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In an interview excerpted from "Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist," screenwriter Paul Jarrico discusses his career as a screenwriter, joining the Communist Party, and being blacklisted.

Screenwriter Paul Jarrico was a man of tireless radical zeal. He was, during the HUAC sessions, one of the most-named Hollywood communists, his traducers led by his sometime writing partner, Richard Collins, "friendly witness." A stalwart of the Hollywood section of the Party, Jarrico had doctrinal differences with John Howard Lawson, whom he succeeded, in time, as section chairman. In addition to fighting the blacklist in court, Jarrico went on to produce the enduring Salt of the Earth (1953), a militant strike film made against great odds during the McCarthy era. Created by the collective effort of blacklisted talents, Salt of the Earth remains a testament to the faith of these privileged Hollywood 'comrades' in the grit of ordinary people.

Jarrico was often a spokesman for his politically-committed generation-a figurehead at events, a key interview for journalists, a campaigner in the Writers Guild to restore blacklisted credits, a speaker at funerals. Yet he rarely talked about himself in terms of his remarkable career-he was Oscar-nominated for his original screenplay for the Ginger Rogers comedy, Tom, Dick and Harry (1941), and also had a hand in the script of another Oscar-nominated film, The Search (1948). His credits span six decades-often, during the blacklist era, under pseudonyms-and he remained active as a screenwriter throughout the Nineties.

On October 27th, Jarrico was an honoree at "Hollywood Remembers the Blacklist," a fiftieth-anniversary commemoration of one of the film industry's darkest chapters. The event was sponsored by Hollywood's four major talent guilds-The American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA), The Directors Guild of America (DGA), The Screen Actors Guild (SAG), and The Writers Guild of America, west (WGAw)-and included film clips, commentary, and dramatic presentations featuring Kathy Bates, James Cromwell, Billy Crystal, David Hyde Pierce, John Lithgow, Jimmy Smits, Kevin Spacey, and Alfre Woodard. The next day, while driving home from a luncheon honoring blacklisted screenwriters, jarrico's car skidded off the highway and crashed into a tree. He died before rescuers could pull him from the wreckage.

Paul jarrico was a good friend of Cineaste for many years. Whenever we were preparing material for publication on Salt of the Earth, the blacklist, the Communist Party in Hollywood, or the recent efforts to restore the credits of blacklisted writers, he could always be counted on for good advice, the loan of rare photos, or providing the addresses and phone numbers of important sources. He will be sorely missed.

The following interview is excerpted from a longer version in Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist, recently published by St. Martin's Press, and is reprinted here by the kind permission of its authors, Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle-The Editors

Cineaste: Tell me a little about your background.

Paul Jarrico: I was born in Los Angeles in 1915, the only son of immigrant Jews from Russia. I grew up as Israel Shapiro, but in 1937, when I got my first job as a screenwriter, I changed it to Paul Jarrico.

Cineaste: How did you decide to become a writer?

Jarrico: I'd been a writer of sorts from an early age. I was a high school journalist, then a college journalist, and I began to write short stories in college, even began a novel.

Cineaste: Why did you turn to screenwriting?

Jarrico: It was unpremeditated-a matter of chance. I'd transferred for my senior year from UC-Berkeley to USC, and I also got married that year, and we were both about to graduate when one of my professors recommended me for a junior writer's job at MGM. It paid $35 a week, which was more in 1936 than a twenty-one-yearold newlywed could expect to make as a fledgling novelist. And, of course, I was excited about movies. Everybody was.

Cineaste: And that's how you started? As a junior writer?

Jarrico: No, I didn't get the job. But it took three suspenseful months for MGM to say no. And it was during those months that I got the bug. I put the novel I was trying to write aside and wrote an original story for the screen. A friend got it to Dore Schary, then a writer at Paramount-this was before his rise as a producer. Schary liked it and recommended me to Nat Perrin, a writer who was then producing 'B' pictures at Columbia. It's now 1937. I'm twenty-two. Perrin asked me if a hundred a week was okay. I gulped and said yes. "You'd take seventy-five, wouldn't you?," he teased. I gulped and said yes. "What the hell," he shrugged, "It's not my money." Perrin assigned me to write a screenplay based on a Saturday Evening Post short story called "Twas the Night Before Christmas" by Paul Gallico. I was installed in an office and I phoned the story department and asked them to send me a script. "Which one?," they asked. "Any script," I said. They sent me several. That's how I learned the format. Perrin was supportive but hardly interfered at all as I wrote. When I finished my first draft, however, he blue-pencilled a lot of my detailed camera directions. "The director doesn't follow them anyway," he explained.

The title was changed to No Time to Marry. In Gallico's story, a newspaper publisher remembers, belatedly, that he promised his kid a wagon pulled by a goat for Christmas. Though the stores are all closed by now, he sends his two star reporters (played by Richard Arlen and Mary Astor) and a photographer (Lionel Stander) to look for a goat. They have a lot of madcap adventures and are able to deliver the goat by dawn. My script went into production very quickly, as I recall, directed by an old hand named Harry Lachman. Though I was still at Columbia, having been rewarded with another assignment and a contract, I had very little contact with him, or with the shoot.

