he couldn’t identify, let alone speak. Whenever he saw me, he’d pull me aside and say, “Hey, Roger, the struggle continues! Howzit goin’ in Hollywood, man? When’re we gonna get some of your movie star friends down here? Teach them a little Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung thought?” It was hard to tell if he was joking or not.
But in truth there were developing connections between the film world and the young radicals of the time, and I was a part of them. One of my first studio screenplay assignments after returning from Spain was an original idea of mine called The Black Wizard of the Dakotas. Inspired by John Ford and the left-wing Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha—and based on information I’d gleaned from Jackie’s labor history class—Black Wizard was a Marxist Western (with a hint of magic) about the nineteenth-century Colorado mining strikes. The script was developed at Warner Brothers for director Paul Williams. Williams had just made a critically-acclaimed but low-budget film called The Revolutionary, the tale of a college student known as “A” (played by Jon Voight, today one of the few movie star supporters of the Iraq War) who rebels against his bourgeois father and gets caught painting anti-capitalist manifestos on the wall. But I don’t think even Williams and his producer partner Ed Pressman had any idea of just how left my script would be. (Let’s say Maxim Gorky couldn’t have done better.)
Not that the executives at Warners seemed to care. There was no mention of the script’s politics in our meetings, but they eventually chose to make another film with Paul Williams on a subject they deemed more commercial: marijuana. Unfortunately, Dealing: Or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost Bag Blues was a flop. Williams—whose career skidded and who has had trouble making movies ever since—went on to attempt to help fugitive Black Panther Huey Newton escape to Cuba under bizarre and ironic circumstances, which I witnessed.
That Panther connection may have been what attracted Pressman and Williams to me in the first place. They probably knew something about it when they came to dinner in Echo Park the first time. At the time, I donated some of my Hollywood money to the Black Panther Breakfast Program; I regarded this humorously as a tithe, though it was considerably less than ten percent. (The Breakfast Program, which fed inner city children, was well publicized then and helped distract from some of the Panthers’ more controversial activities, like drug dealing and murder.) Around ten o’clock at night and often unannounced, some of the brethren in black berets and leather jackets would arrive at my house with a half-dozen or so kids in tow. “Hey, Rajah,” the ringleader would say, “these children got nowhere to go for ham ’n eggs tomorrow.” He knew how to con a Hollywood mark when he saw one. How could I turn them down? I would write a check for a couple of hundred bucks—payable to cash, of course—trying not to wonder whether the money would be used for food or for AK-47s. I guess I didn’t care to know, so long as they left quickly. I have to admit I was a little nervous having the Panthers in my home. I was always pacifist by temperament, even when I flirted with more violent types, and I did have children of my own in the house, first Raphael and then Jesse, born two days after Christmas 1970.
I don’t remember the names of the Panthers who came those nights—they were foot soldiers—but I did meet some of the leadership then, including Eldridge Cleaver, his wife Kathleen, and Elaine Brown, their Minister of Information, who played first-rate blues piano at fundraisers. Brilliant and sexy with a bourgeois background, Elaine was the kind of woman that fed the fantasies of young liberal Jewish boys from New York until they broke into night sweats. Just knowing the Panthers then was a great talking point in Hollywood meetings. Of course, I didn’t know them very well, but who cared and who knew? The point was to give off a whiff of radical danger, but not so much that people would be worried about working with you.
The radical edge was closer then. Granted, most young movie people dabbled in this kind of activity for show, or to be part of a particular crowd, but there were those hardcore types who abandoned the film industry to become actual members of the working class. I knew some recent graduates of UCLA Film School who’d quit the movie business to join the various industrial assembly lines—not to say that their film careers were all that promising in the first place. Nevertheless, they went about the business of being “de-classed”—just as people had in the Thirties, although these were the early Seventies and Stalin was already long dead, long exposed as a tyrant of epic proportions. One man—an aspiring director named Peter Belsito who had written a script called “Stalin’s Children”—and his wife Judy moved from their groovy cottage on the Marina Peninsula in Venice to grimmer digs in City Terrace, in the heart of Latino East Los Angeles. Peter joined the line at the Buick plant in Southgate; Judy, who had a degree in chemistry from the University of Wisconsin, got a job as an information operator with the telephone company so she could organize workers there.
A group called the California Communist League, led by a man named Nelson Peery, was at the center of this extreme left-wing organizing. And when I say “extreme,” I mean it. At the invitation of the Belsitos, Dyanne and I attended a barbecue in East LA given to introduce members of the entertainment industry to the CCL, presumably to enlist us. The problem was, although there were well over a hundred people there, the only actual working movie person, besides Dyanne and me, was our friend Linzee Klingman, who later went on to edit One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. And she had come with us. We tried to make the best of an awkward situation, munching on the tamales while perusing a long table of pamphlets—all of them produced by the Labor Party of Albania and most authored by its chairman, Enver Hoxha. Albania was evidently the only socialist country pure enough for the California Communist League. Even Mao’s China, still in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, was suspect.
After lunch, Nelson addressed the attendees. He warned us, particularly we three film people, that the revolution was nigh and that we had to decide which side we were on because afterwards there would be an accounting. If we stood with the revolution, we would be rewarded. Otherwise, there was no telling what would happen. He frowned ominously.
I remember dismissing this as pure insanity, then wondering: What if he’s right? I didn’t want to end up in a reeducation camp—or worse. Absurd as it sounds now, I felt then that it was best to keep my options open. Even if Nelson was an ideologue, who wouldn’t sympathize with the working-class blacks and Latinos who populated the barbecue that day? They were a lot friendlier than the rich Hollywood types I worked with, far less competitive and slower to judge. If there was going to be a revolution, I wanted to be on their side. And maybe, despite all evidence, something was about to happen. The “illegal” war in Asia was still raging. The inner cities were in turmoil. When people asked me my ambition in those days, I said, only half in jest, “I want to be Minister of Culture.” I even thought of having those words on the frame around my license plate, the way some had “My Other Car is a Porsche.”
Actually, my car was a Mercedes, a used or (in modern parlance) “preowned” one I’d bought from the Republican father of Willard Huyck, the screenwriter with whom I’d shared a table the night Dalton Trumbo spoke. I’d driven the Mercedes to that Writers Guild event, which was at the Beverly Hilton, but not to the barbecue in East LA. For that occasion I’d preferred our more anonymous Volvo, by then fairly beaten up and victimized by a particularly hideous $29.95 magenta Earl Scheib paint job.
My life was filled with this kind of schizophrenic behavior, and would be for years to come. My inability to reconcile my beliefs and my lifestyle probably had something to do with my anger at Dalton Trumbo that evening. Speeches about reconciliation didn’t fit with my self-image—not as a “revolutionary” or as an aspiring Hollywood “player.” I wanted it all on both sides, to be lionized as Fellini and idolized as Che. I wasn’t alone in those dual ambitions. Many never outgrew them.
2
FROM SOUTH CAROLINA BACKWARDS
I have only a dim memory of how I felt in August 1966, when—standing by the
