The Irishman: A Crushing Disappointment

[Joseph McBride]

Pat, I appreciate your dedication to learning about screenwriting. But as a longtime

member of the Writers Guild of America (now retired), and an historian

of Hollywood labor issues and blacklisting, I have to correct you on

the credit question. Wilson had won an Oscar for co-writing, with Harry Brown,

the 1951 classic A PLACE IN THE SUN, based on the novel AN AMERICAN

TRAGEDY by Theodore Dreiser and directed by George Stevens. But Wilson could not be credited on LAWRENCE in 1962 because

he had been blacklisted in 1951. Producer Sam Spiegel and Lean knew that when they hired him for LAWRENCE.

Carl Foreman (who was also blacklisted) and Wilson had written the screenplay

for an earlier Spiegel-Lean film, THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI, working separately.

In a bitter joke, that film won an Oscar for Pierre

Boulle, the author of the source book, who could not read or write English.

Wilson and Foreman were awarded Oscars in 1984 for the KWAI script,

but since both had died, their widows had to accept them in 1985 (see

the New York Times for March 16, 1985). As often happens,

there had been a disagreement between Foreman and Wilson

over who deserved more credit for that script. But Wilson

was brought onto LAWRENCE by Spiegel and Lean. When disagreements arose with Lean

over the story, Bolt (best known as the playwright of A MAN

FOR ALL SEASONS, which ironically is about moral choices in political matters) was brought on. Bolt was not blacklisted, and so

he could receive screen credit. Wilson, as my article indicates, was not happy

about this. The cowardly WGA had shamefully passed a bylaw

banning suspected Communists from receiving screenplay credit,

which had also resulted in Wilson not getting credit on FRIENDLY

PERSUASION; he had been nominated for an Oscar

for that script without his name being on it, but

that nomination was rescinded. So Wilson was not credited on LAWRENCE by the WGA until

1995; Lean even kept Wilson's name off the 1989 restoration,

which was outrageous. You can now see the names

of both Bolt and Wilson on the screen in LAWRENCE. Wilson

was awarded an Oscar nomination as co-writer

and also won the Writers' Guild of Great Britain Award for Best British Dramatic Screenplay. And Wilson

was given the WGA's screen Laurel Award in 1975 for lifetime achievement. Wilson died in 1978.

 

And it is not true that you have to work as a team

to share credit with another writer on a script. I have done a WGA

arbitration and had one of my scripts arbitrated; I've also won a WGA

award for THE AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE SALUTE TO JOHN HUSTON

(CBS-TV, 1983), with the producer and co-writer, George Stevens Jr., and had four

other WGA nominations with Stevens. If you work as

part of a team on a screenplay, the names are linked with an ampersand; if the writers

work separately, the names are linked with the word "and." The guild allows

up to three writers on a screenplay and up to two on a story, as I understand it.

It is true that many writers often work on scripts. Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas

wryly pointed out that it took 33 people to write THE FLINTSTONES but

only one man to write WAR AND PEACE.

 

Edited February 18, 2020 by Joseph McBride
FIX

[Joseph McBride]

Michael Wilson's widow, Zelma, who lost her job as an architect when

he was blacklisted from the film industry, asked me to print her husband's

speech with my article in the WGA magazine. His words were prophetic

as well as eloquent.

 

Michael Wilson accepted his WGA lifetime achievement award in 1976 with a cautionary look toward to the future.

 

 

Exactly 20 years ago Allied Artists was preparing for release a film called Friendly Persuasion. I had written a screenplay of Friendly Persuasion nine years earlier, in 1947. But by the time the picture was produced in 1956, I had already been blacklisted for five years. Unhappily, the Board of our Guild had earlier capitulated to one aspect of the blacklist by agreeing to an unprecedented clause in the Minimum Basic Agreement. In effect this clause stipulated that if any screenwriter who had been a hostile witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities should by some fluke receive credit on a picture yet to be released, the producing company had the right to remove his name from the credits.

