Contents
1. Transcript
1.1. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE ONE APRIL 21, 1988
-
CEPLAIR
- Okay, Mr. Bright, if you can tell me when you were born, where you were
born, and what your family was like.
-
BRIGHT
- Yes. Well, I was born January 1, 1908. I had two sisters. My parents
were very conventional, except in one respect: my father was a militant
abolitionist. In other respects, he was a very conventional man.
-
CEPLAIR
- Were they born in this country or did they come from Europe?
-
BRIGHT
- No, they were both born in the United States. My mother being from
Virginia and my father was born in Columbus, Ohio. I was born in
Baltimore. Except for the fact of my father's abolitionism, which
determined a good measure of my attitude, he was a very conventional
man.
-
CEPLAIR
- What sort of work did he do?
-
BRIGHT
- He was a clerk for the American Radiator Company. My radicalism began
with my father's abolitionism, which I was unaware of at the time, but
which determined my attitude in respect to racism. Although he was an
amputee, having lost an arm at a very young age—His attitude toward race
and racism was very radical for its time and determined my attitude in
that regard.
-
CEPLAIR
- Was he a member of any organization or party?
-
BRIGHT
- No.
-
CEPLAIR
- It was just a value or principle he held, his antiracism?
-
BRIGHT
- Not particularly.
-
CEPLAIR
- The family moved to Chicago at some point, is that right?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes.
-
CEPLAIR
- How old were you when—?
-
BRIGHT
- I was in my early teens.
-
CEPLAIR
- Where did you live in Chicago?
-
BRIGHT
- I lived on the north side in a residential neighborhood.
-
CEPLAIR
- And you attended high school in Chicago?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes. I went to Nicholas Senn High School and the Stephen K. Hayt
[Grammar School], which the kids all called "I hate school." [laughter]
I went to Nicholas Senn for four years and graduated. I intended to go
to college, but I was expelled.
-
CEPLAIR
- From college?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes.
-
CEPLAIR
- Which college?
-
BRIGHT
- Lake Forest [College].
-
CEPLAIR
- Why were you expelled?
-
BRIGHT
- I was expelled for reasons of protest, protesting hazing.
-
CEPLAIR
- The hazing of freshmen?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes, I was expelled shortly after my first year in college. I went to
Europe then, intending to resume college, but I never did. I went to the
New School for Social Research in New York.
-
CEPLAIR
- What year was that that you were in Europe, do you remember?
-
BRIGHT
- Nineteen twenty-seven.
-
CEPLAIR
- Did you go alone?
-
BRIGHT
- No, I went with another fellow.
-
CEPLAIR
- Did you go to Russia when you were there?
-
BRIGHT
- No.
-
CEPLAIR
- You weren't interested in the Russian Revolution at that time,
particularly?
-
BRIGHT
- No, my earliest radicalism was in relation to the Sacco-Vanzetti case,
which I participated in very passionately. I was about sixteen at the
time. The early radicalism that I had derived from the Sacco-Vanzetti
case.
-
CEPLAIR
- When you returned from Europe, what did you do?
-
BRIGHT
- I went to the New School.
-
CEPLAIR
- In New York?
-
BRIGHT
- In New York, yeah.
-
CEPLAIR
- How long were you in the New School?
-
BRIGHT
- About a year and a half. I came under the influence of a teacher there,
Harry Elmer Barnes, who interested me in the question of war guilt,
which I took very seriously and incorporated in my first book, the
[William H.] Thompson book [Hizzoner Big Bill
Thompson: An Idyll of Chicago]. I devoted a chapter to that,
which, although it was a satire, had a serious side to it. I remember
writing it.
-
CEPLAIR
- Did you write that when you were in New York, the Thompson book?
-
BRIGHT
- No. I returned to Chicago briefly during that period. I worked in a
drugstore with the man who became subsequently my partner, Kubec
Glasmon, who had a Jewish bankruptcy at the time and burned down his
store and put in with me. He subsidized me and the book that I was
writing.
-
CEPLAIR
- Why did you decide to write a book about Thompson?
-
BRIGHT
- He was in the headlines, and I thought it was a good subject.
-
CEPLAIR
- Had you wanted to be a writer? I mean, had that been something that you
thought about for a while?
-
BRIGHT
- All my life. All my adult life.
-
CEPLAIR
- Why? What motivated you to become a writer?
-
BRIGHT
- Well, I have a joke about that, which has a basis in fact. My parents,
although they were conventional, made a liar out of me. So the joke I
was very fond of telling, subsequently, to classes in school: when asked
the question of how I became a writer, I said, "Because I was a liar."
Due to the fact that I had to make up excuses for my behavior, as alibi,
that's how I became a writer.
-
CEPLAIR
- Were you kind of a rebellious child?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes. I was rebellious due to the influence of my older sister, who was
very unconventional for that time and place. Together we read all the
subversive literature of the time, including Lady
Chatterly's Lover. My particular gods were Havelock Ellis,
Anatole France, and the young Ernest Hemingway, who had just published
his first book, The Sun Also Rises. I went
to Europe, secretly to get laid, but officially to meet Ellis and
Anatole France, and Ernest Hemingway. I was there several months. I
actually did meet Ellis in England, in Cornwall. Spent the day with him,
a charming man and a very brilliant man in my opinion. Anatole France
was dead. He died when I was en route to Europe. Hemingway, I didn't
meet until Paris.
-
CEPLAIR
- What were your impressions of Europe? Do you remember?
-
BRIGHT
- Well, I was a little bewildered, because I didn't speak French. I was
just confused. [laughter]
-
CEPLAIR
- Now, Mr. Glasmon, did he own the pharmacy at which you worked, the
drugstore?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes. He owned the drugstore.
-
CEPLAIR
- And then he burned it down to get the insurance?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes.
-
CEPLAIR
- And then what happened after that? What did you do?
-
BRIGHT
- Well, I wrote the Thompson book and returned to New York to find a
publisher, which I did.
-
CEPLAIR
- Who published it?
-
BRIGHT
- Cape and Smith. Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, which was a very
respectable publisher at the time. Unfortunately, the book was published
in 1930 and was not successful, except in England, oddly enough. It was
a best-seller due to the celebrity of William Hale Thompson.
-
CEPLAIR
- And then what happened after the book was published?
