Arnold Manoff

Early life Manoff was born Arnold Pismenoff in Manhattan in 1914, the only son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants Boris Pismenoff and Gussie Simon. They had married in Ohio in 1909. His father worked as a paper hanger and later a grocer. The family name was changed to Manoff in the 1920s. Manoff quit school at age 15 and did not attend college.

Career

Initial writing Manoff began writing and won a contest in Story magazine. In the 1930s he compiled games and songs of the streets of New York City for the Works Progress Administration's Federal Writers' Project.

Despite these few successes, Manoff was dissatisfied during his years as a contract writer for Paramount Studios. In a 1997 interview, Abraham Polonsky told an anecdote about visiting Manoff at his Paramount office in Hollywood in the late 1940s. Manoff confided that he was frustrated because many of his best scripts were not accepted by the studio and turned into films: "Abe, I'm going back to New York. I can't stand this. They never make anything I like."

Manoff returned to New York where his novella All You Need is One Good Break, which had been published in Story, was being produced on Broadway in 1950. New York Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson called it "a tabloid tale about a tenement wastrel" and said it was "maudlin when it was not commonplace." The Brooklyn Daily Eagle also panned the play, labeling it "a tiresome, rather whiny business", but praised the performance of supporting actress Lee Grant, who had left the hit play Detective Story to join the cast. All You Need is One Good Break closed after four performances; it was briefly revived later that year.

Blacklisting In April 1951, director Edward Dmytryk testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and named Manoff, among 25 other film industry workers, as a member of the Communist Party. In September 1951, Manoff was named as a Communist to the HUAC by five additional "friendly" witnesses, including screenwriters Martin Berkeley and Leo Townsend. As a result, Manoff found himself blacklisted. In a 2014 interview, Grant admitted she knew nothing about Communism and said, "it was one of the big rifts between my husband [Manoff] and myself. He was a Communist. And I didn't have the base for that kind of philosophy. I just couldn't understand it." As Bernstein recalled, The success of the plan depended on finding "fronts" who would pose as the screenwriter in meetings with the show's producer. One of Manoff's first fronts was an actress acquaintance. She sold a Manoff-written script for the Danger series. Bernstein noted, "A television critic called the show an especially fine example of what the new breed of women writers could do."

Later career Unlike Bernstein and Polonsky, Manoff did not live long enough to see his real name appear again on a screen credit. In the early 1960s, he continued to write under the Joel Carpenter pseudonym for episodes of Naked City, Route 66, and The Defenders.

At the time of his death in February 1965, Manoff was adapting for film a Bernard Malamud story that was to star Harry Belafonte.

Legacy Walter Bernstein described Manoff as "a talent that never really flourished." Author Erik Christiansen said that of the blacklistees who wrote scripts for the You Are There series, Manoff's personal story was the saddest because of his difficulty escaping the blacklist.

The informal writers collective of Manoff, Bernstein, and Polonsky was dramatized in the Bernstein-written film The Front (1976). In an early scene in a New York City restaurant, the Michael Murphy character (modeled on Bernstein) introduces the Woody Allen character to two other blacklisted screenwriter friends.

Grant wrote that she was living at home before their marriage, and that her parents did not approve of him. She added, there was a "Pygmalion" aspect to their marriage, in the way he sought to instruct her on Soviet literature and politics. She claimed that he had little interest in her upbringing, and she never met most of his family members, including his mother.

In his memoir, Walter Bernstein wrote of his friend:

Death On February 10, 1965, Manoff died of a heart ailment at Roosevelt Hospital in New York City. He was 50 years old. He was survived by two daughters, two sons, two sisters, and his mother.