Tod Lippy: I know you grew up in Brooklyn, and other than college at Dartmouth and time in the Army during World War II have made New York your home, but didn’t your first feature film credit—Kiss the Blood Off My Hands—came from a stint in Hollywood?

Walter Bernstein: Yeah. I first went out to Hollywood in the summer of ’47, on a ten-week deal with Columbia Pictures to work for Robert Rossen. The original idea was that I would come out and adapt a Chekhov story called “The Grasshopper” that he wanted to make a movie of. As soon as I got there, he changed his mind. He was working on All the King’s Men then, so he put me to work on that. And I was green—I didn’t know anything. So basically, for the ten weeks I just listened to him. He used me as a sounding board on various things—plot, character, political things. It was a great education for me on how to write a script, essentially, because he was very experienced, and very good.
   At the end of the ten weeks, my agent, Harold Hecht, had just started an independent production company with Burt Lancaster, and they had optioned this book called Kiss The Blood Off My Hands. They had a deal at Universal. I think I had been getting $250 a week from Rossen, and Harold offered me $500. Rossen was very nice about it. He said, “I can’t match that, so go, good luck.” I went to work for them, and because of my lack of experience, Hecht put me together with a more experienced writer named Ben Maddow. And Ben and I worked for several months, doing essentially a treatment first. I forget now whether we did a script or whether we did a script equivalent, but we worked out this story, which we both liked very much.

I haven’t seen it, but it sounds like it must be film noir.

Well, it was—it was a neo-Hitchcockian piece with a lot of odd stuff in it. Burt and Harold liked it very much, and on the basis of that draft they got Joan Fontaine. And I think Gregg Toland was going to shoot it. Then, of course, it became the old “tomato soup” story—the one about the two producers who are lost in the desert and they’re dying of thirst, and they come across this can of tomato soup. One takes out his knife and opens it and is about to drink it, and the other one says, “Wait!” And the guy says, “What is it? What’s wrong?” And the other guy says, “First we piss in it.” [Laughs.] In other words, they hired another writer to rewrite the script. And I didn’t really much care for what came after. So that was my first experience.

How did you like L.A.? I remember reading a comment of yours in your book about how you noticed the flowers there had no scent…

Right, yeah. But I’ve really had very happy experiences in Hollywood, although I never wanted to live there. I only went out there to work—my home was always in New York. L.A. is an awful place to be unemployed in, much more than most places, because it’s a company town. You can’t be anonymous there and unemployed—everybody knows what you’re doing. On my trips out there, I was always working, getting paid—I was doing something I liked doing. And I had a lot of friends there, you know. Played tennis, that kind of thing.

Do you think it was easier to live through the blacklist here than there?

I never really knew what the situation was like out there, but I would think, simply because of that “company town” aspect, it was probably easier here. A lot of the writers there who were blacklisted moved to New York—Polonsky, Ring Lardner, Ian Hunter, Waldo Salt. I imagine it was probably better here.

Your memoir about that period recounts the devastating effects of the blacklist on you and your colleagues, but I was also struck by how close-knit and supportive a group you and the other blacklisted writers managed to form—particularly you, Abe Polonsky, and Arnold Manoff.

Looking back on it, I really do feel that that community we formed really enabled us to get through it. And I miss it, I do miss it. I miss that help that everybody gave everyone else. It was very important.

Is that something that evaporated after the blacklist ended?

Yeah, because it was dictated, essentially, by economic necessity. That was the basis of it. We helped each other find jobs—we needed to do it. It was really kind of a socialist framework in a way, and very hard to impose on a capitalist system. And when the blacklist was over and we all went back to work—although we kept up individual friendships—it was back to the whole individual dog-eat-dog Hollywood.

You also edited a newsletter for a while during the period called Facts About Blacklist, which, as you described it, allowed you to feel like you were making some kind of effort against this monolithic thing. Can you talk about that a little bit?

I guess in any of those kinds of situations, you are made to feel helpless. And you are constantly having to fight against those feelings of victimization, and impotence, too. There was nothing you could do. You weren’t allowed to work in your field. So in putting out Facts About Blacklist, however minimal it might be, we felt we were doing something. It was a sporadic four- or six-page sheet, put out primarily by a wonderful writer who had been the head of the Radio Writers Guild, Sam Moore, and myself. All the networks and advertising agencies—which ran a lot of the television in those days—were saying there was no blacklist, so we would collect facts, like that CBS was doing this or BBDO was doing that, in order to prove that they were lying. And we found that people working at the networks or the agencies would help us—they wouldn’t want their names used, but they would feed us information. We published it and gave it away, or dropped it off at various places. We did three or four different issues of it over a year or so, and then it kind of petered out.