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I should add here, I guess, that Lionel Stander sang the tune but not the words of "The Internationale" as the trio ascended to the publisher's penthouse with the goat, mission accomplished. (The director had told them to ad lib gaiety.) This of course has been cited and derided as a Red plot to affect content. I met a Columbia vicepresident in charge of foreign sales, a few years after the release of the picture, and he asked me to tell him what was wrong with the picture. I was perplexed. "Wrong?" "It was banned in Brazil, banned in Argentina, banned in Venezuela, banned God knows where. I've run the picture a dozen times, trying to figure out why!"

Cineaste: When you got your first job in Hollywood, did you look up to certain people as screenwriters? Were there people who took you, a junior writer, in hand?

Jarrico: Well, that's a little hard to answer. Dudley Nichols was an exceptionally able writer whom I admired. Jo Swerling, whom I met at Columbia Pictures when I was really a neophyte-he had written Man's Castle, a lovely film with Spencer Tracy and Loretta Young about a relationship between a man and a woman living in a Hooverville-I admired him a great deal. I admired Dore Schary a great deal. But no screenwriters took me in hand, although several older writers and particularly Jo Swerling were very nice to me. I was not considered a junior writer, incidentally, youngster though I was.

Cineaste: Your father was a lawyer, I understand.

Jarrico: Yes, mostly for poor people, like the immigrants, Wobblies and other radicals persecuted during the Palmer raids-the Red Scare after the First World War. And he was a political activist, a Socialist, a Labor Zionist. I admired him a lot.

Cineaste: You grew up political?

Jarrico: You might say that. I can remember as a kid reading pamphlets proving that Tom Mooney was framed. I can remember, I was twelve I guess, when Sacco and Vanzetti were executed-what a solemn and tragic feeling there was at our dinner table.

Cineaste: Actually, then you've been following in your father's footsteps, politically.

Jarrico: Well, he was certainly my role model-and still is. But by the time he died, at the end of '33, I'd gone beyond his kind of socialism.

Cineaste: You'd become a Communist.

Jarrico: I was getting there. I joined the YCL, the Young Communist League, at UCLA, as a sophomore. But for my junior year, 1934-35, I transferred to Berkeley, and that's where I really got active.

Cineaste: Nineteen-thirty-four. That was a big year for radicalism.

Jarrico: Was it ever. Harry Bridges, the longshoremen on strike, the whole city of San Francisco on strike, the depression still going strong, Hitler on the rise. The students were more and more involved, especially at Berkeley. We had free speech strikes, peace strikes, all kinds of demonstrations. It was a heady time for me.

Cineaste: How did that lead to your joining the Hollywood section of the Party?

Jarrico: As a matter of fact, it's connected with a meeting at the Los Angeles Philharmonic where Andre Malraux spoke to a large number of people about the cause of the Spanish loyalists, because I ran into an old friend there who was an active Communist organizer. She asked me what I was doing nowadays and I told her I just got a job as a Hollywood screenwriter, and she said, "Are you in touch with people in the Party there?" and I said, "No, not yet." She said, "Would you like me to put you in touch with people there?" and I said, "I sure would."

Cineaste: Was there a social aspect to being in the Party, apart from the politics?

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Jarrico: Oh, of course. That conversation at the Philharmonic led to my being invited to a luncheon at the Hillcrest Country Club where several young Communists looked at me. It was rather peculiar. My background wasn't really working-class, since my father was a lawyer; nevertheless, it felt rather strange to be sitting in this den of wealthy iniquity with two sons of film executives, and another screenwriter, asking me to join their club.

Cineaste: Why were there so many writers in the Party? As opposed to producers, directors, actresses and actors?

Jarrico: That's an interesting question. Maybe it's because writers are smarter than other people. [laughs]

Cineaste: Looking back, was there an element of guilt involved in the reason why some people joined the Party? Because they were rich, or...

Jarrico: There's a Jarrico theory of guilt that will be found, some day, in textbooks of psychology: which is that most people who feel guilty are. Yes, there was a feeling that here we were, living middleclass lives, enjoying a higher standard of living than most people, being paid higher amounts of money for our work than most people got paid for their work, yet identifying ourselves with the oppressed and the poor. And there were people who said, "Well, if you're all that concerned with the poor, why don't you give your money away and become poor?" Yes, it was a question people discussed.

Cineaste: Maybe this guilt would manifest itself later on in informing..

Jarrico: That's a connection that I would not grant: that someone feels guilty about being better off than others, and therefore becomes radicalized, and that somehow this is connected with that same person, later on, becoming an informer. No, I don't grant any connection there at all. I think people joined the Party primarily because they were against fascism and inequality and against injustice, and if they were motivated by guilt, it was a minor motivation and not a major motivation.

Cineaste: What sorts of questions would you discuss, at a branch meeting-a writers' branch of the Party in Hollywood?

Jarrico: A normal branch meeting would consist of an educational-one member of the branch who had prepared a talk on a certain subject-and the discussion of that subject by the entire branch. Then, probably, a check-up of activities: just going around asking people to report on what they'd been doing, usually on the basis of assignments they'd undertaken at earlier meetings. "How's that coming along? What's happening on that Guild committee? What's happening on that janitors' strike you were helping out?"

Cineaste: How many people would be there? Where would they take place? What was the atmosphere like?

