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Carl Foreman, CBE (July 23, 1914 – June 26, 1984) was an American screenwriter and film producer who wrote the award-winning films The Bridge on the River Kwai and High Noon, among others. He was one of the screenwriters who were blacklisted in Hollywood in the 1950s because of their suspected communist sympathy or membership in the Communist Party.
He once said his most common theme was "the struggle of the individual against a society that for one reason or another is hostile." He elaborated that "the stories that work best for me involve a loner, out of step or in direct conflict with a group of people."
He studied at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. In 1934, at age 19, he quit college to go to Hollywood. "I was mostly on the bum and saw the underside of Hollywood", he later said.
He soon returned to Chicago and attended the John J. Marshall School of Law, working at a grocery store to earn money.
Foreman dropped out of law school and worked as a newspaper reporter, fiction writer (selling stories to Esquire), press agent, play director and carnival barker. "I was one of the few college trained barkers in the business", he said.
Foreman returned to Hollywood in 1938. He worked as a story analyst for several studios and as a film laboratory technician, while continuing to write. He was a member of the Communist Party from 1938 to 1942. "The idea was just in the air", he later said.
Foreman's first screen credit was for producer Sam Katzman at Monogram Pictures, Bowery Blitzkrieg (1941), starring the East Side Kids.
Foreman provided the original story (for $25) and wrote a script (for $200) for the next East Side Kids film, Spooks Run Wild (1941), with Bela Lugosi. Also at Monogram he provided the story for and wrote the script of Rhythm Parade (1942). "I expected recognition but hardly anyone noticed", he said later.
Kramer and Foreman's next film, the boxing tale Champion (1949), was a big success and made a star of actor Kirk Douglas. Foreman received an Academy Awards nomination for his script. Champion was directed by Mark Robson and he, Kramer and Foreman reunited on Home of the Brave (1949), an adaptation of Arthur Laurents's play. It was another critical and commercial success.
Kramer and Foreman's next film together was The Men (1950), which introduced Marlon Brando to cinema audiences playing as a paraplegic soldier. The film was directed by Fred Zinnemann and was critically acclaimed, although not a popular success. Also acclaimed was their fourth film, Cyrano de Bergerac (1950), an adaptation of the French classic play, starring José Ferrer, who won a Best Actor Oscar. It was adapted from Brian Hooker's English translation of Edmond Rostand's play Cyrano de Bergerac.
Foreman worked on Young Man with a Horn (1950) next, without Kramer.
Some critics have suggested High Noon is itself an allegory for McCarthyism.[2] Frankel, Glen. "High Noon’s Secret Backstory". Vanity Fair. February 22, 2017. The Western film is considered an American classic and was No. 27 on the American Film Institute (AFI)'s "100 Years, 100 Movies", and has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. High Noon was Foreman's greatest screenwriting accomplishment, but made no mention of him as associate producer – though it did credit him for the screenplay. He was nominated for an Academy Award for the screenplay by fellow members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Because of the blacklist, this was the last film Foreman was allowed to work on by a Hollywood studio for the next six years.
In October 1951 Foreman sold his interest in the Stanley Kramer Corporation for a reported $250,000. He formed a new company, Carl Foreman Productions, whose stockholders originally included actor Gary Cooper. Foreman signed a three-picture deal with Robert L. Lippert to write, produce and direct the films. Lippert said he "had no doubt of Foreman's Americanism." Yet, his films were never made because of political pressure, which also resulted in Gary Cooper and other investors withdrawing their support. Denied a passport because of the blacklist, Foreman successfully sued the United States Department of State to regain it. In 1952 he emigrated to Britain.
Foreman later said that if the blacklist "hadn't happened I was moving towards becoming a director. That was where the action was."
In November 1953, the State Department ordered Foreman to surrender his passport to the US Consul in London, and in September 1954 the Department ruled that Foreman was not entitled to his passport.
In 1954, Foreman worked as an assistant for British director Alexander Korda. "I was very angry: full of rage, and self-pity", he said of this time.
