Miller’s script

Susan King’s story “The Blacklist’s Gray Tones” (Aug. 31) and the PBS documentary “Arthur Miller, Elia Kazan and the Blacklist: None Without Sin” suggest that the reason a film project called “The Hook” -- written by Miller and to be directed by Kazan in the early ‘50s -- was never made was because it fell victim to redbaiting. The documentary even asserts that it was the FBI that blocked the production. In fact, neither of these scenarios are the truth. I know because I’m the one who vetted the script for Columbia Pictures chief Harry Cohn.

In those days in Hollywood, it was customary to submit scripts to various groups for their review. Because I was a longtime labor man, and the International Representative of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, it was only natural that a script about union corruption would come across my desk.

I told Harry Cohn that I wasn’t qualified to pass judgment on the great playwright Arthur Miller, but I was certain that the script’s negative depiction of New York longshoremen would be exploited by the Communist Party to try to get control of the N.Y. waterfront.

I didn’t doubt there was corruption in unions and I wasn’t against exposing it. And I’d never want to interfere with an artist’s right to create a work of art. Nevertheless, I didn’t want to assist anything that would help the Communist Party gain ground, at home or abroad. Miller, Kazan and I met in Cohn’s office. Miller was polite, listened to my concerns, and called me “Mr. Brewer.” He actually said he was open to revisions. One character, Miller said, could accuse the hero of being a communist, then the hero could deny it. I countered that if that character really were a communist, denying it is precisely what he would do. I suggested some sequence that would dramatize the efforts of communists to capitalize on union conflict: Have the protagonist reject any help from the Stalinists on the grounds that they would be worse than racketeers if they ever seized power. I suggested that the hero symbolize American workers fighting against racketeering and refused to compromise with communist disrupters. Miller, however, dismissed these suggestions and said, “I’m not so sure that would be a good idea.”

I have since learned that Cohn later wired Miller: “Interesting how when we make the script pro-American, you pull out.” Miller has said that nothing in his life was ever written to follow a line, but my experience with him in Hollywood more than 50 years ago sure didn’t make it seem that way.

Roy M. Brewer

Los Angeles