You used the term “guerrilla warfare” in the book to describe your experience writing for You Are There—the CBS series in which reporters “interviewed” historical figures played by actors. Especially when you were writing about the trial of Joan of Arc, or the Salem witch trials…

That was Polonsky’s phrase. He said, “It’s guerrilla warfare, it’s guerrilla warfare!” You Are There was just a happy confluence of people. There was Sidney Lumet directing it, and the producer, Charles Russell, and then Manoff, Polonsky and me. We were all on the same page. And Lumet and Russell were risking much more than we were—they would have been blacklisted and lost their jobs if anyone had figured out we were writing it and using fronts. A year or so ago I ran into Walter Cronkite, who was the narrator of the program, and I asked him if he knew that blacklisted writers were writing it—I was always curious about what he knew. And he said he didn’t know anything the first year. He said he thought it was curious that no writers were ever around on the set or anything. And then, after about the first year, or a number of months anyway, Sidney and Charlie Russell took him out for a drink and told him it was blacklisted people.

It sounds like it was a willful denial—or avoidance—on the part of nearly everyone in the industry.

The head of dramatic programming at CBS was a Hollywood producer by the name of William Dozier, who was married to Joan Fontaine. Everyone was scared that he would catch on, and worried what he would do if he found out. After the blacklist, when I was working again, I got a letter from him asking me if I was interested in writing something—a project that he had or something like that—and at the end of the letter he had a postscript: “P.S. Please give my regards to.…” And he named all the fronts for everybody. So obviously he knew what was going on but didn’t say anything. It’s a good example of the fact that nobody liked the blacklist, and nobody wanted it except the people who were profiting from it—or the zealots, like Ward Bond. And if people could help without hurting themselves, they were sympathetic.

Didn’t Sidney Lumet get you the writing job on your first post-blacklist film, That Kind of Woman?

Yes. I was still blacklisted, though the blacklist was beginning to crack—it was right around the time Kirk Douglas had hired Trumbo for Spartacus. Carlo Ponti and his partner at the time, Marcello Girosi, had this movie they wanted to do with Sophia Loren. It was her second English-language movie—I think she’d done one before with Cary Grant. It was being shot in New York, and I think they had a script already that they didn’t like—it was based on a short story—and which I hadn’t read. So Sidney, who was going to direct it, suggested me. They didn’t know anything about the blacklist, so they hired me. I remember Girosi was kind of nervous about my lack of experience. I had given him, like, the first ten pages, and because I really didn’t know much about technique—didn’t know what I was doing, basically—I really thought I was going to lose the job. So I spoke to a good friend of mine, a director named Robert Parrish. I said, “What am I going to do here?” And he said, “Just put a lot of shots into it. Break it up.” You know, I had just written the scenes. So I went back to it and put in “Close Shot” here, “Medium Shot” there, and I gave Girosi back the pages. He was ecstatic: “You’ve learned how to write a movie!” [Laughs.] Anyway, I wrote that and we shot it, and it was a very happy experience.

Were you on set most of the time?

Yeah, it was a very convivial kind of group. We would break for lunch and bring in the bottles of Soave, and people would drink. Sidney was very brilliant and prided himself, particularly in those days, on working very fast. He worked fast and wore funny hats. I haven’t seen the film in a long time, but my friend Jay Cocks called me recently to tell me that he and Scorsese had screened it. There were so excited about it. They kept saying, “It’s Shopworn Angel, it’s Shopworn Angel! It’s wonderful!” I don’t think it’s wonderful, but it was a good experience.

And that led to a three-picture association with Ponti, right?

Ponti and Sophia had a deal with Paramount, so on the basis of That Kind of Woman, they were about to sign me to a contract there. I was still finishing up the script for it when I got a call from my agent, Irving Lazar, telling me that Paramount wouldn’t sign the contract because there was a subpoena out for me to appear before HUAC. So I said, “Thank you very much,” and basically went on the lam. I made my way up to Rhode Island and finished the script there, but Paramount wouldn’t go through with this deal, so I was sort of back where I started. Actually, United Artists had originally offered me the job of writing The Magnificent Seven—Yul Brynner was supposed to direct it and Marty Ritt was going to produce it—but I had said “no” because of the impending Paramount deal. Well, they had hired another writer named Bob Aurthur—Robert Alan Aurthur—and I didn’t really know him very well, but he came to Marty and Yul quite spontaneously and said, “Look, I can work anywhere. I’m getting jobs. I’ll step aside if I have to.”
   So UA hired me, taking the position that they didn’t know anything from any subpoena, and I wrote a first draft of The Magnificent Seven. Then I had a meeting with Ponti and my lawyer, a wonderful man named Leonard Boudin, basically to explain my position. Ponti didn’t know English very well, so there was an interpreter there, too. My lawyer explained everything—which was that I would not give names; I would be an “unfriendly witness.” The interpreter translated it for Carlo, and then there was a big long stream of Italian from him. When he was finished, the interpreter turned to us and said, “Mr. Ponti would like to know who has to be fixed and for how much?” He kept throwing up his hands and saying, “It’s politics, it’s politics!” It was all bullshit to him. Making movies, that was important, but politics, you pay somebody off and you go on with your business. [Laughs.] Anyway, I got a call shortly after that from Paramount, when they found out that UA was willing to hire me, and after a meeting with the head of the studio, they hired me to write Heller in Pink Tights.

