The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild

by Miranda J. Banks

  A third event that November demonstrated that even Guild members had changed their attitudes about what it meant to be a member: the SWG elected a new “All Guild” slate of candidates to its board. This new, all-but-leftist board was more concerned with saving the Guild’s reputation than protecting the rights of individual members. For example, hardboiled novelist and Guild member James M. Cain, who had scripted Stand Up and Fight, wrote to the executive board to demand that the Guild not spend money helping the Ten. If they were communists, which he believed they were, then “they are a job for the Communist Party”; if they were not, the writers should simply say so, and they would need no legal support. But “in neither event,” Cain wrote, “as this now stands, is Guild action necessary, or desirable.”17

  The underlying question in much of this drama was whether the SWG was, at its core, a political organization. Should the Guild as a whole express a political agenda, and if so, what should that agenda be? Had it formerly been run by a leftist leadership that was furthering a series of unknown political schemes? Of course, the debate about the meaning and purpose of the Guild had begun at its very inception. World War II put a hold on many of these disputes, but in the final year of the war through the aftermath of the Waldorf Declaration, the debate became heated and heightened to a level never seen before in the industry. SWG members were vigorously disputing the purpose and political power of their Guild—both within the industry and beyond. Much of this rancor spilled out on the pages of The Screen Writer.

  During these critical years, from the end of World War II to the HUAC hearings, the board of directors of the SWG undertook an extraordinary creative, intellectual, and political endeavor: the publication of its own professional journal. The first issue of The Screen Writer (TSW) appeared in June 1945 and the last in October 1948. This short-lived monthly publication presented a diversity of pieces by screenwriters across genres, across media (radio, television, theater), and even across oceans. The Screen Writer also offered space for directors, cinematographers, animators, and critics to expound on their ideas regarding narrative and story. In the journal’s editorials, articles, and letters to the editor, a range of members debated key issues, which at their core questioned the overarching purpose and mission of the Guild. Here, writers wrote for one another. But quickly, an audience of Hollywood insiders—as well as creative writers (novelists, critics, journalists, playwrights, and composers)—began to take notice and sometimes to contributed their thoughts. The journal’s articles, commentary, and creative writing were celebrated by some in the industry and loathed by others.

  At the beginning of the 1940s, writers mobilized as part of the war effort. However, when they returned from fulfilling their patriotic duty, many faced a tough battle getting their jobs back. Further complicating matters was the great turmoil stirring in Hollywood: the Conference of Studio Unions strikes. The Screen Writer provided a space for the discussion of labor issues, the rising tide of international cinema production, creative labor in and beyond Hollywood, questions of authorship, and the growing anticommunist sentiment. In the shadow of the Waldorf Declaration, however, writers were far less willing to speak out, and the journal ended its run in 1948.

  The Screen Writer was a prestigious enterprise, but also a threatening one. It gave screenwriters a platform within the industry heretofore unavailable to them; by publishing their own journal, they controlled one voice in the larger industry discourse. The articles and essays offered not just thoughtful accounts of the contemporary state of the industry, but also suggestions for radical reforms, unpleasant pictures of the studios and their leaders, and rallying cries to other creative professionals to consider the screenwriters’ point of view. The pages presented screenwriters as intelligent, professional, and creative. But they could also appear to be proud, demanding, ambitious, and dangerous. Because these ideas were put forth in print, they proved particularly damning to many contributors who were later blacklisted, including two of its editors, Dalton Trumbo and Gordon Kahn (writer of Song of Nevada). While contemporary accounts of the blacklist era tend to focus on the HUAC hearings, those proceedings are only part of the story. To understand the Hollywood blacklist, it is critical first to see how writers landed at the center of the controversy. The residual effect of this period redefined the nature of media authorship and the role of the Writers Guild.

  This chapter explores the demise of The Screen Writer and the choices the Guild made about how to respond to the attacks against its members. It will track the story through the end of the blacklist to explore what writers and the Guild learned from the ordeal, as well as how the memory of the blacklist is evident in some of the actions and initiatives of the Guild as it exists today.

  World War II and the Mobilization of Screenwriters

  With a minimum basic agreement (MBA) in place between the Screen Writers Guild and the studios, writers felt some sense of professional security even when the nation was going to war. Decades later, William Ludwig recalled how the studio heads’ treatment of writers began to change: “I think they matured a little in their approach to writers. They still referred to us—regardless of age or number of credits or anything of that sort—as ‘the boys.’ There was no way you could avoid that. As a matter of fact they still do. But they had begun to treat us a little differently.”18 Generally during the mid-1940s, if contract writers asked not to be put on a particular assignment, producers simply offered up another assignment—their contracts were still secure. It seemed as if the terrible days of anti-union attacks had receded, at least for a while.

