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| Leading man John Garfield in Abraham Polonsky's Force of Evil |
I am fascinated by these dark times in American History when what really happened doesn't fit the mythology. Or perhaps it's more American than we'd care to admit.
The internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, Watergate, and most personal for me - the Hollywood Blacklist - have all been parts of American History that I have always found fascinating for what they say about our country.
My first project in film school was a story I wrote and directed (poorly) about the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and I had the opportunity to interview a couple of Japanese-American internment survivors as research. I lived in the Washington, D.C. area during Watergate (a future post) - a few of our neighbors popped up on TV during the Watergate hearings, and through my favorite professor in college I had the good fortune to meet an authentic American hero, whose promising writing and directing career was tragically cut short because of the Hollywood Blacklist.
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| Abraham Polosnky in 1951. |
Abe, as I would come to know him, grew bored as a lawyer and labor leader, and became a writer. He would go on to write several novels, the first of which would be published just before the U.S. entered World War II.
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| Abe Polonsky in 1996. |
After World War II, Abe returned to America and found a home as a writer in Hollywood. Abe's second screenplay, a boxing picture entitled Body and Soul, garnered him an Academy Award nomination for best screenplay. Many critics today still consider Body and Soul one of the best sports pictures of all time. How much more American could you get than that?
Considered a rising star in Hollywood, Abe wrote and directed Force of Evil in 1948. Force of Evil, a rare film at the time to be shot on location in New York City, contained dark themes and its dialogue was blank verse, was considered by most critics and knowledgeable filmmakers to be ahead of its time. Martin Scorcese has said Force of Evil was a huge influence on his work, and he filmed an introduction to the original home video release of the film. Abe would not direct another film for over twenty years.
After Force of Evil, Abe's past association with the Communist Party and his growing prominence in Hollywood would attract the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee (H.U.A.C.). He would share a screenwriting credit for the 1951 film I Can Get It for You Wholesale. That same year, he was finally called to testify before H.U.A.C., refused to name names, and then his own name was placed on the Hollywood Blacklist - he would not have a screen credit again until 1968 (as a writer for the film Madigan).
One of the most talented and promising filmmakers in Hollywood, a man whom the American government had determined was safe enough to fight the Germans in occupied France, was declared by that same government not safe enough to work in Hollywood for fifteen years.
He wrote and directed Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (starring Robert Redford) in 1969, and would continue to have occasional screenwriting credits up through the 1980's.
Abe and his friend and fellow blacklisted screenwriter, Walter Bernstein (The Magnificent Seven, Fail Safe), were two of the primary writers for the popular You Are There television program starring Walter Cronkite. This was in the mid-1950's during the blacklist, so they used "fronts" - people not on the blacklist - who would pretend to have written the material, and would take screen credit in exchange for a percentage of the writing fee.
The premise of the show was that the viewer would go back to famous moments in American history and the CBS news team of the 1950's would interview prominent players in the story. For a certain generation of Americans, this was how many of them learned American history. The irony being they learned it from a couple of writers who had been blacklisted.
Bernstein would go on to write about this time in The Front, which was released in 1976. The most powerful part of the film is the end credits when they list all the people who worked on the film who had been blacklisted.
When I first met Abe in 1985 - in my Film Noir class after we had screened Force of Evil - - he was a clever, charming, impish man who was savoring a renewed appreciation for his life's work by film students and historians all across American. His size and carriage reminded me of Jacques Cousteau.
I would spend time with him in the next couple of years at school, and while working as a production assistant on an educational video series, where we interviewed such screenwriting luminaries as Julius Epstein (Casablanca), Lawrence Kasdan (Body Heat, The Big Chill, Raiders of the Lost Ark) and Waldo Salt (Serpico, Coming Home, Midnight Cowboy). Abe was the producer, and they all did the interviews as a show of respect for Abe and his work.
We shot the series at an office in an industrial park in the middle of nowhere in Los Angeles - Downey, Norwalk or Cypress - someplace you hear about on the weather or traffic reports, but you never actually go there yourself. I had the pleasure of driving Abe, and several of the other writers, back and forth to the set, and then pretty much sat back on the location and took a Master Class in screenwriting.