-
BRIGHT
- Well, I took the advance and came to California. I arrived in California
October 29, 1929, and the book was published in 1930. I arrived in
California with twenty-nine cents in my pocket after having spent my
advance in the various ports of call. I came by boat and took thirty
days to get here. And then I settled down with Glasmon, with whom I had
a publishing arrangement. Together we wrote Beer
and Blood, which became The Public
Enemy.
-
CEPLAIR
- You wrote it as a book, though.
-
BRIGHT
- Yes. And it was never published, except in a bowdlerized version.
-
CEPLAIR
- Had you written for a newspaper before you—?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes, I did, I was briefly a reporter, a cub reporter, for the Chicago Daily News. But I got fired for
telling the truth about department store advertising.
-
CEPLAIR
- You mean you wrote a story about it?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes. I got fired.
-
CEPLAIR
- So you knew quite a bit about Chicago politics then.
-
BRIGHT
- Yes.
-
CEPLAIR
- And Beer and Blood was a story about
Prohibition based on what you had learned as a newspaper reporter?
-
BRIGHT
- I got my information about Chicago from Glasmon.
-
CEPLAIR
- And how did he know so much about it? Was he a bootlegger, among other
things?
-
BRIGHT
- Well, everybody was in those days. He had traffic with a lot of
hoodlums. Went to nightclubs cheek by jowl with a great many gangsters
and was quite sophisticated about the underworld.
-
CEPLAIR
- Did you intend to become a screenwriter when you first came here?
-
BRIGHT
- No.
-
CEPLAIR
- That wasn't the reason you came here?
-
BRIGHT
- No. I was chasing a girl—[laughter]
-
CEPLAIR
- That's a better reason, I suspect.
-
BRIGHT
- Whom I subsequently made the mistake of marrying. We married,
incidentally, in a "wee kirk of the heather," which is in a graveyard.
And that was a presaging of the marriage.
-
CEPLAIR
- Well, so when you finished Beer and Blood,
you couldn't find a publisher for it?
-
BRIGHT
- No. I was tinkering with a publisher at the time, because I promised him
another book, a sequel, a second book. When Beer
and Blood was finished, I negotiated with the publisher, who
wanted the book edited by Morris Ernst, who was an American Civil
Liberties Union lawyer at the time. I didn't want the book edited by a
lawyer, but by another writer. We were in the process of negotiating
when the book was purchased by Warner Brothers [Pictures, Inc.].
-
CEPLAIR
- How did Warner Brothers hear of the book?
-
BRIGHT
- Well, a man by the name of Rufus LeMaire, whom I knew from Chicago and
Glasmon knew, who was a producer of LeMaire's
Affairs, a musical show in Chicago, he was trying to get
into the picture business. He took the manuscript to Darryl [F.] Zanuck,
who immediately bought it. And that's how I got into the picture
business.
-
CEPLAIR
- So they hired you to turn it into a script, you and Glasmon?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes.
-
CEPLAIR
- I'm just curious, how did you two work together? Did you each write
separate chapters or did you write together the same?
-
BRIGHT
- Well, it was rather complicated. He was, at best, semiliterate, and I
was literate. And so I did the writing. But he supplied the material
that I wrote about. That was the nature of the collaboration. He
subsequently learned to be a screenwriter, but at the beginning he was
not equipped to do it.
-
CEPLAIR
- Well, did you know how to write a screenplay?
-
BRIGHT
- No.
-
CEPLAIR
- So you just sort of learned as you did it?
-
BRIGHT
- I learned as I did it. My teacher was Darryl Zanuck, who was personally
an arrogant, tin-pot Mussolini. As a producer, he himself was a
frustrated writer and wrote the Rin-Tin-Tin
pictures. But he learned how to produce. He taught me. Everything that I
subsequently found out about movies I learned from him, and that was the
measure of my gratitude.
-
CEPLAIR
- Well, did you get a contract just for Public
Enemy, or were you given a contract as of—?
-
BRIGHT
- I had a term contract with options. I started at $100 a week and Glasmon
the same. I banked the money in the Bank of Hollywood, which never
opened. And I realized ten cents on the dollar, subsequently, years
later. So I wrote to the—I worked for nothing.
-
CEPLAIR
- Now, when Public Enemy was finished, they
then picked up your option, I assume.
-
BRIGHT
- Yes.
-
CEPLAIR
- Because I think you wrote three other movies that year—didn't you?—you
and Glasmon.
-
BRIGHT
- Four.
-
CEPLAIR
- Four.
-
BRIGHT
- In one year.
-
CEPLAIR
- So they must have liked your work at Warner Brothers.
-
BRIGHT
- Oh, we were hot at the time!
-
CEPLAIR
- Those were all [James] Cagney movies, weren't they, that you wrote?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes.
-
CEPLAIR
- Where did you get the ideas? Did Zanuck give them to you or did you just
pick them up out of the newspapers? Because I know a lot of them were
very topical. I mean, you wrote one about a taxi drivers' strike, didn't
you, called Taxi!?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes.
-
CEPLAIR
- Where did the story ideas come from?
-
BRIGHT
- The newspapers, public information, public domain.
-
CEPLAIR
- Now, shortly after you went to work for Warners, you were one of ten
writers who met to form the Screen Writers Guild.
-
BRIGHT
- Yes.
-
CEPLAIR
- How did that come about?
-
BRIGHT
- Well, our intention was, of the loosely formed ten men who met at my
suggestion, which included—Nine of us are dead. The rest were
haphazardly chosen on a social basis in 1933. It became the focal point
of what became the Screen Writers Guild in '36.
-
CEPLAIR
- What was the catalyst? I mean, what moved you to start to organize?
-
BRIGHT
- Being exploited. I very quickly found out that I had been going to work
for $100 a week. This constituted exploitation, because I found out that
a great many writers were making a good deal more than that. And so I
organized a union.
-
CEPLAIR
- Were you a communist at that time?
-
BRIGHT
- No.
-
CEPLAIR
- Were you at all politically active in any way at that time?
-
BRIGHT
- Well, I was sort of a left-wing person in general. There was no
Communist Party at that time.
-
CEPLAIR
- In Hollywood.
-
BRIGHT
- In Hollywood. That wasn't until 1936, which was the year that I was
instrumental in organizing the Screen Writers Guild.
-
CEPLAIR
- Now, Glasmon and you parted company over the union, didn't you?
