Carl Foreman, CBE was an American screenwriter and film producer who wrote the award-winning films The Bridge on the River Kwai and High Noon, among others.
57 Facts About Carl Foreman
2.
Carl Foreman 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.
3.
Carl Foreman soon returned to Chicago and attended the John J Marshall School of Law, working at a grocery store to earn money.
4.
Carl Foreman dropped out of law school and worked as a newspaper reporter, fiction writer, press agent, play director and carnival barker.
5.
Carl Foreman worked as a story analyst for several studios and as a film laboratory technician, while continuing to write.
6.
Carl Foreman was a member of the Communist Party from 1938 to 1942.
7.
Carl Foreman won a scholarship for a screenwriting course, where his teacher was Dore Schary.
8.
Carl Foreman later gave credit to Michael Blankfort for mentoring him.
9.
Carl Foreman provided the original story and wrote a script for the next East Side Kids film, Spooks Run Wild, with Bela Lugosi.
10.
Carl Foreman's career was interrupted by service in the United States armed forces during World War II.
11.
Carl Foreman served with the USArmy Signal Corps, where he was assigned to a unit that made orientation and training films.
12.
Carl Foreman provided the original story for a John Wayne Western, Dakota.
13.
Carl Foreman says "I began to learn the craft in a serious way", in this time.
14.
On his return to Hollywood, Carl Foreman became associated with producer Stanley Kramer and George Glass.
15.
Kramer produced Carl Foreman's next credited screenplay, So This Is New York, starring comedian Henry Morgan, for The Enterprise Studios; it was directed by Richard Fleischer.
16.
Carl Foreman wrote The Clay Pigeon, which Fleischer directed at RKO.
17.
Kramer and Carl Foreman's next film, the boxing tale Champion, was a big success, making a star of actor Kirk Douglas.
18.
Champion had been directed by Mark Robson, and he, Kramer and Carl Foreman reunited on Home of the Brave, an adaptation of Arthur Laurents's play.
19.
Carl Foreman testified that he had been a member of the American Communist Party more than ten years earlier while still a young man, but he had become disillusioned with the Party and quit.
20.
Carl Foreman was nominated for an Academy Award for this screenplay by fellow members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
21.
In October 1951 Carl Foreman sold his interest in the Stanley Kramer Corporation for a reported $250,000.
22.
Carl Foreman formed a new company, Carl Foreman Productions, whose stockholders originally included actor Gary Cooper.
23.
In 1954 Carl Foreman worked as an assistant for British director Alexander Korda.
24.
Carl Foreman later fell out with Lean, but was the one who recommended his replacement, fellow blacklisted writer Michael Wilson.
25.
Carl Foreman worked on A Hatful of Rain, for which he received no credit.
26.
In January 1956 Carl Foreman's passport was reinstated and returned to him.
27.
Carl Foreman invoked the Fifth Amendment to refuse to answer some questions.
28.
Bridge on the River Kwai had been a massive commercial and critical success, and Carl Foreman's contribution was recognized.
29.
In 1957 Carl Foreman announced he would make Insurrection, about the 1916 Easter Rebellion in Ireland, with director John Guillermin.
30.
Carl Foreman wrote and helped produce The Key, a war film directed by Carol Reed.
31.
Carl Foreman wrote and produced The Guns of Navarone, based on a best-selling novel by Alistair McLean.
32.
Carl Foreman was intending to follow it with The Holiday, with Anthony Quinn, Charles Boyer, Earl Holliman and Ingrid Bergman, but the film was never produced.
33.
Carl Foreman 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.
34.
Carl Foreman's next big success was the film Born Free, which Carl Foreman produced.
35.
In 1968 Carl 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.
36.
Carl Foreman wrote and produced Mackenna's Gold for Columbia.
37.
Carl Foreman's company worked on Monsieur Lecoq and Otley.
38.
Carl Foreman tried to get financing for a film about a rafting trip across the Indian Ocean, Finding Ernie, which he would direct, but it was not made.
39.
In 1975 Carl Foreman returned to the US, and signed a three-picture contract with Universal.
40.
Carl Foreman co-wrote and helped produce a sequel to Navarone, Force 10 from Navarone.
41.
Carl Foreman was elected to the executive council of the British Film Production Association, was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and was appointed a governor of the British Film Institute, the British National Film School and the Cinematographic Film Council.
42.
Carl Foreman was president for seven years of the Writers Guild of Great Britain.
43.
In 1970, Carl Foreman was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
44.
Carl Foreman was a member of the board of directors of the Center Theater Group in Los Angeles.
45.
Carl Foreman was back home in the United States when he died of a brain tumor in 1984 in Beverly Hills, California.
46.
Carl Foreman married Estelle, and they had a daughter Katie.
47.
Carl Foreman won the Whitbread Prize for her 1998 best-selling biography Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire.
48.
Carl Foreman later wrote the history, A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War.
49.
Carl Foreman worked as an editorial writer and senior film critic for the New York Post.
50.
Carl Foreman was called before HUAC while he was writing the film.
51.
When Stanley Kramer found out some of this, he forced Carl Foreman to sell his part of their company, and tried to get him kicked off making this film.
52.
An outstanding Bank of America loan helped Carl Foreman remain on the picture, as Carl Foreman had not yet signed certain papers.
53.
Carl Foreman 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.
54.
Carl Foreman said that Kramer was afraid of what would happen to him and his career if he did not cooperate with the committee.
55.
Carl Foreman was pressured by Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures ; 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 Carl Foreman out of this country".
56.
Influential society writer Hedda Hopper of the Los Angeles Times pressed Carl Foreman to testify about names.
57.
Carl Foreman was the subject of an episode of Screenwriters: Words Into Image, directed by Terry Sanders and Freida Lee Mock.