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  • Letter to the Editor
  • Larry Ceplair

Re: "Julian Blaustein: An Unusual Movie Producer in Cold War Hollywood"

Due to a lack of due diligence, I failed to mention in my article on Julian Blaustein in Film History 21:3 that the blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo had written the original script on which Cowboy was based. My tardy research has indicated that the omission did not change the tenor of what I wrote, but it is information that should have been included. This letter is a partial rectification of my nonfeasance.

The script for Cowboy was adapted from My Reminiscences As a Cowboy (1930), by the Irish writer, Frank Harris (1856–1931). At some point, Columbia Pictures had purchased the rights to the novel. In 1948, Sam Spiegel and John Huston founded Horizon Pictures and signed a multi-picture deal with Columbia Pictures. It appears that Horizon agreed to make a film based on the Harris book, as its second or third project.

Several of the Hollywood Ten were actively seeking work, either in England or on what was known as the "black market". Trumbo was the most active "black market" writer, and, in June 1949, his agent, George Willner, brought Spiegel and Trumbo together. Trumbo agreed to write two scripts for Spiegel, a thriller that was later released as The Prowler (United Artists), and an adaptation of Reminiscences. Hugo Butler put his name on both. (Unlike Blaustein, Spiegel took advantage of Trumbo's situation and paid him far less than he had earned under his last contract at MGM.)

However, when Horizon's first film, We Were Strangers (1949), did not earn back its negative cost, Spiegel and Cohn had a falling out and Horizon stopped, for a few years, making movies at Columbia. (Spiegel returned to produce On the Waterfront [1954], and Columbia became the distributor of a series of movies made by Horizon, including The Bridge on the River Kwai [1957] and Lawrence of Arabia [1962]. Blacklistees Michael Wilson and Carl Foreman wrote Kwai, and Wilson wrote the first two drafts of Lawrence. Neither received screen credit when those movies were first released.)

Flash forward to 1957. Following the box-office failure of Storm Center, Columbia Pictures head Harry Cohn asked Blaustein to use the Reminiscences script to complete his company's production contract with Columbia. Cohn, however, had removed Butler's name from the script, and it was referred to as "the Huston script". Neither Blaustein nor the new screenwriter, Edmund North, knew that Trumbo had written it nor that Butler had fronted for Trumbo.

When the studio gave North sole credit, he balked, because he knew he had not made sufficient revisions to merit it. He asked the WGA to arbitrate, but the guild informed North that the original script had been written by a blacklisted writer, and Columbia was exercising its right under the revised minimum basic agreement to refuse a credit to any Fifth-Amendment witness. (The minimum basic agreement had been revised, following the 1952 court case between Paul Jarrico and Howard Hughes over the writing credit for The Las Vegas Story [RKO, 1951].) According to Trumbo, North "later and privately expressed to Hugo his repugnance at receiving sole screenplay credit in this fashion". [End Page 411]

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