-
BRIGHT
- Well, it was a complicated reason. I grew up. Whereas the ten-year
difference in our ages was decisive when I was in my late teens, it
became far less decisive ten years later. I became increasingly
assertive about my ideas, of which politics played a big role. I moved
to the left and he moved to the right.
-
CEPLAIR
- So did you cease to be friends as well as collaborators?
-
BRIGHT
- Well, we were kind of cool.
-
CEPLAIR
- Because I know he was active in helping form the company union, the
Screen Playwrights, wasn't he?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes. He joined the Screen Playwrights and I stayed with the guild.
-
CEPLAIR
- Were you blacklisted by the producers for your efforts to organize the
guild?
-
BRIGHT
- Not really. They didn't take it seriously.
-
CEPLAIR
- Oh, I see. So you continued to work, you continued writing while you
were—
-
BRIGHT
- I continued writing, yes.
-
CEPLAIR
- Did your salary go up?
-
BRIGHT
- Well, I went on a one-man strike and refused to work until I got well.
[laughter] And so they quickly came around and—I was then a partner of
Glasmon. It wasn't until 1938 or more that the Screen Playwrights was
formed as an attempt to break the union, the guild.
-
CEPLAIR
- Did you like writing screenplays? Was that something you got enjoyment
from?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes and no. I was dissatisfied with the content of most of the stuff I
did. It wasn't until I was blacklisted that I fulfilled myself as a
screenwriter. I adapted two books of B. Traven and met him subsequently.
-
CEPLAIR
- Were you still at Warner Brothers in '36 when the Screen Writers Guild
actually took full shape?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes.
-
CEPLAIR
- How did you become a communist?
-
BRIGHT
- Well, it seemed to me to be the natural thing to do. I was always
left-wing, and my joining of the party was the culmination of my
radicalism. I had worked for Upton Sinclair in '34, and it was natural
that I would graduate to the CP [Communist Party].
-
CEPLAIR
- Were you one of the original members of the Hollywood branch?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes. I was one of four.
-
CEPLAIR
- Do you remember who the others were?
-
BRIGHT
- I'd rather not say.
-
CEPLAIR
- Okay. So '36 was an active year. I mean, with the guild and your joining
the Communist Party and your screenwriting, it must have been a—
-
BRIGHT
- Yes.
-
CEPLAIR
- Did you begin to collaborate with Robert Tasker in this?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes.
-
CEPLAIR
- How did that come about?
-
BRIGHT
- Well, we met when he was a partner of Samuel Ornitz, subsequently one of
the Hollywood Ten, He was in the process of being radicalized at the
time that I broke up with Glasmon, He was a logical person for me to
collaborate—As an ex-convict, [laughter] He was a very close friend of
mine. He became that. We continued friends until he went to Mexico in
order to avoid the draft, which he looked upon as another prison. This
was before the United States entered the [Second World] War. He
committed suicide in Mexico.
-
CEPLAIR
- Sad. So Warners—The two of you just worked together. They didn't assign
you to work with other people in those days.
-
BRIGHT
- No.
-
CEPLAIR
- It was you and Tasker who worked together.
-
BRIGHT
- Yes. He was the only collaborator I had after Glasmon.
-
CEPLAIR
- So in those years you never wrote a screenplay by yourself, right?
-
BRIGHT
- Oh, yes, I did. A number of them.
-
CEPLAIR
- Did you prefer collaborating to writing alone?
-
BRIGHT
- It was easier, because there was a good deal of conversation and you put
it on paper. You had somebody to talk to.
-
CEPLAIR
- Was the fight to get the guild recognized and against the Screen
Playwrights a particularly ruthless—?
-
BRIGHT
- Oh, God! We almost—We were saved by the Wagner Act [also known as the
National Labor Relations Act]. They drained us down to a couple of
hundred from five or six hundred and would have destroyed the guild had
it not been for the Wagner Act. Our attorney, Thurman [W. ] Arnold, a
big Washington attorney who volunteered to be the guild attorney—
-
CEPLAIR
- So you got an NLRB [National Labor Relations Board] hearing?
-
BRIGHT
- Oh, several hearings.
-
CEPLAIR
- And that was the big turning point, right?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes.
-
CEPLAIR
- I was looking over the Screen Writers Guild officers, and I noticed you
weren't an officer. How come? You just didn't want to do that sort of
thing?
-
BRIGHT
- No, I didn't want to. I was engaged in CP work and the subsequent
offshoots of the party. And I didn't have the stomach for the guild
after having organized it.
-
CEPLAIR
- Yeah. What sort of work did you do in the Communist Party? What kinds of
activities?
-
BRIGHT
- Well, various front organizations, including the Scottsboro case, which
went back to my original abolitionism, and all kinds of left-wing front
organizations, of which the less said the better.
-
CEPLAIR
- Okay. Did you consider yourself a Marxist? Did you read Marx carefully?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes. I did read Marx and carefully. I had doubts about the party, but I
didn't voice them publicly.
-
CEPLAIR
- What sort of doubts?
-
BRIGHT
- Well, I had suspicions of Stalin, and it wasn't until [Nikita S. ]
Khrushchev exposed him that it was sustained.
-
CEPLAIR
- You mean, the trials, for example, gave you pause.
-
BRIGHT
- Yes. I regarded the trials with great suspicion, especially in relation
to the fact that these were all Bolsheviks. But I continued membership
in the party despite that and rationalized the Stalinism. I was taken a
little bit in by the party press.
-
CEPLAIR
- Did you admire Earl Browder?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes. I admired him considerably.
-
CEPLAIR
- Were you one of the higher-ups in the Communist Party in Hollywood? I
mean, you wouldn't become an officer or an apparatchik. Or were you just
a regular member of the party?
-
BRIGHT
- Well, I guess I was a person of considerable influence in the party. But
within the party I had differences, which I voiced at some length within
the party.
-
CEPLAIR
- Did you clash with John Howard Lawson, for example?
-
BRIGHT
- Well, I respected him, but I clashed with him.
-
CEPLAIR
- He was a difficult man, wasn't he? I mean, from what I've heard.
-
BRIGHT
- He was temperamentally a liberal and yet officially a doctrinaire party
member. He was a big shot in the party.
-
CEPLAIR
- Now, were you employed regularly throughout the thirties?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes.
-
CEPLAIR
- So you never had to worry about unemployment. You just wrote screenplays
regularly throughout that time.
-
BRIGHT
- Yes.
-
CEPLAIR
- At Warner Brothers? Or did you change studios?