Jarrico: It was relatively informal. There would ordinarily be a dozen people at a normal branch meeting. It would take place at people's homes, a different home from week to week; or more often, biweekly-every two weeks at a different home.

Cineaste: Was there pressure to stay active?

Jarrico: There was, but there was always a conflict, especially among writers, because writing is hard work, and a lot of people were reluctant to take the time off from their normal work of writing in order to engage in political activity. That was a constant conflict. "I haven't got time. I've got this assignment to do." "But Christ, if you don't do this...if you don't talk to so-and-- so in preparation for the next Guild meeting, it's not going to be done; you're the only one who knows him. You're the only guy who knows how to move him on this issue. You've got to do it." "All right, for Christ's sake, I'll do it!" More or less like that. It was not a "Comrade, you are expected to do this. Report next week that you have done it!" It wasn't quite as stiff and autocratic as some people might suppose.

Cineaste: What was the role of women in the Party?

Jarrico: In theory, we believed totally, unequivocally, in the equality of women. But just as we never overcame our white chauvinism, we never overcame all of our male chauvinism, and the chairmanship of the branch tended to go to a man, and the organizational secretaryship tended to go to a woman. We had one of the best cores of organizers in the mass organizations in the country, maybe in the world, and it was manned-if I may use the wrong word-by women. The women were so remarkable in their organizational capacities that many of them went on to become successful organizers in bourgeois enterprises after the Party was no longer a force in Hollywood.

Cineaste: But to a certain extent women were excluded from the best leadership positions, and also from priorities in terms of political issues?

Jarrico: I'm not saying they were excluded. No, there were women in the leadership. But there weren't as many women in the leadership as their number might have justified.

Cineaste: How did you see yourself as aligned within the Party in terms of the most important political questions that would arise inside of the Hollywood section?

Jarrico: Well, the Party line changed on a number of issues. Looking backward, for me the most significant division among the screenwriters, or among Hollywood Party members, was the question of whether the content of film could be basically affected by our work, or could not basically be affected by our work. There were those who felt that since the movie industry was owned and controlled by the ruling class that it was a part of the superstructure and that its function was to defend the base-the economic base being a capitalist system-and that therefore we were kidding ourselves if we thought we could affect content at all. And there were those who felt that there was a sufficient freedom in the film industry-sufficient enough choices possible-so that one could affect its content. Perhaps one couldn't make a revolutionary film, but one could certainly affect the attitude toward minorities, toward women, toward working people, or toward people in general. A humanist attitude as opposed to a fascist, antihuman attitude. I was in this latter group, this second group, of those who thought that content could be affected. That put me, in Party terms, on the right; that is to say, I was a right-wing opportunist as compared to the left-wing sectarians. From my point of view, John Howard Lawson was a left sectarian, and I was a true Marxist. From his point of view, I was a right-wing opportunist and he was a true Marxist.

Cineaste: Most of the work of the Party had nothing to do with the issue of whether you could affect film content, right?

Jarrico: Obviously, the fight against fascism was the priority from '35 to '39; and then again, after the pact period was over, from '41 to '45. It was certainly the central priority. But there were always people who felt primarily that the job of the Party in Hollywood was to organize and strengthen the trade unions. That was certainly a very legitimate current within the Party; the Party leadership as a whole would certainly endorse that as an aim. And there were many people who all along felt that the main job of a Communist in Hollywood was to help the struggle of people outside of Hollywood-to supply cultural materials, shows, skits, and speeches to people on strike.

There were always reasons for activity. There was a campaign for someone's freedom, or there was a strike going on somewhere, or there was an organizing effort going on, and things that we Hollywood people could do. We could sing or dance or entertain. We could write speeches, pamphlets or letters. We had certain craft energies and abilities that were of use to the movement as a whole.

Cineaste: Let's get back on the career track. Where did you go after Columbia?

Jarrico: I really moved around a lot. After the three and a half months on No Time to Marry and the month or so on I Am the Law in '37, I found myself borrowed from Columbia by Samuel Goldwyn to work on the script (never produced) called The Duchess of Broadway. How this happened, why Goldwyn would have wanted a neophyte who'd just been put under contract at Columbia, I just can't imagine. Anyway I was on The Duchess for six weeks or so, then back at Columbia to work on a Blondie story (unproduced) and The Little Adventuress (my insufficient research only reveals that it was for an actress named Edith Fellows), then back at Goldwyn's for another month or so on The Duchess. It was on the Goldwyn assignment that I got to know Garson Kanin, whom Goldwyn had employed as some sort of director trainee. Which led later to Tom, Dick and Harry.

The contract at Columbia didn't last long, that seems evident, for I seem to have spent the period between the summer of '38 and the summer of '39 on a variety of assignments at other studios. I'm not sure of the order, but I remember a funny one at MGM on a script (unproduced) called Frank Morgan for Senator. ("But no politics!," the producer warned.) There was also a short job at Universal on a treatment of Probation Nurse (unproduced); a screenplay of Rip Van Winkle at Monogram (which I've reacquired and am still trying to get produced, but that's another saga); an original screenplay at Universal called Men of the Timberland, which was rewritten, leaving me with a story credit. It dealt with the fight Richard Arlen, Andy Devine and some Dead-End-type kids in the Civilian Conservation Corps put up against the timber barons. Premature environmentalism.