That’s a terrific film.

It’s fun. It has great style.

You were working for George Cukor on that one?

Cukor was going to direct it. Dudley Nichols had already been hired, and had written a treatment or outline of some kind, but he was dying, unfortunately—he couldn’t do it anymore, and Ponti called me on it. And I ended up essentially writing the entire thing during production, a day ahead of shooting.

The role of Tom Healy, the leader of the theater troupe, was an unusual one for Anthony Quinn.

It’s interesting, Cukor at first didn’t want Quinn. He wanted someone much lighter. I remember he mentioned this young British actor he liked a lot who nobody had heard of—Roger Moore—but Ponti and Girosi kept saying no, they needed someone “very masculine” to stand up to Sophia. So they hired Tony, who was a pain in the ass through the whole thing. And he felt a little bit like a fish out of water in that part—he wasn’t quite secure in it, really. And Sophia’s English was still quite shaky. But Cukor was wonderful, he was just wonderful. He wanted to do a Western because he was interested in the style. And he hired George Hoynigen Huene to work on the color and the look of it, and Gene Allen as art director. I think George had found Gene on A Star is Born—he’d been an L.A. cop, and he looked like an L.A. cop—but he had this wonderful sensibility and talent. The three of them made a very odd but really quite wonderful combination. Nobody paid too much attention to the story—it wasn’t that great—but the whole style of it I loved. That sequence when the Indians raid the troupe’s caravan and try on all of their theater costumes is just great. Unfortunately, what happened was that Paramount didn’t know what to do with the picture when they saw it.

Because it didn’t comfortably fit into the Western genre?

Exactly. So they made me write and George direct a couple of action sequences that he wasn’t happy with and didn’t care about particularly. When it was finally released, it got quite good notices, but again, the studio didn’t know how to market it. But anyway, I loved it, and I liked Cukor very, very much.

What did you do after that?

I went and spent seven miserable weeks in Vienna working on this movie based on the Molnar play, Olympia. I took my name off the picture, which was called A Breath of Scandal. I think Ring Lardner had worked on the script previous to me. I remember that every ten minutes Girosi would come in and say to me, “You have to put in a Swedish actress here,” or “You have to put in an Italian actress there,” and I would say, “This is Vienna in 1890—what are you talking about?!” He’d say, “Never mind, we can get 600,000 lire from Italy if we use the Italian actress.” They were putting the picture together that way. Michael Curtiz came in to direct it, and he was senile, I think, by that time, so Vittorio De Sica, who was actually in it, was kind of directing behind his back.

Were you working with either Curtiz or De Sica on rewrites?

No, I had done pretty much what I had done. De Sica had to be paid in cash at the end of every day so he could go gamble—it was a mess, it was really a mess. [Laughs.] But while I was there, Cukor came over to direct a movie about Franz Liszt called Song Without End. Charlie Vidor, who was supposed to do it, had died, and Cukor, as a favor, had promised the family he would take over and direct it. He arrived in Vienna just as I was about to leave, and asked me to read the script. He had Dirk Bogarde playing Lizst, and after I read it I said to him, “Don’t touch the script, but fire Dirk Bogarde and get Sid Caesar.” He said, “No, come on, will you work on it? Just for two weeks?” And I said, “There’s nothing to be done—it’s just too bad,” and I flew back to Paris. Then he sent Charlie Feldman, who was the producer—mainly because his mistress, Capucine, was in it—to Paris after me, and for really the only time in my life, I was wooed. He found out where I was, took me out to dinner every night, offered me the two-week gig at twice my normal salary, promised other fabulous jobs afterwards. It’s so fascinating, because 99 percent of you is laughing at it, but 1 per cent is saying, “Who knows?…”
   I finally agreed to go back and do the two weeks. I met with Cukor, and we decided to start working on the material he was going to shoot first. There was a scene between Liszt and Wagner, and I rewrote it and took it back to Cukor. He read it and said, “It’s not right.” And I said, “I know it’s not right, but is it better? It’s better, isn’t it?” “Yeah, it’s better, but it’s not right.” And for two weeks I worked on that one scene—he would not let it go until he felt it was “right.” I kept saying to him, “We’ve got to move on….” So there’s one decently written scene between Dirk Bogarde and Lyndon Brook in this terrible, terrible movie. The promised jobs, of course, never materialized.

You also worked with Cukor on Marilyn Monroe’s last film, didn’t you?

Later on, yes. But before that, I went back to Paris and got a job working for Anatole Litvak, who wanted to do a picture about corruption in Italy. He liked to play gin rummy, he liked to gamble, and he didn’t like to work particularly. He took me on a tour. I remember we went to the Venice Film Festival, where we were supposed to be “working.” He would sleep in the morning and I would get up and tool around. Then I would meet him for lunch, and then afterward he would have to play gin rummy with Willie Wyler and Sam Spiegel and that crowd. In the evenings he had to go to the casino. We stopped in Rome for a couple of days, and Fellini was shooting La Dolce Vita. He invited Litvak and me to see some scenes from it that he had started to cut together. After seeing them, I said to Litvak, “Let’s pick another subject to do, because we are never going to get anywhere near this.” I did write the script, but nothing really happened to it. We had a big fight over something, and I got very upset and angry and I told him to go fuck himself, and I don’t think anybody—especially not a writer—had ever spoken to him like that. I remember he looked at me and sputtered, “Go fuck yourself yourself!” [Laughs.]    
   It was after that that the Monroe movie—Something’s Got to Give—happened. And I went out to L.A. to work on that. They were getting ready to shoot it when I arrived. But there again, I did very little, because not long after I started writing it the whole thing blew up. But Cukor was very good with Monroe.

I’m assuming at this point she was probably not in very good shape.

It was interesting, because the first assistant had worked with her before—he was an old Hollywood hand. And I’ll never forget the first day she came in—everyone was kissing and hugging, and she was in great form. When she left at the end of the day, he said to me, “She won’t be back tomorrow.” And I said, “What are you talking about? She’s up and she’s fine.” And he said, “I’m telling you, she won’t be here tomorrow.” And she wasn’t. He knew her well, and could see the signs. But as I said, Cukor was very good with her. And the other one who was very professional on it was Dean Martin—he was always there on time, and he was always patient with her, too. She was out of control, or in control, depending on how you want to look at it.

Did you ever work directly with Monroe on any rewrites?

At one point George asked if I would I go and meet with her on some scene. And I went out to her house and she was very nice, very sweet. She showed me around, and was very proud of everything. But she was also very shrewd about the scene—about herself in the scene—and that was what interested me. She would refer to herself in the third person: “No, Monroe wouldn’t do that, really.” It was shortly before she died. Soon after that she stopped showing up at the set—things got out of hand. The money was piling up, and they just finally pulled the plug on the picture.

You have a writing credit on the 1961 Martin Ritt film Paris Blues, that starred Newman, Woodward and Poitier…

I had very little to do with that. I did about a month’s work on it, but very little. Mostly dialogue stuff and some internal writing. I was surprised when I got a credit on it because I really didn’t think I deserved one.

And that was due to your association with Martin Ritt?

Yeah, that was the whole thing. Marty called me and asked if would I do some work on it that he wanted done.

How did Fail-Safe come about?

It was a producer thing. Max Youngstein at UA, whom I knew socially and also through The Magnificent Seven, called me. He had gotten the rights to the book and asked me to do it. Whether he had already approached Sidney Lumet yet I really don’t remember. Anyway, I was delighted. And I wrote the script in three weeks in the Henry Hudson Hotel on a diet of tuna-fish sandwiches and black-and-white milkshakes. I remember that very well; I just hunkered down in the hotel. UA paid for a room—something like $13 a week—and I wrote it. It was really just about organizing the material. And it was a very good picture for Sidney. He had that kind of energy and drive, and he was also so good with actors.

Wasn’t there an issue with Kubrick, whose similarly themed Dr. Strangelove came out at around the same time?

There was a lawsuit. We were scheduled to come out first, and Kubrick didn’t like that; he wanted Strangelove to come out first. So I don’t know who the hell he sued, whether it was UA or Max or Columbia or something, but he claimed that the book Fail-Safe was plagiarized from the short story he had based Strangelove on. It was a nuisance suit, but it scared Columbia enough so that Columbia bought the rights to the book from Max, or whoever it was, and let Strangelove come out first. And it’s too bad, because actually they hurt us a lot, and we wouldn’t have hurt them. You can do a satire after you have the straight one, but you can’t do it the other way.

In the film, I was struck by the conversation at the end between the American general and the Soviet general, when they start sharing their impressions of London, finding a commonality in the midst of this mounting crisis...

That’s not in the novel.

It reminded me of a passage from your book, where you mention the phone call between you and the FBI agent who’s been following you around for months, and the two of you have a fairly intimate discussion about how similar your lives are. Was that something you drew on for this?

No, not really, but I love that moment. You know, they’re doing Fail-Safe again for TV. Stephen Frears is directing, and George Clooney is producing and starring. But unfortunately, CBS or Clooney or whoever it was who originated this whole thing couldn’t get the rights to the script from Columbia, but they were able to get the rights to the book, which were available again. So in doing the script again, I could use what I had taken from the book, but I couldn’t use what I had invented—like that moment between them. I had to find something else. And it works so well, that moment there. But I had to bring in a whole other kind of conversation for that.