After working on Born for Trouble (1955), he wrote a draft of the screenplay for The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) for Sam Spiegel and David Lean. Foreman later fell out with Lean, but was the one who recommended his replacement, fellow blacklisted writer Michael Wilson. The two did not receive a credit on the film. The resulting Academy Award for adapted screenplay went to French author Pierre Boulle, who had written the source novel but who had no involvement in the script (and could not speak English). The two scriptwriters did not receive credit for their work on this film until 1984, after their deaths, when the two writers' names were added to the award. By 1958, however, Foreman was publicly claiming credit for the screenplay.
Foreman also worked on A Hatful of Rain (1957), for which he received no credit. It was directed by Zinnemann.
Eventually a court ruled that the State Department could not take away someone's passport without a quasi-judicial hearing. In January 1956 Foreman's passport was reinstated and returned to him. In August 1956, Foreman gained approval to go to the United States and testify in executive session before the House Un-American Activities Committee, but he refused to become an informant. He invoked the Fifth Amendment to refuse to answer some questions.
In 1957, Foreman announced he would make Insurrection, about the 1916 Easter Rebellion in Ireland, with director John Guillermin. It would have been adapted from a novel by American writer Herman Wouk, but the film was not made.
Foreman wrote and helped produce The Key (1958), a war film directed by Carol Reed. Highroad next made the comedy The Mouse that Roared (1959), starring Peter Sellers, which was a big hit. Mouse was meant to be part of a four-picture slate from Foreman worth $11 million; the others were The Guns of Navarone (1961), and Holiday.
Foreman wrote and produced The Guns of Navarone (1961), based on a best-selling novel by Alistair McLean. He fired director Alexander Mackendrick shortly before production started, and replaced him with J. Lee Thompson. The resulting movie was a massive hit. He was intending to follow it with The Holiday, with Anthony Quinn, Charles Boyer, Earl Holliman and Ingrid Bergman, but the film was never produced.
The success of Navarone enabled Foreman to direct as well as to write and produce his next film, The Victors (1963) for Columbia. A war story, this film was a box office disappointment.
He signed a contract with MGM to adapt The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, at a fee of $275,000, but this film was never made. In 1962, he said "the bulk of Hollywood movies are old fashioned and creaky. There is nothing here to compare with the ferment of Great Britain, Italy, France or even Poland."
Foreman's next big success was the film Born Free (1966), which Foreman produced. In 1968, Foreman announced he would produce a musical, The House of Madame Tellier, based on a story by Guy de Maupassant, with music by Dimitri Tiomkin, and book and lyrics by Freddy Douglas, but it was not produced.
He wrote and produced Mackenna's Gold (1969) for Columbia. It had the same director, J. Lee Thompson, and star Gregory Peck, as Navarone. Gold was his first film shot in the US since High Noon. "I tried very hard to break the blacklist but I never succeeded", he said. The film was a flop.
The Virgin Soldiers (1969), which his company made for Columbia, was a hit in Great Britain. His company also worked on Monsieur Lecoq (never completed) and Otley (1969). It developed a project called Fifteen Flags, about the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War, but this was never completed as a film.
Foreman's next big production was Young Winston (1972), about British wartime prime minister Winston Churchill, which he wrote and produced, with Richard Attenborough directing. It was not particularly successful; neither was Living Free (1972), a sequel to Born Free.
He tried to get financing for a film about a rafting trip across the Indian Ocean, Finding Ernie, which he would direct, but it was not made.
He executive produced The Golden Gate Murders (1979). Foreman's last credit was as writer of disaster movie, When Time Ran Out (1980). This was a notable flop.
His final project was writing the screenplay for The Yellow Jersey, a proposed film about the Tour de France bicycle race. It was to star Dustin Hoffman.
He was president for seven years of the Writers Guild of Great Britain.
In 1970, Foreman was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Such is his influence on the British film industry, that from 1998 to 2009 there was a British Academy Film Award named in his honor; the Carl Foreman Award for the Most Promising Newcomer.
When he returned to the US, he served on the advisory board of the American Film Institute, on the public-media panel of the National Endowment for the Arts, and on the executive board of the Writers Guild of America. He was also a member of the board of directors of the Center Theater Group in Los Angeles.
He married Estelle Barr, and they had a daughter Katie. They divorced. He married again, to Evelyn Smith. Their two children, Amanda and Jonathan, were born in London. He was also survived by his mother, Fanny, and sister Sherry Sobel (mother of Ted Sobel, Los Angeles based sportscaster-reporter-author of memoir Touching Greatness.)