-
BRIGHT
- Well, I subsequently was sent to work for Paramount [Pictures, Inc. ],
Ben [Benjamin P. ] Schulberg. I wrote my first—The day after I was fired
from Warner Brothers, I went to work for—
1.2. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE TWO APRIL 21, 1988
-
CEPLAIR
- You said you had been fired at Warner Brothers. Why were you fired at
Warner Brothers?
-
BRIGHT
- Well, it was an inadvertence. I was fired and Glasmon was kept on. And
then he retired to the reading department, which he subsequently quit.
The purpose of Darryl Zanuck was to break us up. There were rumors that
we were broken up subsequently, anyway.
-
CEPLAIR
- What year was this?
-
BRIGHT
- Nineteen thirty-three.
-
CEPLAIR
- Which means Zanuck fired you just because he wanted to break up the
writing team?
-
BRIGHT
- Well, he fired me out of spite. The background of the thing was pure
spite on his part. I was subsequently commandeered to show up at eight
o'clock in the morning: unheard of! He left word before he went to work,
the day before, that I was to be awakened early, which was pure
spitefulness. The reason for the dispute was this: I had criticized his
casting. He wanted to break up Cagney and [Joan] Blondell. He had
Loretta Young under contract for a final picture, and he wanted to use
her for Taxi! The idea of Loretta Young as
a cab driver's wife in Brooklyn seemed to me to be unthinkable. So I
criticized him, Zanuck, through the means of a man that he respected,
unlike the guttersnipe that I was. This was a very celebrated writer
working on another picture at Warners. I thought that he had Zanuck's
respect and would be listened to, whereas I was, as I said before, a
guttersnipe from Chicago and not a celebrated Pulitzer Prize-winning
author. So this man, whose name escapes me at the moment, very politely
voiced my criticism and gave me credit for the idea, which infuriated
Zanuck, who had an imperious dislike of anybody criticizing his casting.
And so I tried to throw Zanuck out of the window, even though it was the
first floor. The second floor? But I was overpowered by his secretary, a
male secretary.
-
CEPLAIR
- You mean, he attacked you?
-
BRIGHT
- Oh, yes! He called me a stool pigeon, which I disliked intensely and
told him so. He took a poke at me, and so I tried to throw him out the
window—subsequently, got fired. [laughter]
-
CEPLAIR
- And then you were picked up by Paramount.
-
BRIGHT
- Picked up by Paramount and for that reason! He was hated. My agent was
Myron Selznick, who hired me, or arranged for my getting the biggest
assignment of the year, [laughter] She Done Him
Wrong.
-
CEPLAIR
- That was a Mae West movie.
-
BRIGHT
- Mae West.
-
CEPLAIR
- Was that your first comedy?
-
BRIGHT
- Well, not exactly. First full-length comedy, but there were amusing
scenes in all of Cagney's pictures.
-
CEPLAIR
- Was the grapefruit scene in Public Enemy
your idea?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes. There's been a lot of controversy about it. Subsequently, Zanuck
took credit for it and [William A. ] Wellman, the director, took credit
for it. Actually, it was in the book.
-
CEPLAIR
- It's a terrific movie. I mean, it holds up very, very well over the
years.
-
BRIGHT
- It's a pretty good movie.
-
CEPLAIR
- Yeah.
-
BRIGHT
- I didn't think it was as good as critics said, but it was a pioneer
effort and—
-
CEPLAIR
- Did you get along with Wellman? Because he was kind of a maverick type,
wasn't he?
-
BRIGHT
- Yeah, I got along with him all right.
-
CEPLAIR
- Was Paramount a better experience than Warner Brothers had been for you?
-
BRIGHT
- No. Warners was unique on account of Zanuck. It was unique in the sense
that they made topical pictures, which were very good, on the whole.
-
CEPLAIR
- What kind of movies did Paramount make?
-
BRIGHT
- You mean, in addition to She
Done Him Wrong Wrong Wrong?
-
CEPLAIR
- Yeah. What were they assigning you to work with there? What kind of
movies?
-
BRIGHT
- Oh, crap, mainly.
-
CEPLAIR
- I see. Did you ever think of leaving screenwriting and going back just
to writing books or novels?
-
BRIGHT
- Often. [laughter]
-
CEPLAIR
- But you didn't.
-
BRIGHT
- But I didn't. It was always another picture.
-
CEPLAIR
- The money was pretty good then, wasn't it?
-
BRIGHT
- Yeah.
-
CEPLAIR
- Being a communist and being a screenwriter, did that ever cause you any
problems or any contradictions?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes and no. I was intensely busy, and that interfered with my work as a
screenwriter. But ideologically, no. Well, my work in the party was
left-wing liberalism in the main. And so there was no interference
there.
-
CEPLAIR
- Did you have any hopes that you could, that enough people could, change
the way movies were made or make better, different kinds of movies?
-
BRIGHT
- No. I was pessimistic. I knew my country.
-
CEPLAIR
- And you knew your producers, right?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes.
-
CEPLAIR
- Weren't you active on the Motion Picture Democratic Committee?
-
BRIGHT
- Yeah.
-
CEPLAIR
- Was that the main front work you did?
-
BRIGHT
- It was one of the main ones, yes.
-
CEPLAIR
- So you must have been involved when the Nazi-Soviet Pact came along and
sort of started to break up all of those front groups.
-
BRIGHT
- Yes, yes.
-
CEPLAIR
- What did you think of the Nazi-Soviet Pact?
-
BRIGHT
- Well, I thought that the pact between Stalin and the Nazis was logical
and inevitable. It was broken by the Germans. I had no misgivings about
that.
-
CEPLAIR
- What about the Communist Party decision to call the war an imperialist
war and stay out of it? I mean, did that bother you?
-
BRIGHT
- No. It was.
-
CEPLAIR
- You didn't think that Hitler was much worse than Great Britain, for
example.
-
BRIGHT
- Oh, yes, I did. I was sympathetic to England, and there's an enormous
difference between England and the Nazis.
-
CEPLAIR
- So why didn't you want to support England, then, in the war, or had the
United States entered on England's side?
-
BRIGHT
- Well, I didn't think that either one—Until the Soviet Union got in the
fracas, it was an imperialist war. And the Germans were one-half of the
business until they conquered half of Europe. And then they made the
mistake of turning on the Russians.
-
CEPLAIR
- Were you drafted during the war?