The Train (1964), I believe, was the only movie you worked on with Arthur Penn. Wasn’t he taken off the picture by Burt Lancaster?

Yeah. Burt fired him after the first day of shooting, which seemed to me totally unjustified, absolutely unjustified. There was no basis for it. He didn’t like Arthur for some reason. I just got a new biography of Lancaster, and of course the first thing you do is look up your own name in the index and see what they said about you. [Laughs.] But what the author says about The Train was that Lancaster had not had a commercial success with his last several pictures, and he wanted something very commercial. I think he felt that Arthur wanted something different, which is true, because what he and I were trying to do there was tell a story, really, about the ass-end of the war—when everybody was tired and crippled and beaten down.
   I remember the first scene that Arthur shot with Burt. It was with him and Michel Simon, a French actor, and it was quite an emotional moment between them in the cab of the locomotive. Arthur was directing Burt, and Burt was resisting him. And finally he turned around and said, “Here, I’ll give it the grin.” He was making it plain that he wasn’t going to do what Arthur wanted, wasn’t going to give it any real or true emotion—just his trademark grin. The next day was a holiday, and I was home having dinner that night with Alexandre Trauner, a marvelous set designer, when I got the call from Lancaster saying that Arthur had been fired and Frankenheimer was taking his place. And I’ll never forget what Burt said about John: “He’s a bit of a whore, but he’ll do what I want.” Then he told me he’d like me to stay on and finish the script, and I said, “No thanks.” And that was it. So there’s very little, if anything, of mine in the film.
   But Burt was an interesting man. I liked him. During that period that I was doing Kiss the Blood Off My Hands, I didn’t have a car. I was staying in an apartment someone had loaned me in Beverly Hills, and Burt would pick me up and drive me to the studio—he was shooting All My Sons, I think. We’d talk—he was very anxious to learn. He would ask me questions about books or art or what music to listen to.

It seems that you were traveling back and forth between L.A. and New York quite a bit in the sixties.

It all depended on the picture. With Sidney Lumet, I always worked in New York. But some of the other directors, like Michael Ritchie and Cukor, were in L.A.

Did you ever feel like you weren’t getting offers on things because you weren’t living out there?

It’s easy to say that. I do think my career was hurt by being here in those days. Unless you were a firmly established writer with a lot of hits and stuff like that, executives would want you in their office in ten minutes. So it’s not really worth it to them to book the flight, pay your airfare and bring you out—it would have to be for a particular reason. Although, with Marty Ritt I worked out there a lot. He had clout. If a director of his stature wanted you out there, you went out. But yeah, I think I probably would have gotten more work if I’d lived there.

Speaking of Ritt, can you talk a bit about The Molly Maguires? How did you get involved with the project? You’ve got a producing credit on the film.

Well, I first read about those militant Pennsylvania coal miners in college, and I remember thinking, “Wow, this would make a great movie.” I forget how the subject came up with Marty, but I brought it to him and he set it up at Paramount, with the usual proviso: “Get some stars and we’ll do it.” We flew to the south of Spain, where Sean Connery was doing a Western, and he liked the idea and agreed to do it—although I think he would have done anything to get away from the James Bond stuff. And then we searched around for an actor to play the Pinkerton detective who infiltrates the gang. We went to Albert Finney, who would have been very good, but he didn’t want to do it, and we finally settled on Richard Harris. The only other thing Paramount insisted on was a love story, which I had not thought of having originally, so it became a question of writing in a love story that was thematic in some sense.
   It was a very happy experience, because it was something we both felt very strongly about, and loved doing. But when the picture came out, it got mixed reviews. Ordinarily, the studio would have let it sit for a while to see if it could find its audience, but around the same time they had had four or five big-budget movies that had flopped—On a Clear Day, Harold Robbins’ The Adventurers, Paint Your Wagon. A big budget in those days was around ten million. And in a corporate decision, they just dumped them all to save on prints and advertising and whatever else.

I’m surprised that the film didn’t get any Oscar nominations. Harris and Connery were both terrific.

They were wonderful, but it didn’t. The Academy very rarely nominates something that doesn’t make money. It’s too bad; it never really got its shot.

The subject matter—capital exploiting labor, and labor’s attempts to fight back—obviously struck a chord with both you and Ritt. There was also a lot of blacklist subtext in the film—particularly the whole idea of an informer who befriends and gains the trust of the people he will eventually betray.

Right—the betrayal, and the choices one has to make in that kind of situation. I screened that movie for a bunch of Black Panthers, figuring this was their kind of movie—I was sure they were going to love it. They hated it.

Why?

They said to me, “We’re getting shot at, we’re getting killed, the cops are kicking the shit out of us. Why do we have to go to movies to see it done again?” That was their attitude toward it. It was very interesting. They said they didn’t need to see a bunch of people fighting for what they believe in only to get hanged at the end.

