the amalgamation of studio control to the overthrow of the studios by the independent contractor with his or her own production company. Rapf gives special attention to the film community's awakening from an apolitical apathy, focused on assimilation rather than confrontation, towards a community increasingly aware of its social responsibility due to the Great Depression and the war against the fascist Axis powers.
Variety, the bible of show business, reported in its July 31, 1998 issue that the Writers Guild of America, the union that Rapf had helped found, had voted to give screen credits to 13 blacklisted screenwriters, including Rapf, for their unaccredited contributions to 21 movies produced during the period of 1950-69. The WGA's Blacklist Credits Committee had conducted an investigation into the production history of each movie with questionable credits, a process hampered by the blacklisted screenwriters' use of fronts and the pseudonyms. Although Dalton Trumbo of Hollywood Ten fame broke the blacklist in 1960 with credits for Spartacus (1960) (at the insistence of producer/star Kirk Douglas) and Exodus (1960) (because of the efforts of director/producer Otto Preminger), some screenwriters had continued to write under pseudonyms until the 1970s.
In addition to Rapf, who was given credit on The Detective (1954), the blacklisted writers included the late Paul Jarrico, one of the more famous of blacklisted screenwriters, who posthumously picked up four credits. Jarrico had refused to be given credit by the committee until after it had investigated all other blacklisted screen writers. CPUSA stalwart and Hollywood Ten member John Howard Lawson picked up one credit, while Carl Foreman, one of the first benefactors of credit restoration when he and Michael Wilson were given credit (and posthumous Academy Award statuettes) for the Oscar-winning screenplay for The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), picked up another credit, for the Oscar-nominated screenplay of A Hatful of Rain (1957), which lost to their "Kwai" screenplay (originally credited to Pierre Boulle, a Frenchman who did not write in English).
Screenwriters who were awarded multiple new credits were Henry Blankfort, with three, and Daniel James and Robert L. Richards, with two each. Screenwriters receiving a single new credit were Leonardo Bercovici, Jerome Chodorov, Howard Dimsdale, Howard Koch, Jean Rouverol and Donald Ogden Stewart. WGA West president 'Daniel Petrie Jr., at the announcement of the new credits, said, "It is with pride and sadness that we announce these changes."
In a speech at the University of Oklahoma, Rapf said that Walt Disney & Co. had contacted him about a re-release of "Song of the South" on DVD. The studio wanted to create disclaimers about the film's "racial insensitivity" and asked Rapf to write them. Ever the committed progressive, he declined, thus able to expiate a sin from the past, as he had come to believe that the film was inherently racist and should never have been made. No one ever claimed that Maurice Rapf was not a man of his word, or a man of courage who stood up for what he believed in. In his belief in himself and his ideals, this idealistic man who was accused of being "anti-American" elucidated the best of the American character.
Maurice Rapf died on April 15, 2003, at the age of 88. He had been married to his wife, the former movie actress Louise Siedel, for 56 years before her death. His daughter, Joanna E. Rapf, is a Professor of English and Film & Video Studies at the University of Oklahoma, but regularly teaches as a Visiting Professor of Film & Television Studies at her father's alma mater.
Upon his death, Dartmouth President James Wright eulogized the man responsible for the success for the college's film department. "Because of Maurice Rapf's commitment, love and encouragement, the Dartmouth Film Society is a highly-regarded Dartmouth institution and Film Studies is a strong and thriving department on campus. Dartmouth is forever enriched by his commitment. We will greatly miss our friend and colleague."
The college bestows the Maurice Rapf Award for Outstanding Achievement in Film at Dartmouth in his honor.- Writer
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Screenwriter Lester Cole, who is known in cinema history primarily as a member of the "Hollywood Ten," a group who defied the House Committee on Un-American Activities investigation into their political beliefs who were black-listed by the industry for their defiance, was born on June 19, 1904 in New York to a Polish immigrant family. His first desire was to be an actor, and Cole dropped out of high school at the age of sixteen in 1920. He began writing and directing plays, and in the 1920s and '30s, he worked primarily as an actor on the stage. He appeared in Painted Faces (1929) and Love at First Sight (1929) but made his name as a screenwriter. His first screenplay, W.C. Fields comedy If I Had a Million (1932) was made in 1932. In 1933, the first year of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, Cole and eight other screenwriters, including future Hollywood Ten members John Howard Lawson and Samuel Ornitz, organized the Screen Writers Guild (SWG), the first and most radical of the Hollywood guilds. Cole's politics were on the hard left, and he joined the Communist Party-USA in 1934.
Cole adhered to the Hollywood Ten's common front strategy of challenging HCUA's right to interrogate them on the basis of their political beliefs. Convicted of contempt of Congress, he was fined and served one year in prison. His unfinished script about the Mexican revolutionary general Emiliano Zapata later finished by fellow traveler John Steinbeck for former CP-USA members (and HUAC song-bird) Elia Kazan, who made Viva Zapata! (1952) starring Marlon Brando from the script.
After he got out of federal prison, Cole worked a series of odd jobs. He emigrated to London in 1961, but eventually returned to the U.S., where he began collaborating on screenplays using an assumed name. One of his scripts, written under the pseudonym "Gerald L.C. Copley", was made into the popular movie Born Free (1966). He also wrote his autobiography, "Hollywood Red" (1981) and reviewed films for "The People's World" and taught screen-writing at the University of California, Berkeley.
Lester Cole died of a heart attack on August 15, 1985. He was 81 years old.- Writer
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Producer and screenwriter who, among many in his craft labeled in the late 1940's and early 1950's as 'subversive' by the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities, was blacklisted, Jarrico in the prime of his career. His name was left out of the credits of most American films that he wrote during the 50's and 60's, and in others replaced by a pseudonym. He defied the ban, however, in producing the then little known film Salt of the Earth (1954), which would win awards in Europe - and eventually be listed by the U.S. Library of Congress in its catalogue of films to be preserved for all time! Ironically, Jarrico's death occurred as he was motoring home from a ceremony in observance of the 50th anniversary of the House Committee's first hearings.- Writer
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Alvah Bessie was born on 4 June 1904 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for Objective, Burma! (1945), Northern Pursuit (1943) and Smart Woman (1948). He was married to Sylviane L. Martin. He died on 21 July 1985 in Terra Linda, California, USA.- Writer
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Adrian Scott, the producer of progressive films who was blacklisted as one of the Hollywood 10, was born into a middle-class Irish Catholic family in Arlington, New Jersey, on February 6, 1912, to Mary (Redpath) and Allan Scott. He established his reputation as a writer on various magazines before finding employment in the movie industry. As a screenwriter, Scott worked on Keeping Company (1940), The Parson of Panamint (1941), We Go Fast (1941) and Mr. Lucky (1943), but it was as a producer he made his biggest mark in Hollywood, helping to create the genre later known as "film noir". In the mid-1940s at R.K.O., working with director Edward Dmytryk and screenwriter 'John Paxton ', Scott produced Murder, My Sweet (1944), a detective thriller based on 'Raymond Chander's's "Farewell My Lovely", with 'Dick Powell' as Philip Marlowe. The team next made Cornered (1945) (again with Dick Powell) and So Well Remembered (1947), with Scott producing Clifford Odets Deadline at Dawn (1946), directed by Harold Clurman. But it was for the gritty noir masterpiece Crossfire (1947), the first Hollywood film to deal with anti-semitism, that the group is best known. "Crossfire" was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Robert Ryan, Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Gloria Grahame), Best Director (Dmytryk), Best Writing-Screenplay (Paxton) and Best Picture (Scott). Scott and his collaborator Dymytrk had reached the summit of their careers; for Scott, it would be the last motion picture he'd ever produce. Both he and Dmytryk were called before the House Un-American Actitivies Committee in 1947 and refused to name names. As a part of a common defense strategy crafted by Communist Party lawyers (Scott had