-
BRIGHT
- Well, I volunteered for every branch of the service until finally I got
into the coast guard. I felt that all my friends were in the service as
officers, and I was an officer in age, but I was turned down
consistently for officers' training. That's why I got into the coast
guard so late. I had been turned down by the marines, the navy, the
army, and on political grounds.
-
CEPLAIR
- Where were you stationed when you were in the coast guard?
-
BRIGHT
- New York.
-
CEPLAIR
- You had to resign from the party—didn't you?— when you went into the
service.
-
BRIGHT
- Yes, at their suggestion. I intended to rejoin, but then, in the course
of the war, my misgivings about the party persisted. I subsequently—
Well, it was one incident of censorship that was arbitrary on their
part, by Lawson. I was offered [Norman] Mailer's novel The Naked and the Dead for review when it was
published. For review by the party—controlled monthly. This was the
prize assignment. So I wrote a review praising the book, but with a
paragraph that said, in effect, that if certain things were not done,
and I predicted that they wouldn't be done, namely, the—Well, I wish I
had a copy of the thing. The key paragraph in the review was a
qualification that was pro-democratic, but it was a threat to the reader
that—Well, at any rate, the key paragraph of qualification was taken out
arbitrarily, because it was pessimistic and a prediction of McCarthyism,
which I thought would wreck the party and the whole liberal movement, as
subsequently happened. I predicted it and said so in that review. It was
taken out arbitrarily, without consulting me at all, just lopped out as
being opposed to the party line. That was decisive: I decided I didn't
want any traffic with the party officially, although I continued
sympathetic to its purposes. I refused to be disciplined by it.
-
CEPLAIR
- Was that your first experience with censorship by the party of anything
you had written?
-
BRIGHT
- The most flagrant.
-
CEPLAIR
- There were smaller examples?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes.
-
CEPLAIR
- Did you approve of Browder's changing the party into the Communist
Political Association?
-
BRIGHT
- No. I had many misgivings about that.
-
CEPLAIR
- And you still had misgivings about the Soviet Union and what Stalin was
going to do, I assume.
-
BRIGHT
- Yes.
-
CEPLAIR
- So when you came back to Hollywood, did you start writing again,
screenwriting again, without any problem?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes. I wrote a picture for Hal [B. ] Wallis, which I signed up for while
I was still in uniform, but anticipating severance from the thing. It
was a picture for Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster called I Walk Alone.
-
CEPLAIR
- Was postwar Hollywood a different place than prewar Hollywood had been?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes. It was the beginning of the breaking up of the monopolies. The five
studios who controlled the town became fifty independents, a situation
which persists now to the present day.
-
CEPLAIR
- Were you politically active? I mean, now that you were no longer in the
party, did you still maintain politically active—?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes, I continued active in the party, despite the fact that I was not a
member.
-
CEPLAIR
- What sorts of things were you involved in? Do you remember?
-
BRIGHT
- Oh, the fight for the Hollywood Ten and various progressive things.
-
CEPLAIR
- Were you active in the [Henry A. ] Wallace campaign?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes.
-
CEPLAIR
- When the Hollywood Ten occurred, did you think that you were next on the
agenda? Did it occur to you that you were a target, or going to be a
target?
-
BRIGHT
- Well, I found out about it through an inadvertent conversation with a
man who was a fan of mine, Bob [Robert] Fellows, who told me that I had
written for him a very distinguished picture, which subsequently wasn't
made, called Dynamite. He confided to me
that he was leaving Paramount and putting in with John Wayne. So my
heart sank, because I knew that Wayne was a reactionary. Yet, he said,
"Wait a minute. Wayne likes you as a writer. He wants to have you as a
writer. You won't have to do anything. You won't have to name anybody,
except people that are already named. " Here's the reason why: the
emphasis in Hollywood had been anti-Nazi. He said, "Forget about this.
And the reason that you should forget about it, according to Wayne, is
that J. Edgar Hoover showed up unexpectedly at our Wednesday meeting. "
He admitted that he was a civilian employee of the FBI [Federal Bureau
of Investigation]. And the reason was that the emphasis in Hollywood
should be forget about the campaign against the Nazis in Hollywood and
concentrate on anti-Soviet. Why? The Battle of Stalingrad had just been
won by the Russians. And he said, "That's the enemy. " I said, "Well,
what has that got to do with me?" He said, "Well, you've been picked as
one of several to build Wayne's new staff. " I said, "But why? Why me?"
I was well known as a left-winger. He said, "Wayne told me to tell you
that you would not be named as a left-winger, except secretly. " So I
gulped and made up my mind to leave for Mexico at once. I was one of the
first to go to Mexico.
-
CEPLAIR
- When was this?
-
BRIGHT
- Nineteen fifty.
-
CEPLAIR
- Okay, I guess I'm a little confused. The Battle of Stalingrad was in
1943.
-
BRIGHT
- The Battle of Stalingrad was not 1943. I forget the exact date of it
[September 1942-February 1943].
-
CEPLAIR
- Well, it was during World War II. So I guess I'm a little confused,
because you said that as a result of the Battle of Stalingrad, you were
going to stop being anti-Nazi and start being anti-Soviet.
-
BRIGHT
- Yes. The whole emphasis had shifted in those years.
-
CEPLAIR
- Yeah. Well, now, who is this Bob Fellows?
-
BRIGHT
- He was a producer.
-
CEPLAIR
- At Paramount?
-
BRIGHT
- At Paramount.
-
CEPLAIR
- And you think he worked for the FBI as well?
-
BRIGHT
- Well, he told me he was.
-
CEPLAIR
- Oh. And so what they were saying is that they had your name, but they
wouldn't expose you if you went to work for Wayne.
-
BRIGHT
- That's right.
-
CEPLAIR
- And you just decided the heck with this. Let's see, Gordon Kahn also—
Didn't he go about the same time to Mexico?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes. He went at the same time—
-
CEPLAIR
- Where—? Go ahead.
-
BRIGHT
- Oh, we went on the same train.
-
CEPLAIR
- And where did you go in Mexico?
-
BRIGHT
- Mexico City. Pedro Armendariz was an old friend of mine. He was
sympathetic to my views and admiring of my talents. He got me the Traven
job.
-
CEPLAIR
- So you just sort of picked up and just left. I mean, sort of on the
instant, practically?
-
BRIGHT
- At once.
