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American screenwriter and film producer

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 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.

Foreman won a scholarship for a screenwriting course, where his teacher was Dore Schary. He later gave credit to Michael Blankfort for mentoring him. The Western film is considered an American classic and was No. 27 on American Film Institute (AFI)'s "100 Years, 100 Movies", and has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. High Noon, the film that was Foreman's greatest screenwriting accomplishment, made no mention of him as associate producer but did credit him for the screenplay. He was nominated for an Academy Award for this 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 State Department to regain it. In 1952 he immigrated 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."

A number of blacklisted American writers were working in Britain at the time, such as Ring Lardner Jr. As "Derek Frye", he and fellow blacklistee Harold Buchman wrote the thriller The Sleeping Tiger (1954) which was directed by Joseph Losey, also blacklisted in the US. Foreman would use the names of friends Herbert Baker, John Weaver, and Alan Grogan on his scripts as a personal signature. 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.

Bridge on the River Kwai had been a massive commercial and critical success, and Foreman's contribution was recognized. He set up his own production company, Highroad. In March 1957 he signed a deal with Columbia Pictures, which had released Kwai, to make four films over three years. 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 League of Gentlemen (1960), 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. (While fictional, it was inspired by the Allied Dodecanese Campaign against Italian held islands in the Aegean Sea.) 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.

In 1975 Foreman returned to the US, and signed a three picture contract with Universal. Foreman co wrote and helped produce a sequel to Navarone, Force 10 from Navarone (1978). It did not match the success of its predecessor. 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 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 law degree 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.

Foreman's work on High Noon intersected with the period of the second Red Scare after World War II and the Korean War. During the Cold War, some American politicians began to fear communist activities in the United States. Foreman was called before HUAC while he was writing the film. By then he had not been a member of the American communist party for nearly ten years. Because he declined to 'name names', or identify other people who had been members, he was classified as an 'un cooperative witness' by HUAC. When Stanley Kramer found out some of this, he forced Foreman to sell his part of their company, and tried to get him kicked off making this film. Fred Zinnemann, Gary Cooper, and Bruce Church intervened. An outstanding Bank of America loan helped Foreman remain on the picture, as Foreman had not yet signed certain papers. He moved to England before the film was released, as Congress had established a blacklist and movie studios did not allow persons on it to work for them. Kramer claimed he had not stood up for Foreman partly because Foreman was threatening to name Kramer as a Communist. 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. 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. 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."

In 2002, PBS television made a two hour film about Foreman's ordeal during McCarthyism titled Darkness at High Noon: The Carl Foreman Documents. It was written and directed by outspoken conservative Lionel Chetwynd. Foreman was also the subject of an episode of Screenwriters: Words Into Image, directed by Terry Sanders and Freida Lee Mock.