  Throughout Hollywood, as in the rest of the United States, conversations about the war and the nature of the enemy were increasingly common. While right-wing organizations warned about the threat of communism before the war began, concerns about the rise of Nazism took center stage for most Americans. By the time of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in 1939, socialist-minded workers in Hollywood were seen as particularly threatening; in reality, many Hollywood artists with liberal leanings were equally distressed by this accord between communists and fascists. It was only after Pearl Harbor, when Germany declared war on the United States, that Americans, including reactionaries in Hollywood, settled on Germany as the nation’s worst enemy. Nazism, rather than communism, was now the focus of their attention.19 Director John Ford decried the investigation into communist subversion and suggested the bigger threat was Nazism: “May I express my whole-hearted desire to cooperate to the utmost of my ability with the Hollywood anti-Nazi League? If this be Communism, count me in.”20 Only the most conservative of politicians and citizens were still more concerned about Reds. Still, the thought of any enemy who could operate undetected continued to unsettle many American citizens.

  Once the United States entered World War II, many Hollywood employees went straight into action, joining the ranks of the armed services or making films to aid the war effort. The transition was almost fluid. As Nancy Lynn Schwartz contends, “There was probably no place in the country as overwhelmingly affected by the war as Hollywood, and as little inconvenienced by it.”21 After the prosperity of 1939 that peaked with Gone with the Wind, the industry had fallen into a slump. Box office sales were down by a third, foreign markets were weak, and the practice of block booking (selling films to theaters only in groups) was starting to be banned.22 Many of the studios already had war films in production, and now they were set to be released. Even better for Hollywood, film attendance rose at local movie houses around the nation as gas rationing made leisure travel difficult. Everyone still at home was going to the movies.

  Classical Hollywood filmmaking was at its finest in 1941: the studios premiered How Green Was My Valley, The Lady Eve, The Maltese Falcon, Dumbo, Sullivan’s Travels, and Citizen Kane. Many people went to the theaters not just to escape but also to get in touch; civilians were eager to see footage from the front lines, which was accessible to them only through newsreels. The American film industry was still producing movies at an
impressive rate, especially in relation to countries where the war had crippled or entirely suspended production of features. Oddly, as screenwriter Marc Norman points out in his history of screenwriting, World War II brought a cease-fire to some of Hollywood’s infighting.23 From the moguls to the above-the-line creatives and the below-the-line craftspeople, virtually everyone in Hollywood was ready and willing to participate in the war effort.

  SWG members were active both as soldiers overseas—almost 300 deployed to active service during the war years—and as participants in the Hollywood Writers Mobilization (HWM).24 The HWM, like its East Coast counterpart, the Writers War Board, served the American government by writing informational materials, public service documentation, advertising, and agitprop for the Office of War Information (OWI) and the Office of Civilian Defense.25 Many celebrated writers, including Samson Raphaelson, Pearl S. Buck (author of The Good Earth), Howard Estabrook, Arch Oboler (writer of Escape), Budd Schulberg (writer of On the Waterfront and A Face in the Crowd), and Talbot Jennings (writer of Mutiny on the Bounty), participated in the Free World Radio, a series of nineteen half-hour radio plays written in conjunction with the OWI. Over the course of the war years, 3,500 writers—novelists, radio writers, cartoonists, publicists, journalists, and screenwriters—joined the HWM.26 In 1943, the SWG calculated that it had packaged 9,507 programs—each of which included one feature, one or two short subjects, and a newsreel—to be screened on the front lines. The shorts alone tallied 13,027.27 By October 1944, the HWM had written scripts for 143 shorts, trailers, and documentaries for various federal agencies, as well as 839 radio scripts and spot announcements. Participants crafted 784 sketches for live United Service Organization (USO) shows and staged Department of Defense entertainment events. By 1944, as the SWG’s records indicate, its members had provided the OWI, the US armed forces, government agencies (such as the Treasury Department), and American branches of charities like the Red Cross with 861 speeches, 19 brochures, 96 feature articles, 52 songs, and 315 posters and slogans.28 Guild members even offered creative writing workshops to returning veterans (something the Writers Guild Foundation still offers today).29

  In order to provide a consistent voice for these materials, writers were instructed on best practices through a Manual for Writers that was created by the SWG and the OWI. The goal, particularly for screenwriters speaking to international audiences, was to clarify for viewers “those ideas and ideals we are fighting for” and also to present those American values in such a way “that they are kept continually fresh and interesting to the public.”30 In the chapter entitled “Aspects of the Enemy Which Need Dramatization,” the manual instructs writers to keep in mind that the enemy may be lurking at home as well as abroad, and that both battlefronts are crucial to winning the support of Americans and their allies. The enemy at home might be someone who “seeks to shortchange the American people so that they fail to receive their full rights as guaranteed by the Constitution.”31 Consequently, any form of racial discrimination or religious intolerance should be treated as—and should be exposed to the public as—a manifestation of fascism.

