Red All Over

When producer Irwin Winkler asked writer-director Abraham Polonsky to collaborate with him on a film about a blacklisted Hollywood director, Winkler had the right guy. Polonsky, blacklisted himself in 1951, had plenty to write about.

Four years later, however, a screenplay is circulating with both their names on it--and Polonsky’s notified the Writers Guild that he wants his removed.

“That script was not written by me, not a single word is mine,” Polonsky told Outtakes. “There is no political basis to it, which is what I intended.”

Polonsky, 78, who wrote the classic 1947 John Garfield film “Body and Soul,” said Winkler rewrote the script without consulting him and, as a sop, offered to make him exec producer. Polonsky declined.

Winkler acknowledged rewriting the script: “I wanted a story about how the blacklist affects (the director’s) life, his family, his friends, his jobs.”

Polonsky, feeling that stories about blacklist victims have been done to death, said he wanted “a picture about someone who’s guilty of being a radical and has to face the problem and say, ‘Yes, I’m a communist and I don’t have to answer any questions about my politics . . . That’s my right.”

Winkler said he’ll let the Guild determine credits when the film is finished. Polonsky wants action now.

“As it stands,” he said, “if the movie is made, I would get sole screen credit, and I don’t want any credit for it.”

Meanwhile, Polonsky and producer Mike Kaplan plan to adapt “Season of Fear,” a novel Polonsky wrote during the blacklist period, about a water engineer caught up in the paranoia of the Red Scare.