Alumnus returning for literary celebration
By Colleen Koestner
April 23, 2008 9:51 p.m.
Writers from all over the world will be swarming the UCLA campus this weekend. Mixed among these literary expatriates rests a UCLA native.
Clancy Sigal, who graduated from UCLA in 1950 with a degree in English literature, will be returning to UCLA this weekend for the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. His most recent book, “A Woman of Uncertain Character,” a memoir about his mother, was released in February 2007. This will be his fourth time appearing at the festival, confirming Sigal’s belief that he was destined to be a writer. Even before he started writing, he unconsciously embodied the role.
“I went around dressed as a writer. I went around with a pipe in my mouth. I went around talking like a writer. But I hadn’t really written. I was full of a young man’s luster,” Sigal said.
He discovered his passion for writing at UCLA, and his first writing experience came with the publication of a letter he wrote in a section of the Daily Bruin called Grims and Growls.
Sigal fell in love with the look of his name in print, and, soon after, he joined the Daily Bruin. When he received his first assignment ““ a 4-inch story about the junior prom, he recognized the struggle of relating to his peers in a professional setting.
“I’d been in the Army ““ I’d commanded people in the Army ““ and there was this peroxide blonde my age telling me how to write. It was a terrific blow to my ego, and it was the best thing that ever happened to me,” he said.
During his three years at UCLA, Sigal spent most of his time in the Daily Bruin office, often abandoning class in favor of working until midnight.
He cites the Daily Bruin as the first real democracy he encountered.
“It was chaotic, it was imperfect and it was terrific because we were responsible only to ourselves. It drove the administration and the student executive council nuts,” he said.
While still at UCLA, Sigal began to meet the children of directors and screenwriters, and after graduation he slowly emerged in the movie industry as a screenwriter.
However, after some editorials he had written for the Bruin drew the attention of the FBI during the age of McCarthyism, Sigal was blacklisted from Hollywood. The fear and betrayal that swept through the industry deflated his young man’s swagger.
“If you opened your mouth, you were liable to get slapped down. … Some people killed themselves, some people went to Europe and worked under other names or so far away from Hollywood that they felt they couldn’t be touched. … The deal was to attempt to break your spirit. That was the main thing,” he said.
Sigal left the United States in search of a country that allowed freedom of expression, and he found this freedom in England.
“It was a relief living in England where people were in a sense dreadfully frightened by the long Depression and by the war and by the blitz and the bombs of German air force and all the rest. They weren’t about to be frightened about speaking their minds,” he said.
Over the years, Sigal made occasional returns to the United States, drawn by the dismantling effects of such events as the Civil Rights Movement. On an assignment as an English journalist in the United States, Sigal met Janice Tidwell, a UCLA art student who graduated in the late ’70s. His marriage to her ended his 30-year sabbatical in England.
Tidwell, who began writing screenplays with her husband in the ’90s, credits movies as one of their first shared interests.
“We both started to see movies when we were very young, and they gave us a lot of comfort and took us to worlds that we didn’t know. They give you experiences even though you don’t have your own that you can identify,” Tidwell said.
As a team, Tidwell and Sigal work on different aspects of the screenplay. Tidwell focuses on the visual elements and Sigal provides the narrative. Together they wrote the screenplay for “Frida”(2002), starring Salma Hayek.
“I didn’t choose “˜Frida.’ If you’re a freelance writer, the jobs come to you,” Sigal explained. “(The producer) said, “˜Look, we’ve had so many scripts done on Frida, and nothing’s worked.’ We had a whack at it, and it turned out to be a winner.”
However, while many argue that writing talent is subjective, Sigal views his job as a trade rather than a profession.
“It’s no different than anybody who can bus-drive or an electrician or a fire-person or whatever. My goal is to get a certain number of words done at the end of the day,” he said.
This view of his role may have to do with a little lesson he took away from The Bruin.
“I like deadlines. I learned that at The Bruin,” Sigal said. “I’m a masochist.”
