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Smart friends, however, made smart appraisals. One of them said that my stars looked as if they were dressed for a Beverly Hills costume party: “Come as Mr. and Mrs. Cattle Baron.” In New York, the New Republic critic wrote: “They wander through a lavish production like thoroughbred somnambulists.”…

Which is when I certainly should have quit. Here’s a story Bud Lighton told me; I recalled it as I sat there in the flickering light. It’s about Victor Fleming, the director whom Lighton held up to me as a model. He’d agreed, Fleming had, to direct a film to be made from the novel The Yearling. He …

The “Anatolian,” of course, was accurate. The “arrogant”? I was elated by this characterization. “At last,” I said to myself, “I’ve made it. It’s what I’ve always wanted to be.” I believe every artist is, as he has to be, arrogant. You may not go along with that; the word has unfortunate connotatio…

What if, in Deep Are the Roots, the returning black soldier coming back from an army that, as I’d seen, refused him weapons and further humiliated him by confining his services to driving trucks, digging ditches, cleaning latrines, and peeling potatoes, came back full of anger instead of being that…

Forty years is a long perspective, but perhaps it can afford a clear view. I look back at Clifford Odets—no one I’ve known was more talented. He couldn’t resist the money, the flattery, the apparent safety and security in the movie community. And he lost himself. Harold Clurman, one of the men I’ve…