Mentor of Unheard Stories

The farmhouse sits on a sleepy back road near the Ashokan Reservoir, its front porch halfhidden by an immense rhododendron. Screenwriter Zach Sklar opens the kitchen door, wearing a Saratoga Racetrack tee-shirt. He’s lean and fine-featured, with a welcoming smile tempered by a guardedness that seems hard-wired into his posture.

Pancho, a cocker spaniel rescued from an abusive home, frisks around, wagging his tail. Sklar’s longtime partner, film composer Sarah Plant, is pan-frying matzo brei at the stove, and the smell of caramelized onions sweetens the air. A health-conscious vegetarian, Sklar tries to avoid both sugar and gluten, but he’s treating himself to a brownie today.

The living room is low-key and homey. The only clues to its owners’ professions are a 3-D mockup of a cinema with a marquee reading Eat Drink Man Woman (Plant was associate music director) and a magnum champagne bottle with a logo for JFK (Sklar wrote the screenplay with director Oliver Stone).

“I grew up with a lot of writers,” he says, settling into a chair with his contraband brownie within easy reach. “We had a surrogate family that was built around two things: Most of them had been in the Communist Party, and most of them were writers.”

Sklar’s father, a politically active New York playwright and novelist, was wooed to Hollywood with others like Clifford Odets. Though George Sklar’s Broadway plays “Laura” (written with Vera Caspary) and “Merry-Go-Round” (written with Albert Maltz) and his novel The Two Worlds of Johnny Truro were optioned by studios, he spent most of his time as a salaryman, doing endless rewrites to support his family.

The youngest of three children, Zach was born in 1948. A year later, George Sklar was named before the House Unamerican Activities Committee. Refusing to testify, he was blacklisted alongside Dalton Trumbo, Waldo Salt, Ring Lardner Jr., and other noted screenwriters. “My entire life was after he was out of film,” Sklar says.

His mother, Miriam Blecher Sklar, a former Martha Graham dancer, became the family breadwinner, teaching modern dance classes for children and later for adults. “She was a very gifted teacher. People loved her,” says Sklar, “But she kept her dance life totally separate from us. She never danced at home. We never danced.”

Her husband became a recluse. “He crumbled a bit psychologically,” Sklar says, emotion choking his voice. “He didn’t fight back. He didn’t wilt—didn’t name names or sacrifice his principles—but he didn’t leave the house.”

He also never discussed his political affiliations, so his children would not have to lie if they were questioned. After his death in 1988, Sklar and his siblings—playwright Daniel Sklar and writer Judith Sklar Rasminsky—were sorting their father’s possessions when his Communist Party card fell out of a book. “I just gasped,” Sklar recalls. “He never told, even long after the blacklist was over.”

Like many blacklistees, George Sklar warned his children against political activism, cautioning them not to sign petitions or get their pictures taken. “Of course, the first thing I did was sign petitions and go to demonstrations,” says Zach, who came of age during the Vietnam era.

He attended the newly formed University of California at Santa Cruz, which he describes as “a very communal-minded place” in Reagan-governed California. “But I was frightened. That was one of the big messages—not subconscious, it was pounded into me. ‘Don’t accept the way things are. Fight for justice, but you can get hurt. Be careful.’ It was a very schizophrenic message. When I did things, it was always, always a way of overcoming that fear.”

During college, he worked as a volunteer on poverty-stricken Daufuskie Island, off the coast of South Carolina. There were about 100 residents, all black. “It was like being in the 19th century: no paved roads or running water,” Sklar says. For a politically conscious Angeleno, seeing black people cross into the street in deference as a white person passed was shocking. “I was exposed to things I’d never been exposed to. People living in shacks with newspapers on the walls, eating squirrels. I buried a body.” He also worked with Donald Gatch, an idealistic doctor who served a community in which 80 percent of the children had malnutrition and parasites. “It was life-changing,” Sklar says. “An abrupt introduction into the contradictions of life in America.”

That summer, Sklar’s family rented a house in Beacon, and the three siblings drove to the Woodstock festival. The closest they could get was 12 miles away. They parked on the roadside and hiked in, arriving at 3am to hear Joan Baez finishing her set in the distance. They slept in a field in the pouring rain, and hiked the 12 miles back the next morning. “We never really heard any music at all,” Sklar laughs.

