‘Spartacus’ producer helped break blacklist

Edward Lewis, a producer who helped break the Hollywood blacklist with “Spartacus” by hiring “subversive” screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, and who later shared an Oscar nomination with his wife for producing “Missing,” about the death of an American writer in Chile, died July 27 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 99.

A daughter, Susan Lewis, confirmed the death but did not give a cause. His wife and frequent collaborator, Mildred Lewis, died April 7.

In a career that stretched back to the late 1940s, Lewis wrote occasional film scripts, produced 20 episodes of the TV anthology series “Schlitz Playhouse of Stars,” and worked with leading directors such as John Frankenheimer (“Seven Days in May”), John Huston (“The List of Adrian Messenger”) and Louis Malle (“Crackers”).

His movies earned 21 Oscar nominations, including six for “Spartacus” (1960), a swordsand-sandals epic directed by a young Stanley Kubrick and executive-produced by Kirk Douglas, who also starred as the title character, a gladiator who leads a slave revolt in ancient Rome.

Blockbuster

Adapted from a novel by Howard Fast, which Lewis’ wife read and recommended he produce, “Spartacus” was one of the most expensive films of its time. Made on a $12 million budget, the equivalent of more than $100 million today, it featured a sprawling cast of extras and received mixed reviews upon its release, with New York Times critic Bosley Crowther dismissing it as “heroic humbug.”

But it became a fixture of late-night television and, because of its script by Trumbo, was credited with helping to bring down the Cold War-era blacklist, under which scores of purported communists and left-wing sympathizers were barred from work.

Since the late 1940s, blacklisted writers had left the country, switched fields, written under assumed names or used sympathetic producers as “fronts.” Among the most vaunted incognito scriptwriters was Trumbo, a member of the Hollywood Ten who served a brief prison sentence after being held in contempt of Congress, then wrote Oscar-winning screenplays for “Roman Holiday” and “The Brave One.”

Neither bore his name. But in January 1960, director Otto Preminger announced that his upcoming epic “Exodus” — released by United Artists, which had not signed a pledge to bar communists from its films — was written by Trumbo. Months later, Universal-International followed suit with “Spartacus,” becoming “the first major movie studio to give screen credit to a blacklisted writer,” according to a New York Times report.

While the American Legion protested the decision, the blacklist era seemed all but over when newly inaugurated President John F. Kennedy left the White House to see “Spartacus” at a nearby theater, later offering a three-word review: “It was fine.”

Breaking hysteria

In interviews and a 2012 memoir, “I Am Spartacus!: Making a Film, Breaking the Blacklist,” Douglas claimed primary credit for hiring Trumbo, securing the writer’s screen credit and striking the decisive blow against anti-communist hysteria in Hollywood. To others who were involved in the movie, however, that narrative was much exaggerated.

“It was Lewis who directly commissioned Trumbo to write the script,” journalists John Meroney and Sean Coons reported in a 2012 article for the Atlantic, drawing on interviews with the families of Trumbo and Fast, who had both died, and with Lewis, who rarely spoke to the press.

Serving as a front for Trumbo, Lewis had his own name printed on the cover of the script, until “the subterfuge began to gnaw at his conscience,” according to the Atlantic. By his account, he waited until it was too late for Universal to cancel the film, then told the studio, “Take my name off the script.” He went on to negotiate a salary of more than $50,000 for Trumbo, along with 4 percent of net producer profits.

“We’ll make this thing go, Eddie,” Trumbo wrote him in a letter. “And we’ll enjoy it, too. I am most grateful to you. By way of recompense, I want the quality of my work to make you grateful to me. And then, nothing but love, gratitude, money, success, increment earned and unearned, glamour . . . and a torrent of good pictures.”

Indeed, Lewis produced five more scripts written by Trumbo, including “The Last Sunset” (1961) and “Lonely Are the Brave” (1962), both Westerns for Douglas’s production company. According to a 2015 biography of Trumbo, the screenwriter later wrote that Lewis “risked his name to help a man who’d lost his name.”

Edward Lewis was born in Camden, N.J., on Dec. 16, 1919. A grandfather ran a furniture business that employed his father, and his mother was a homemaker. At 16, he entered Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa.