Paul
Jarrico was
born
in Los Angeles, California, on 12th January, 1915. He attended the
University of California before moving to Hollywood where he found
work as a screenwriter. Early films include The
Men in Your Life
(1941), Bar
20
(1943), Border
Patrol
(1943), Colt
Comrades
(1943) and Forty
Thieves
(1944).
In 1947 the House of Un-American Activities
Committee (HUAC) began an investigation into the Hollywood Motion
Picture Industry. The HUAC interviewed 41 people who were working
in Hollywood. These people attended voluntarily and became known as
"friendly witnesses". During their interviews they named
several people who they accused of holding left-wing views.
One of those named, Bertolt Brecht, an
emigrant playwright, gave evidence and then left for East Germany.
Ten others: Herbert Biberman, Lester
Cole, Albert Maltz, Adrian
Scott, Samuel Ornitz,, Dalton
Trumbo, Edward Dmytryk, Ring
Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson
and Alvah Bessie refused to answer any
questions.
Known as the Hollywood
Ten, they claimed that the 5th Amendment of the United
States Constitution gave them the right to do this. The House
of Un-American Activities Committee and the courts during appeals
disagreed and all were found guilty of contempt of congress and each
was sentenced to between six and twelve months in prison.
Others called before the HUAC were willing to testify and the screenwriter,
Richard Collins, named Jarrico as a
former member of the Communist Party.
Jarrico refused to identify people who were members of left-wing groups
and after being sacked from his $2,000 a week
job with Columbia Pictures, was blacklisted by the Hollywood studios.
In 1954 Jarrico worked with Michael Wilson,
Adrian Scott and Herbert
Biberman on Salt of the Earth
(1954), a film about a mining strike in New Mexico. Although the film
earned critical acclaim in Europe, winning awards in France and Czechoslovakia,
it was not allowed to be shown in the United States until 1965.
Jarrico continued to write under assumed names. This included the
film The Girl Most Likely (1957).
After the blacklist was lifted he write the screenplays for: All
Night Long (1961), Treasure of
the Aztecs (1965) and Messenger
of Death (1988). Paul Jarrico was killed in a road accident
on 28th October, 1997.
The Chicago Tribune (1954)
(1)
Richard
Collins gave information about Paul Jarrico's activities in the
Communist Party when he testified in
front of the House
of Un-American Activities Committee
on 12th
April, 1951.
Paul Jarrico visited me and wanted
my personal assurance that I would not give any names. I didn't give
that assurance. We then had a long political discussion. Paul Jarrico
feels the justice of his position, and he went over the situation
that he believes the Soviet Union is devoted to the interests of all
people and is peace-loving as well.
(2) Paul Jarrico, interviewed on 28th January, 1955.
There is a direct relation between
the blacklist and the increasing emphasis of the Hollywood film on
prowar and anti-human themes. We have seen more and more pictures
of violence for the sake of violence, more and more unmotivated brutality
on the screen as the blacklist grew.
(3) Paul
Jarrico was interviewed by Elizabeth Farnsworth in 1997.
Elizabeth Farnsworth: Paul Jarrico,
tell us how you came to be blacklisted.
Paul Jerrico: Well, I was pretty well known as left of center, considerably
left of center. There was no secret about my political orientation,
and I, in fact, produced a film about the "Hollywood Ten,"
called the "Hollywood Ten" in the summer of 1950, on the
eve of their going to prison. So I was not at all surprised when the
committee began its new hearings in the spring of ‘51 as the
ten were, in fact, coming up to be called.
Elizabeth
Farnsworth: So you were called and then were you automatically blacklisted?
How did you know? When was the moment you knew you’d been blacklisted?
Paul
Jerrico: Well, I knew I was blacklisted the moment I arrived at RKO
Studio in my car and was barred from the lot, but that was before
I testified. That was the morning after I had been served a subpoena
and had said to some of the reporters who accompanied the marshal
and who asked me what stand I would take, I had said I wasn’t
sure but if I had to choose between crawling in the mud with Larry
Parks or going to prison like my courageous friends, the Hollywood
Ten, you might--you could be sure I would choose the latter. And that
was in the papers the following morning, and I was barred from the
lot within an hour or two of that.
Elizabeth
Farnsworth: Paul Jarrico, once you found out you were blacklisted,
once you could no longer work in Hollywood, what did you do? How did
you manage to produce Salt of the Earth.
Paul
Jerrico: The hard way. I and Herbert Biberman and Adrian Scott, both
of whom were - had been members of the Hollywood Ten and were blacklisted,
of course, formed a company to try to use the growing pool of talent
of the blacklistees. And we had several projects underway with - that
is to say being written and came across - I came across by coincidence
- this strike and in New Mexico in which Mexican-American zinc miners
were on strike, the company got an injunction, saying that company
- that striking miners may not picket - the wives said the injunction
doesn’t say anything about their wives - we’ll take over
your picket line, and the men were reluctant to, as they put it hide
behind women’s skirts. But there really was no other alternative.
The women found themselves on the picket line being attacked by force,
arrested in droves.
Elizabeth Farnsworth: And did people try to stop you from making this
film?
Paul
Jerrico: Well,
of course. There was a concerted effort to stop the making of the
film after it became known that we were making the film. We had started
the film in quite a normal fashion with contracts with Pate Lab to
develop our film and rental of the equipment from Hollywood, people
who supplied such things. A whistle was blown by Walter Pigeon, the
then president of the Actors
Guild, and the FBI swung into action and movie industries swung into
action and we found ourselves barred from laboratories, barred from
sound studios, barred from any of the normal facilities available
to film makers, and we found ourselves hounded by all kinds of denunciations
on the floor of Congress and by columnists.
The public was told that we were making a new weapon for Russia, that
since we were shooting in New Mexico, where you find atom bombs, you
find Communists, and every kind of scurrilous attack - vigilante attacks
- on us while we were still shooting developed.
Our star, who had come
up from Mexico to star in the film - LeSoro Regueltos - was arrested
and deported before we were finished shooting her role. We had difficulty
getting permission to shoot the remaining scenes with her in Mexico,
which we absolutely had to have, and so on.
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