Edward Lewis, Hollywood Blacklist Breaker, 1919-2019.

PuttingWordsInKirk's
MouthVille


Like a lot of kids growing up in the seventies, I got hooked on Dalton Trumbo's 'Johnny Got His Gun', the book not the movie, in my early teens.

And because of that I knew that Trumbo had been blacklisted as one of the Hollywood Ten, which caused great harm to his real moneymaker, screenwriting, for more than a decade.

In fact, because Trumbo refused to turn rat and name names to a congressional witch hunt called the 'House Un-American Activities Committee, he was convicted of contempt of Congress and spent almost a year in a federal penitentiary in 1950 before fleeing to Mexico where he wrote the scripts for a series of B-Movies under an assumed name.

I also knew that the blacklist broke in 1960 when Trumbo was given credit for writing the movie adaptation of the blockbuster 'Spartacus', starring Kirk Douglas.

What I didn't know was that it was a much lesser known fellow, a producer named Edward Lewis, who engaged Trumbo to write the screenplay, on the sly, in his bathtub.

Then, once Universal Pictures had sunken huge costs into the the film and there was no going back, Mr. Lewis forced the studio to credit Mr. Trumbo as the writer.

Mr. Lewis died this week at the age of 99.

Sam Roberts has an excellent obituary up at the NY Times.

It ends thusly:

...In 1959, Trumbo presented Mr. Lewis with an autographed copy of his book, “Johnny Got His Gun.” It was inscribed: “To Eddie Lewis — who risked his name to help a man who’d lost his name.”


That's some kicker, eh?


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Here's something I didn't know...The entire blacklist thing was originally invented by a tabloid publisher named William Wilkerson who ran the Hollywood Reporter....Which just goes to show that, while these are interesting times were are currently living in, they are also tinged with a shade of the deja vu.


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