joined the Party in 1944), he and Dymytrk and the eight others who became known to posterity as "The Hollywood 10", refused to answer any questions other than their names and addresses. The even denied the Committee the right to query them as to their membership in the Screen Writers Guild. The 10 claimed that the Firstst Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gave them the right to refuse HUAC's inquiry into their political beliefs as it was an unconstitutional violation of privacy. All members of the Hollywood 10 subsequently were found guilty of contempt of Congress and fined and jailed. All were blacklisted from the industry. Scott was sentenced to a year in prison and fined $1,000. (Dmytryk later recanted his communist past and was re-employed by Hollywood. Testifying before HUAC in 1951, he claimed that Scott had pressured him to put communist propaganda in his films.) On his part, Scott took on the Hollywood blacklist: He sued R.K.O. for wrongful dismissal, but the case was ultimately rejected by the Supreme Court in 1957. While blacklisted, Scott survived by writing for television under an assumed name, including such All-American fare as "Lassie" and the faintly subversive ("Steals from the rich/Gives to the poor!") "The Adventures of Robin Hood". He also produced one of the more remarkable American movies, the left-wing Salt of the Earth (1954), a film about a miner's strike that was made by Scott and other victims of the blacklist. Adrian Scott died of lung cancer in Los Angeles, on 25th December, 1973.- Writer
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During the 1930s, it was fashionable to be a part of the radical political movement in Hollywood. Lillian Hellman devoted herself to the cause along with other writers and actors in their zeal to reform. Her independence set her apart from all but a few women of the day, and gave her writing an edge that broke the rules. Born in New Orleans in 1905, but raised in New York after the age of five, she studied at Columbia. She married Arthur Kober in 1925, did some work in publishing and wrote for the Herald Tribune. When her husband, also a writer, got a job with Paramount, they moved out to California. It was there that she met Dashiell Hammett and subsequently divorced Kober. Their relationship lasted, in one form or another, for 30 years. Her first important work was the play "The Children's Hour," which was based on a true incident in Scotland. This was an amazingly successful play, and gave Lillian a definite standing in the literary community. Her next venture, a play called "Days To Come," was a complete failure so off she went to Europe. There, she took in the Spanish Civil War and traveled around with Ernest Hemingway. When back in the States, she wrote "The Little Foxes," which opened in 1939 and was a financial windfall for her. She also followed Dorothy Parker and other highly esteemed writers to Hollywood where she was well compensated for her screenwriting efforts. While it may have been fun and daring to be part of a radical political group in the 1930s, with the '40s came the Un-American Activities Committee. She was forced to testify in government hearings, and there was the threat of black lists and tax problems. She remained a visible force and became almost an icon in her later years. Despite an assortment of health issues, including being practically blind, she traveled, lectured, and promoted her political beliefs. She was 79 when she died in 1984, and yet she is still very much with us. It's been over 60 years since it originally opened, but "The Little Foxes," along with other works, is still being produced at all levels of the theater. What writer could ask for anything more?- Director
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Known for his creative stage direction, Elia Kazan was born Elias Kazantzoglou on September 7, 1909 in Constantinople, Ottoman Empire (now Istanbul, Turkey). Noted for drawing out the best dramatic performances from his actors, he directed 21 actors to Oscar nominations, resulting in nine wins. He directed a string of successful films, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), On the Waterfront (1954), and East of Eden (1955). During his career, he won two Oscars as Best Director and received an Honorary Oscar, won three Tony Awards, and four Golden Globe Awards.
His films were concerned with personal or social issues of special concern to him. Kazan writes, "I don't move unless I have some empathy with the basic theme." His first such "issue" film was Gentleman's Agreement (1947), with Gregory Peck, which dealt with anti-Semitism in America. It received 8 Oscar nominations and three wins, including Kazan's first for Best Director. It was followed by Pinky (1949), one of the first films in mainstream Hollywood to address racial prejudice against black people. A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), an adaptation of the stage play which he had also directed, received 12 Oscar nominations, winning four, and was Marlon Brando's breakthrough role. In 1954, he directed On the Waterfront (1954), a film about union corruption on the New York harbor waterfront. In 1955, he directed John Steinbeck's East of Eden (1955), which introduced James Dean to movie audiences.
A turning point in Kazan's career came with his testimony as a witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952 at the time of the Hollywood blacklist, which brought him strong negative reactions from many liberal friends and colleagues. His testimony helped end the careers of former acting colleagues Morris Carnovsky and Art Smith, along with ending the work of playwright Clifford Odets. Kazan later justified his act by saying he took "only the more tolerable of two alternatives that were either way painful and wrong." Nearly a half-century later, his anti-Communist testimony continued to cause controversy. When Kazan was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1999, dozens of actors chose not to applaud as 250 demonstrators picketed the event.
Kazan influenced the films of the 1950s and 1960s with his provocative, issue-driven subjects. Director Stanley Kubrick called him, "without question, the best director we have in America, and capable of performing miracles with the actors he uses." On September 28, 2003, Elia Kazan died at age 94 of natural causes at his apartment in Manhattan, New York City. Martin Scorsese co-directed the documentary film A Letter to Elia (2010) as a personal tribute to Kazan.- Writer
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Clifford Odets dropped out of high school to pursue acting. In the 1930s he became a charter member of the Group Theatre, the famous "Method" acting troupe founded by Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg and Cheryl Crawford. Beginning with "Waiting for Lefty" (1935), Odets quickly became the most famous young playwright in America. In the next four years he wrote five more plays, including "Awake and Sing!"; "Golden Boy" and "Rocket to the Moon", whose histrionics well suited the Group's exuberant style. On his first Hollywood assignment he met (and soon married) Luise Rainer, but they lived together only briefly. Between reconciliations with Rainer, Odets had a stormy, tempestuous affair with Frances Farmer. His other conquests included Fay Wray and a host of less famous women, including stage actress Betty Grayson, who became his second wife.
In 1934 - Odets joined the American Communists Party; he left the party a few months later. In 1952 - Odets was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee as a "friendly witness". He disavows Communism, and he "confirms names" of fellow Communists. He only said the names of people already mentioned to HUAC, and did not give any new names to the committee.
Odets was not himself 'blacklisted' by the HUAC.- Actor
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Morris Carnovsky was one of the more prominent victims of the Hollywood blacklist, being named as a Communist party member by both Elia Kazan -- the most infamous of the informers who sang before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the era blacklistee Lillian Hellman called the "Scoundrel Time" -- and Sterling Hayden. However, he had been effectively blacklisted -- unofficially banned from appearing in Hollywood films -- since 1950, two years before Kazan sang before HUAC, when Carnovsky himself refused to "name names" before the Committee. Carnovsky did not make any more movies for the better part of a decade -- in fact, his movie acting career essentially was over -- but he did have a thriving career on the Broadway stage, the venue where he established his reputation as a thespian back in the 1930s.
Morris Carnovsky was born in St. Louis, Missouri on September 5, 1898, the son of a grocer. Upon graduation from high school he attended St. Louis' Washington University.
Like most actors of his generation, he worked his way up the ladder by first appearing with traveling stock companies. Eventually, he landed in New York City, where he became a member of the Theatre Guild, the legendary theatrical company appearing as Kublai Khan in Nobel Prize winner 'Eugene O'Neill's play "Marco Millions' (I)'. Subsequently, he became one of the founding members of the left-wing Group Theatre.
