The Ubiquitous (and Surprisingly Introspective) Kirk Douglas

If you live in L.A., sometimes it seems as though Kirk Douglas is everywhere. I’ve heard him speak at a local synagogue, and I’ve attended plays at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, a Culver City movie palace converted into a playhouse specializing in intimate, unusual fare. He and wife Anne have made sizable donations to Children’s Hospital L.A. and have helped revamp playgrounds on schoolyards throughout the city. Today, when I went to do research at the Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library, I gained access to the collection via the Kirk Douglas Grand Staircase. Gracing the Herrick lobby was a special exhibit featuring the informal celebrity photos of Nat Dallinger. Prominently featured was a charming Dallinger image from 1950. It shows Kirk Douglas shaving his famous chin, while young son Michael (all of six) studiously tries out his own electric shaver in imitation of Dad.  

Douglas of course made the big bucks as an actor, famous for leading-man roles in films like Champion, The Bad and the Beautiful, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Lust for Life, and Lonely are the Brave. But in recent years he’s become quite the writer too. There are several volumes of well-received memoir, starting with The Ragman’s Son in 1988. There’s fiction, and also books for young readers. His late-in-life exploration of spirituality produced  Climbing the Mountain: My Search for Meaning, as well as several volumes about growing old. (He’s now a still-vigorous 98). But I want to discuss the book he published in 2012, I Am Spartacus!: Making a Film, Breaking the Blacklist.

The Screen Writers Guild honored Douglas in 1991 for dramatically signalling that the era of the blacklist was over. In truth, he wasn’t the first to give screen credit to a writer who’d been banished from Hollywood in the HUAC era on trumped-up charges of being a Communist. Back in 1958, producer-director Stanley Kramer hired Nedrick Young and Harold Jacob Smith to write The Defiant Ones. As Stanley Kramer’s widow Karen has often reminded me, Kramer not only put their names on the screen but also gave them roles in the film. Still, neither Young nor Smith was one of the infamous Hollywood Ten. These were  prominent Hollywood screenwriters (and one director) who were sent to jail for contempt of Congress, with the approval of many Hollywood power-figures. Douglas, producing Spartacus in 1960, first concealed his hiring of the prolific Trumbo, but then had the guts to credit him for his work. He was emotionally told by Trumbo, who had recently won two screenwriting Oscars officially credited to others, “Thank you for giving me back my name.”

Douglas’s Spartacus book isn’t only about the blacklist. He tells great yarns about the casting of Jean Simmons, the hiring of a young Stanley Kubrick to replace a less accomplished director, and the heroic dedication of Woody Strode. There’s also a disturbing glimpse of Laurence Olivier’s wife Vivien Leigh, deep in the throes of bipolar disorder. As an aside, Douglas shares the story of his own son, Eric, who years later struggled with the same cruel disease.

Part of what makes this book so fascinating is its sense of an old man looking back. At one point Douglas notes, “Writing about myself almost fifty-three years ago is a strange experience. I’m learning a lot about the man I was back then; I’m not sure I like him very much.” Elsewhere he admits, “I was a very different person fifty years ago . . . . I was surprised by how headstrong I was back then, and yet that’s probably what helped me to make Spartacus.”

Heir Apparent

I’ve been thinking a lot about how our movie tastes are formed. For many of us, I suspect, our parents were our first teachers—in this as in so many other things. Of course, I know that some from my generation were shuttled off to the movies every Saturday, to see whatever was playing at that week’s kiddie matinee. The Saturday afternoon regulars probably came to view their movie outings as a chance to slip away, however briefly, from parental influence (and their parents doubtless appreciated those matinees as a source of cheap babysitting).

Older kids, of course, have always delighted in ferreting out movies that undermine the safe, sane worldview of their parents. Back in the day, this was part of the allure of Roger Corman-style monster flicks. Director Joe Dante (Gremlins) told me as much: “The whole thrust of these cheap movies was that they were movies your parents wouldn’t want you to see.”

Still, conscientious parents have long used moviegoing as a way to instill their own values into their offspring. An African-American filmmaker I know remembers that from an early age she was introduced by her mom and dad to the films of Sidney Poitier as well as every movie that touched on the black experience in America. Some parents share with their kids a taste for science fiction or for musicals or for foreign films with a leftwing slant. As a boy, novelist David L. Robbins regularly accompanied his mother to the picture show. She had a passion for heroic epics like Ben-Hur and El Cid, and David’s whole concept of manliness evolved from those afternoons in the dark. As he confessed to me, “I even to this day still have some sort of internal moral compass: it’s not What would Jesus do?, but . . . What would Spartacus do?”

And me? I was the child of good-hearted liberals who liked films that illuminated the great social issues of their day. When they let me stay up past my bedtime to watch an old movie on the Late Late Show, it was always a quiet kind of teaching moment. From The Ox-Bow Incident, I learned about the dangers of mob rule. Through Gentleman’s Agreement, I discovered that bigotry can lurk beneath a polite facade. The Best Years of Our Lives introduced me to the concept that no one really wins a war. Citizen Kane convinced me that the ultimate source of mystery is the human psyche. No monster movies for me—I grew up conscious that the world could be a difficult place, but also that you could find something approaching a happy ending at the final fadeout.