p. 28 – ‘Just finishing up here: Mott and Grand’: The filming of Cry of the City (1948) Robert Siodmak: 26 December 1947 to 24 February 1948, New York.
p. 28 – ‘you ever see Brute Force?’: Brute Force (1947) Jules Dassin.
p. 43 – ‘something good with Charles Laughton’: The Big Clock (1948) John Farrow (released 9 April, 1948).
p. 43 – ‘then The Naked City’: The Naked City (1948) Jules Dassin (released 4 March, 1948).
p. 46 – ‘San Pedro’: Pronounced Peedro.
p. 69 – ‘They were shooting in the 3rd Street Tunnel’: The filming of Act of Violence (1948) Fred Zinnemann: 17 May to 15 July 1948, Los Angeles.
p. 70 – ‘He goes down Court Street and sees cameras’: The filming of Criss Cross (1949) Robert Siodmak: 14 June to 28 July 1948, Los Angeles.
p. 70 – ‘goodbye to all we ever had’: Siodmak used the song ‘I’ll Remember April’ repeatedly as a leitmotif for fated relationships in Christmas Holiday, Phantom Lady, The Killers and Criss Cross.
p. 71 – ‘down in the storm-drains’: The filming of He Walked by Night (1948) Alfred Werker and Anthony Mann (uncredited): 14 April to 31 July 1948. The storm-drain sequence may have inspired the Vienna sewer scenes in The Third Man (released 31 August 1949).
p. 71 – ‘doing pieces in the New York Sun’: For five months, beginning in October 1948, Siodmak and novelist Budd Schulberg worked together on a screenplay titled ‘A Stone in the River Hudson’, based on Malcolm Johnson’s articles exposing corruption on the New York waterfront. The McCarthy hearings put an end to Schulberg’s involvement and Daryl Zanuck sold the rights to Sam Spiegel, who produced the film with Elia Kazan directing, with the new title On the Waterfront. Siodmak sued in 1954 and was awarded $100,000.
p. 73 – ‘the Hulbert, another SRO’: SRO – single-room occupancy ‘apartment hotels’.
p. 80 – ‘snow on Angels Flight’: From 9 to 12 January 1949, snow fell on Los Angeles.
p. 81 – ‘all together as OLLYWOODLAND’: The Hollywood sign is what remains of a 1923 advertisement for the ‘Hollywoodland’ real-estate development. In 1944, the sign was dilapidated (the ‘H’ having been destroyed in the early 1940s by a drunk driver, so it read OLLYWOODLAND), and the impecunious property developers transferred the deeds to the city, who agreed to repair it on the understanding that the ‘LAND’ would be dropped. The sign was rebuilt and restored in late 1949.
p. 84 – ‘mopping out his cell’: February 1949. Robert Mitchum was jailed for two months for possession of marijuana.
p. 90 – ‘he went to see Deadly Is the Female’: Deadly Is the Female (1950) Joseph H. Lewis (released on the west coast on 20 January under this title and on the east coast on 24 August renamed Gun Crazy). The two leads are John Dall and Peggy Cummins. The script was co-written by Dalton Trumbo, one of the then-blacklisted Hollywood Ten, who was imprisoned that year.
p. 94 – ‘The new Widmark’: Night and the City (1950) Jules Dassin (released 9 June 1950).
p. 97 – ‘Three men in shirtsleeves’: The filming of M (1951) Joseph Losey: 5 June to 7 July 1950, Los Angeles. Robert Siodmak’s cousin, Seymour Nebenzal, had worked with Fritz Lang on the original M in 1931, and wanted to remake it. Given its subject matter – child-abduction and murder – Joseph Breen (Catholic censor, and administrator of the Motion Picture Production Code) said it could only be made if it followed the original script. Nebenzal hired various left-leaning actors and writers, and the former Communist Party member, Losey, to direct. Losey later said he took the film to make money in anticipation of blacklisting by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Ernest Laszlo was director of photography and Robert Aldrich the assistant director.
p. 122 – ‘O’Brien stayed there in D.O.A.’: D.O.A. (1950) Rudolph Maté.
p. 122 – ‘chased past its door in The Lady from Shanghai’: The Lady from Shanghai (1948) Orson Welles.
p. 122 – ‘Bacall’s apartment in Dark Passage’: Dark Passage (1947) Delmer Daves.
p. 126 – ‘There’s a film-crew outside’: The filming of The Sniper (1952) Edward Dmytryk: 24 September to 20 October 1951, San Francisco.
p. 127 – ‘On the cover of Time magazine’: 22 October 1951.
p. 137 – ‘past the Brocklebank’: The Lady from Shanghai.
p. 137 – ‘Agnes Moorehead . . . fire-escape’: Dark Passage.
p. 138 – ‘Joan Crawford leaves . . . 2nd Street Tunnel’: Sudden Fear (1952) David Miller.
p. 149 – ‘The CRA can do anything’: The CRA (Community Redevelopment Agency) was created in California in 1948. Unaccountable and largely corrupt, the CRA was in thrall to the business community and the automobile industry. They demolished most of the old and historic residential buildings in downtown Los Angeles either to make way for freeways or for lucrative street-level parking, so dividing and reducing the local population and making street stores unviable as a result.