Founded in 1931 by Lee Strasberg and Harold Clurman, and Cheryl Crawford, The Group Theatre contained Luther Adler, Stella Adler, Elia Kazan, and playwright Clifford Odets; the latter three were major forces in transforming American theater and acting, a process that began with the Provincetown Theatre. Stella Adler, Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg, including their students/latter Group Theatre members like Bobby Lewis, were instrumental in making "The Method" -- a variation of Konstantin Stanislavski's acting theories, based on finding and cultivating "motivation" -- revolutionized American acting on stage and in the movies, most famously through Adler's student Marlon Brando. Kazan and Strasberg later founded the Actors Studio, America's premier acting school that promulgated "The Method" via such alumni as James Dean, Paul Newman and hundreds of others.
Carnovsky was a member of the Group Theater until it broke up in 1940. He appeared prominently in Odets' plays "Awake and Sing" and Golden Boy (1939). Carnovsky's talents were in demand by other theatrical troupes, and he appeared on Broadway in the 1930s in multiple non-Group Theatre productions.
Eventually, Hollywood beckoned and Carnovsky made his screen debut in The Life of Emile Zola (1937), playing Anatole France in support of Paul Muni. Settling in Los Angeles after the Group Theatre breakup, Carnovsky was one of the founders of the Actor's Laboratory and became involved with the the Hollywood Communist Party, whose cultural apparatchik, screenwriter John Howard Lawson, was later one of the Hollywood Ten, the first group of leftists blacklisted by the film industry. While Carnovsky was never involved in espionage or any overt acts against the interests of the United States (as were none of the Hollywood Ten or other blacklistees), he led Marxist study groups in his home, as Sterling Hayden testified to before HUAC.
In his 1952 testimony before HUAC, Elia Kazan named Carnovsky as a member of the Communist Party cell he had belonged to in the Group Theatre. Other members included Lee Strasberg's wife, Paula (best known as Marilyn Monroe's acting coach). Kazan had quit the cell in the mid-1930s, he said, when it was ordered by the Party to undermine Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg (who did not know his wife was a communist) and take over the Group Theatre. The attempted coup was never launched.
In 1950, Carnovsky was hauled before HUAC, where he refused to "name names." This resulted in his blacklisting, not Kazan's testimony. (Kazan said that Carnovsky, like others he named, already were known by the Committee.) The blacklist did not exist on Broadway, and producer (and future Osar-winning actor) John Houseman cast Carnovsky in the Broadway production of Henrik Ibsen's "An Enemy of the People," whose script was written by future HUAC target Arthur Miller. He acted in many Broadway productions throughout the 1950s and into the '60s.
A part in Sidney Lumet's film version of Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge (1962) did not revive his movie career, and he continued to act on stage. He died on September 1, 1992, at the age of 94.- Actress
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Wife of Morris Carnovsky, famed Shakespearean actor. Original member of the legendary Group Theater with Clifford Odets.
Blacklisted with Carnovsky in 1951 after director Elia Kazan named them as Communists in front of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.
Taught acting in New York into her late 90s.- Writer
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Budd Schulberg was born on 27 March 1914 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for On the Waterfront (1954), Everglades! (1961) and A Face in the Crowd (1957). He was married to Betsy Ann Langman, Geraldine Brooks, Agnes Victoria Anderson and Virginia Ray. He died on 5 August 2009 in Westhampton Beach, Long Island, New York, USA.- Director
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Writer / director Frank Tuttle, whose Hollywood career stretched from the silent movie era to the dawn of the 1960s, was born on August 6, 1892, in New York City. His first credit in the movie industry was as a screenwriter for the Monte Blue picture The Kentuckians (1921) in 1921 for Famous Players-Lasky (Paramount). He made his directorial debut the following year with the melodrama The Cradle Buster (1922), starring Osgood Perkins. A contract director at Paramount, he directed 73 more movies before hanging up his megaphone after 1959's Island of Lost Women (1959). His output included films ranging from the classic This Gun for Hire (1942)--the film that made Alan Ladd a star--to the Edgar Bergen-Charlie McCarthy farce Charlie McCarthy, Detective (1939).
Tuttle worked in every genre, including slapstick, and with greats and near-greats, from silent stars Clara Bow, Evelyn Brent, Louise Brooks, Thomas Meighan and Gloria Swanson to sound-era stand-outs Jean Arthur, Mary Astor, William Bendix, Joan Blondell, Eddie Cantor, Bing Crosby, William Demarest, Cary Grant, Veronica Lake, Fredric March, Adolphe Menjou, William Powell, Robert Preston, Edward G. Robinson, Charles Ruggles, Simone Signoret and Phil Silvers.
Tuttle became notorious during the Hollywood Red Scare for his associations with the American Communist Party, revealed in testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Not only had the director had been a member of the Communist Party, but he had hosted Party get-togethers in his New York City home, which served as the site for one meeting of party members attended by V.J. Jerome. Jerome was a cultural commissar for the Communist Party USA, who served as editor of its theoretical journal "The Communist" (later retitled "Political Affairs"). In 1951 Jerome was indicted for subversion under the Smith Act along with other members of the Communist Party. Convicted, he was imprisoned for three years. Lionel Stander, who was blacklisted, was at the Jerome meeting at Tuttle's home.
The same year the Communist Party leadership was indicted along with Jerome, Tuttle returned to the US to play tattle-tale. In an appearance before HUAC, he admitted to being a Party member from 1937-47, when he quit the party as it had become "too violent" for his taste (Jerome and other Communist Party leaders were indicted for advocating the violent overthrow of the U.S. government). Tuttle went through the ritual of "naming names", including that of director Jules Dassin, who himself was blacklisted and forced into exile in Europe. Avoiding the blacklist by his public show of contrition, Tuttle continued to direct in Hollywood, but ironically his career ended in 1959, the year that the blacklist was broken when Otto Preminger and Kirk Douglas openly hired blacklisted Hollywood 10 member Dalton Trumbo to write the scripts for Exodus (1960) and Spartacus (1960), respectively.
Frank Tuttle died on January 6, 1963, in Los Angeles, California. He was 70 years old.- Actor
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When amiable Columbia Pictures actor Larry Parks was entrusted the role of entertainer Al Jolson in the biopic The Jolson Story (1946), his career finally hit the big time. Within a few years, however, his bright new world crumbled courtesy of the House Un-American Activities Committee after the actor admitted under pressure that he was once affiliated with the Communist Party. Although he unwillingly testified in 1951, he was still (unofficially) blacklisted. Never-say-die Larry managed to continue his career in years to come - both here and abroad, on stage and in nightclubs - alongside steadfast wife Betty Garrett. His film career, however, literally came to a standstill and would never be the same again.
Samuel Klausman Lawrence Parks was born in Olathe, Kansas, on December 13, 1914, of German and Irish descent. As a child growing up in Joliet, Illinois, he was plagued by a variety of illnesses, including rheumatic fever, but persevered with physical exercise and sheer strength of will. Majoring in science at the University of Illinois, his plans to become a doctor dissolved when, to the dismay of his parents, he found a passionate sideline in college dramatics.
He began appearing in touring shows, then made the big move to New York, finding initial employment as an usher at Carnegie Hall and a tour guide at Radio City. Following a number of summer stock shows, he made an inauspicious 1937 Broadway debut with a minor role in the Group Theatre's presentation of "Golden Boy". Developing a close-knit relationship with the Group, he was just beginning to build up his resumé in such Broadway outings as "All the Living", "My Heart's in the Highlands" and "Pure in Heart" when he had to return to his Illinois home following the death of his father.
