“Should the Novel Native Son Be Made Into a Motion Picture?” This was the name of a symposium held at Hollywood’s Roosevelt Hotel in May, 1940—just two and a half months after the publication of Richard Wright’s best-selling novel. Hosted by the League of American Writers, a Communist-affiliated group for which Wright would soon be elected a vice-president, the symposium gathered soon-to-be-blacklisted screenwriters, the future production chief of MGM, and emerging leaders of the civil-rights movement to argue the merits of adapting Wright’s controversial novel. “Native Son” was meant to shock: it tells the story of Bigger Thomas, a black Chicagoan who accidentally murders the daughter of his white employer, then kills his girlfriend, Bessie, while fleeing the police, and ultimately pays for his crimes in the electric chair.
The symposium doesn’t appear to have been Wright’s idea, but it could have been: he was a child of the cinema. In 1941, he told his friend Harry Birdoff that the movies were his “dish” because, he said, “I think people’s lives are like the movies.” In “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” the essay that served as the introduction to “Native Son” in its multiple reprints, Wright explains, “I wanted the reader to feel that Bigger’s story was happening now, like a play upon the stage or a movie unfolding upon the screen.”
Bigger had quickly become lodged in the country’s popular imagination. To liberal white readers who encountered him through their Book-of-the-Month-Club subscriptions, he was a black antihero, claiming their interest and testing their sympathy. To some of Wright’s peers in the Communist Party, Bigger’s story read like bad propaganda: at the novel’s end, Bigger is failed by his Jewish Communist lawyer no less than by white capitalists; the book, they feared, might lead black nationalists away from the Party’s integrationist platform. To many middle-class black readers, Bigger was a disgrace.
Among those invited to the symposium was Orson Welles (an invitation to the event can be found in his F.B.I. file), who, soon afterward, began working with Wright and the dramatist Paul Green on an adaptation of “Native Son” for Broadway. Welles placed a red sleigh in the foreground of the play’s first set, an homage to his own recently completed “Citizen Kane,” which Wright had apparently loved. Welles also used elaborate sets, fades to black, and a soaring soundtrack to create Hollywood-inspired continuity between scenes. The play was hailed for its realist effects and technical innovations, and, during its run, MGM executives offered Wright twenty-five thousand dollars for the novel’s film rights. They had one condition: they wanted to cast the film entirely with white actors.