That reminds me of a quote of yours from some years back: “In certain pictures of mine, the protagonists go to jail at the end or get hanged or suffer some sort of unpleasant fate, because it’s their struggle that counts. What interests me most is a person who will fight, even if reluctantly, someone who will ultimately take a stand.”

Yeah. It is the kind of theme that interests me most: Somebody who, at the end, makes a stand that goes against his better judgement or his self-interest—the kind of character Woody played in The Front. And that theme is very connected to the blacklist experience. Because what they were saying to you all the time—and it’s essentially what they say to you in Hollywood, too—is “What’s your bottom line? How far can we push you?” And that seems to me a great subject to deal with.

You were good friends with Martin Ritt for many years; can you talk about your relationship with him a little bit?

I revered Marty as well as loved him. He was an extraordinarily moral man—he would not do anything that he didn’t feel in some way had a moral component to it. We’d argue a lot, and there was an “even-ness” about his directing that I sometimes didn’t like, but he was a wonderful man—somebody once said about him that he had “made integrity into a style.” And it really does fit him. We were always thinking of projects. We wanted to do one in particular about labor unions, but we couldn’t really get anyone interested—at least not in the way we wanted to do it. We were always thinking about improbable kinds of stories to tell.

Was The Front hard to sell?

We had always wanted to do a movie about the blacklist and our experience of it, and the idea was basically to tell it straight. We couldn’t get anyone interested at all in that. But then we came up with the idea of doing it sideways, as a comedy. We went to David Begelman, who was the head of Columbia at that point, and who had been our agent at one time. He was perverse enough to go for something like this, and he commissioned a script. I did a first draft, and they liked it, and as usual, the studio said, “We need a star.” They mentioned Redford, Newman, Jack Nicholson. I said, “That’s not the type we were thinking of.” But we couldn’t come up with anybody. Then one day, Marty and I were playing tennis and he said, “What about that kid?” I said, “What kid?” He couldn’t think of the name: “That funny kid.” We went back and forth and finally I realized he was talking about Woody Allen. I thought it was a great idea. Begelman said he would do it with him, and we sent it to Woody, and he agreed. And that got it made. We cast it with as many ex-blacklisted people as we could.

Having read your book, it was shocking to hear how much of what happens to Zero Mostel’s character in the film had actually happened to him during the blacklist.

That incident in the hotel in the Catskills, where they cut his pay, was a true incident. I drove him up there. He needed the rent money—it was down to that—and the hotel guy cut his fee in half. But he went onstage and he did his show. And he was in such a rage. He went before this big audience—it must have been 1,200 people—and he cursed them, screamed at them in Yiddish. And the more he did it, the more they liked it, the more they laughed. They couldn’t get enough of him. He couldn’t get the rage out. Finally, after the show, he went off and drank most of a bottle of whiskey. I put him to bed and we got up the next morning and came home.

Making The Front must have been cathartic for all of you.

Well, it was cathartic, and, in a way, there was also this kind of triumphant feeling: “Fuck you, we’re still here. We’re still working.” It was a very nice shoot. But that moment with Zero, I’ll never forget it. It was too terrifying for him to do again in the film—I don’t know if he could have recreated the intensity and the rage that was in him. It was very tough.

After The Front, you wrote the screenplay for Semi-Tough, which was directed by Michael Ritchie. How did that come about?

Well, Michael had a script by Ring Lardner which he didn’t like for whatever reason—I don’t know, I never read it. He called and asked me if I would do another draft. And I called Ring, as a matter of fact, and asked him what was going on, and he said he was out of it. So we just threw the novel out—it had no story, really. We kept the names of the characters and the fact that they’re headed for the Super Bowl, and we really just ended up doing a satire on the consciousness-raising movement that was going on—EST and pyramid power, all that kind of stuff. And we had a great time. I like that movie, I think it’s fun. And Reynolds was very good. He was really a first-class comedian—a leading-man comedian, like Cary Grant.

And was Ritchie also open to you being involved during production?

Oh, yeah. I’ve been very lucky with most of the directors I’ve worked for. If they wanted changes, they would call me, or I would go down to the set if I could. In the case of Semi-Tough, I went down to Dallas when they were shooting there, and went down to Florida when they shot in the Orange Bowl. But I’m lucky, as I say, because I didn’t have directors or, for that matter, stars who wanted to rewrite it themselves.

I’m assuming that in the sixties and seventies there were fewer situations with actors coming in with their own script doctors or that sort of thing…

No, it was not out-of-hand the way it is now, where it’s taken for granted that there will be four or five writers on a movie. It wasn’t like that at all then. I felt, rightly or wrongly, that if I wrote a script, that would be the script that would be shot, along with whatever changes I made along the way.

Why do you think that’s changed so drastically?

