Philip Stevenson

Active - 1945 - 1953  |   Born - Dec 31, 1896   |   Died - Sep 30, 1965   |   Genres - Drama, War, Adventure

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Philip Stevenson was a screenwriter, playwright, author, and novelist whose Hollywood career was interrupted by the blacklist. Born in 1896, he began writing books and plays in the 1920s. His early output included a play inspired by the life of William Bonney, aka Billy the Kid. He and his wife, Janet Stevenson, occasionally collaborated on theatrical projects, most notably the play Counter Attack, which was brought to the screen under that same title in 1945 by Zoltan Korda at Columbia Pictures, from a screenplay adapted by John Howard Lawson (himself a future blacklistee). Stevenson was nominated for an Oscar that same year for his screenplay for The Story of G.I. Joe. Unfortunately, soon after the war ended, a reaction set in against anyone in Hollywood who was too visibly associated with pro-labor and/or pro-Soviet points of view, both areas in which Philip and Janet Stevenson were vulnerable. Neither one was ever able to contribute directly to a Hollywood production again, although Philip Stevenson wrote the screenplay for Dramma nella Kasbah (1953), an Italian-produced movie starring George Raft (who was then having his own problems, with U.S. tax authorities) that was issued in America as The Man From Cairo. He continued to write books, both under his own name and the pseudonym Lars Lawrence, among them an acclaimed trilogy entitled The Seed, telling of the struggle of coal miners in a Southwest town to organize themselves into a union. In 1954, screenwriter Bernard Gordon, who had been blacklisted himself but was still able to work under other names, utilized the Stevenson play about Billy the Kid as the basis for his screenplay for the feature film The Law vs. Billy the Kid. Stevenson died suddenly of natural causes while on a visit to the Soviet Union in the fall of 1965.

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