He toiled for a time in Chicago as a Pullman inspector on the New York Central Railroad until the possibility of a film role had him re-setting his acting sights on Los Angeles. Although the film deal fell through, Larry stayed in L.A. and somehow made ends meet working construction. Columbia expressed interest in the fledgling actor and signed him up in 1941 after a favorable screen test. He stayed for nine years. His buildup was slow-moving, taking his first small step with a minor role in Mystery Ship (1941). Time, however, did not increase the tempo or quality of his movies. Either he was oddly cast, such as his role as an Indian opposite exotic Yvonne De Carlo in The Deerslayer (1943), or completely dismissed, as co-star of such obscurities as The Black Parachute (1944), Sergeant Mike (1944) or She's a Sweetheart (1944).
His association with the Group Theatre back in New York led to a chance introduction to musical actress Betty Garrett and the couple married in 1944. Larry had settled by this time in Hollywood but Betty was a hot item on Broadway. MGM finally offered her a contract and she relocated to Los Angeles to join her husband. The couple eventually had two children, one of whom, Andrew Parks, became a fine actor in his own right. Their other son, Garrett Parks, served as composer for the film Diamond Men (2000).
Larry scored an Oscar nomination playing Jolson (which was originally offered to both James Cagney and Danny Thomas), and hoped for equally challenging roles. His hopes were dashed as the studio instead continued casting him haphazardly in mild-mannered comedies and swashbuckling adventures. Other than the box-office sequel Jolson Sings Again (1949), most of Larry's films were hardly worthy of his obvious talent. To compensate somewhat, he managed to find a creative outlet in summer stock, and both he and Betty put together a successful vaudeville act with one tour ending up playing London's Palladium.
Following the completion of Love Is Better Than Ever (1952) with Elizabeth Taylor, the political scandal erupted and erased all of his chances to do film. One of many casualties of Hollywood "blacklisting", he was forced to end his association with Columbia, and he and Betty, whose own career was damaged, traveled to Europe to find work.
He found some TV parts after the controversy died down, and Betty and Larry were a delightful replacement for Judy Holliday and Sydney Chaplin on Broadway in "Bells Are Ringing". During the many meager times, he concentrated on becoming a successful businessman, including building apartment complexes. He made only two more films, last playing a doctor in the Montgomery Clift starrer Freud (1962). By the time he died of a heart attack on April 13, 1975, at age 60, Larry had long faded from view. Betty, however, managed to revitalize her career on TV sitcoms with regular roles on All in the Family (1971), Laverne & Shirley (1976), and roles on numerous other TV series before passing on February 12, 2011.- Actor
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American character actor who specialized in underworld types, despite a far greater range. A native of the Bronx, he participated in plays in school, then attended City College of New York. In 1930, he was accepted into Eva Le Gallienne's company, where he became friendly with another young actor, one day to be known as John Garfield. The two appeared in a number of plays, both with Le Gallienne's company and with the highly-politicized Group Theatre, before Lawrence was given a film contract with Columbia Pictures. His scarred complexion and brooding appearance made him a natural for heavies, and he played scores of gangsters and mob bosses over the next six decades. Nevertheless, he could turn in fine performances in very different kinds of roles as well, such as his bewildered mountain boy in The Shepherd of the Hills (1941).
Following the Second World War, as anti-Communist fervor gripped America, Lawrence found himself under scrutiny for his political leanings. When called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), he admitted he had once been a member of the Communist Party. The Committee broke down his resolve and he "named names" (including Sterling Hayden, Lionel Stander, Anne Revere, Larry Parks, Karen Morley and Jeff Corey). Nonetheless, he was blacklisted and departed for Europe, where he continued to make films, often in leading roles. Following the demise of the blacklist, he returned to America and resumed his position as a familiar and talented purveyor of gangland types. He was also a writer and director.- Writer
- Script and Continuity Department
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Writer-director Abraham Lincoln Polonsky, one of the most prominent victims of the Hollywood blacklisting of communists and social progressives in the post-World War II period, was born on December 5, 1910, in New York, New York. An unreconstructed Marxist, Polonsky never hid his membership in the Communist Party. (Indeed, it was known by the federal government during World War II, when he was a member of the O.S.S. working in France with the Resistance, given credence to the charge that the House Un-American Activities Committee wasn't interested so much in "ferreting out" communists and fellow-travelers as in making progressives of the F.D.R. coalition publicly repudiate their beliefs in a form of public penance.) After being named by former fellow O.S.S. member Sterling Hayden, Polonsky himself was arraigned before HUAC in 1951. After defying the committee by refusing to name names, he was blacklisted for 17 years by the U.S. film industry.
As director and screenwriter, Polonsky was an "auteur" of three of the great film noirs made in the last century: Body and Soul (1947) (screenplay; directed by fellow CPUSA member Robert Rossen, who kept his career by "naming names"), Force of Evil (1948) (which he wrote and directed), and Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) (which he wrote using a front).
Polonsky studied English at City College of New York (CCNY) and, after briefly shipping out as a merchant seaman, went to Columbia Law School. Polonsky's father wanted him to have a profession, and he preferred the law over medicine. The young Polonsky had wanted to be a writer, and he taught English at CCNY while matriculating at Columbia Law, but the law was his first career. After graduation from Columbia Law, he became a practicing attorney, which ironically, led to his career in screenwriting.
Gertrude Berg, the creative force behind the popular radio show "The Goldbergs" (which later made the transition to TV), was a client of his firm. Needing background for an episode that would feature the machinations of the law, Polonsky was assigned to Berg as an expert. Berg was so impressed when Polonsky dictated a scene to his secretary, she hired him as one of her writers. Thus, in 1937, by a serendipitous route charted originally by his father, who wanted his son to be a professional, not a writer, Polonsky was on his way to becoming a hot, Oscar-nominated screenwriter and writer-director.
Polonsky eventually left Berg and became a labor organizer. In 1939, after organizing autoworkers at a General Motors plant near his home in Briarcliff, New York, he became the educational director of the Congress of Industrial Organization, the major labor federation for skilled workers, in upstate New York. While working as a labor organizer, Polonsky wrote his first novel, "The Discoverers", a novel dealing with New York City bohemians, radicals, and frustrated intellectuals. The book was optioned by a publisher that unfortunately went out of business; it remains unpublished to this day. However, he began to thrive as a novelist: Simon and Schuster published a novel he co-wrote, "The Goose Is Cooked," in 1942, and Little Brown published his sea-adventure story "The Enemy Sea," which originally had been serialized in "Colliers Magazine".
Paramount became interested in Polonsky and offered him a contract. However, as a dedicated anti-Nazi, Polonsky was determined to serve in the war despite being turned down for military service due to poor eyesight. Recruited by the O.S.S. (likely because of his communist background; it was said that during World War II, communists made the best secret agents due to their propensity for secrecy and their dedication to their ideology). He signed a contract with Paramount guaranteeing him a job after the war, and then was shipped off to London before serving in France as a liaison with the French underground.
Back from World War II, Polonsky alienated Paramount's head writer when he complained that his nominal boss had kept him waiting too long for their initial meeting. The peeved head writer gave him the Marlene Dietrich potboiler Golden Earrings (1947) as his first screenwriting assignment, and although he received a screen credit, he claimed that nothing he wrote made it to the screen. He quit Paramount to take a job with John Garfield's Enterprise Productions, which had a collectivist philosophy akin to the old Group Theater on Broadway, of which the former Julius Garfinkle (Garfield) had been a member. Garfield was a leftist, though not a member of the Communist Party, though he did employ director Robert Rossen, who was a member of CPUSA, as was Polonsky, who had joined during the Depression.