I don’t know. I think it reflects the whole change in the culture—the whole kind of corporate attitude that you have now. Whatever else you might say about the Harry Cohns, the Zanucks, or those kind of guys, they really cared about movies in their own crazy, despotic way. You don’t get the feeling now that anyone gives a shit, essentially.
   I have a director friend who just recently got a job, and his agent called and said, “What writer are you bringing on?” And he said, “What do you mean? I like the script, and if there’s any work to do I’ll deal with the original writer.” And the agent said, “No, the studio won’t respect you unless you bring your own writer.”

Do you do a lot of script doctoring, or rewriting?

I did a lot in the past. I haven’t been doing as much lately. I remember one experience along those lines I had with Marty Ritt—I rewrote a script called The Electric Horseman for Ray Stark. Marty was going to direct it, and it was going to be for Steve McQueen originally. But then McQueen got lung cancer, and Stark called and said, “Redford is interested in doing it, would you meet with him?” He was here in New York at the time, and Marty flew in, and we all had a script meeting. Redford had certain criticisms—certain notes—but he was generally positive about it. Afterward, Marty and I left his office and went to see Sam Cohn, our agent. We were very pleased and told him what had happened, and Sam said, “I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. You’re out, the two of you.” And we said, “What are you talking about? We just had this nice meeting….” He said, “Redford will hire Sydney Pollack to direct it and David Rayfiel or Alvin Sargent to rewrite it. That’s what’s going to happen.” And that’s exactly what happened—he wanted his people to do it.

Did the film with Redford resemble anything you had written?

I remember I had written a scene which McQueen would have done very well, where the protagonist, who was kind of a bum, is visited by his ex-wife. She wants him to sign over to her a piece of property that they jointly own. And he says he’ll think about it—he doesn’t do it right away. That night, he comes to visit her in her motel room. He holds up the piece of paper, smiling. She’s so thrilled she grabs him and they fuck on the floor. When they finish fucking, she rolls over and looks at the paper, and says, “You didn’t sign it,” and he says, “No, I didn’t,” and walks out. [Laughs.] That’s a scene that Redford would never play in a million years. And in the current thing, Valerie Perrine comes to see him in Vegas and he signs the paper—he’s this nice guy.

Is that a vanity issue, do you think?

I think it’s an image issue, really, about what he sees himself as. And from his point of view, what succeeds for him—what the audience wants to see him as. McQueen saw himself as much rougher, much harder-edged. Not so much “macho,” but mean—he would let himself be mean.

How did you get involved with Yanks? Had you worked with John Schlesinger on anything else?

No, that was the only thing we worked on together. He reminded me a lot of Cukor, really, in the sense that he was wonderful on individual scenes, in the texture he would give to them. I enjoyed working with him very much. That picture, which I like, is really all texture. That’s what makes it. The story is a soap opera story. But I find the film very moving every time I see it. And it all comes from John.

The screenplay is credited to you and Colin Welland.

The original script was written by Colin Welland—it was based on his experiences when he was a little kid. He had worked for many years on it, and it was not easy to have an American writer come in and start rewriting it.

It’s weirdly appropriate for the story, though, which is centered on this culture clash between the Americans soldiers in WWII and their interactions with English civilians.

Well, I wrote the American stuff, really. The basic structure is Colin’s, and the English characters are his. And I don’t know if I would have handled it as graciously as he did, but we became friends and hung out together during the shoot.

There’s an element to that film which I’ve noticed recurs in many of your screenplays—women characters often tend to be the conscience of the male characters, like Samantha Eggar in The Molly Maguires. It’s not just that the women are “strong,” which I think might be a more typical way to do it; it’s that they represent a potential that the men haven’t yet reached. In Yanks, Lisa Eichhorn’s character is constantly asking Richard Gere’s character to “do better.”

Well, as I said about The Molly Maguires, when I do a love story, I really try to relate the relationship—or the woman’s role—to the theme of the film. And that usually means that the female characters turn out to be carrying the conscience of the film. And it isn’t just a matter of strength—it’s a moral strength that Samantha Eggar’s character has, to a great extent. I hadn’t thought about it consciously, but it’s true—I tend to look at the women that way.

From my understanding, you’ve only ever directed one feature film—the 1980 remake of Little Miss Marker.

I never really had a fire in my belly about directing, but at one point I thought I should try it. Jennings Lang, this producer, had asked me to write the remake of that film, and I said, “I’ll write it if I can direct it.” He said, “Sure. I’ve started a lot of directors.” He was an extremely nice man. I remember I called Marty Ritt, and he said, “Don’t do it. That’s the kind of movie that should be done by either someone who’s 22 years old and just starting, or someone who’s done 50 movies.” I didn’t listen to him, and I should have, really, because I wrote a nice script—mild, but nice—but it required a style to pull it off that I just didn’t have.
   I thought I would balance Walter Matthau off with Julie Andrews, and that didn’t work at all—there was negative chemistry there between them. And then I hired Tony Curtis—who I like as an actor very much—for a part that should have been played by Jack Palance or somebody like that. Also, Tony at that time was heavily into coke, and that became a problem. I remember one time we were shooting a pretty long one-take scene and he just couldn’t remember his lines. Finally, he excused himself and went to his camper for a few minutes. When he came back, he knew all the words, except not in their proper order. [Laughs.] And I had a little girl playing the Shirley Temple part who had the most beautiful face, and I cast her off the face, but then discovered there was nothing beyond.