For several years, he took a series of blue-collar jobs, including lawn maintenance in a trailer park housing the last remnants of the Merry Pranksters (“You could still see the day-glo on the barn ceiling”) and crewing on a salmon boat in Alaska. “I got a jellyfish in my eye on my birthday, and thought, ‘What am I doing with my life?’” Sklar recalls. It was 1973, the year of the Watergate break-ins. Inspired by Woodward and Bernstein, Sklar applied to Columbia’s journalism school.

After graduation, he worked as a proofreader at Time and Life, and edited a national law magazine called Juris Doctor. He also edited books for the left-leaning Sheridan Square Press and wrote for the Nation, becoming its executive editor while Richard Lingeman was on leave. In 1984, he joined an international brigade picking coffee in Nicaragua, and fell in love with the woman who interviewed him. Sarah Plant was hard to pin down, but Sklar suggested they meet for breakfast in Riverside Park, and brought along a squeezer and fresh oranges. “I think that got her,” he laughs.

Two years later, he was stricken with incapacitating chronic fatigue syndrome and lost his proofreading gig at Time, unable to keep the late hours. It wasn’t an ideal time to start a new project, but Bill Schaap and Ellen Ray of Sheridan Square asked him to edit a book called On the Trail of the Assassins by a former New Orleans DA named Jim Garrison. “It ended up being the best thing that ever happened to me,” he says.

Garrison’s first draft was an attempt at an objective history. Sklar urged him to tell the story in first person, tracing his 180-degree turnaround from career military man and true believer to someone who became convinced that the CIA murdered President Kennedy. He helped Garrison reshape the book as “not a whodunnit, but a whydunnit.”

Soon afterward, Schap and Ray gave it to director Oliver Stone at the Havana Film Festival. Stone called three days later, saying he wanted to film it but was busy with Born on the Fourth of July; did they have a writer to recommend? Stone hired Sklar over the phone, telling him, “Don’t read any of those screenwriting books, just write from the heart. And I don’t care how long it is.”

Sklar and Stone’s models were Costa-Gavras’s Z and Rashomon, using witness reports and flashbacks to interweave past and present. Sklar’s first draft took a year and weighed in at over 500 pages. Stone cut and combined scenes, adding new ones. Sklar learned “a tremendous amount” from his co-author, who encouraged such liberties as resetting an office meeting with Jack Lemmon’s character to a racetrack, where he’s hung over, drinking coffee in the stands. “It gave you the milieu of this guy, a much deeper character,” says Sklar. “It’s not factually true, but it’s actually more true—the audience understands him better.”

The film came under attack even before it was shot, when a stolen script was leaked to the press. “Oliver enjoyed the fight—he stayed up late writing letters to editors,” Sklar recalls. “It was an adventure. It was insane.”

JFK was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including one for Best Adapted Screenplay. “It was a high-visibility film that caused a huge controversy. Oliver took a lot of the heat, and a lot of the credit. But it established me as a screenwriter. And ended my journalism career.” Sklar laughs. “I think those doors closed the minute JFK came out.”

He wrote an unproduced screenplay for Stone called Mediocracy, about a corporate media takeover, and continued to edit for Sheridan Square. But his health worsened, and he and Plant moved upstate so he could heal.

Sklar has a penchant for hard-to-finance film projects. His other unproduced screenplays include Tai-Ping, set in China during the bloodiest civil war in history; The Wounding, set in Arctic Canada; and a biography of singer/activist Paul Robeson, developed with Robeson’s son. He also adapted Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel Feast of the Goat; the 2006 film was released in Europe, but not in the US.

In recent years, Sklar has mentored Latin American and Palestinian screenwriters through Sundance’s international workshops. “This is where I think the vitality of film is now, in these cultures that haven’t been heard from yet. There are stories they need to tell that nobody’s heard,” Sklar asserts.

Zachary Sklar also has stories he needs to tell. He’s just interviewed for a controversial new screenwriting project. It’s too soon to reveal any details, but, he says with a grin, “If it didn’t get panned by the New York Times, I’d be very upset.”