Working from Polonsky's script, Rossen shot the classic boxing drama Body and Soul (1947). Polonsky actually was allowed on the set (not a common occurrence for the film industry) and actively gave Rossen advice. Some critics see Polonsky as a "co-director," a claim Polonsky rejected as "no one," he said, "co-directs a Robert Rossen Picture." However, in the collectivist atmosphere of the studio, he was able to prevail over Rossen's conception of a "happy ending," ensuring that his own ending was part of the picture. Polonsky won an Oscar nomination for his screenplay for the film that was hailed as a classic by cineastes not long after its release. Garfield encouraged Polonsky to become a director, a development the screenwriter relished as it would give him more control over his screenplay and enable him to bring his vision to the screen just as he saw it. Adapting a 1940 crime novel "Tucker's People," Polonsky wrote and directed Force of Evil (1948), which has been hailed as the greatest low-budget film noir ever.
By the time production had wrapped, Enterprise had gone bankrupt, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was impressed enough to pick up the picture, though its hard-hitting indictment of big business, capitalism and political corruption was not Louis B. Mayer's cup of tea. MGM essentially dumped the picture as the bottom half of a double bill released for the Christmas season. This classic noir, with its indictment of capitalist society, was not exactly Christmas fare, and as Turner Classic Movies' Robert Osborne has said, it was quickly forgotten until rediscovered in the early 1960s. It has been considered a classic for at least a generation and had a big influence on Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972), whose equation of crime with business, and business with criminal behavior had been aired 24 years before in Polonsky's debut. In a huge loss to American cinema, Polonsky's debut was to be his last directorial effort for 20 years.
Both Body and Soul (1947) and Force of Evil (1948) are about the deleterious effects of materialism on the soul, as both protagonists (both played by John Garfield operating at the peak of his talent) face the loss of their soul due to the temptation of big money. Indeed, it is easy to see why conservatives would be offended by Force of Evil (1948) as it arguably is the most radical film to have come out of mainstream Hollywood, and definitely is informed by Marxism.
Blacklisted after his uncooperative appearance before HUAC in April 1951, Polonsky did not get a chance to direct another film until 1968, when he helmed the production of the revisionist Western Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969), which he turned into an indictment of genocide. Although he wrote screenplays and marketed them through fronts (most famously, with the indictment of racism Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), directed by Robert Wise, it wasn't until 1968 that he was credited on a film, for the screenplay for Don Siegel's exegesis of police corruption, Madigan (1968). After the release of the well-reviewed "Willie Boy," Polonsky enter4ed into "Fiddler on the Roof" territory and helmed the more light-hearted Romance of a Horsethief (1971). After that, he was told by his physician that his heart could not take the strain of movie directing, so he retired from that part of his work, though he continued to write screenplays until the end of his life.
After the tide of public opinion turned against the HUAC informers after Victor Navasky's 1980 history "Naming Names," Polonsky was rediscovered by scholars of the cinema. However, he proved a frustrating subject to those that wanted to ferret out the films that had been produced from his fronted-work screenplays. Similarly to his stand 40 years earlier, when he had refused to "name names," Polonsky refused to cite the pictures he had ghostwritten or to name the fronts he had used for his fronted screenplays during the days of the blacklist. He said he had given the men his word that he would not betray their confidence, and indeed, he refused to cite his anonymous work as he felt it would have gone back on his pledge to the men who had helped him through a tough period, as it would have resulted in them being denied credit for the work. Polonsky had bargained with them in good faith, and a man of principle, he refused to go back on his pledge to them.
An unrepentant Marxist until his death, Polonsky publicly objected when director Irwin Winkler sanitized his script for Guilty by Suspicion (1991) to make the character played by Robert De Niro a liberal rather than a communist. He also was prominent in objecting to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences awarding an honorary Academy Award to director Elia Kazan, who was the most prominent of the people who "named names" before HUAC.
Abraham Polonsky died of a heart-attack in Beverly Hills, California, on October 26, 1999, convinced that he had been exonerated by history. As the auteur of three classic films that will live on in cinema history, he was right.- Writer
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Robert Rossen was born on 16 March 1908 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer and director, known for The Hustler (1961), All the King's Men (1949) and Alexander the Great (1956). He was married to Sarah (Sue) Siegel. He died on 18 February 1966 in New York City, New York, USA.- Composer
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Hanns Eisler was a German-Austrian-American composer and lyricist. He was known for his "Das Lied von der Moldau" ("La Chanson du Moldau", "The Song of the Moldau") used in the TV film Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg (1961) and also sang by Zarah Leander on TV. He did so many more songs in Hollywood, France, Austria and Germany.- Writer
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Bernard Gordon was born on 29 October 1918 in New Britain, Connecticut, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for Horror Express (1972), Zombies of Mora Tau (1957) and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956). He was married to Jeannette Lewin. He died on 11 May 2007 in Hollywood Hills, California, USA.- Writer
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Graham Greene was one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century and his influence on the cinema and theatre was enormous. He wrote five plays and almost all of his novels, including "Brighton Rock", "The Ministry of Fear" and "The End of the Affair", have been brought to the screen. A superb storyteller, he also wrote the screenplays for such classics as The Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man (1949).
A colorful and larger-than-life figure, Greene traveled widely throughout the world, from the jungles of Liberia to the Mexican desert to the Far East and the Soviet Union. In World War Two was a member of MI-6 (the British intelligence service) working with the double-agent Kim Philby, and he numbered among his friends such diverse personalities as Evelyn Waugh, Noël Coward and Panamanian dictator Gen. Omar Torrijos. A notorious womanizer, he married only once but had a string of extra-marital affairs and confessed he was "a bad husband and a fickle lover." During the 1920s and 1930s he confessed that he had had relationships with over 50 prostitutes.
Born in Hertforshire, England, in 1904, the son of the headmaster of Berkhamstead School, Greene was educated at Berkhamstead and later Oxford. At Oxford he published more than 60 poems and stories and soon after graduation converted to Roman Catholicism. "I had to find a religion to measure my evil against" he said. His first novel, "The Man Within", came out in 1929, to public and critical acclaim. "Stamboul Train" (1934), a topical political thriller, was the first to reach the screen (as Orient Express (1934)) and a string of other taut suspense dramas followed: "This Gun For Hire" (1942), "The Ministry of Fear" (1943) and "The Confidential Agent" (1945). It was his novel "Brighton Rock", however, which depicted Pinkie, a teenage gangster with demonic spirituality, that eventually became a milestone in British cinema. Originally a successful stage play starring Richard Attenborough as Pinkie, Greene co-wrote the 1947 screenplay Brighton Rock (1948)) with Terence Rattigan.
Greene's collaboration with director _Carol Reed' produced three distinctive films: The Fallen Idol (1948), starring Ralph Richardson, The Third Man (1949) and Our Man in Havana (1959). One of the peaks in British filmmaking, "The Third Man", starring Orson Welles as Harry Lime, was a skillful tale of deception and drug trafficking. Greene developed the screenplay from a single sentence: "I had paid my last farewell to Harry a week ago, when his coffin was lowered into the frozen February ground, so that it was with incredulity that I saw him pass by, without a sign of recognition, amongst a host of strangers in the Strand". The character of Harry Lime later inspired an American radio series starring Orson Welles, short stories published by the News of the World and the TV series The Third Man (1959), starring Michael Rennie. In Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures (1994). Kate Winslet fantasizes about Harry.
As well as writing novels, Greene reviewed films for "The Spectator", then for the short-lived "Night and Day", which folded after he was accused of a "gross outrage" on 'Shirley Temple (I)'--then nine years old--in his review of Wee Willie Winkie (1937). He wrote that "her admirers--middle-aged men and clergymen--respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality". In the view of the prosecuting counsel it was "one of the most horrible libels one could well imagine."