-
CEPLAIR
- At once.
-
BRIGHT
- I knew it was coming.
-
CEPLAIR
- You weren't married at the time.
-
BRIGHT
- Yeah. I was, yeah.
-
CEPLAIR
- Did your wife [Josefina Fierro Bright] go with you?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes. My wife and two kids, who were then tiny.
-
CEPLAIR
- How long did you stay in Mexico?
-
BRIGHT
- Ten years.
-
CEPLAIR
- Did you work pretty consistently when you were there?
-
BRIGHT
- Well, I worked rather consistently, but at bargain prices. And I
couldn't—I was subsequently deported from Mexico.
-
CEPLAIR
- Aren't you one of the few people who has ever met B. Traven?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes.
-
CEPLAIR
- What sort of person was he?
-
BRIGHT
- Dreadful. He was a man of unquestioned integrity, but impossible to work
with.
-
CEPLAIR
- What were the two books of his you adapted?
-
BRIGHT
-
Rebellion of the Hanged was the first one.
That's the one Armendariz got for me. And Mexican
Trio, which is a collection of Traven's short stories. That
took the better part of two years to write two of them.
-
CEPLAIR
- You wrote alone then? You didn't have any partners?
-
BRIGHT
- No.
-
CEPLAIR
- Was this in Mexico City, or did you go to Cuernavaca?
-
BRIGHT
- Mexico City.
-
CEPLAIR
- Did any other blacklisted people join you in Mexico City?
-
BRIGHT
- Well, all of them subsequently, but I guess there were maybe six or
seven of them—of the Ten—and they drifted back through Hollywood.
-
CEPLAIR
- Did you like living in Mexico?
-
BRIGHT
- Oh, yes. Yes, indeed, that's for me. Corrupt and inefficient and— Well,
I offended some of my Mexican friends by saying that Mexico was like a
syphilitic maiden aunt who gave me my first bicycle. [laughter]
-
CEPLAIR
- Why were you deported from Mexico?
-
BRIGHT
- Oh, I was deported as a red under the influence of the FBI, although I
hadn't been a party member for several years. But the fact that I went
to Mexico to avoid subpoena proved to them that I had party membership.
Why else would I do it?
-
CEPLAIR
- So that was when? That was in 1960 that—?
-
BRIGHT
- Nineteen fifty.
-
CEPLAIR
- No, that you were deported from Mexico.
-
BRIGHT
- Well—What was your question?
-
CEPLAIR
- When were you deported? What year were you deported?
-
BRIGHT
- Nineteen forty-nine to fifty.
-
CEPLAIR
- No, that's when you went to Mexico.
-
BRIGHT
- Yeah.
1.3. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE ONE APRIL 27, 1988
-
CEPLAIR
- When we talked last week, you said that your sister had been
unconventional for her time and had been an influence on you. I was
wondering, did she herself become a radical?
-
BRIGHT
- No, she was a left liberal. She died of cancer.
-
CEPLAIR
- Okay, I also would like to know the title of the [William H. ] Thompson
biography. I don't think we mentioned that.
-
BRIGHT
-
Hizzoner Big Bill Thompson: An Idyll of
Chicago.
-
CEPLAIR
- Okay, when you were in Europe, did you go to Germany?
-
BRIGHT
- No.
-
CEPLAIR
- So you weren't particularly aware of the rise of fascism at that time or
its problems?
-
BRIGHT
- It was endemic only in Italy under Mussolini.
-
CEPLAIR
- And you didn't go to Italy either?
-
BRIGHT
- No.
-
CEPLAIR
- I wonder if you could maybe tell me a little more about Robert Tasker,
his background, etc. You know, people don't hear much of him and yet he
did—You and he were very close I know.
-
BRIGHT
- Well, I wrote a whole book about him.
-
CEPLAIR
- You did?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes.
-
CEPLAIR
- But was it published?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes.
-
CEPLAIR
- What was the title of it?
-
BRIGHT
- It's Cleaner on the Inside.
-
CEPLAIR
- Who published it?
-
BRIGHT
- A British publisher. It was published only in England. I forget.
-
CEPLAIR
- Okay. So as far as you know, unless it was a very big library, it might
not be available in this country.
-
BRIGHT
- Yes, I think so.
-
CEPLAIR
- Okay.
-
BRIGHT
- I have a copy of it here, but I can't lay my hands on it at the moment.
-
CEPLAIR
- Okay. Both you and he married Spanish women, is that right?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes.
-
CEPLAIR
- So that you spoke Spanish before you went to Mexico and knew a lot about
it, I assume.
-
BRIGHT
- Yes, I had a Mexican wife, Josephine [Josefina Fierro Bright], who is my
favorite wife. [laughter]
-
CEPLAIR
- How many were there?
-
BRIGHT
- Four.
-
CEPLAIR
- My goodness. Was she the one with whom you went to Mexico?
-
BRIGHT
- Yeah.
-
CEPLAIR
- And I assume you learned to speak Spanish when you were married to her?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes. I learned Spanish—well, what I know of it— through her and living
in Mexico briefly.
-
CEPLAIR
- When you were in Hollywood, you know, oftentimes people talk about a
writers' community. That is, you know, the writers spend time together
at Musso and Frank [Grill] or Stanley Rose's Bookstore or at the writers
table. Was that something that you partook of?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes.
-
CEPLAIR
- What was it like in the writers' community? What sort of community was
it?
-
BRIGHT
- Well, it's hard to capture in a phrase.
-
CEPLAIR
- I'm sure.
-
BRIGHT
- I don't know. What it was like is sort of a tricky question. It could
mean anything. The answer could mean almost anything. I hung out,
largely, at Musso and Frank and Stanley Rose's Bookstore next door. I
used to have informal meetings with a number of fellow writers. We
talked about almost everything under the sun, mainly our problems.
-
CEPLAIR
- As writers?
-
BRIGHT
- As writers.
-
CEPLAIR
- Did the writers consider themselves a kind of a group apart from the
other Hollywood workers?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes, and superior. [laughter]
-
CEPLAIR
- You believe that your job is probably the most important in movies?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes.
-
CEPLAIR
- And no one else did.
-
BRIGHT
- [laughter] No, except writers.
-
CEPLAIR
- Except writers, yeah. You mentioned that Darryl [F. ] Zanuck was a good
producer as far as you were concerned. You didn't like him, but you
respected him as a producer. Were there any other producers or directors
whom you respected?