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At any rate, I wound up at RKO at some point in 1939 working on the first stage-the original story-of Tom, Dick and Harry, and on a rewrite of Beauty for the Asking. I was back at RKO for more work on Tom, Dick and Harry at some point in 1940, but also worked at Republic again, on a story and screenplay called All Night Program (unproduced); sold a 'spec' story called That Was No Lady (unproduced) to MGM; and went back to Columbia for a rewrite of the screenplay of The Face Behind the Mask. I don't think I even met the director, Robert Florey, I'm quite sure I didn't meet Peter Lorre, and although I have pretty full files on most of the things I worked on, I find nothing in The Face file but a step outline and a favorable review in The Hollywood Reporter of April 24, 1941.

Then I went back to RKO for the final push on Tom, Dick and Harry in 1941. Kanin kept me with him all through the shoot and even the editing. Unprecedented. He had made few suggestions for changes in the script, but good ones, and he really wanted my input during the production. As I've said in other interviews, he really seemed to believe that the writer was to the director as the composer was to the conductor, or the architect to the builder. Which is why, presumably, he more or less gave up directing and became a writer.

Cineaste: When you were nominated for an Oscar, did your career get a jolt of electricity? Did your phone ring off the hook? Were you there for the awards ceremony that night, and how did you feel-being the David against the Goliath of Mankiewicz-Welles's Citizen Kane?

Jarrico: I'd been on the escalator from the beginning, and my salary had gone up a little with almost every assignment, but Tom, Dick and Harry graduated me from 'B' pictures to 'A' pictures and now my salary made a much bigger jump. Even before I got nominated for an Oscar. I was not there for the awards, and I was not surprised to be defeated by Citizen Kane. It deserved the Oscar.

Cineaste: I understand you thought Tom, Dick and Harry was a breakthrough in political content...at least at the time.

Jarrico: Well, I've changed my mind about Tom, Dick and Harry. Tom, Dick and Harry was a milestone picture for me because it was the first chance I got to write one for a big star, with a relatively large budget, and so on. I thought that I was writing an attack on the Cinderella myth and an attack on the success-story myth, and that it had some real content. I also thought I was writing for Jean Arthur instead of Ginger Rogers, but that's another subject. And it took me years, really, to realize that Tom, Dick and Harry, a rather pleasant little comedy, had no profound content. It's in fact a contribution to the general romantic love story which Hollywood was so famous for, and a pretty good example of its type. But certainly no trail-blazer as far as content. So you could use that as an example of how we kidded ourselves about what we were accomplishing.

Cineaste: What happened next in your career? How did you get roped into Thousands Cheer?

Jarrico: On the strength of Tom, Dick and Harry, I got a job-with Richard Collins as my collaborator -developing an original screenplay called Boy Wonder for Universal. We designed it for Jimmy Stewart and Jean Arthur. The producer, Bruce Manning, had written some of Joe Pasternak's big successes at Universal, and Manning liked our work so much that he recommended us to Pasternak who was, by that time, producing at Metro. Which is how we wound up writing Thousands Cheer at Metro, which is how we wound up writing Song of Russia at Metro, for both of those were Pasternak productions. To get back to Boy Wonder, it languished on the shelf until it was rewritten for Abbott and Costello [as Little Giant-ed.] Collins and I got original story credit, and deserved no more.

I did not "get roped into" Thousands Cheer. The move from Universal to Metro was a step upward in both money and prestige, and though Pearl Harbor had not as yet been bombed, Russia had been invaded, the draft had shifted into high gear, and an entertainment about an individualistic draftee learning to adjust to the army collective seemed like a good idea at the time.

Cineaste: What did you do during World War II, and how much was your choice influenced by the Party?

Jarrico: I'm a bit fuzzy on the chronology, but I think December 7 exploded while we were very close to completing the Thousands Cheer script. I began on December 8 to apply for a commission as a combat correspondent in various branches of the service, plus the OSS. A series of turndowns. The reason was obvious (and later confirmed)-they knew all about my Party membership.

Cineaste: Then came Song of Russia, right? A most unlikely MGM production.

Jarrico: Hollywood was more than willing to do war films, but it took a lot of pressure by Roosevelt and the OWI to get the majors to celebrate our alliance with Russia. So Metro bought a grim story called Scorched Earth, and it was assigned to Pasternak, who produced musicals (mistake #1), and he asked Jarrico and Collins, who'd just done a successful musical for him, to do the screenplay, and at least one of them jumped at the chance. I knocked myself out to do it fast-the Battle of Stalingrad was raging-but Collins seemed to be dragging his feet. Gregory Ratoff was assigned to direct (#2), Robert Taylor to star (#3). When we finished the script, Collins said to me, shamefaced, "Look, I've done ten percent, you've done ninety per cent. I don't deserve credit." I turned the offer down. "We were hired as a team," I said, "and we'll take credit as a team. But I don't think we ought to work together again." Cineaste: How did you and Collins meet? Jarrico: In the Party.

Cineaste: What was he like then as opposed to later?

Jarrico: He was a nice guy and he became a shit.

Cineaste: Who did what in the collaboration?

Jarrico: I carried him. Which was why, I guess, he knifed me. As I've said before, he wanted to stand on his own two knees.

