The collection includes a handful of scripts for films directed by Dmytryk; a few scripts for unproduced films; extensive clippings; 60 letters from Dmytryk written to his wife Jean during the period of his incarceration in the federal penitentiary at Danville, Connecticut in 1950; writings by Dmytryk, including his manuscripts for “Dmytryk on Film-Making,” “It's a Hell of a Life But Not a Bad Living,” “Odd Man Out,” “On Film Directing,” and “On Film Editing”; material on the “Hollywood Ten”; and photographs.

Edward Dmytryk was born in Grand Forks, British Columbia, Canada in 1908. He was the second of four children born to Ukrainian immigrant parents. With the advent of World War I, his parents were in danger of being interned by the Canadian government, so the family emigrated to the United States and settled in Northport, Washington. When his mother died in 1917, his father moved the family down to San Francisco, and finally to Los Angeles when he remarried in 1919. Because his father was abusive, Dmytryk ran away from home to live on his own at the age of fourteen, working as a messenger for Famous Players-Lasky while attending Hollywood High School. He excelled at mathematics and enrolled at the California Institute of Technology but left after his first year to return to the film industry. He eventually made his way back to Famous Players-Lasky, by then known as Paramount Pictures Corp., and found work as a projectionist, taking advantage of his time projecting the day’s rushes to observe the aesthetic and technical choices made by such filmmakers as Erich von Stroheim and Josef von Sternberg. He became an assistant cutter in 1929, working on THE DANCE OF LIFE (1929) and a few Spanish-language productions before being promoted to editor with ONLY SAPS WORK (1930). As an editor he had the opportunity to work under and observe such directors as George Cukor on THE ROYAL FAMILY OF BROADWAY (1930) and ZAZA (1939) and Leo McCarey on RUGGLES OF RED GAP (1935) and LOVE AFFAIR (1939). However, many of his editing assignments at Paramount were B pictures.

4.5 linear ft. of papers

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