-
BRIGHT
- Yeah. John Ford? Howard Hawks, who directed one of my pictures? William
Wyler? and half a dozen others.
-
CEPLAIR
- In those days, directors couldn't change scripts, could they, when they
were shooting? Is that true?
-
BRIGHT
- It wasn't true of Zanuck pictures. Zanuck respected writers, but not
directors. He got to respect them later, but so far as I know, he was in
a minority of producers.
-
CEPLAIR
- So the only one who can change a—If you worked for Zanuck, only he could
change a script, right? No one else could?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes.
-
CEPLAIR
- Now, you mentioned that one of the reasons you didn't want to go back
into the Communist Party was because of that censorship of the review,
the Norman Mailer review, you had written.
-
BRIGHT
- Yeah.
-
CEPLAIR
- Was that about the time when Albert Maltz had written his article ["What
Shall We Ask of Writers"] and was forced to—?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes.
-
CEPLAIR
- Were you involved in that discussion about Maltz's article?
-
BRIGHT
- Well, I took part in it. I was on the side of Maltz.
-
CEPLAIR
- You mean his first article.
-
BRIGHT
- Yes.
-
CEPLAIR
- What did you think when he wrote the second one recanting? Were you
upset with that? Angry with him for doing that?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes, I was. I don't think that he should have recanted, nor did he.
Later on he regretted it very much. His capitulation to the party was
little short of disgraceful in my view.
-
CEPLAIR
- Although I guess at the time he didn't have a great deal of support.
Most everyone seemed to turn against him as soon as it became clear that
the party didn't like the article. It seemed a lot of writers, although
they may have agreed with him quietly, publicly they seemed to have
turned against him.
-
BRIGHT
- Well, it was a difference of opinion.
-
CEPLAIR
- Was there pressure on you to rejoin the party?
-
BRIGHT
- Oh, yes indeed. And I was about to do so when—I was about to resolve the
differences that I had with the party until the Mailer incident.
-
CEPLAIR
- Did you lose friends when you didn't rejoin? I mean, did people stop
talking to you because—?
-
BRIGHT
- No, no.
-
CEPLAIR
- So you didn't become a nonperson just because you decided not to go back
into the party.
-
BRIGHT
- No. [laughter]
-
CEPLAIR
- Now, I heard that you and Tasker were fired from Paramount because you
wrote a script that B. [Benjamin] P. Schulberg didn't like in 1941.
-
BRIGHT
- No, that's not true.
-
CEPLAIR
- That's not true? Oh, okay. Because I noticed when I looked at your
screen credits that between 1942 and 1948, you only had one credit,
which was for a documentary called We
Accuse.
-
BRIGHT
- Yes.
-
CEPLAIR
- How come you didn't have any credits between 1945 and 1948?
-
BRIGHT
- I wrote consistently, but I didn't get screen credit for anything.
-
CEPLAIR
- But you were constantly employed during that time.
-
BRIGHT
- I was employed, yes.
-
CEPLAIR
- What was We Accuse? What was that?
-
BRIGHT
- Well, that was an investigation of the war guilt, principally Nazi
responsibility for instigating the war. I did a pretty thorough job, I
received praise from no less than Walter Winchell for my efforts in
that. That was in New York.
-
CEPLAIR
- Who produced the film?
-
BRIGHT
- It was produced privately by a man with the name of Levine, but I rather
suspected that the Soviet Union had a good deal to do with that.
-
CEPLAIR
- Let's see, then, in 1948 you had four credits according to the records.
And then in 1949 you had one credit, and I guess that was in 1949 that
you decided that it would be a good idea to go to Mexico. Is that right?
-
BRIGHT
- Well, that was the late fifties.
-
CEPLAIR
- That you went to Mexico. The last credit, then, was The Brave Bulls. That was the last script you wrote?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes.
-
CEPLAIR
- And that was for Columbia [Pictures Industries, Inc. ].
-
BRIGHT
- That was for [Robert] Rossen.
-
CEPLAIR
- I guess you didn't have much confidence that Harry Cohn would back you
up?
-
BRIGHT
- No.
-
CEPLAIR
- Now, when you were in Mexico, you said that you had done the two [B. ]
Traven screenplays. Did you do any screenplays for Hollywood producers
when you were in Mexico?
-
BRIGHT
- No, I was blacklisted.
-
CEPLAIR
- Not even under an assumed name or—?
-
BRIGHT
- Not even under an assumed name.
-
CEPLAIR
- Because weren't some people in Mexico writing for the black market, as
it was called?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes.
-
CEPLAIR
- But you didn't?
-
BRIGHT
- No.
-
CEPLAIR
- Did you have to take any other work in Mexico to keep body and soul
together, as it were?
-
BRIGHT
- [laughter] No.
-
CEPLAIR
- Your writing kept you going.
-
BRIGHT
- My writing kept me going.
-
CEPLAIR
- When exactly did you return to the United States?
-
BRIGHT
- In 1959.
-
CEPLAIR
- And you said that the Mexican government had decided to deport you,
because they thought you were a communist.
-
BRIGHT
- Yes.
-
CEPLAIR
- Did they treat you respectfully or did they just sort of—?
-
BRIGHT
- No, no, no, on the contrary.
-
CEPLAIR
- What did they do?
-
BRIGHT
- Well, they beat me up.
-
CEPLAIR
- Really?
-
BRIGHT
- Yeah, treated me rather roughly. I never did learn why I was deported,
although many of my friends tried to investigate it. The nearest thing
to an explanation was my close association with [William] O'Dwyer. I was
ghosting his biography, My Brother Bill,
ostensibly a biography of William O'Dwyer by his brother. And I got paid
$5,000 for work on that book, which I abandoned when I ran into the
incontrovertible facts of O'Dwyer's corruption, which I couldn't see my
way clear to pretty up. But we quarreled amiably about that. Bill
O'Dwyer was in favor of abandoning the whole thing, and eventually that
was done. I wrote four chapters of the book, bringing up through his
activities as a policeman. The book sort of dwindled out when I refused
to alter the facts, to pretty them up. I still have some regrets about
that, because I had a very fancy contract with Doubleday [and Company,
Inc. ] for the book and I would have made a lot of money. I had the
lion's share of the profits of the book. Well, I devoted a year to that
and received, as I say, $5,000 for the book, for the down payment
advance on the book.