Abe, born and raised in New York, never learned to drive, and always had to be driven everywhere he went in Los Angeles. It was a tough way to get around L.A. I loved driving him and hearing his stories. He lived in a fashionable condominium in Beverly Hills, and every time I picked him up at his place, he was sure to remind me that even though he'd been blacklisted by the U.S. Government, he was still the President of his condo association in Beverly Hills.
Unlike any of the other writers or directors I picked up and drove to the location, Abe would always ride up in the front passenger seat. He would tell his old Hollywood stories - I would egg him on ("I really shouldn't say anything else about that s.o.b., but if you insist...") and ask questions to try and keep him talking. But he would always stop his stories and ask me questions - things in my life, school and my thoughts on current events. The rides flew by in a blur.
My film professor, a co-producer with Abe on the project, pulled me aside one morning when we got to the set and asked me what I was talking about with Abe on the drive back and forth to Beverly Hills each day. I thought I was in trouble. "Nothing special. Just movies. Travel (I had just come back from Vancouver and loved it - so did Abe)...just chit-chat."
"Well, keep it up," my Professor said, "he asked me to make sure you were always his driver." I was thrilled.
Abe knew his career was nearing its end, but he was working with French director Bertrand Tavernier (who had just released 'Round Midnight) on an autobiographical screenplay (which would eventually be released as Guilty by Suspicion in 1991) in which the lead character, like Abe, was a blacklisted filmmaker. Abe, and the rest of us, hoped it would be his cinematic swan song.
Tavernier eventually dropped out of the project and the film's producer, Irwin Winkler (Rocky, Raging Bull, The Right Stuff), decided he would change the character from a screenwriter to a director, tone the political aspects of the story down, and direct it himself. Robert DeNiro played the lead character, but the film met a lukewarm reception. Abe felt so betrayed that he asked that his name be removed from the credits. Winkler, who couldn't write his way out of a paper bag, took the screenplay credit - his sole feature film writing credit.
There were times when there would be a break in taping the writers, the lights and the camera positions were constantly being adjusted, and I'd find myself in a conversation with Abe and Waldo Salt or Abe and Walter Bernstein. They were comrades in a long, dark war who had survived, and now they were revered within the film community. I could have sat there forever and just listened to them tell their war stories.
I eventually came to my senses, moved from Hollywood back home to the Bay Area, and started to raise a family. I never lost my fascination with the blacklist. I still read any new, well-reviewed books on the blacklist. I was hoping Abe would write his memoir before he passed, but that was never to be. Walter Bernstein published his memoir in 1996, and I read it as soon as I could get my hands on it. He mentioned Abe and their years using "fronts" to write for the "You Are There" TV series.
Several times in the 1990's, I thought I should write Abe a letter and let him know how much our friendship meant to me and how much I admired his body of work, and how his refusal to rat on his friends to clear his name was a terrific moral lesson and inspiration to a young man looking to find his way in the world. But each time I talked myself out of it. It was too late.
Every year while re-watching Body and Soul and Force of Evil I would often wonder if Abe was still alive. I felt surely I would read about it somewhere, at least an obit in the New York Times, when he passed.
In 1996 I read that the Writer's Guild was finally working to restore film credits lost to writers who had worked under a "front" or pseudonym during the black list; restoring Abe's rightful credit to Odds Against Tomorrow, released in 1959 while he was still on the blacklist. Some screenwriting credits from the 1950's still haven't been properly restored.
And then an odd thing happened. The Motion Picture Academy, in all its self-congratulatory twisted glory, announced that they were giving Elia Kazan - a man who couldn't rat out enough former friends and co-workers to H.U.A.C. to keep working during the blacklist - was to receive a special "honorary" Oscar from the Academy.
And then, as the saying goes, the fit really hit the shan. Many in the Hollywood and film community were appalled the Academy - never having made any atonement for their compliance with the blacklist - would honor Kazan - one of the most reviled men in Hollywood. Guess who was leading the charge against Kazan? Abe and Walter Bernstein, right there on the evening news. They were both as smart and clever as ever. Fighting the good fight to the bitter end.
Kazan received his lifetime award from the Academy, to a mixed reception, and Abe passed away six months later.
Looking back on my time with Abe and his fellow blacklisted writers, I can't help but be saddened by how many great American movies were never made because scores of talented writers, actors and directors were never allowed to work again, so a few grandstanding public officials could gain some political points.
How many cinema masterpieces did we lose? We'll never know.
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