Brooks, Richard

(b. 18 May 1912 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; d. March 1992 in Beverly Hills, California), novelist, screenwriter, and director of the motion pictures Blackboard Jungle (1955), Elmer Gantry (1960), and In Cold Blood (1967).

Brooks was born Reuben Sax, the son of Crimean Jewish immigrant laborers. After graduating from Overbrook High School in Philadelphia in 1929, he studied communications and theater at Temple University. Financial hardship and a dispute with his parents caused him to drop out in 1932, one semester short of graduation. He spent the next several years riding the rails and finding his own way. During this period he reinvented himself as Richard Brooks, an aspiring writer. He was also married for two weeks, ending the hasty union when he threw a Christmas tree out the window. Little is known of these early years; Brooks revealed few details even to intimates, establishing a passion for privacy that would characterize his entire career.

After holding journalistic and other jobs in New Orleans, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas, Brooks returned to Philadelphia, where he worked for the Philadelphia Record beginning in 1934 and then the Atlantic City Press Union in 1936. He was in New York City by 1937, writing radio scripts for WNEW and the NBC Blue Network and serving as announcer and commentator as well. In 1940 he helped organize the Mill Pond Theatre of suburban Roslyn, New York, with a program of introducing new plays. After an argument with a colleague, Brooks moved to Hollywood in 1941, where he continued to write dramatic scripts for radio—one a day for over a year. He broke into the movies as a scriptwriter for Universal Pictures, where he advanced from doctoring B pictures to writing exotic adventures like White Savage (1943) and Cobra Woman (1944).

Brooks enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1943, serving in a filmmaking unit at Quantico, Virginia. He wrote and narrated a documentary about the invasion of the Mariana Islands. Out of this military experience came his first novel, The Brick Foxhole (1945), a study of the boredom and pressures of barracks life. This book, which concerns the murder of a homosexual, was later filmed as Crossfire (1947), with the theme somewhat diluted. Brooks was nearly court-martialed because he failed to clear his novel with Marine Corps authorities in advance. Among the writers who rallied to his defense was Sinclair Lewis, a contact that had important consequences for Brooks’s later career.

Returning to Hollywood, Brooks became associated with more important pictures. For the producer Mark Hellinger he collaborated on the screenplays of such hardhitting crime dramas as The Killers (from Ernest Hemingway’s short story, 1946), and Brute Force (1947). With the director John Huston he cowrote Key Largo (1948). Huston became a lifelong friend; Hellinger, who died suddenly in 1948, became a major influence. Brooks’s third and final novel, The Producer (1951), is a rough portrait of Hellinger. It contains the telling line, “I can’t take risks; I’m an independent producer.”

Always seeking his own independence, Brooks signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) in 1949. There he sought to direct his own scripts, beginning with Crisis (1950), a dark film about a doctor’s moral dilemma: whether to heal a brutal Latin American dictator whom he personally detests. Brooks was obliged to direct other people’s stories in the early 1950s (The Light Touch, Take the High Ground, and Battle Circus). Deadline U.S.A. (1952) is the most personal of his early films; it featured Humphrey Bogart as a tough newspaper editor who investigates a scandal. The picture that vaulted Brooks to the top rank of Hollywood directors was Blackboard Jungle (1955), an explosive portrait of juvenile violence in an urban school. The theme was considered risky at the time, and MGM actually withdrew the film from the Cannes Festival for fear of seeming unpatriotic. But Brooks’s violent staging captured public attention, initiating a whole cycle of juvenile delinquency films. Blackboard Jungle also helped launch the careers of two young stars, Sidney Poitier and Vic Morrow, and Brooks’s savvy introduction of “Rock Around the Clock” into the background score helped drive the urban pulse of rock and roll into the public consciousness.

Brooks’s concerns for violent subjects were now expressed in major efforts like The Last Hunt (1956), about the slaughter of the buffalo, and Something of Value (1957), a vivid picture about the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya. He overreached with his melodramatic adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov (1958) but had greater success adapting Tennessee Williams to the screen in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and Sweet Bird of Youth (1962), both with Paul Newman. The absurd studio-imposed happy ending for the latter was the last straw for Brooks’s strained relationship with MGM. Thereafter he became an independent producer (Pax Enterprises) as well as writer-director.

