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He acts out his scripts for the brothers, whose respect for his literacy is reverent; and he doesn't even have to do that for Monogram, which merely distributes for him. It is a very pretty pitch indeed, as Yordan will explain: "In the small-picture field there is a fixed gross, that is, you can almost tell how much you're going to make to a penny. I plan to use it as an experimental theater."
Yordan's experiments, so far, are at once vigorous and surefire: he believes in hard, straight storytelling, draws richly on and writes skillfully for deep-city folk of the kind that swarm North Side Chicago's Wilson Avenue, where he grew up.
On the side, Yordan is co-producing Ma-ritta Wolff's Whistle Stop (he wrote the script) with Seymour (Mayerling) Neben-zal. He has the script ready for his next movie, Crime and Punishment, with the setting changed from St. Petersburg to Boston.