Greene was an intelligent and sophisticated playwright. His first play written directly for the stage was "The Living Room" (1953), a powerful drama of suicide and despair which starred Dorothy Tutin. It was followed by "The Potting Shed" (1957), a drama about an atheist's pact with God, and "The Complaisant Lover" (1959), a comedy of manners in which a husband and lover knowingly share a wife's favors, which starred Michael Redgrave. Many of his played were televised.
Greene's work continues to fascinate actors, filmmakers and cinema goers throughout the world. In 1973 Maggie Smith and Alec McCowen starred in "Travels With My Aunt" (Smith's role had originally been offered to Katharine Hepburn), Nicol Williamson and Ann Todd starred in The Human Factor (1979) and Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore starred in a remake of The End of the Affair (1999).
Greene said of his writing: "When I describe a scene . . . I capture it with the moving eye of the cine-camera rather than with the photographer's eye--which leaves it frozen. In this precise domain I think the cinema has influenced me."
Towards the end of his life Greene lived in Vevey, Switzerland, with his companion Yvonne Cloetta. He died there peacefully on April 13, 1991.- Joan Scott was born on 21 May 1921 in Long Branch, New Jersey, USA. She was a writer, known for Have Gun - Will Travel (1957), The Magical World of Disney (1954) and Cairo (1963). She was married to Adrian Scott and Charles Edward McCarthy. She died on 19 June 2012 in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA.
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Norma Barzman was born on 15 September 1920 in Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA. She was a writer and actress, known for Fanciulle di lusso (1952), Never Say Goodbye (1946) and Theatre 70 (1960). She was married to Ben Barzman and Claude Shannon. She died on 17 December 2023 in Beverly Hills, California, USA.- Writer
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Richard Wright was born on 4 September 1908 in Roxie, Mississippi, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for Native Son (1951), Domingo salvaje (1967) and The Man Who Lives Underground. He was married to Ellen Poplar and Dhimah Rose Meidman. He died on 28 November 1960 in Paris, France.- Writer
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Waldo Salt was one of the many people blacklisted in Hollywood during the Red Scare, but unlike others, Salt recovered triumphantly. He wrote his first scripts in the late 1930s (MGM contract writer, 1936-42) and also served as a civilian consultant to the Office of War Information from 1942- 1945 before being blacklisted in 1951 after refusing to testify before HUAC. Salt spent several years writing under assumed names for various television series (low-budget series such as "Colonel March of Scotland Yard," for example) and undistinguished films before slowly turning his career around, working in more widely seen television and eventually winning two Oscars for his later work in film.- Actor
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Dean Reed was born September 22, 1938, in Denver Colorado. He went to Hollywood where he signed a record contract with Capitol Records in 1958, but his third single, "Our Summer Romance" was so popular in South America he went to tour there. More popular than Elvis Presley, he stayed to enjoy his incredible fame in Chile, Peru, Argentina. He made albums, starred in movies and had his own television show in Buenos Aires. He was known as Mr. Simpatia because he worked free in barrios and prisons and protested US policy, nuclear bomb tests etc. His politics moved to the left but he never joined the Communist party. He was deported from Argentina in 1966 and ended up in Rome, where he made "spaghetti westerns" for several years. He made his first concert tour of the Soviet Union in 1966 and became a mega star there and in Eastern Europe. He continually got into trouble with US State Department for protesting Vietnam War and attending International Peace Conferences. He moved to East Germany (GDR) in 1973, made numerous albums, starred in several films, and wrote and directed his own.
His last visit to the States in late 1985 encouraged him to dream of making a career for himself back home, especially if he could return with his current project in hand, a movie about the war between AIM and the FBI at Wounded Knee, 1973. A GDR/Soviet Union co-production, the film had taken years to get off the ground. Just days before shooting was due to start in the Crimea, Dean Reed's body was found in the lake near his home outside of East Berlin. He had been missing for several days. Many close to him in the GDR suspected suicide; his family and friends in America believed he was murdered.- Writer
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Kaneto Shindô was born on 22 April 1912 in Hiroshima, Japan. He was a writer and director, known for Postcard (2010), The Naked Island (1960) and A Last Note (1995). He was married to Nobuko Otowa and Miyo Shindo. He died on 29 May 2012 in Hiroshima, Japan.- Director
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Satsuo Yamamoto was born on 15 July 1910 in Kagoshima, Kagoshima, Japan. Satsuo was a director and writer, known for Shiroi Kyotô (1966), Fumô chitai (1976) and The Battle of Manchuria (1970). Satsuo died on 11 August 1983 in Tokyo, Japan.- Director
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Known for his social realist films, the Japanese director Tadashi Imai was mostly interested in depicting the tragedies of human life. Often described as 'nakanai realism', or 'a realism without tears', Imai's films show the hard struggles of the poor. Among his most appreciated films are Nigorie (1953), focusing on women in the Meiji era, Night Drum (1958), co-scripted by Kaneto Shindô, and Bushido (1963), the latter two condemning the Samurai honor codex. Having similar choices of subject matter, Imai admired his contemporary Keisuke Kinoshita. Although lauded for his directorial skills, film historians criticize Imai's lack of a consistent style, and his tendency to focus more on consequences than analysis of his themes. Still, Imai remains a highly celebrated exponent of the Golden Age of Japanese cinema.- Writer
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After training as a painter (he storyboards his films as full-scale paintings), Kurosawa entered the film industry in 1936 as an assistant director, eventually making his directorial debut with Sanshiro Sugata (1943). Within a few years, Kurosawa had achieved sufficient stature to allow him greater creative freedom. Drunken Angel (1948) was the first film he made without extensive studio interference, and marked his first collaboration with Toshirô Mifune. In the coming decades, the two would make 16 movies together, and Mifune became as closely associated with Kurosawa's films as was John Wayne with the films of Kurosawa's idol, John Ford. After working in a wide range of genres, Kurosawa made his international breakthrough film Rashomon (1950) in 1950. It won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival, and first revealed the richness of Japanese cinema to the West. The next few years saw the low-key, touching Ikiru (1952) (Living), the epic Seven Samurai (1954), the barbaric, riveting Shakespeare adaptation Throne of Blood (1957), and a fun pair of samurai comedies Yojimbo (1961) and Sanjuro (1962). After a lean period in the late 1960s and early 1970s, though, Kurosawa attempted suicide. He survived, and made a small, personal, low-budget picture with Dodes'ka-den (1970), a larger-scale Russian co-production Dersu Uzala (1975) and, with the help of admirers Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, the samurai tale Kagemusha: The Shadow Warrior (1980), which Kurosawa described as a dry run for Ran (1985), an epic adaptation of Shakespeare's "King Lear." He continued to work into his eighties with the more personal Dreams (1990), Rhapsody in August (1991) and Madadayo (1993). Kurosawa's films have always been more popular in the West than in his native Japan, where critics have viewed his adaptations of Western genres and authors (William Shakespeare, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Maxim Gorky and Evan Hunter) with suspicion - but he's revered by American and European film-makers, who remade Rashomon (1950) as The Outrage (1964), Seven Samurai (1954), as The Magnificent Seven (1960), Yojimbo (1961), as A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and The Hidden Fortress (1958), as Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977).- Writer
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Ben Barzman was an Anglo-Canadian best known as a screenwriter who was blacklisted during the post-World War II "Red scare" in Hollywood. Born on October 12, 1910, in Toronto, he moved to the United States, where he established himself as a screenwriter during the war. He is probably best known for The Boy with Green Hair (1948), his adaptation of Betzi Beaton's novel that was an allegory against intolerance that bears witness to post-war American attitude that demanded conformity. The movie was directed by Joseph Losey, who also would be blacklisted and with whom Barzman would work in the future.