Cineaste: What was Louis B. Mayer's attitude towards the project?

Jarrico: I wouldn't say he was enthusiastic about it, but he did do what the government asked him to do. And when he was told that I was a Communist, he said, "I know. I wouldn't keep him for a minute if he wasn't such a good writer." That was the attitude before the Un-American Activities Committee said that he, Louis B. Mayer, had no right to employ a Communist.

There are funny stories about Louis B. Mayer's criticism of our script. He wanted us to take the word "community" out because it was too much like the word Communism. The plot, if you recall, deals with an American orchestra conductor, played badly by Robert Taylor, who meets a Soviet pianist, played by Susan Peters, while he's on a tour of the Soviet Union; they fall in love, get married and go off to visit her family which works at a collective farm. Louis B. Mayer said it couldn't be a collective farm; it had to be a private farm. We said there's no such thing in the Soviet Union. He said, "Why can't it be just her father's farm? Why does it have to be a collective farm?" We finally reached a compromise. We wouldn't specify either collective or private. We'd just avoid the question.

Cineaste: Why, when the film was done, did you ship out on the Merchant Marine?

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Jarrico: It's complicated. Warner Brothers offered me a job to accompany an ice-breaker that was sailing to Murmansk as a gift of the Americans, and to do a movie about it, and MGM refused to lend me to Warner's. I was furious and got in touch with some officers of the National Maritime Union I knew, and arranged to ship out. I wanted to see the war, be part of it. I didn't feel like sitting around a studio.

Cineaste: What did that experience consist of for you?

Jarrico: It consisted of shipping out, being in North Africa and Italy in 1943, and seeing some action there. But I was a hitchhiker. As a volunteer, I could get off at any time the ship was back in the United States. And I did. it was a marvelous experience for me, and later in the war-at the tail end-I was drafted. I wasn't draftable earlier because I had a wife and a child. I was drafted in the Navy, but I didn't get overseas. By that time the war was just about over.

Cineaste: There was a period after you got back from the Merchant Marine, when you did another stint at RKO, right?

Jarrico: I was borrowed from MGM by RKO, before my stint in the Navy, to do a screenplay based on a book called I Am Thinking of My Darling. William Dozier, then in charge of production at RKO, liked my script a lot. While I was in the Navy, my agent managed to free me from my MGM contract and to get me a dream contract as a writer-director at RKO. I was just getting started there after the war when Dozier was replaced by my old friend Dore Schary. As it happened, Darling was a fantasy and Schary didn't like fantasies. That was the end of that project. The contract allowed me to turn down their proposals and them to turn down mine. A duel ensued. Omitting the blow by blow, it wound up in my writing The White Tower script. It was not to be directed by me, however, but by Eddie Dmytryk. Omitting details again, Dmytryk and I went mountain climbing, he got himself blacklisted, the project was shelved, and I was loaned out to a Swiss company to work on The Search. That all happened in '46-'47. The White Tower wasn't shot until 1950, when I was long gone from RKO. Ted Tetzlaff, who directed, and Glenn Ford, who starred, respected my script, except for its heart, which was antiwar. They cut its heart out and failed to replace it with another heart, even an artificial one.

Cineaste: Tell me about The Search. Were you around for the filming? How did you get along with Fred Zinnemann, the director?

Jarrico: I reduced a 240or-so page script in German to a 120-or-so page script in English, and Americanized the hero (Montgomery Clift). Asked what kind of credit I wanted, I replied, "Subtractional dialogue." The quip cost me an Oscar; I got an additional dialogue credit and the producer's son, an apprentice to the original writer, shared his Academy Award. I'd been given the job because Zinnemann asked for me, and we got along famously. His reactions to my work were always helpful, and he's gone out of his way, in interviews and in person, to praise my contributions. I was invited to stay for the shoot, but declined in favor of a vacation with my family. Another mistake.

Cineaste: How involved were you with Not Wanted? Did you work closely at all with Ida Lupino? Can you tell me anything about how she worked as a director?

Jarrico: I wrote the first draft of the story and screenplay of Not Wanted very quickly, and barely met Ida Lupino. Saw it on tape recently. Embarrassing.

Cineaste: Then you were blacklisted. Briefly, I wonder if you could tell me the story of a movie you wrote for RKO that you didn't get credit for, The Las Vegas Story?

Jarrico: Well, The Las Vegas Story was not a script that I was particularly proud of, and I would not ordinarily have fought for credit on it. But I had just about completed that script at the time that I was subpoenaed by the Un-American Activities Committee, and Howard Hughes, who by that time owned RKO, reacted. First he ordered that the script be rewritten thoroughly so as to get rid of my credit, and they did make an effort to rewrite it thoroughly, but the picture was about to go into production and they didn't have enough time to really take out the last bit of Jarrico poison. The Writers Guild, which then had control of credits, awarded me one of the credits. And Hughes declared that he would simply not have my name on the film, and if the Writers Guild didn't like it they could go on strike. So he not only violated his contract with me, which provided that I be given credit for my work, but he violated his collective bargaining agreement with the Writers Guild, and several lawsuits ensued. I sued Hughes, Hughes countersued me, the Guild sued Hughes.