 

William Wyler, the producer-director of Friendly Persuasion, chose to list as coauthors of the screenplay his brother Robert and Jessamyn West, the author of the short stories on which my screenplay had been based. I appealed to the Guild for an arbitration and was later informed that a panel of my peers had ruled unanimously that I was the sole author of the shooting script. When Allied Artists was also so informed, a company spokesman reminded the Guild that I did not have to be given credit because I had been a naughty boy. Very well, said the Guild spokesman, but you can't give credit to another writer. And so for the first and perhaps only time a Hollywood picture was released that wasn't written by anyone.

 

In this instance, the blacklist had a serendipitous effect because Friendly Persuasion went on to win the Writers Guild Award the following spring and the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, so my noncredit on the film gained me more recognition than I would have received had my name been on it.

 

I do not tell you this anecdote to pick at old wounds or to rehash ancient wrongs. The truth is that I was one of the fortunate few who managed to continue practicing our craft through much of this period, and tonight I think of other blacklisted writers who might be here in my place had they had my luck.

 

No, I don't want to dwell on the past, but for a few moments to speak of the future, and I address my remaining remarks primarily to you younger men and women who had perhaps not yet established yourselves in this industry at the time of the Great Witch Hunt. I fear that unless you remember this dark epoch and understand it, you may be doomed to replay it, not with the same cast of characters, of course, or on the same issues. But I foresee a day coming in your lifetime, if not in mine, when a new crisis of belief will grip this republic; when diversity of opinion will be labeled disloyalty; when chilling decisions affecting our culture will be made in the board rooms of conglomerates and networks; when the powers of the programmers and the censors will be expanded; and when extraordinary pressures will be put on writers in the mass media to conform to administration policy on the key issues of the time, whatever they may be.

 

If this gloomy scenario should come to pass, I trust that you younger men and women will shelter the mavericks and dissenters in your ranks and protect their right to work. The Guild will have need of rebels and heretics if it is to survive as a union of free writers. The nation will have need of them if it is to survive as an open society.

[Ron Ecker]

According to WGA guidelines, a co-writer must write at least one-third of a script to get co-writing credit.

What I don't understand is how five screenwriters share the screen credit for "Blazing Saddles." According to my limited math skills, that comes out to five thirds. I'm sure there are other examples of more than three writers on a script, each writer contributing a least a "third."

 

 

 

 

[Joseph McBride]

Also, the WGA guidelines state that who wrote the dialogue should not be the main consideration

in arbitration, since structure is considered more important. William Goldman

wrote, "SCREENPLAYS ARE STRUCTURE." But in practice that rule is often disregarded

in WGA arbitrations, which I have found twice in my experience to be corrupt.

Edited February 17, 2020 by Joseph McBride
added a word

[Joseph McBride]

Andrew Bergman wrote the original screenplay that became BLAZING SADDLES.

His was called TEX X and was about a contemporary black hipster who finds

himself a sheriff in the Old West. Brooks bought it and transformed it with

his team, who included Bergman, Richard Pryor, and others. Brooks wanted

Pryor to play the sheriff, but Warner Bros. said no. I went to a discussion

with Brooks shortly after the film came out, and someone asked him how

it was writing with Pryor, and Brooks said, "He's great as long as you give

him some white stuff to stick up his nose once in a while." Some people

booed. I was also at the first public preview in Westwood, with Brooks

and Anne Bancroft present, and the audience sat in stunned silence

until I broke it with a laugh, and thirty seconds later the whole place

erupted and kept laughing until the end.

[Ron Ecker]

I think my favorite line in "Blazing Saddles" is "Work, work, work, work, work, work." (I wonder which writer came up with that.)

My second favorite is "It's twue! It's twue!"

 

 

 

Edited February 18, 2020 by Ron Ecker

[Ken Davies]

Gentlemen,

 Although this is interesting, it is about as far away from the JFK murder as the FBI are from solving the Hoffa hit.😉

 

 

[James DiEugenio]

Joe,  but I was under the impression that Kirk Douglas broke the blacklist in 1960 for Dalton Trumbo to get credit for the script of Spartacus. And JFK deliberately attended the film in public to get the message across that he agreed.