In Hollywood Ben and his wife Norma Barzman became members of the Communist Party and remained so in exile. After Barzman traveled to England in 1949 to work on a movie, he decided to stay in Europe, and he and Norma moved to Paris, where they had the freedom to associate with Communists, left-wingers and anyone else they wanted to. However, Ben grew to dislike the milieu, and moved the family to the south of France in the 1950s. They broke with the Party after the student riots of 1968 due to the French Communist Party's failure to support a general strike called by labor unions in solidarity with the students.
Norma Barzman claims that Ben rewrote the screenplay of the Oscar-winning Z (1969) for director Costa-Gavras, but did not receive credit. He also helped arrange for the filming of the movie in Algeria. In addition to his screen work, Barzman wrote the science-fiction novel "Out of This World" in 1960.
He died on December 15, 1989, in Santa Monica, California, at the age of 79.- Writer
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Leonardo Bercovici was born on 4 January 1908 in Brooklyn, New York, USA. He was a writer and director, known for Story of a Woman (1970), Square of Violence (1961) and The Bishop's Wife (1947). He was married to Märta Torén. He died on 22 November 1995 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Director
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John Berry was born on 6 September 1917 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a director and writer, known for Ça va barder (1955), 'Round Midnight (1986) and A Captive in the Land (1990). He was married to Myriam Boyer and Gladys Berry. He died on 29 November 1999 in Paris, France.- Writer
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Songwriter ("Whistling in the Dark", "Love is Like That"), writer, author and producer, educated at City College of New York and New York University. He joined ASCAP in 1941, and his chief musical collaborators included Walter Samuels, Ned Lehac and Dana Suesse. He wrote songs for the Broadway musicals "The Garrick Gaieties" (1930) and "Sweet and Low", and for Radio City Music Hall. His other song compositions include "I've Got It Again", "So Shy", and "Dark Clouds".- John Bright was born on 1 January 1908 in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. He was a writer, known for The Public Enemy (1931), The Accusing Finger (1936) and Blonde Crazy (1931). He was married to Jeanne Dunne. He died on 14 September 1989 in Los Angeles, California, USA.
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Hugo Butler, the screenwriter, was born on May 4, 1914 in Calgary, Alberta, the son of a silent movie actor and screenwriter. Butler worked as a journalist and playwright before moving to Hollywood in 1937, where he established himself as a screenwriter. In 1940, he married actress and screenwriter Jean Rouverol. The next year, he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Edison, the Man (1940) along with future Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer boss Dore Schary. (Schary, a well-known liberal, was one of the few top movie industry executives who objected to the imposition of the blacklist at the 1947 Waldorf Conference, which he attended as R.K.O.'s executive vice president in charge of production). His career was temporarily interrupted by military service in World War II, then permanently disrupted when he was blacklisted as a subversive after the war.
Butler and his wife moved to Mexico with Hollywood 10 member (and fellow blacklistee) Dalton Trumbo, with whom Butler pseudonymously collaborated on the screenplay for He Ran All the Way (1951), a film noir that was John Garfield' s last film. (Garfield died of a heart attack soon after being grilled by the House Un-American Activities Committee.)
In Mexico, Butler wrote for the directors Luis Buñuel and Carlos Velo. Butler and his wife did not return to the United States on a permanent basis until the 1960s.
Hugo Butler suffered from arteriosclerotic brain disease. He died from a heart attack on January 7, 1968 in Hollywood, California at the age of 53. The last film for which he was credited, Robert Aldrich's potboiler The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968) was released later that year.
In 1997, the Board of Directors of the Writers Guild of America voted to posthumously give him official credit for scripts he had written.- Writer
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Jean Rouverol was born on 8 July 1916 in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. She was a writer and actress, known for It's a Gift (1934), Bar 20 Rides Again (1935) and Guiding Light (1952). She was married to Hugo Butler. She died on 24 March 2017 in Wingdale, New York, USA.- Anne Froelich was born on 8 December 1913 in Hinsdale, Massachusetts, USA. She was a writer, known for Harriet Craig (1950), Easy Come, Easy Go (1947) and Shining Victory (1941). She was married to Philip Taylor. She died on 26 January 2010 in Los Angeles, California, USA.
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Hecht won the Academy Award for Best Picture ("Marty") in 1956 and produced the box office hits "Vera Cruz" and "Trapeze," the cult classic "Sweet Smell of Success," the award-winning "Separate Tables" and "Birdman of Alcatraz" and the wildly popular Western comedy, "Cat Ballou". He was a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and the Screen Producers Guild.
During his first stay in Hollywood in the 1930s, Hecht was one of the leading dance directors in the movie industry, working with some of the biggest stars of the day: the Marx Brothers, Mae West, Bing Crosby, Cary Grant, W.C. Fields, Gary Cooper, Maurice Chevalier and Marion Davies. Hecht was hired by Nat Goldstone in late 1939 as a talent agent. The Goldstone Agency initially represented actors and after Hecht established a literary department, he was promoted to partner in the company. He worked two years for the Goldstone Agency, eventually handling up to 36 writers.
In late1945 he learned about a sensational new actor starring in a Broadway play, "A Sound of Hunting". When Hecht saw Burt Lancaster he was sold instantly. Backstage, Lancaster said that the big agencies had all been courting him. Hecht opted for honesty: "If you sign with a big agency, you'll be represented by a junior agent who gets a salary and divides his time among 20 future stars. But if you sign with me, I'll work mostly for you and I have to eat so I'll keep you working." The two men soon took the train to Hollywood and Hecht put him into his first two films, "The Killers," and "Brute Force".
In 1947, Hecht co-founded an independent film production company with Lancaster, Norma Productions. He soon co-produced an action-with-acrobatics movie at Warner Brothers, "The Flame and the Arrow" followed by a swashbuckler, "The Crimson Pirate," both starring Lancaster. Next came a widescreen Western, "Vera Cruz," pairing Lancaster with Gary Cooper, which grossed over $11 million, a huge box office success in that time.
Among the most notable Hecht-produced movies that followed, "Marty" was made in 1954 as a low-budget film, shot mostly on location in New York City, with a bank roll of just $250,000 and an additional $100,000 for advertising. No one in the company dreamed that a small, black & white film with unknown stars would win the Academy Award for Best Picture, but it did, beating out "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing," "Mister Roberts," "Picnic" and "The Rose Tattoo."
"Trapeze" was a big-budget circus film with Tony Curtis and Gina Lollobrigida joining Lancaster, that became one of the three top grossing films of 1956. That year writer James Hill became a partner in the company. From 1954 to 1959, as the Hollywood big studio system was failing, Hecht-Hill-Lancaster Productions became the most successful independent production company in Hollywood. Hecht was again nominated for his 1958 film, "Separate Tables". But perhaps his best remembered film today is "Sweet Smell of Success," released in late 1957. Though it was a flop at the box office when first released, it has since grown to become one of the most iconic cult films of the 1950's and has been referenced as a major influence by many critically-acclaimed directors, including Barry Levinson and Martin Scorsese.
Following the end of the Hecht-Hill-Lancaster partnership, Hecht continued as one of the top three independent producers in Hollywood, a position he shared with Stanley Kramer and the Mirisch brothers for the next ten years.
In 1962 Hecht solo produced "Birdman of Alcatraz," and hired the young John Frankenheimer to direct. Lancaster starred as Robert Stroud, a prisoner serving a life term for murder who taught himself ornithology and wrote books on bird medicine. While the film was shooting, no fewer than four film editors were hired and fired. The rough cut ran four hours. When the film wrapped, Lancaster himself spent months supervising the editing of the film. The result was Academy-nominated performances for Lancaster, plus Supporting Actor for Telly Savalas, Supporting Actress for Thelma Ritter and Cinematography for Burnett Guffey.
