Hollywood Double Agent: The True Tale of Boris Morros, Film Producer Turned Cold War Spy by Jonathan Gill

 As a classical musician, Boris had wanted to get to Carnegie Hall since childhood, and if practice wouldn't take him there, the movies now would.

--Jonathan Gill, Hollywood Double Agent (Abrams, 2020).

We may consider Carnegie Hall a happy-ending sequel to Detour.

--Noah Isenberg, Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins (University of California Press, 2014) 

Reading Jonathan Gill's account of Morros's production of Carnegie Hall (1947) I noticed something missing, namely, the director Edward G. Ulmer.  I wrote about Isenberg's book on Ulmer back on Oct. 1, 2014, in which he puts Carnegie Hall in the center of Ulmer's career, one of his more personal and larger-budget films, in which Ulmer shows his knowledge and love of both classical music and jazz, with performers from Arthur Rubinstein to Harry James. Isenberg mentions Morros as producer but otherwise gives him no credit for the film.  This difference of approaches to the film demonstrates a continuing gap in film writing as to who gets credit for a film, the director ("when William Wyler made Wuthering Heights ...") to the producer (Samuel Goldwyn:  "William Wyler didn't make Wuthering Heights, I did.  Wyler only directed it") and attempts to determine who gets credit for what in such a collaborative medium continues.

Morros produced five movies after he left his job as music director at Paramount in 1940.  He had left Russia after the revolution, made his way to Turkey and then in 1922 to America.  He was a trained classical musician and gradually found work in Hollywood, where the studios were run by people like him, emigre Jews. Morros struggled as an independent producer and then ran a successful record business, all the time working for the Soviet Union.  Morros became a spy unwillingly, in order to protect his parents and his siblings still in Russia.  Mostly he hired Soviet operatives to work for his companies as cover; whether he actually gave the Soviet Union anything of value is questionable.  When his Soviet handlers refused to finance his record company and his attempts to establish himself in television he went to the FBI in 1947 and became a double agent, receiving significant payments from the FBI for his work.  By 1957 the Soviet Union knew what he was doing and he just barely escaped a kidnapping that would have brought him to trial in Russia.  From then until his death in 1962 Morros testified before Congressional committees and helped the FBI track down spies.

Gill's book is full of details about Hollywood during WWII and the Cold War.  Morros was often homesick for Russia but subscribed to no ideology other than making money and living well under capitalism.