Arlen helped bring human injustices to the big screen

Published 12:00 am Wednesday, March 2, 2016

Alice Arlen, a screenwriter who collaborated with Nora Ephron on the 1983 Mike Nichols film “Silkwood,” the story of a lab worker killed in a suspicious car crash en route to meet a reporter to expose what she considered life-threatening dangers at a nuclear plant, died Monday evening at her home in New York. She was 75.

Michael Arlen, her husband, said she died after a long illness.

For their work on “Silkwood,” Arlen and Ephron were nominated for an Academy Award for best original screenplay. (Horton Foote won the Oscar for “Tender Mercies.”)

The screenplay, which centered on Karen Silkwood, played by Meryl Streep, left open the question of whether Silkwood died accidentally or was murdered, though the film implied that she and others handling highly radioactive plutonium were being exposed to contamination at a nuclear fuel recycling plant in Oklahoma.

“Perhaps for the first time in a popular movie has America’s petrochemical-nuclear landscape been dramatized, and with such anger and compassion,” Vincent Canby wrote in a review for The New York Times. “Mr. Nichols and his writers have attempted to impose a shape on a real-life story that, even as they present it, has no easily verifiable shape.”

Fascinated by tales of injustice against ordinary people, Arlen was a rebel and a writer by nature, the scion of one of America’s most prominent journalism families. She started as a freelance journalist and television culture critic in Chicago and enlarged her scope with Hollywood screenplays and biographies of two powerful women in her family.

After her success with “Silkwood,” Arlen wrote the screenplay for Louis Malle’s 1985 film “Alamo Bay,” about the battles of Texas fishermen and Vietnamese immigrants over shrimp and fish harvests in the Gulf of Mexico. It was also about clashing cultures in a Gulf Coast village between native-born patriots, many of them veterans of the Vietnam War, and refugees with little command of English or concern for time-honored local customs and fishing practices.

Based on events in Seadrift, Texas, from 1979 to 1981, the story portrayed fire bombings, the destruction of boats and homes, and a nightmare of bigotry leading to the killing of an American — and to a resolution, of sorts, in court, with the acquittal of a Vietnamese.

“I couldn’t have made ‘Alamo Bay’ without Alice,” Malle said. “I knew we had a terrific setting for a film. But we needed great characters and a great story, and Alice created them.”

Arlen’s journalism pedigree could be traced to her grandfather Joseph Medill Patterson, who founded and published The Daily News in New York. Her great-aunt, Eleanor Medill Patterson, owned and published The Washington Times-Herald, and her aunt, Alicia Patterson, founded, published and edited the Long Island newspaper Newsday.

Arlen’s mother, Josephine Patterson Albright, covered crime for The Chicago Daily News in the 1930s, interviewing killers like George (Baby Face) Nelson; her colleagues were models for characters in the Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur comedy “The Front Page.” Arlen’s brother, Joseph Medill Patterson Albright, is the former husband of Madeleine Albright, secretary of state under President Bill Clinton and the first woman to hold that post.

Arlen’s first husband was James Hoge, a former president and publisher of The News. As Alice Albright Hoge, she wrote “Cissy Patterson” (1966), a book about her great-aunt. And with her second husband, Arlen, an author in his own right, she wrote a biography of her aunt, “The Huntress: The Adventures, Escapades and Triumphs of Alicia Patterson: Aviatrix, Sportswoman, Journalist, Publisher,” which is to be published this year.