I lost my suit, and I lost it under the so-called morals clause. The judge decided that I had placed myself in public obloquy by refusing to cooperate with the Un-American Activities Committee-though we maintained that claiming your Constitutional rights could not possibly be considered immoral. Nevertheless, the judge ruled against me, and the Guild got frightened. The lawyers for Hughes discovered that there was no enforcement clause in the collective agreement, and the Guild backed down. They not only gave up their campaign against Hughes, they surrendered their control over credits-not only in my case, in the case of that one film, but for the next fifteen or twenty years. That's why one saw such wild, ridiculous things as people winning Academy Awards whose names were not on the screen.

Anyway, the law suit against Hughes got a lot of publicity, as did anything connected with Hughes. I was proud to have him as an enemy. A man's known by his enemies as well as his friends. [laughs] Cineaste: know the story of Salt of the Earth is a book in and of itself, but can you summarize the effort by a group of blacklistees to get into independent production and the travail that you had to go through to get the film made and exhibited? Why did you hire yourself as producer, and not writer or director?

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Jarrico: The word producer covers a multitude of sinners, from independent monarchs like Goldwyn and Selznick to lowly deputies of studio heads who serve as supervisors but have no real power. In theory, the producer is boss. He hires and fires writers, directors, actors, staff and crew, determines budgets and schedules, runs the show. In practice, it doesn't work that way. He's the coordinater of a number of major players.

What did I do in the case of Salt of the Earth? I joined Adrian Scott and Herbert Biberman in forming a company determined to use the growing pool of blacklisted talent to make films that said something. We had several scripts in development when I persuaded my partners to put that story ahead of the others. We agreed that Mike Wilson-an Academy Award winner before and after the blacklist-would be the best possible writer for the job, and he agreed to try it. Adrian would have been a more logical choice as producer, but he wasn't well. In the event, Mike as writer, Herbert as director and I as producer were a triumvirate. No substantive decision was made unless two of us agreed to it. So I was an unprecedented kind of producer.

I have said that Salt of the Earth was our chance to really say something in film, because we had already been punished-we'd already been blacklisted. I used the phrase, "We wanted to commit a crime to fit the punishment." The film dealt with a strike of Mexican-Americans in which the women took over the picket line. It was unequivocally prolabor, prominority and prowomen.

The effort to suppress the making of the film took dramatic forms. Our leading lady, who had come up from Mexico to play the lead, was deported to Mexico before we had finished with her, on trumped-up charges. There was vigilante action against us-- attempts to burn down our sets, gunfire directed against us, shots taken at a union organizer's car in the middle of the night, our crews assaulted on the streets of the town in New Mexico where we were shooting. Laboratories refused to process our film. I had to trot around the country with cans of film under my arms, putting the film through different labs under phony names. We had a lot of trouble, but we did complete the film, despite the obstacles.

It won international prizes, but it was successfully blocked as far as any real distribution, or even unreal distribution, in the United States. Now, more than forty years after the film was made, the picture is finally beginning to have a future in our own country. And I sometimes say that it's the only picture I ever worked on that got better over the years instead of worse.

Cineaste: What types of projects did you have in mind if you had been able to continue?

Jarrico: We had several projects. We had a black writer named Mason Roberson working on a script of a book we acquired called Scottsboro Boy. Dalton Trumbo was doing a script about a woman whose children are taken away from her in a divorce case because she is accused of being a Red. We were looking very hard for a film to star Paul Robeson, because we felt that he had been historically blacklisted, and was certainly the most eminent blacklisted actor in America. But we lost our shirts on Salt of the Earth because of the boycott, and we were never able to realize these other projects.

Cineaste: I have gotten the feeling from some books that the Albert Maltz affair-that is, when Maltz was forced to recant his article arguing creative freedom for the Communist writer-- was another turning-point for some people in the Party. But you have told me that it really wasn't. What were the issues involved there?

Jarrico: The issue in the Albert Maltz affair was the definition of the cultural worker's responsibility to the political line of the Party-the nature of cultural work, really; whether an artistic piece of work that is positive in its human values is enough, or whether it's necessary for a work to be more sharply political and more definitely aligned to political needs. If the political need is, let us say, the war against fascism, then your work, your cultural work, ought to be about the war against fascism, and not about how terrible poverty is in general, or about other issues that are not as central. This issue-this question of what is the relation between progress and culture, and the responsibility of the cultural worker who accepts political affiliation-is an old one. It goes back to Marx and Engels, and has been continued up through the history of the First Communist International, the Second, the Third, and those to come.

In the Soviet Union, the Zhdanov linel was that the responsibility of the cultural worker is to serve the political line directly, not indirectly-not just by doing good work, or great works of art. That line became the dominant line in the Soviet Union, and by extension in the American Party as well. Maltz was rebelling a little-not much, but a little-against the dogmatic assertions of the Zhdanov line, and he got slapped down hard. He was told if he was a good Communist he would accept this line. And he did, which he later regretted.

But the point I am trying to make is that that was going on all over the world. Mao was saying the same thing to Ding Ling, saying she could not just write in general, she had to write what would help the Party directly, in the current struggle. And Ding Ling accepted that-reluctantly-before she rebelled against it, and got thrown into all kinds of terrible jails and exiles because of her rebellion. The penalty for rebelling in the United States wasn't quite as tough.

