Quotes

[on serving as a "front" for blacklisted writers in the 1950s]: I tell you, I never read a newspaper until I was fifty. I never looked at television until the 1970s. I never read "Time" magazine. I never tended to be political, I never voted. So I didn't understand this whole blacklist thing.

What interested me in "55 Days At Peking" was $400,000. That's what Bronston was paying me for the script. He pre-sold to the whole world. You could find a marvelous story for the United States, and they wouldn't buy it in England. So we had to have some idea the whole world would buy in advance. Very difficult. I bought "Brave New World" by Huxley. We had a meeting of all the distributors, and - boy! - there was almost a riot, they hated it, wouldn't touch it. I had to unload it and think up an idea they'd buy. The Boxer Rebellion? Big sets, suspenseful, colorful. Coming up with a title was kind of hard, but "55 Days" and "Peking", along with everything else - they bought it. So it was a commercial manufacture job.