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I NEVER got to explain to Joe why the meeting I hadn’t attended meant so much to me. It was because I saw that what my guild brothers were defending was the middle road. The men who beat De Mille, an extremist of the right, were not from the left. Many were “reactionaries” like John Farrow or Jack …

“Then the meeting got savage. Jack Ford was there, for a change, and he said, ‘My closest friend is Merian Cooper’—remember Merian Cooper: he made the original King Kong?—‘and he happens to be a brigadier general in the United States Army, and last night, as we were having dinner, Coop said he woul…

WHILE I was directing A Streetcar Named Desire, all hell broke loose at the Screen Directors Guild of America, my guild. I’d kept myself at the far edge of that organization for two reasons, the simplest being that meetings bore me. But an issue had come up that would involve me, like it or not. Ce…

WHILE I was directing A Streetcar Named Desire, all hell broke loose at the Screen Directors Guild of America, my guild. I’d kept myself at the far edge of that organization for two reasons, the simplest being that meetings bore me. But an issue had come up that would involve me, like it or not. Ce…

I learned why Jack Ford surrounded himself with roughnecks when he made a film. You can ask them to do anything or to cause anything you might dream of to be done. It uninhibits you; you stop worrying about the actors’ comfort or even their safety. Remember in The Sea of Grass how the property man,…