The Party's relationship to things that writers wrote was somehow more strict when it came to nonmovie writing than when it came to movie writing. Somehow one felt, or the Party felt, maybe correctly, that the individual writer was more responsible for a novel than for a movie, because the writer didn't have ultimate control of the movie, but he certainly had ultimate control of his novel. There were a couple of cases in which the attitude of the Party shifted, depending on the political situation, toward a work of art.

There was the famous case of Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run? Budd Schulberg is still groaning and bemoaning the fact that the Party mistreated him. The Party didn't mistreat him. Some members of the Party felt that if a Jewish hero, or antihero, was treated with the contempt that he deserved in Budd's book, he would feed anti-Semitism at the very time when the Hitler line was that Jews are like that...like Sammy. It was an ill-timed novel. Whether they were right or wrong, nobody said to Budd Schulberg, "You may not publish that novel." It was an opinion expressed by some people.

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Similarly, Dalton Trumbo had written a marvelously graphic, compelling antiwar novel in johnny Got His Gun. He had written that, I recall, before the pact. It was considered maybe not too useful a book at a period when we were trying to mobilize a collective security against Naziism. But when the pact came along and with it the slogan "The Yanks Are NOT Coming," why nothing was more perfect than Trumbo's antiwar novel. Except that when the line changed and the Yanks were coming, then Trumbo's antiwar novel became an embarrassment again, although Trumbo was not forced to withdraw his novel.

Cineaste: You're saying, in part, that you feel that Albert Maltz was wronged more by this correct lineism, than, say, Budd Schulberg.

Jarrico: Oh, I do. I think Maltz was wronged because Maltz accepted the Party discipline, and Schulberg just kicked about it-- and- kicked about it to the Un-American Activities Committee. What business is it of the Un-American Activities Committee? Part of Budd's being an informer was to talk about this terrible adventure he'd had of mind and thought control within the Party, which was a big exaggeration. It's true my attitude towards Albert and my attitude towards Budd are quite different.

Cineaste: When the first HUAC subpoenas came down, was there initially a lot of popular support for the Hollywood 19?

Jarrico: There was not only popular support, there was political support. The Committee for the First Amendment was formed, which consisted of a lot of important stars, including people like Bogart and John Huston, celebrities of one sort or another, and sincere liberals who went to Washington at the time of the hearings to lend their support to the people who were called by the Committee. They went to lend their support to the thesis of those called, which was that the Committee on Un-American Activities did not have the right under the First Amendment to the Constitution to inquire into people's politics. Yes, there was all kinds of support-including newspaper editorials-which faded quite quickly not too long afterwards.

Cineaste: Do you feel that you underestimated what was about to happen?

Jarrico: We underestimated the amount of fear and the quickness with which it spread. Once the producers got together at the Waldorf Astoria and the leaders of the producers association declared they were going to blacklist the Ten-who by that time had refused to cooperate with the Committee and had been indicted for contempt of Congress-the defenses just collapsed. The liberal defenses collapsed. Even though the target of the Committee, it seemed to me then and it still seems to me, was less a radical minority than the liberal center.

Cineaste: You underestimated the reactionary forces that were aligned against you.

Jarrico: We underestimated the direct connection between the Cold War abroad and repression at home. Looking back at it now, it seems very obvious. If you're going to call on people to give their lives in a fight against Communism internationally, you can certainly raise logically the question of why we should allow Communists or Communist sympathizers to express themselves domestically, here at home. I mean, there was a logic to the reactionary position, and we underestimated the strength of that logic.

Cineaste: How did you find out about your own imminent blacklisting? Who named you-and why, do you think?

Jarrico: I'd produced a fifteen-minute short about the Hollywood Ten on the eve of their imprisonment, made quickly and secretly by a small professional crew I recruited with promises of anonymity. Mine was the only name publicized at the time. I was pretty wellknown as an activist anyway, and I didn't have to "find out about my imminent blacklisting," I expected it. Who named me? I was named by thirteen (I think it was) informers, some of whom I don't think I ever met. Why? Guess.

Cineaste: Most people were offered some sort of deal or cop-out. Were you?

Jarrico: No, and I'm afraid you're mistaken. Most people were not offered deals. Except for one or two people whose studio was rumored to have bribed somebody, there was no way to cop out. If you were named, you either named others or you were blacklisted.

Cineaste: Even if you were not a Communist?

Jarrico: Even if you were guilty by association, even if you were a liberal fingered as a radical by a malicious competitor, even if you'd joined the Party for a short or long period, and then decided it was not for you. If you were named, whether falsely or not, you had two choices, and only two. You could accept, or pretend to accept, the basic assumption of McCarthyism-that Communists were traitors-plead that you were a dupe or a dope, and clear yourself by naming others. Or you could stand on the constitutional amendments that give you the right to speak out, the right to remain silent and the right to believe any damn thing you want to believe. For those who were genuinely pissed off at the Party but reluctant to name others, the choice must've been difficult. For a person like me, a true-blue Red, the choice was easy. Cineaste: After HUAC descended on Hollywood and wiped a lot of people off the map, professionally, many people either left town or quit the Party. Why did you stay?

Jarrico: I personally felt that I had things to do politically and that the fight was not over. Making Salt of the Earth was certainly part of the counterattack that we launched. And there were other things: a newspaper we put out called Hollywood Review, in which we tried to analyze what was happening to the content of films; and work remained to be done in certain organizations-non-Party organizations. The unions remained. There were plenty of things to do.

