By Sidney Lumet Page #6

have been talking outside there, right men? That's right. All right, number one, we put

guards around the whole area. Nobody get in or out

until we're finished. Number two We get a list of

every man's name in the place over 15 years old and we

get up committee and we question each guy. That committee will be you,

Fisher, her and two others. We find this guy

in a couple hours. And then we got some plans too. I'm going to dig

my hooks into him. All right, that's enough. How about it? Well I don't know if

we can just go on out. Yeah, well we're

going to stop him. Look, I tell you, Duran,

you ought to call the police. You can't run things like this. Who can't? You can't. I mean, this kind of stuff is

dangerous, taking over the law. [yelling] SIDNEY LUMET: This

was a live show. The climax took place

in this outdoor field. It's at night, which we did so

that We could light it by just putting up simulated

automobile headlights with him in the middle. [inaudible] see him better. SIDNEY LUMET: And Lloyd Bridges,

who was playing the lead, flipped out on air. Huh? What are you going to do? I don't know! I don't know! He got so involved,

so intense about it, he started, you sons of

b*tches, you-- with tears coursing down his face. And it was terrific

acting, but it was disastrous live

television because of the language he was using. I never saw what went

out onto the air. I was in the control room. Come on and get me, pigs. Come on! The first one up gets

it across his face. Go on, you pigs. You pigs! You pigs! You pigs! Just look at yourselves. Don't it make you

creep with shame? You mob of dirty, thick-skulled

pigs, and all of a sudden, you're the law. Well let me tell you something. Every time that pigs

like you mob together to become your

own law, you crawl one step closer to the cliff. That's what you did to him. Someone will do to you and

it'll be your fault, you hear? It'll be your fault because

you started it rolling. And here's the beauty part. When some other pigs

come for you sometime, it might not be because

you did something wrong. It might be for

no reason at all. Blacklisting was creeping

in, and as we know from our recent past, we

are capable of a very strong right wing in this

country, and it was pervasive, all pervasive. Television had it

tougher even than movies. They were tough on CBS

because their real objective was to break the

CBS news department, which under Fred

Friendly and Ed Murrow, they considered left wing. And Paley, to his everlasting

credit, said you cannot touch the news department. I don't care if you

bring the network down. Because a report on Senator

McCarthy is, by definition, controversial, we want to say

exactly what we mean to say. And I request your

permission to read from script whatever remarks

Murrow and Friendly may make. SIDNEY LUMET: We,

on "You Are There," found out that Murrow was

going to do his McCarthy show. And out of deep

respect for Murrow, but also out of our own

personal convictions, We thought, well, We cannot

leave him alone in this. So we decided to join the

fray in the only way we could. A ferment of

hysteria and fear has been seething in the

little Massachusetts colony village of Salem. Since spring, several

villagers there have faced trial for witchcraft. The accusations have all

been made by a group of girls ranging in age from nine to

20, who claimed to be tormented and tempted by certain

people and they cry out on them as witches or wizards. Every single word was actual

transcript of the trials. People like to think

Murrow's show mattered. I don't think it did. I don't think any art has ever

made a raindrop's difference in a bucket of water. Remove the prisoner. But I am innocent! SIDNEY LUMET: Fear is-- it's

accurate but inadequate. It was terror. There were spies. There were people getting

up left and right-- I saw him at a

Communist Party meeting. That happened to me

and it was a total lie. My sponsor came to

us and said, we're having a lot of trouble Sidney. You have been named

in the "American Legion" magazine

as having attended a Communist Party meeting. And there's a big campaign

for us to fire you and we're not going to. And about a month

later, he said, look, we can't fight the

campaign anymore. Would you be good enough

to meet with them? And I didn't know, of course,

know who them would be. JUDGE: You seem to be

studied in the language of divine philosophy, sir. I studied two years

for the ministry. JUDGE: Before

studying for the bar? I never studied law. Nor I, nor any of us. JUDGE: But gentleman-- We were appointed for our

discretion and fidelity by Governor Fipps

of this colony, of which I have the honor

of being deputy governor. JUDGE: I see. And I remember

walking up there, kind of nice pleasant

evening, and literally not knowing what I would do. I didn't know whether I'd crawl. I didn't know whether

I'd behave well. I literally didn't know because

the whole careers on the line. If this meeting doesn't

go well, I'm out of work and out of work everywhere. I remember feeling-- and

this is why I've always had some sympathy for Kazan--

I was hoping desperately that a truck would round

the corner quickly and solve the problem for me because

the dilemma was so intense, and the fear on both sides. If I behaved badly, the fear of

having behaved badly because I knew what the process would be. The process would be that if

I said, OK, that was me, then they'd say OK, and who else? Because it never stopped. They kept after you. It was a sign of your good

faith or not if you named names. Finally, I arrived somewhere

on Park Avenue and the doors open into the apartment

and I behaved well. I was so filled with feeling by

then as I was crossing the room into Mel's apart, I was, you

son of a b*tch, what you-- and cursing and yelling at

these two guys sitting there, whom I'd never seen before. And one of them said,

relax, relax, don't get your balls in an uproar. You're not the one. The fascists are taking

Europe, the world is dying, and you're playing

Trotskyist politics. There would be no Hitler today

if not for Stalin, true or not? That is simplistic. Where was Stalin when a

united front in Germany could have kept Hitler

from seizing power? Now you're all

big anti-fascists. We're prepared to grant

you your righteousness. What then? Remember how you

broke up our meeting? Your people threw

chairs, I remember. Yesterday we were

social fascists. Today, we're your comrades. You're a simplistic sectarian. No I'm not.

I'm Jewish. Then maybe you'll

explain to the Jews in Nazi concentration camps the

fine points of your dialectic. What about Spain? What about the

Trotskyites in Spain? SIDNEY LUMET: It was always

called the Soviet Union-- it was not called Russia--

so as to distinguish it from czarist Russia. This generation of people,

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