The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild

by Miranda J. Banks

  In its first two years, TSW built an impressive reputation. Many pieces originally written for the journal were picked up by mainstream newspapers and magazines. The National Board of Review praised TSW and the journal Hollywood Quarterly, declaring that they provided readers with a more complete portrait of Hollywood and its denizens: “These magazines leave a double impression: of the high competence of contemporary filmmakers, and of the magnitude of their problems. Also they leave in mind a notion that the modern inhabitants of Hollywood are citizens of the world. The journals will gain more respect for the industry among leaders of American opinion than a million dollars worth of ‘public relations.’”101 Even amid the politics, there was always a place in TSW for wit and great writing. Howard Koch, a master of sophisticated screenplays like Casablanca and Sergeant York, reimagined his daily exploits in light of the news that Congressman John Rankin (Republican of Mississippi) had declared writers to be workers and Reds: “Once accepting my class status of worker, and I don’t quite know how I can avoid it, I find myself in the company of labor unions, guilds, and, in fact, people in general.”102

  By the end of 1945, as the tone in Hollywood shifted and the SWG board increasingly criticized HUAC and its “friendly” witnesses, some more rightwing writers began attacks against both TSW and left-leaning SWG members, not only to provoke pro-AAA writers but also to stop what they believed was leftist infiltration of the industry. Some even used the pages of TSW to vilify the journal and its editors. Lewis R. Foster (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) wrote in a letter to the editor, “It is being said that The Screen Writer has at last appeared in its true colors—red and yellow.”103 Foster called the journal communistic (red) and cowardly (yellow) and claimed that TSW represented only the subsection of writers on the extreme Left. In the same issue, the editors replied, “It is to be hoped the time will never come when writers are obliged in their work to express the ‘collective viewpoint’ of any group.”104

  Frustrations about the tone and temperature of Guild meetings made their way into TSW as well. Garrett Graham (The Noose) dismissed the possibility of communist infiltration, given the structure of Hollywood film production: “In all this time, I have never seen the slightest crevasse through which any Communist propaganda could possibly trickle to the screen. Motion pictures are big business, controlled from Wall Street. Even the most autocratic studio head in Hollywood is a mere chore boy for the financial powers that direct the major companies and the theater chains.” Having shown that writers had no chance to infuse films with their own political agendas, Graham issued a “plea for urbanity” at Guild meetings and an end to infighting.105

  Philip Dunne, as a member of the editorial committee of TSW but writing as an individual Guild member, posed the question directly in his article “SWG—Trade Union or Writers’ Protective Association?” Dunne argued that the Guild should be both: it should serve as a workers’ syndicate that protects writers as employees and also as a trade association that protects writers as the authors of original material.106 Dunne became a board member of the SWG at the end of 1946 in hopes that he could keep pertinent political issues front and center for writers—which he did, but not at all with the outcome he hoped.

  The Hollywood Ten and the Waldorf Declaration

  The battle to define the Guild’s politics—from within and by outsiders—was reaching a climax as 1946 came to a close. The Red-baiting in Hollywood was merely an echo of the panic that had taken hold in the public discourse on a national level. Republicans had been voted into the majority in both the US Senate and the House of Representatives; from then on, as Nancy Lynn Schwartz notes, any official opposition to HUAC or to its investigations was minimal. By December 1946, the newly elected SWG board faced a number of inherited crises: the effects of the pending anti-union Taft-Hartley Act and the heightened public Red-baiting of Hollywood writers. Cries for an AAA had petered out. Everyone in Hollywood seemed to be bracing for a storm of attacks from the East Coast. Even as the politicians focused on left-leaning writers, studio heads came under the microscope as well. In January 1947 the Chicago Tribune published a series of articles claiming that Hollywood was overly friendly to the Soviet Union because of familial legacies. It noted “three Hollywood dynasties”—the Schencks, the Mayers, and the Warners—thereby implicitly aligning Jews with communism.107 Emmett Lavery, president of the SWG at the time, was also under attack. Lavery, who had written Behind the Rising Sun (directed by Edward Dmytryk) and had run for the 16th US Congressional District in Los Angeles, seemed unimpeachable, given that he was a staunch Catholic, a blue-blooded Democrat, and the author of a play and screenplay based on the life of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. In discussing his own convictions, he declared, “I take my social conscience from the Gospels of the Apostles, not from the essays of Karl Marx.”108 Yet conservatives argued that he was sure to be a Red, since he was president of the SWG, the former chair of the Hollywood Writers Mobilization, and a member of the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions. In February 1947, IATSE leader Roy Brewer boldly asserted in TSW that the SWG was a “Fellow Traveler organization” colluding with the Conference of Studio Unions.109

  When Representative J. Parnell Thomas became head of HUAC in May 1947, the offensive against the Hollywood left truly began, first with the testimony of friendly witnesses and then, in September, with the delivery of subpoenas to nineteen above-the-line creatives. HUAC claimed that Communist Party members who were Hollywood insiders had been inserting dangerous anti-American material into mainstream films. Hollywood moguls narrowed the targets of this attack, pointing specifically at the writers. Though he claimed he “wouldn’t know one if I saw one,” Jack Warner told the Thomas Committee that “Communists injected 95 percent of their propaganda into films through the medium of writers.”110 The list of HUAC’s nineteen suspected infiltrators included mostly writers and actors, but also a few directors. Ivan Goff, who wrote White Heat and later created Charlie’s Angels, mused about the committee’s rationale in formulating this list: “Writers and actors are fair game. They make headlines, quick headlines, because you’re talking about Hollywood, which reaches the world and [with] a Writers Guild or an Actors Guild you have headlines all over the world.”111 Of the witnesses, both Lester Cole and Ring Lardner Jr. were serving on the Guild’s executive board. And it was certainly true that the board had become involved in some minor social and political action. In 1945, the SWG had sent a telegram to President Harry S. Truman urging him to request that General Francisco Franco of Spain commute the death sentences of two leaders of the short-lived socialist Spanish Republic.112 In 1946, the Guild demanded that the management of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles apologize to Carlton Moss, writer of The Negro Soldier, who was refused service in the hotel elevator.113 Maurice Rapf, the Guild’s secretary, threatened to publish an account of the affront in the Guild journal if an apology was not forthcoming. (Rapf had just penned Song of the South, which depicts a joyful, “idyllic” relationship between a slave and his master.)

  Arthur A. Ross, who wrote Creature from the Black Lagoon and episodes of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, believed that the goal of HUAC was in fact “the weakening of the democratic and militant trade union movement in the United States and the suppression of the radicalized American intellectual. I suppose that [an] intellectual was anybody who read books other than those that came out of the Book of the Month Club.”114 Emmet Lavery, in a departure from his previous stance and in an attempt to curb the damage to the SWG by the inclusion of so many writers among the Nineteen, demanded, upon threat of termination, that all board members sign an affidavit of noncommunist affiliation. Philip Dunne refused to sign and reprimanded Lavery for believing that such a request would be necessary for writers who wished to serve on the Guild’s executive board.115

  In this atmosphere, the group since known as the Hollywood Ten was called to testify in Washington in October 1947. The men had agree
d upon a strategy: they would assert their right to free speech under the First Amendment. Although the obvious defense might have been to invoke the Fifth Amendment, legal counsel for the Ten wanted to avoid any correlation between their clients and the notorious gangsters who were appealing to the protection against self-incrimination during criminal testimony around that same time. More important, the Ten wanted to speak their minds and defend themselves. But they faced an obvious conundrum: they could not answer the questions put before them. In his book about these events, Dalton Trumbo explains that a witness who was a communist and denied it when asked would be committing perjury. If he were to acknowledge his affiliation, then the next question would be to name others—relatives, friends, and acquaintances—in the party.116 The initial affirmative response would also virtually guarantee that the witness would lose his studio job and that he would be investigated by the FBI and the American Legion and doubtlessly shunned by his friends and neighbors. But beyond all these personal tribulations attached to a positive answer was the certainty that everyone he knew would be exposed to speculation and attack. “His compulsory confession will not affect his own destiny alone,” Trumbo asserted. “It will touch twenty, fifty, a hundred lives, baring each of them the ugly, discriminatory climate of the age.”117 Trumbo would refuse to be an informant, whereas fellow witness Albert Maltz felt that invoking the First was a straightforward way to question the authority of the Committee.118

  Rather than answer the Committee’s questions, the Ten planned to read prepared statements. But the Committee began its inquiry with a question none of the writers had foreseen: “Are you a member of the Screen Writers Guild?” It was followed by: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States?” Ben Margolis, one of the lawyers for the Ten, believed that a witness’s refusal to answer either question made it seem that the SWG and the party were synonymous.119 A better strategy, he proposed, would be to respond by expressing their right to First Amendment protection. This tactic angered writer Sheridan Gibney: “[The Ten] acted as if they were the Guild’s representatives, which they were not. . . . This, of course, lumped the two organizations and the implication was that they did not want to admit they were members of the Writer’s Guild because it might incriminate them in some way.”120 Only the third of the Ten called to testify, screenwriter Albert Maltz, read his entire statement; the fourth witness, Alvah Bessie, managed to deliver about a half of his statement before Committee members cut him off.121 This concession, he believed, was a response to public censure for HUAC’s blatantly hostile treatment of Lawson and Trumbo in comparison with its friendly attitude toward the witnesses who preceded them: Lela Rogers, a former assistant at RKO and founding member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, and Walt Disney.122

  Of course, not everyone in Hollywood sat passively watching these scenes broadcast from Washington. The Committee for the First Amendment (CFA) mobilized supporters of the Ten and organized a trip to Washington in late October 1947 to protest what it viewed as baseless attacks. Philip Dunne remembers calling Darryl F. Zanuck at his home in Palm Springs to tell him about the formation of the CFA and its plan to save the industry. “There was quiet for about ten seconds. Then he said, ‘Well, if you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go.’ . . . [Even] Eric Johnston was making the same noises we were at the beginning, before the whip cracked and they all turned around.”123

  IMAGE 13 Letter from Philip Dunne to the executive board of the SWG regarding participation on the Committee for the First Amendment. His letter was sent one day before the Waldorf Declaration was announced.

  Screen Writers Guild Records, 1921–1954, Writers Guild Foundation Archive, Shavelson-Webb Library, Los Angeles

  All fifty members of the CFA were elite Hollywood talents, including Lauren Bacall, Danny Kaye, Gene Kelly, Groucho Marx, Frank Sinatra, Ira Gershwin, John Huston (writer and director of The Maltese Falcon), William Wyler, and the group’s chair, Humphrey Bogart. Their intention was solely to demand due process and express distaste for the structure of the hearings.124 But HUAC’s attack on communism was only a slightly masked version of anti-Semitism. Congressman Rankin declared he served on the Committee to protect “the Christian people of America.” In a public reading of the names of CFA members, he made sure to point out that “another one was Danny Kaye, [but] we found out his real name was David Daniel Kaminsky. . . . One . . . calls himself Edward G. Robinson. His real name is Emanuel Goldenberg.”125 Philip Dunne returned from the CFA trip to Washington and joined Huston and Wyler in closed-door sessions with all of the studio heads—all except for Jack Warner, who was doggedly against the Ten. They asked the moguls to hold their ground, remain firm against HUAC’s allegations, and protect their employees.126 As time would soon show, the moguls had other plans.