Cineaste: Is it true you headed the Hollywood section in the mid1950s?

Jarrico: I was the head of the Party in the sense that I presided over its liquidation-to use the Churchillean phrase. People were leaving the Party. Being chairman was not quite the prize that it had been in earlier years, though some people would never have considered it a prize. What was left of the Party we tried to hold together, but it was more or less a lost cause. When the Khrushchev report came along in 1956, even the slowest of us realized that the accusations against Stalin and Stalinism had been true-though we had denied they were true-and that we had been defending indefensible things. That, I would say, was the end of the Party. Though not quite. Some of us participated in a movement to have the American Party declare its independence, so to speak, from the Soviet leadership. It was a movement that seemed for a little while to be succeeding. It was analogous to what was going on in Hungary in exactly the same year and for exactly the same reasons. But even after we won in a national Party convention-with resolutions to kick out the pro-Soviet leadership and so on-they reasserted their authority and kicked us out, or kicked some of us out and the rest of us resigned. That was early in '58, and I didn't see any future for me in the Party. I no longer wanted to be part of a Party that considered itself "the holder of the franchise," to use the word of the leadership, the franchiser being the Soviet Union.

Cineaste: How did you quit?

Jarrico: Just quit. Just said: I'm getting out.

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Cineaste: What were the worst mistakes of the Party in Hollywood?

Jarrico: The mistakes of the Party in Hollywood were probably the same as the mistakes of the Party everywhere in the United States. It was looking to the Soviet Union for leadership. But I think there was another mistake, which was probably special to Hollywood, and that was that our membership was covert. Secret. There are good historical reasons why Party members did not advertise their membership in the Party. But in Hollywood it was a disastrous course, because though we would have been one-- tenth the size that we were, we would never have suffered the plague of informers that we did. And we would have accomplished just as much, I think-or more.

Cineaste: Around this time-when you left the Party-you also left Hollywood and the United States. Can you tell me why, and what that entailed?

Jarrico: I left the United States as soon as I could get a passport, after I was blacklisted. That, however, took six years. One of the ironies was that at the same time we were blacklisted they took our passports away, and it was the time when I really wanted to get out of the United States because I could work abroad. I'd been abroad a number of times before the blacklist. The State Department took away the passports of radicals, and it took a long, hard fight for the lawyers-notably Leonard Boudin-to get the Supreme Court to rule that the State Department did not have the right to withhold passports on political grounds. The moment that happened, which was in '58, I took off. By that time I had less need to take off, since I was beginning to get enough black market work to support myself in the United States, but I had built up such a head of steam trying to get out that I just took off as soon as I could.

Cineaste: Where did you live, and what was the attitude towards you wherever you went?

Jarrico: Once I got to Europe in the fall of '58, 1 lived various places. Initially in Paris, then in London, the south of France, Switzerland, Paris again, Switzerland again, London again, and so on. I lived in a number of places, but Paris was the base to which I kept returning.

The attitude, obviously-or maybe it's not as obvious as I think it is-was very positive towards the blacklisted people who had gone to Europe. Generally we were made to feel welcome. And those who managed to get out of the country before their passports were lifted, but whose passports were lifted after they were abroad, got favorable treatment by the French government, and even the British government. There was a general feeling of something unjust that was going on in the States, and they were congratulating themselves that they were not part of the ridiculousness of McCarthy,ism.

Cineaste: Were you able to get work regularly? Both on the black market, and openly?

Jarrico: I managed to support myself as a writer through preblacklist, blacklist and postblacklist periods, fortunately. Not always to support myself well, but I managed to support myself. Yes, I got work. I got work at first under phony names, but in Europe at least the producers knew they were hiring me and not using a front. I used pseudonyms because most of them were still trying to get American distribution and thought my name might embarrass their efforts. Cineaste: Why did you ultimately return to Hollywood?

Jarrico: I was born and bred in L.A., I've lots of personal and professional connections here, I'd had enough of Europe, so I came home. From a job point of view, I should have done so years earlier.

Cineaste: In thinking about your generation of leftists and Hollywood leftists, it seems to me to be to some extent a tragic story. Would you characterize it as rr tragedy? Jarrico: It was certainly tragic for some people. It was not tragic for me. I had thought of getting out of Hollywood and into independent production before I was blacklisted. I had in fact acquired the rights to a book called Temptation by a Hungarian writer who used the pen name of John Pen, which dealt with a youngster in Budapest between the wars, and which had a radical theme. I'd gone to Hungary to try to set up a coproduction. The Hungarians had said yes, and then I'd lined up some American funds before the Hungarians changed their minds. I mention it only to indicate that this was back in '48, after the Ten but three years before I was blacklisted.

I would say that I personally found many positive aspects to being blacklisted. I don't recommend being blacklisted to others. But it really allowed me to have experiences that I would not otherwise have had. Apart from Paris and other cities, I had a chance to live in Czechoslovakia for several months in 1967, and for five months in 1968 during the entire period known as the Prague Spring, so I don't have to get my knowledge about Eastern Europe from books. I really know what it's like to be there. I've had all kinds of fascinating experiences that I would not have had otherwise.