Lawrence of Arabia was released in 1962.  So are you saying that two years later, some people were still deferring to the John Wayne/Hedda Hopper types in Hollywood?

Edited February 17, 2020 by James DiEugenio

[David Andrews]

5 minutes ago, Ken Davies said:

Gentlemen,

 Although this is interesting, it is about as far away from the JFK murder as the FBI are from solving the Hoffa hit.😉

 

 

This is the movie thread.  If JFK wanted consideration here, he should have joined SAG.

[Cliff Varnell]

57 minutes ago, Ken Davies said:

Gentlemen,

 Although this is interesting, it is about as far away from the JFK murder as the FBI are from solving the Hoffa hit.😉

 

 

A LOT of regular posters here enjoy coloring outside the lines once and a while.

Why the beef?🥩
 

 

 

Edited February 17, 2020 by Cliff Varnell

[Ken Davies]

4 hours ago, Cliff Varnell said:

A LOT of regular posters here enjoy coloring outside the lines once and a while.

Why the beef?🥩
 

 

 

No beef! It isn't healthy!

[James DiEugenio]

But the Impossible Burger is 1100 calories at Denny's.

More than a hamburger.  Cannot understand it.

[Joseph McBride]

Otto Preminger (EXODUS) and Kirk Douglas (SPARTACUS) both deserve credit

for breaking the blacklist. Preminger made the first open move to hire Dalton

Trumbo, and Douglas followed, though SPARTACUS beat EXODUS to the screen.

JFK conspicuously attended a public screening of SPARTACUS during the 1960

campaign to show his support. The blacklist started crumbling in 1956 when

Trumbo won an Oscar through a nonexistent front that just about everyone knew about, and blacklist ringleader Ward Bond

complained in the late fifties that it was weakening overall, but it did not end overnight in 1960. Some

blacklistees took years to get back their names onscreen, e.g., the great Abraham Polonsky, who

had been writing through fronts, finally got his name back

on the script of MADIGAN in 1968 and as writer-director of TELL THEM WILLIE

BOY IS HERE in 1969. Some blacklistees never went back to work; some had

killed themselves, died for other reasons, or left the business. (Bond, by the way,

flew his flag at half-mast at his home when Khrushchev visited Twentieth Century-Fox

in September 1959 and died three days before Kennedy was elected, while sitting on

the toilet in a hotel in Dallas. He was there to attend the Cotton Bowl in the company of his rich

Texas rightwing friends; a person of interest in our case, Clint Murchison, was one of them. One of Bond's fanatical

cronies attributed his heart attack to the stress of his anti-Communist crusade,

but he was overweight and drank and smoked too much while partying once he became a TV star.

While his body was in the John Ford Chapel at the Motion Picture Home waiting

for his funeral, it was stolen but then returned. Those are some political

connections for ya. Henry Brandon, the actor who played Chief Scar in Ford's THE SEARCHERS,

which features a splendid performance by Bond as the Capt. Rev. Sam Clayton,

said to me, "Bond was a horror. He and Hedda [Hopper] ran the blacklist. They

put dozens of actors and directors out of work. Well, if you do that to a cowboy -- if

you take his horse -- you'd get hung." But Brandon added, "Bond was good in those parts, you can't take it away. Ward was a sh-t AND

he was a good actor.")

Edited February 18, 2020 by Joseph McBride

[Ron Ecker]

I'm sorry to hear that about Ward Bond. Always joined his acting, he seemed to be in everything from "Gone with the Wind" to all of Wayne's movies. But I guess if you can't separate actors from their personal lives and beliefs, you'd almost have to stop watching movies. I had to force myself recently to finally watch "Forrest Gump."

 

 

[David Andrews]

Who stole Ward Bond's body?  This sounds like a Coen Brothers comedy, with Tom Hanks as John Wayne: "Put his boots on him!"

Ron, if you want to see a great Abe Polonsky movie, see the idiosyncratic film noir Force of Evil, with John Garfield.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040366/?ref_=nm_knf_i4

It takes the kind of jaundiced view of American enterprise that can help get a man blacklisted.

Edited February 18, 2020 by David Andrews