Next Hecht revived an old property from the mid-1950s, Roy Chanselor's Western novel, "The Ballad of Cat Ballou". The plot centers around a young woman (Jane Fonda, in her movie debut) coming back to her homestead only to find her father's farm terrorized by local gunmen. She hires the legendary Kid Shelleen to defend the farm but finds out that he's now a washout, more interested in getting drunk. Released in the summer of 1965, "Cat Ballou" earned over $20 million at the box-office - $162 million in today's dollars. It was one of the top-ten films of the year and won a ton of awards. At the 38th Academy Awards ceremony in 1966 it was nominated for five Oscars including one for Lee Marvin who won for Best Actor in a Leading Role.- Writer
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Millard Lampell was born on 23 January 1919 in Paterson, New Jersey, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for Rich Man, Poor Man - Book II (1976), Saturday's Hero (1951) and Chance Meeting (1959). He was married to Ramona Love Estep and Elizabeth Wright Whipple. He died on 3 October 1997 in Ashburn, Virginia, USA.- Writer
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Robert Lees was born on 10 July 1912 in San Francisco, California, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for The Green Hornet (1966), Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) and Hold That Ghost (1941). He was married to Abel, Jean. He died on 13 June 2004 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Writer
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Alfred Lewis Levitt was born on 3 June 1916 in Bronx, New York, USA. He was a writer, known for All in the Family (1971), Shakedown (1950) and The Bionic Woman (1976). He was married to Helen Levitt. He died on 16 November 2002 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Writer
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Helen Levitt was born on 6 December 1916 in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA. She was a writer, known for All in the Family (1971), The Bionic Woman (1976) and That Girl (1966). She was married to Alfred Lewis Levitt. She died on 3 April 1993 in Encino, Los Angeles, California, USA.- Bess Boyle was born on 10 December 1913 in New York City, New York, USA. She was a writer, known for Marcus Welby, M.D. (1969), True to Life (1943) and A Likely Story (1947). She was married to Robert F. Boyle. She died on 21 July 2000 in Los Angeles, California, USA.
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Born in New York, director Bernard Vorhaus made his name in England during the 1930s and later became a victim of the Hollywood blacklist. His most well-known film was The Last Journey (1935), but his quirky thriller about phony spiritualists, The Amazing Mr. X (1948), has a loyal following. A graduate of Harvard University, Vorhaus gave a young director by the name of David Lean his first job as a film cutter. Lean went on to become an Oscar-winning director known for such intelligent epics such as Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965). Lean called Vorhaus the "greatest influence" in his life. After being blacklisted, Vorhaus relocated to England, where he lived with his Welsh-born wife until his death in November 2000.- Julian Zimet was born on 4 July 1919 in The Bronx, New York, USA. He was a writer, known for Horror Express (1972), Crack in the World (1965) and The Naked Dawn (1955). He died on 9 March 2017 in Rome, Lazio, Italy.
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Donald Ogden Stewart was born on 30 November 1894 in Columbus, Ohio, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for The Philadelphia Story (1940), An Affair to Remember (1957) and Not So Dumb (1930). He was married to Leonore (Ella) Sophie Winter Steffens and Beatrice Ames. He died on 2 August 1980 in London, England, UK.- George Sklar was born on 31 May 1908 in Meriden, Connecticut, USA. He was a writer, known for Afraid to Talk (1932), City Without Men (1943) and First Comes Courage (1943). He died on 15 May 1988 in Los Angeles, California, USA.
- Arnold Manoff was born on 25 April 1914 in The Bronx, New York, USA. He was a writer, known for No Minor Vices (1948), Route 66 (1960) and The Big Break (1953). He was married to Lee Grant, Marjorie Jean MacGregor, Ruth Steinberg and Irene Dworkin. He died on 10 February 1965 in New York City, New York, USA.
- Isobel Lennart was born on 18 May 1915 in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA. She was a writer, known for Funny Girl (1968), Love Me or Leave Me (1955) and Meet Me in Las Vegas (1956). She was married to John Briard Harding. She died on 25 January 1971 in Hemet, California, USA.
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Giuseppe De Santis was born on 11 February 1917 in Fondi, Lazio, Italy. He was a writer and director, known for Tragic Hunt (1947), Giorni d'amore (1954) and Bitter Rice (1949). He was married to Gordana Miletic. He died on 16 May 1997 in Rome, Lazio, Italy.- Actor
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Vittorio De Sica grew up in Naples, and started out as an office clerk in order to raise money to support his poor family. He was increasingly drawn towards acting, and made his screen debut while still in his teens, joining a stage company in 1923. By the late 1920s he was a successful matinee idol of the Italian theatre, and repeated that achievement in Italian movies, mostly light comedies. He turned to directing in 1940, making comedies in a similar vein, but with his fifth film The Children Are Watching Us (1943), he revealed hitherto unsuspected depths and an extraordinarily sensitive touch with actors, especially children. It was also the first film he made with the writer Cesare Zavattini with whom he would subsequently make Shoeshine (1946) and Bicycle Thieves (1948), heartbreaking studies of poverty in postwar Italy which won special Oscars before the foreign film category was officially established. After the box-office disaster of Umberto D. (1952), a relentlessly bleak study of the problems of old age, he returned to directing lighter work, appearing in front of the camera more frequently. Although Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963) won him another Oscar, it was generally accepted that his career as one of the great directors was over. However, just before he died he made The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970), which won him yet another Oscar, and his final film A Brief Vacation (1973). He died following the removal of a cyst from his lungs.- Director
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Carlo Lizzani was born on 3 April 1922 in Rome, Lazio, Italy. He was a director and writer, known for The Violent Four (1968), Chronicle of Poor Lovers (1954) and Celluloide (1996). He was married to Edith Bieber. He died on 5 October 2013 in Rome, Lazio, Italy.- Writer
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Bernardo Bertolucci, the Italian director whose films were known for their colorful visual style, was born in Parma, Italy. He attended Rome University and became famous as a poet. He served as assistant director for Pier Paolo Pasolini in the film Accattone (1961) and directed The Grim Reaper (1962). His second film, Before the Revolution (1964), which was released in 1971, received an Academy Award nomination for best screenplay. Bertolucci also received an Academy Award nomination as best director for Last Tango in Paris (1972), and the best director and best screenplay for the film The Last Emperor (1987), which walked away with nine Academy Awards.- Director
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Gillo Pontecorvo was an Italian filmmaker. He is best known for his 1966 masterpiece, The Battle of Algiers, widely viewed as one of the finest films of its genre: realistic though fictionalized documentary. Its portrayal of the Algerian resistance during the Algerian War uses the neorealist style pioneered by fellow Italian film directors de Santis and Rossellini, employing newsreel-style footage and non-professional actors, and focusing primarily on a disenfranchised population that seldom receives attention from the general media. Though very much Italian neorealist in style, Pontecorvo co-produced with an Algerian film company.
The Battle of Algiers achieved great success and influence. It was widely screened in the United States, where Pontecorvo received a number of awards. He was also nominated for two Academy Awards.
Pontecorvo's next major work, Queimada! (Burn!, 1969), is also anti-colonial, this time set in the Antilles. This film (starring Marlon Brando) depicts an attempted revolution of the oppressed. Pontecorvo continued his series of highly political films with Ogro (1979), which addresses the occurrence of terrorism at the end of Francisco Franco's dwindling regime in Spain.
In 2006, he died from congestive heart failure in Rome at age 86.- Writer
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Elio Petri was born on 29 January 1929 in Rome, Lazio, Italy. He was a writer and director, known for Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970), We Still Kill the Old Way (1967) and His Days Are Numbered (1962). He was married to Paola Pegoraro. He died on 10 November 1982 in Rome, Lazio, Italy.