His first independent production had come two years earlier for United Artists: Elmer Gantry (1960) is a burly, bustling masterpiece that is often said to improve on Sinclair Lewis’s satiric novel about traveling evangelists. Brooks had received the novelist’s encouragement to make a free adaptation of the book years earlier. He found the perfect incarnation of Gantry in his old friend Burt Lancaster, who humanizes the con-man-tumed-preacher while romancing the deluded, yet passionately sincere, evangelist played by Jean Simmons. The film was widely praised for its vivid Americana, its imaginative use of color, and its lively performances. It was nominated for multiple Academy Awards and received three Oscars, including one for Brooks’s screenplay. Brooks also fell in love with Jean Simmons on this project. They were married in 1961 and had one daughter. (Brooks’s second marriage, to Harriet Levin in 1945, had ended in divorce.)

Brooks’s next project was the colossal failure Lord Jim (1965), filmed under difficult conditions in prewar Malaysia and Cambodia. He rebounded with a taut Western, The Professionals (1966), and the beautifully photographed crime drama In Cold Blood (1967), one of Hollywood’s last major black-and-white productions. The Happy Ending (1969) is an odd mixture of satire, melodrama, and feminism that was designed to showcase the talents of Jean Simmons, who was widely praised and earned an Oscar nomination for her work. After an uncharacteristic comedy, $ [Dollars] (1971), and another Western, Bite the Bullet (1975), Brooks invested much effort in Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977), a story about a young woman’s troubled sexuality and eventual murder. Fighting to finance the film and make it his own way, Brooks went so far as to mortgage his home against the project. (The strain seems to have ended his marriage with Simmons; they divorced in 1976.) The resulting movie was praised for its vivid performances but criticized for overly explicit moralizing. Nevertheless, it became the greatest financial success of Brooks’s career. However, Brooks’s next two pictures failed miserably at the box office: the incoherent satires of nuclear terrorism (Wrong Is Right, 1982) and Las Vegas gambling (Fever Pitch, 1985). Brooks’s health declined thereafter.

A highly uneven artist whose passionate idealism could be undercut by strident moralizing, Brooks nevertheless traced an extraordinary career path from straitjacketed studio writer to independent filmmaker. A rumpled, pipe-smoking, crew-cut figure in a baggy shirt, he got his own way by passion, guile, and fearless independence. A tough guy of the old school, he could boast of bringing in a picture a month ahead of schedule and a million dollars under budget. His ruthlessness could terrorize. Some called him “bonecrusher Brooks” and “God’s angry man.” But friends recalled a warm spirit under the gruff exterior. He received a total of eight Academy Award nominations—four for writing and four for directing. The Directors Guild and Writers Guild recognized his unusual combined talent with their joint presentation of the Preston Sturges Award for lifetime achievement in 1990.

Brooks died of heart failure in 1992. He is buried at Hillside Memorial Park in Culver City, California, where his epitaph reads, “First Comes the Word.”

Brooks’s papers are not yet available for study. Some materials are at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles. Patrick McGilligan, Back story 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1930s and 1940s (1991), pp. 27–72, contains a lengthy interview. Other interviews are in American Film (Oct. 1977 and June 1991). Richard Schickel offers a personal memoir in Matinee Idylls (1999), pp. 211-226. A valuable survey with filmography and bibliography is in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 44: American Screenwriters, 2d series (1986). The English journal Movie 12 (1965) contains extensive interviews and appreciations. A doctoral dissertation by Francis Frost offers “A Historical-Critical Study of the Films of Richard Brooks, with Special Attention to His Problems of Achieving and Maintaining Final Decision-Control” (University of Southern California, 1976). Obituaries are in the New York Times (13 Mar. 1992) and Variety (16 Mar. 1992).

Brooks has received more critical attention in France than America. Patrick Brion, Richard BrooKs (1986), is a lavish, large-format tribute that reproduces many French and English interviews and essays. See also Cahiers du Cinema (Feb. 1959 and May/June 1965) and Positif (May 1968 and Nov. 1975).

John Fitzpatrick