The Marxist and the Movies by Larry Ceplair

Author:Larry Ceplair
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2007-04-09T04:00:00+00:00

The passport office replied that there would be no further consideration of the Jarricos’ pending applications. Jarrico wrote Tarloff that the “only thing about this whole fucking blacklist that’s really made me feel personally gypped is the travel restriction.” Ben Margolis referred Jarrico to Leonard Boudin, a New York lawyer who had become expert at winning passport cases for left wingers.34

At Jarrico’s insistence, he and Sylvia decided to await the outcome of their passport case in New York. They sold their house and, on July 3, drove east. They spent a few weeks with the Polonskys on Martha’s Vineyard and arrived in New York City in late August. They rented an apartment on East Ninety-third Street.

In New York, Jarrico compiled ten script ideas for Hannah Weinstein’s consideration, three television series ideas for the producer Alfred Crown, and four television spectaculars for the producer David Susskind. None were accepted. He also sent letters to directors and producers offering his services and his old scripts. (Michael Wilson once commented that Jarrico was “a ghoul about old scripts, always digging them up again.”) Jarrico and Sylvia wrote three outlines for The Phil Silvers Show, but only one was purchased (for $1,100). In November, he noted, “In 1956, I made $6,416.25. In the first eleven months of 1957, $400. But oh the promises, oh the speculations, oh the possibilities.” To Bill, who was now at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, he wrote, “I’m not getting much better jobs here than I was not getting in L.A. . . . Do you know that I’ve made less as a writer this year than in any year for twenty years?”35

The Jarricos’ financial situation was eased somewhat when Wilson sent Jarrico a treatment, The Grand Tour, to polish (for $500), and Sylvia was hired by McGraw-Hill as an assistant editor. (She also did some editorial work for C. Wright Mills.) Edward Lewis, who had fronted for Malvourneen and was now an executive at Kirk Douglas’s Bryna Productions, asked Jarrico to rewrite a western script, The Silent Gun, for which he would be paid $7,500. It concerned a gunslinger, Johnny Ringo, who learns that real men know how to live without killing. When Lewis rejected Jarrico’s first outline because it lacked conflict, action, and tension, Jarrico farmed it out to another blacklisted writer, Arnaud d’Usseau. But Jarrico ended up rewriting d’Usseau’s version. Even though Lewis reported that Douglas “was crazy about” the new approach, Bryna dropped the project. Wilson, however, made a deal for The Grand Tour, which Jarrico would cowrite with him.36

Alfred Crown then came through with a more substantive project, a jazz musician version of Othello originally titled The Night They Waited. He paired Jarrico with Nel King, a jazz enthusiast who had been a film editor at Paramount, and they closed the deal. Crown agreed to pay them $2,500 in advance for the outline, $5,000 for the script, and another $5,000 if it was produced. Jarrico and King envisioned it as “a classic tragedy” played out in “a high-voltage,” all-night jazz session in a Manhattan loft.

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