Foreman's daughter, Amanda Foreman, graduated from Columbia University and Oxford University, where she received a PhD in history. She won the Whitbread Prize for her 1998 best-selling biography Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire. She later wrote the history, A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (2011).
Foreman's son, Jonathan Foreman, graduated in modern history from Cambridge University and earned a Juris Doctor from the University of Pennsylvania. He worked as an editorial writer and senior film critic for the New York Post. In 2004, he relocated to London to work for the Daily Mail. In 2008, he became a co-founder of the monthly British magazine Standpoint, which explores current affairs from a centre-right position.
Kramer claimed he had not stood up for Foreman partly because Foreman was threatening to name Kramer as a Communist.Byman, p. 86. Foreman said that Kramer was afraid of what would happen to him and his career if he did not cooperate with the committee. Kramer wanted Foreman to name names and not plead Fifth Amendment rights.Byman, pp. 76, 80. See also Chapters 1 and 5 Foreman was also pressured by Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures (Kramer's new boss); actor John Wayne, who was associated with the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals and said he would "never regret having helped run Foreman out of this country". He called High Noon "un-American". Influential society writer Hedda Hopper of the Los Angeles Times also pressed Foreman to testify about names.Byman, pp. 83, 86, 87
In addition to screenwriters, directors, actors and producers affected by the confrontations with HUAC, cast and crew members were affected by the Congressional investigation and blacklist. For instance, Howland Chamberlain was blacklisted, while Floyd Crosby and Lloyd Bridges were "gray listed."Byman, p. 9
Foreman was also the subject of an episode of , directed by Terry Sanders and Freida Lee Mock.
| + !Year !Title !Writer !Producer !Presenter !Director(s) !Notes | ||||||
| 1941 | Bowery Blitzkrieg | Wallace Fox | Uncredited | |||
| Spooks Run Wild | Phil Rosen | |||||
| 1942 | Rhythm Parade | Howard Bretherton | ||||
| 1945 | Frank Capra Joris Ivens | Uncredited Documentary film | ||||
| Dakota | Joseph Kane | Story only | ||||
| 1948 | So This Is New York | Richard Fleischer | ||||
| 1949 | The Clay Pigeon | |||||
| Champion | Mark Robson | |||||
| Home of the Brave | ||||||
| Let's Go to the Movies | Tholen Gladden | Uncredited Documentary film | ||||
| 1950 | Young Man with a Horn | Michael Curtiz | ||||
| The Men | Fred Zinnemann | |||||
| Cyrano de Bergerac | Michael Gordon | |||||
| 1952 | High Noon | Fred Zinnemann | Uncredited associate producer | |||
| 1954 | The Sleeping Tiger | Joseph Losey | Credited as "Derek Frye" | |||
| 1955 | Born for Trouble | Desmond Davis | ||||
| 1957 | A Hatful of Rain | Fred Zinnemann | Uncredited | |||
| The Bridge on the River Kwai | David Lean | |||||
| 1958 | The Key | Carol Reed | ||||
| 1959 | The Mouse That Roared | Jack Arnold | Uncredited | |||
| 1961 | The Guns of Navarone | J. Lee Thompson | ||||
| 1963 | The Victors | Himself | Directorial debut (only directoral credit) | |||
| 1966 | Born Free | James Hill | Presenter | |||
| 1967 | Monsieur Lecoq | Seth Holt | Unfinished | |||
| 1969 | Otley | Dick Clement | Executive producer | |||
| Mackenna's Gold | J. Lee Thompson | |||||
| The Virgin Soldiers | John Dexter | Executive producer | ||||
| 1972 | Living Free | Jack Couffer | ||||
| Young Winston | Richard Attenborough | |||||
| 1974 | Born Free | Leonard Horn Gary Nelson Barry Crane Paul Krasny Russ Mayberry Richard Benedict Jack Couffer | Television series Creator and developer 13 episodes Story for episode "Elsa's Odyssey" | |||
| 1976–78 | One-Upmanship | Ray Butt | Television series Arranger 16 episodes | |||
| 1978 | Force 10 from Navarone | Guy Hamilton | Story only Executive producer | |||
| 1979 | The Golden Gate Murders | Walter Grauman | Television film Executive producer | |||
| 1980 | When Time Ran Out | James Goldstone |
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