  On November 25, 1947 HUAC cited the Ten for contempt of Congress. On the same day, the studio heads announced what would be known as the Waldorf Declaration. Philip Dunne remembered going to Darryl Zanuck’s office soon afterward, where Zanuck told him that denouncing and firing the Ten was a financial decision. The moguls were anxious to avert any possibility of an audience boycott of Hollywood films. “[Zanuck] intimated at the time what I believed to be true, that it was pressure from the banks that led to the Waldorf Declaration. The bankers had said, ‘Look there’s too much trouble. Get rid of those guys and go on.’”127 The MPAA reasoned that the only way to stop HUAC’s meddling into the inner workings of Hollywood was to sacrifice the Ten. But the studios actually went one step further. Any individual under contract with a major studio who was found by the Committee to be a communist sympathizer would be discharged without compensation and would not be allowed to return to studio work until swearing under oath to have ended all communist ties. All of the Ten were terminated. MGM suspended Trumbo and denied him $60,000 in back pay. The statement released by the studios in conjunction with the dismissals did say that as yet nothing subversive or un-American had ever been seen or portrayed in a Hollywood picture—and yet inclusion on a blacklist inferred that these writers had committed or been party to nefarious acts.

  The MPAA called upon all of the trade unions to help in its mission to root out subversives, essentially asking the organizations that were designed to protect employees to turn against their members. The MPAA’s November 1947 statement read: “Creative work at its best cannot be carried on in an atmosphere of fear. We will guard against this danger, this risk, this fear. To this end, we will invite the Hollywood talent guilds to work with us to eliminate any subversives.”128 The MPAA called for all guilds to pass a resolution stating that employees could be denied credit on a picture and compensation for their work if they were suspected of communist sympathies and had not formally cleared their names. Ultimately, the MPAA was pressuring the guilds to require loyalty oaths. Although the MPAA did not officially hold power over the guilds, this was a case of an employers’ organization compelling employees’ associations to act. In light of the citations against the Ten, it was clear that the stakes were high. In short order, the guilds acquiesced, and SWG members began vociferous, contentious debates over whether loyalty oaths should, could, or would become a fixed part of contract language.129

  By that time, the SWG was in the throes of reorganizing from the top down. The election held in November 1947 offered two slates. The “Progressive Slate” supported Sheridan Gibney for president and included I.A.L. Diamond (writer of Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, and Irma la Douce), Arthur Kober (writer of Me and My Gal), Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, and Lester Cole, a current SWG board member and one of the Hollywood Ten. They campaigned under a platform of upholding a “unified, progressive, and militant Guild” that would support the AAA, oppose the Taft-Hartley Act, and repudiate the actions of HUAC.130

  The alternate candidates, the self-proclaimed “All-Guild Slate,” was, as Leonard Spigelgass (Gypsy) described it, “a merger of innocent liberals like myself and
some very right-wing people, but more non- than anti-Communist.” The All-Guild Slate promised to “restore control to the people who would use it for the purposes for which it was intended, the protection of writers’ economic interests.”131 Rather than focus on political discussions, HUAC, or Red-baiting, the candidates argued that the key issues facing the Guild were salary raises and improvements to the minimum basic agreement. They believed that the current, more left-leaning board was using the Guild as an “organ for political propaganda” and had to be stopped.132 But they described themselves as committed to restoration, and they promoted the idea of a Guild serving solely an economic purpose. It was a campaign intended to create an image of a sanitized Guild and to absolve the SWG of all charges or hints of communist affiliation.

  The All-Guild slate won handily, and in the process the Guild redefined itself as a trade association designed to help working writers rather than a union mandated to defend all of its members, not just A-listers or Red-baiters. As described by a TSW editorial a year after the change in leadership, this iteration of the board was elected “primarily on the platform of restricting Guild activities to Guild affairs” and “pledged to do all in its power to drive politics out of the Guild.”133 In fact, the push was not so much to drive out politics as it was to drive out radical politics within the Guild. From a historical standpoint, scholars could argue that it was an utterly political move to sacrifice the Ten and turn a blind eye to the threats soon to come for other left-leaning liberals who remained in the Guild.

  Victor Navasky argues that A-list writers had a higher stake in the economic structure of Hollywood production. Thus, those at the top were most vulnerable to the pressures of HUAC.134 The voices of some A-list writers swayed a few on the Guild leadership who wavered about turning away from the Ten. That is not to say that the Guild did nothing to support members who were targeted by the Committee; however, the new leadership had simply decided to focus on protecting the majority rather than risking controversy to rescue the minority.