Jarrico Killed in Car Crash

Posted by Reinaldo Massengill on Thursday, September 5, 2024

Screenwriter

Screenwriter Paul Jarrico, who went from celebrated scribe in the World War II years to blacklisted non-entity merely a decade later, died Tuesday from injuries sustained in a car accident on the way home from a luncheon in honor of blacklisted scribes. He was 82.

Jarrico, who also was among honorees at a Monday night “Hollywood Remembers the Blacklist” event sponsored by the four showbiz guilds, was killed when he drove off Pacific Coast Highway and slammed into a tree. He died by the time rescuers pulled him from the wreckage, the California Highway Patrol said.

Friends speculated that Jarrico was exhausted after Monday and Tuesday’s events.

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“What happened on Monday night was a triumph — years spent surviving terrible conditions,” Abraham Polonsky, another blacklisted filmmaker, said Wednesday. “He was really enjoying, finally, the victory after all these years. He was enjoying every minute of it.”

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Ring Lardner Jr., one of two surviving members of the famous blacklisted filmmakers known as the Hollywood Ten, said Jarrico was instrumental in restoring credits for blacklisted writers. “He was the outstanding figure in the whole ceremony,” Lardner said. “He had started the effort to restore credits. That was his mission.”

Rather than buckle under the intense pressure brought to bear on suspected Hollywood liberals, socialists and Communists in the late 1940s and ’50s by the infamous Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Jarrico sought a different path.

Officially blacklisted

Shortly after being officially blacklisted by McCarthy’s allies in the studios in 1951 for refusing to name names, Jarrico assembled a team of likewise banned filmmakers, including writer Michael Wilson, actor Will Geer and director Herbert Biberman, and produced “Salt of the Earth” (1954), a widely praised examination of striking New Mexico miners that was originally banned in the U.S. for being pro-socialist.

Even after the intense shadow of Red-hunting in Hollywood slowly abated in the mid-1960s, Jarrico led the push to remind the industry of its complicitous behavior and became something of an unofficial walking history of the blacklist period, fusing his own personal experiences with those of the Hollywood Ten and other persecuted filmmakers.

He was never shy or apologetic about his membership in the American Communist Party, and his refreshing honesty about the existence of Communists and/or sympathizers in the industry went a long way toward putting their influence on Hollywood filmmaking in general in its proper perspective.

Born in Los Angeles in 1915, Jarrico began working as a screenwriter on the Columbia Pictures staff and, save for a stint in the Navy and Merchant Marines during World War II, worked steadily from 1937 through 1951.

He was nominated for a screenplay Oscar for 1941’s “Tom, Dick and Harry” but lost to the writers of “Citizen Kane.” He subsequently wrote the Gene Kelly film “Thousands Cheer,” “Song of Russia” with Robert Taylor, “The Search” for Montgomery Clift and “The White Tower,” which starred Glenn Ford.

After refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951, RKO boss Howard Hughes removed Jarrico’s name from “The Las Vegas Story,” which resulted in one of the earliest and most celebrated credits-related lawsuits of the time.

After making the controversial “Salt of the Earth” in 1954 and still finding Hollywood closed to him, Jarrico moved to Europe, splitting time between London and Paris and working as a screenwriter for hire. Among his “exile” films are “Five Marked Women” for Dino De Laurentiis, “All Night Long” for the Rank Organization and “The Day the Line Got Hot” for Alexander Salkind.

Story editor

Jarrico finally returned to the U.S. in the late 1970s, writing a play (“Leonardo”) and serving as story editor on two TV series, “Call to Glory” and “Fortune Dane.” Ironically, his final writing gig — a substantial rewrite on the telepic “Stalin” in 1992 — was uncredited.

Jarrico is survived by wife Lia Benedetti and son Bill. There will be no funeral services; a memorial will be announced in the near future.

(Contributor:The Associated Press)

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