Can you give me a idea of how often you’ve felt that the actor who ended up playing a role you’d written had been perfectly cast?

I was very pleased with the casting of The Molly Maguires. I really, really, really thought that was great casting. And I thought Woody did the best acting of his career in The Front. The casting of Yanks was very good, although I didn’t like William Devane in it. He’s a heavy.

He’s got that vaguely malicious smile.

He’s the smiler with the knife. But John had directed him in Marathon Man and liked him, and Devane really went after this part—he really wanted it very much. I thought it needed a young Fonda—that’s the kind of actor that part was for. In the television movie I wrote, Miss Evers’ Boys, I thought that Alfre Woodard was beyond great acting, she was extraordinary.

Miss Evers’ Boys was about the Tuskegee Experiments in Alabama, where the government purported to offer treatment to a group of black men with syphilis, when in fact they were giving them placebos so they could study the course of the disease. You’re obviously still managing to write projects with a social conscience.

That’s the side of the street I work.

You’ve used the Scylla and Charybdis analogy to characterize the struggle you’re often faced with—to do work that is informed by your political convictions, but to not go so “far” as to scare off financiers or alienate audiences.

I work in a commercial medium—that’s what I chose to do and that’s what I’ve always done—and it’s a balancing act. You’re always testing to see how far can you go, trying to push it as much as you can. But I have to say, I don’t think so much of the audience; it’s more of a question of how I’m going to get it made. And when you think that The Molly Maguires cost ten million in 1970—it would cost at least seventy today. I just wrote an original script for an English company, a movie that takes place in Germany in 1942. It’s based on fact—Goebbels, who, of course, was in charge of propaganda, decided that he would spice things up by having a jazz band play on his radio program. But jazz was forbidden in Germany, so he would beam it directly to American and English troops. That’s the basic subject. Anyway, it’s a question now of where do Michael Ritchie—who’s going to direct it—and I go with it, how do we raise the money, who do we find to play in it. If you get so-and-so, you’ll this amount of money, and if you get so-and-so, you’ll get this much more. There’s an American character in it, for example, and we were talking about how we’ve got to boost up this part because we want to get an American actor with a half-assed name for it. So you’re up against that. But I don’t generally think about what’s going to please the audience.

You once said your goal as a writer was to make “audiences go away dissatisfied in a satisfied way.” Can you elaborate on that?

This sounds rather grand, but I am interested in affecting people—in changing people. I want what I write to have an effect on them, and I want to present the world to them in a truthful, dramatic way—to show them the conflicts. I want them to go away feeling gratified that they’ve had an experience that has filled them with pleasure, but there should be a little bit of a burr under the saddle. That happens, I think, in all my movies. You know, The Front ends with Woody Allen going off to jail, and it’s funny in a way, but I hope an audience goes away thinking, “What’s going to happen to him there?” The same thing for the ending of The Molly Maguires. These guys get hanged at the end, and the man who caused that is going to become very successful because of it. What’s going on there? You know, you come away from Death of a Salesman very shaken, very moved, but wow, is that enormously satisfying.

Is there any particular subject you haven’t yet treated that you’d like to?

I don’t know, there’s a subject I’ve toyed with that revolves around the Palmer Raids after the First World War, in New York. And I just took an option on a novel that I think would make a very good small movie that I’d like to write and direct if I can.

Can I ask how old you are?

Eighty.

What do you attribute the longevity of your career to?

I don’t know; I really don’t know. Right now, I’ve lucked into a relationship with HBO, which has been a very happy and fruitful one for me. I don’t have too much of a career in feature films at the moment. Maybe it’s because it’s a business run mostly by and for 15-year-olds. [Laughs.] Although maybe that’s why I get work—they think I’m in my second childhood.

Do you think your experience during the blacklist somehow contributed to your resilience?

I survived.

But you did more than survive. You never named names, you managed to somehow find work—

Well, I survived on my own terms, I suppose.

Just to wrap up, how do you think New York has affected your work and your life?

It’s my town. It’s the one place I can come in the world and know I’m home. I feed off of it—I love the anonymity of it when I step out of the house or I get on a bus or I get in the subway. And the heterogeneity of it, and the energy. It’s gotten more crowded, it’s gotten dirtier—it’s gotten a lot of other stuff—but I can’t see myself disconnected from it. I love traveling, and I can imagine at this stage of my life, if I could afford it, living maybe three, four months in Europe and then back here—just like I lived in Los Angeles happily for months. But I have to keep my feet on the ground here. That’s why the name of my company is Antaeus.