p. 155 – ‘fountains in that Garden of Allah’: The Garden of Allah was an exclusive and infamous hotel in Los Angeles, reputed to be the subject of the Joni Mitchell line: ‘they paved paradise and put up a parking lot’.
p. 156 – ‘Para todo mal . . . también!’: ‘For everything bad, mezcal! For everything good, the same!’
p. 161 – ‘Back in March, he’d watched Ed Murrow’: A special edition of Edward R. Murrow’s ‘See It Now’ – ‘A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’ – was broadcast on CBS on 9 March 1954. It was the first open attack on McCarthy’s witch-hunt.
p. 162 – ‘the hearings started’: From April to June 1954 the United States Army was under investigation for Communist activities by McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, popularly known as the Army–McCarthy hearings. Joseph Welch was the chief counsel for the army. McCarthy’s legal adviser was Roy Cohn, who had been instrumental in the 1951 trial of the Rosenbergs for espionage and their subsequent conviction and execution based on manipulated evidence. In the 1970s, Cohn was the friend, mentor and legal adviser to Donald Trump.
p. 163 – ‘there was a film-shoot going’: The filming of The Big Combo (1955) Joseph H. Lewis: 26 August to 21 September 1954, Los Angeles.
p. 166 – ‘Chaplin’s old set-up’: Charlie Chaplin Studios was built in 1917. Chaplin sold it in 1953, having left the US after a decade of attacks from Hedda Hopper, HUAC and, finally, the attorney general James Patrick McGranery, on charges of immoral conduct and sympathy for Communism. It was known briefly as Kling Studios, where The Big Combo was produced, and is currently the Jim Henson Company Lot.
p. 166 – ‘it was “Kike”’: Joseph Lewis was born in New York, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants.
p. 168 – ‘He found a crew on Clay Street’: The filming of Kiss Me Deadly (1955) Robert Aldrich: 29 November to 23 December 1954, Los Angeles. Ernest Laszlo was director of photography.
p. 175 – ‘The Joe Lewis picture was opening’: The Big Combo (1955) Joseph H. Lewis (released on 13 February 1955).
p. 175 – ‘how it got past the Code’: Unaccountably, the Motion Picture Production Code passed a film that featured a pair of overtly homosexual hoodlums and a scene of oral sex.
p. 176 – ‘Charlie Parker’s died’: 12 March 1955.
p. 178 – ‘Kiss Me Deadly was what it was called’: Kiss Me Deadly (1955) Robert Aldrich (released on 18 May 1955).
p. 198 – ‘I’m nobody’s friend, the man with no place’: Ride the Pink Horse.
p. 200 – ‘her beautiful neighbor, the Melrose Hotel’: The Melrose Hotel (a favourite of presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William McKinley) was demolished in 1957. The hotel was replaced with a temporary parking structure which is still standing today.
p. 208 – ‘They’ll pull down their house’: The CRA didn’t demolish Dr Green’s old house at 232 S. Grand Avenue after his widow died, they moved in; it was their re
development office from 1963 to 1968.
p. 212 – ‘Hey . . . hey, I got this . . . you know, I got this ticking noise . . .’: Touch of Evil (1958) Orson Welles (released 23 April 1958).
EPILOGUE
The Bunker Hill Urban Renewal Plan involved the eviction of 8–9,000 people, the removal of all structures on the 134 acres of Bunker Hill and the lowering of the elevation of the hill by up to 100 feet. The graded lots then became ‘super-blocks’ which were sold to developers at an estimated cost of $100 million. The clearances took place between 1959 and 1964, and involved the removal of 7,310 dwelling units and their occupants from 340 residential structures, and the demolition of 132 non-residential structures. The Sunshine Apartments building was destroyed in 1964.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
With warm thanks to Robert Hass in Berkeley, Drenka Willen, Shelby White and the late Jean Stein in New York, Gary Kamiya in San Francisco, Ryan Gattis in Los Angeles and the MacLeods of Inverness County, Cape Breton; my gratitude also to Robert Stewart of Kansas City, Mona Simpson and Stephen Yenser at UCLA, and Alison Granucci.
My special thanks to Paul Baggaley and Emma Bravo, to Laura Morris and David Thomson, to Gary, again, for bar-work and picture-research, to Carole Newlands and Jack Niles for their generous hospitality in Berkeley and Boulder, and to Beatrice Monti Della Corte for her kindnesses over the years and for lending me her tower for a fifth time.
Among the many books I read, the most helpful was Howard Margolian’s invaluable account of the execution of 187 Canadian prisoners-of-war in Normandy, Conduct Unbecoming (University of Toronto Press, 1998).
I’m indebted, as always, to my first reader, James Lasdun, to Don Paterson, my editor, and Peter Straus, my agent, and – particularly – Karin Altenberg, who has travelled with this book from the beginning.
ROBIN ROBERTSON was born and raised in Scotland. His collections of poetry have won the Roehampton Poetry Prize, the E. M. Forster Award, and three Forward Prizes, among others, and have been nominated for the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Costa Poetry Award. He studied under the award-winning author Alistair MacLeod when he was a Master’s student at the University of Windsor. He was also MacLeod’s teaching assistant, and later became his U.K. publisher. He lives in London, U.K.
Photo credit: © Niall McDiarmid
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