-
CEPLAIR
- You did the two Traven movies and you did this. What other writing did
you do while you were down there?
-
BRIGHT
- Well, I commenced work on the Tasker book, the Tasker novel, a novel
based upon his life and ending with his suicide.
-
CEPLAIR
-
Cleaner on the Inside. That refers to that
he thought jail was less corrupt than being out of jail?
-
BRIGHT
- Yeah, it was used ironically. The title is the idea of my mentor,
William Blake, who had an enormous amount of influence over me.
-
CEPLAIR
- The poet William Blake?
-
BRIGHT
- No, he was a novelist, married to Christina [E. ] Stead.
-
CEPLAIR
- Where did you know him?
-
BRIGHT
- I knew him in New York, an incredible man. An encyclopedist of substance
who had read everything that was published and remembered everything
almost verbatim—he had that kind of memory. An extraordinary mind. I've
got several books of his around here, none of which was successful.
-
CEPLAIR
- He was a novelist, you say?
-
BRIGHT
- Yeah.
-
CEPLAIR
- Was there a blacklist community in Mexico City? Did a number of
Hollywood people come there to stay as long as you did?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes, all of them eventually came to Mexico and returned to here.
-
CEPLAIR
- Did any of them stay as long as you did?
-
BRIGHT
- Only Gordon Kahn, and I think that's all. But everybody—Hugo Butler,
whose widow is Jean Butler of the [Writers] Guild [of America], Ring
Lardner [Jr. ], Dalton Trumbo, inevitably.
-
CEPLAIR
- Would you have stayed in Mexico if the government had allowed you to?
Would you just have lived out your life there?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes, I would have stayed. My official explanation, for the few people
who didn't know that I was deported, was that I left Mexico because of
inability to make a living. But that wasn't true.
-
CEPLAIR
- You couldn't be politically active, could you, in Mexico? I mean, could
you get involved in Mexican politics?
-
BRIGHT
- No, it was forbidden as a foreigner.
-
CEPLAIR
- From the Mexican perspective, what did it look like in the United
States, with [Joseph R. ] McCarthy and everything else?
-
BRIGHT
- Pretty bleak.
-
CEPLAIR
- You thought fascism had arrived?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes.
-
CEPLAIR
- How did you react when you heard about [Nikita S. ] Khrushchev's speech
about Stalin in 1956? Did that just—?
-
BRIGHT
- Well, in a way I had anticipated it. I welcomed it, of course, and then
deplored it when he was kicked out. It wasn't until [Leonid I. ]
Brezhnev was succeeded by the present one [Mikhail S. Gorbachev] that my
faith in the Soviet Union was restored.
-
CEPLAIR
- When you came back to the United States, you came back, I assume, to Los
Angeles?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes.
-
CEPLAIR
- What kind of work did you try to get? How successful were you?
-
BRIGHT
- Well, that's the basis of my present dictation. Hollywood underwent an
enormous amount of changes, but one thing was unchanged, and that was,
"What did you do lately?" Well, I hadn't worked in Hollywood for ten
years or nine years, and so I had to answer negatively—I hadn't.
Meantime, these monumental changes had happened in the production
schedule of— Scenario about Hollywood. But one thing was unchanged. That
was "What have you done lately?" So I had a difficult time. I tried to
get into television, but that didn't work out. And so that's true up to
the present.
-
CEPLAIR
- You never could put your writing career back on track?
-
BRIGHT
- No.
-
CEPLAIR
- Well, what did you do? I mean, how did you manage to sustain yourself?
What sorts of work did you do?
-
BRIGHT
- Well, largely through borrowing and I had my sons, particularly my older
boy, who has been supporting me for several years now.
-
CEPLAIR
- Nancy [Lynn] Schwartz in her book on the writers [The Hollywood Writers'
Wars] said that you had worked for Bill Cosby productions
[Campbell-Silver-Cosby] for a while.
-
BRIGHT
- Yes, I worked for Cosby. He had two partners, [Bruce] Campbell and
Silver. The very fancy office was plundered and eventually went bankrupt
and closed. I was with them for about a year and a half.
-
CEPLAIR
- What did you do for them?
-
BRIGHT
- I was a screenwriter and a story editor. I helped pick the various
projects that never got made, but that I recommended. Including Trumbo's
novel.
-
CEPLAIR
-
Johnny Got His Gun.
-
BRIGHT
-
Johnny Got His Gun, which I recommended to
Campbell, and he ran with it. Has a sordid story. He married Trumbo's
daughter, and it was pretty ugly.
-
CEPLAIR
- You mean their divorce or their marriage?
-
BRIGHT
- They were divorced, yeah. But I was in the middle on that one.
-
CEPLAIR
- Did you have any other jobs in television or movies, aside from that
one?
-
BRIGHT
- No.
-
CEPLAIR
- Did you try to write any other novels or books during that period?
-
BRIGHT
- Well, I completed the Tasker novel, and then I continued writing—and
unsuccessfully.
-
CEPLAIR
- Did you feel bitter about it?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes. I felt that the blacklist was indefinite—it went on and on and
on—due to the fact that—"What have you done lately?" And as time went
on, why that period lengthened.
-
CEPLAIR
- Did you try getting the Tasker book published in this country?
-
BRIGHT
- Yes, I did.
-
CEPLAIR
- Did you think that there was a blacklist operating there?
-
BRIGHT
- No. That was due to the error of Blake, who sold the rights to the
British commonwealth. For that reason I didn't get an American
publisher. They looked upon the Canadian and Australian rights as
important, and they were sold to England. And so I never did get
published in this country.
-
CEPLAIR
- Did you become, in any way, politically active when you returned to the
United States?
-
BRIGHT
- Oh, in a way. Not very, in contrast to what I had been before.
-
CEPLAIR
- Are you in the process of writing your autobiography at this point or
your memoirs? I think I had heard someone say that you were doing that.
-
BRIGHT
- Well, I have written and so far been unable to get a publisher for my
memoirs. Arsenic and Old Faces is the
title. It is subtitled Memories of Old Hollywood by
John Bright. So far I've gotten nowhere with the publication
of that. I guess if it's published, it will be published posthumously.
-
CEPLAIR
- I hope not. Well, that about ends the questions that I have. Is there
anything, any question that I should have asked you that I didn't? Or
anything you'd like to say for the record?
-
BRIGHT
- No, I don't think so.
-
CEPLAIR
- Okay.