Edward Lewis
Producer of Spartacus who welcomed blacklisted writers
EDWARD LEWIS, who has died aged 99, was a film producer whose exceptional run of credits from the 1960s onwards may be less significant than the place he inhabits in Hollywood history.
For his third feature, Spartacus (1960), Lewis hired the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who had been blacklisted by the entertainment industry for refusing to testify before the House Un-american Affairs Committee 13 years before. Lewis agreed to serve as Trumbo’s “front” – the creative whose name would grace the script pages.
Sharper eyes may have spotted evidence of subversion in the film’s rousing climax, in which the hero’s fellow slaves defy their Roman interrogators, each in turn claiming the identity of the fugitive Spartacus. Yet the behindthe-scenes masquerade continued for much of the shoot’s duration.
In his 2012 memoir I Am Spartacus! Making a Film, Breaking the Blacklist, the star Kirk Douglas suggested that Lewis found it tricky to maintain the pretence: “Every time Eddie Lewis told someone he was writing Spartacus, it embarrassed him.” But only when the film was well into production – making it hard for the heavily invested studio to pull the plug – did Lewis reveal his screenwriter’s identity, insisting that Trumbo be given full credit and salary.
Universal’s acquiescence led to protests from the American Legion, yet on its 1960 release, Spartacus was hailed as a triumph, going on to win four Oscars, a Golden Globe, offhand approval from the newly inaugurated JFK (“it was fine”) and a lasting place in the cinematic canon.
More importantly, the film’s success changed the way the industry perceived those who had been blacklisted. After writing Otto Preminger’s Exodus (1960), Trumbo was rehired by Lewis – this time without the need for subterfuge – to write the Universal-released The Last Sunset (1961) and Lonely Are the Brave (1962). In return, Trumbo presented his former front with a copy of his novel Johnny Got His Gun bearing the inscription “To Eddie Lewis – who risked his name to help a man who’d lost his name.”
Edward Lewis was born in Camden, New Jersey, on December 16 1919 to
furniture maker Max Lewis and his wife Florence (née Kline). He was a restless youth but eventually served as a US Army captain in England during the Second World War.
After the war, he moved to Los Angeles, and met and married Mildred Gerchik. Mildred, from an activist background, nudged Edward’s politics Leftwards.
The pair adapted a Balzac play for the cinema, The Lovable Cheat (1949), which succeeded in carrying them into the entertainment sector. Lewis served an apprenticeship in television before joining Douglas’s Bryna Productions in 1956, claiming: “I couldn’t make a living as a writer, so I became a producer.”
After Spartacus, he worked consistently for two decades, producing many of the director John Frankenheimer’s strongest films, among them the Cold War thriller Seven Days in May (1964), the cult science fiction Seconds (1966) and The Iceman Cometh (1973) starring Lee Marvin.
Politics remained central to Lewis’s work. He resumed his writing career with Brothers (1977), about the relationship between a black activist and a jailed Black Panther. Then he produced Costa-gavras’s Palme d’or-winning Missing (1982), on the 1973 Chilean coup. After overseeing the successful miniseries The Thorn Birds (1983), Lewis’s final production was an Oscar-nominated farmland drama, The River (1984).
In retirement, he wrote fiction and plays. In a 1987 Los Angeles Times piece promoting his musical The Good Life, he reflected: “I’m bothered by the cynicism and negativity everywhere today. I’m an optimist; I believe there can be a good life.”
Edward Lewis’s wife died in April and he is survived by two daughters.
Edward Lewis, born December 16 1919, died July 27 2019