  Because films were a primary form of entertainment for the troops, the Manual reminds writers of their responsibility to serve and to represent the soldier as “a plain guy with a terrific problem”: “You can’t talk at him; you must talk with him.”32 Didactic language would fail. Writers should strive both to educate and to entertain. The Manual encourages writers to know and to explore as characters the soldier, the enemy, and the family at home. It also speaks to the way that women are portrayed in films: “Show women on the job . . . their lives readjusted to the war. American women are finding new expression in jobs they have assumed. Ways and means must be found of interpreting this new role and what it means to the American people. Women are not going to return ‘en masse’ to the kitchen, as soon as the war is over; many of them are going to remain on their jobs. These new attitudes must be articulated in order that they be understood.”33

  The goal for the OWI was to provide viewers with enough information to decide for themselves who the villains and the heroes were—or rather, to decide that the heroes were Americans and their allies and that the enemies were the Axis and anyone who supported fascism. The Chinese and the Russians were to be treated as new neighbors.34 Alvah Bessie observed that the quality of Hollywood films improved during this period precisely because multiple voices had to be included in the narrative. “For the first time, Negroes were presented in a responsible and decent light, trade unions were shown for the first time in John Howard Lawson’s Action in the North Atlantic, films began portraying women with some decency, not just as sexual objects, because women were working in war factories.”35

  The idea behind the mobilization was to pool writers to support the war effort, and the values upheld in the Manual are a combination of those enumerated by government offices and President Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms.36 The focus should always be on Americans taking actions that will help win the war overseas. Harold Medford, writer of Berlin Express, listed some of the opportunities for writers: for example, they could work on films such as Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series, or they could collaborate with editors to create documentaries from a mass of unedited raw material. The writer, according to Medford, “works with celluloid as much as with pencil and paper. The frames of stock film are his dialogue, his descriptive words, his phrases. . . . That is the break war film writers get. Their basic material being life itself, it is at once unimpeachable and matchless.”37

  IMAGE 12 Draft of the Manual for Writers, sent to Robert Riskin, chief of the Bureau of Motion Pictures, Office of War Information, Overseas Division, 1944.

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

  For some observers like Medford, writing was a process of interpretation and translation of reality to reflect the human experience onscreen. Looking back at this era from 2002, blacklisted writer Bernard Gordon, who scripted Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, defended the screenplays created by more liberal writers during this period. Rather than being influenced by communism, they promoted humanist values and followed some of the ideals set out by the HWM:

  Whatever our mistakes and shortcomings, we were people who had a keen sense of what was wrong in the world in terms of racism, poverty, and war. We quite naturally brought this kind of concern for the human condition to our writing and filmmaking. Of course, speaking up for the rights of the oppressed, for the right of workers to organize, against the evils of unnecessary poverty and for peace and for a world not organized solely in the interests of multinational corporations was considered then, and is considered now, a threat to domestic security. . . . This may be the role of troublemaking dissenters.38

  Central to these conversations about best practices during the war effort was a demand for verisimilitude and heartfelt storytelling that captured the real-life drama in a way that spoke to soldiers, the American people, and even global audiences. Paul Jarrico said of films like Song of Russia, a tribute to the Russian war effort that he co-wrote, “All the studios made movies like that. . . . [W]e were writing under orders of the Office of Wartime Propaganda [the OWI]. Louis B. Mayer never let anything he thought was Russian propaganda into his movies. We even had to take out the word ‘community,’ because he felt it sounded too much like ‘Communism.’”39 Created as propaganda for the American war effort, Song of Russia was later condemned by HUAC as communist propaganda. Michael Kanin, writer of Woman of the Year, recalled that “those who were suspected of being Communists were among the hardest and most dedicated workers in all war effort causes.”40 Philip Dunne suggested that perhaps the term “mobilization” came back to haunt some writers as having a sinister, communist ring to it.41

  Writers’ interest in defining their role and supporting the liberal causes of freedom and democracy did at times go beyond their studio work and into the realm of education and outreach. Write
rs were eager to discuss what they had learned and to share information. Following the first American Writers Congress in 1941 on the craft of writing and the social function of writers, those involved in the Hollywood Writers Mobilization suggested a second congress to bridge the gap between writers and educators and to examine the possibilities of writing in the postwar era. In 1943, 1,500 writers and scholars gathered on the Los Angeles campus of the University of California to hear one hundred papers on the war effort and the ways that writers could provide guidance to audiences, clarifying the stakes of World War II and setting the terms for a future peace. Topics ranged from a talk on “The Responsibility of the Industry” by Darryl Zanuck, to “The Exiled Writer in Relation to His Homeland” by novelist Thomas Mann, to “The Director’s Point of View” by Edward Dmytryk, to “The Function of the Radio Dramatist” by Arch Oboler.42 The event and the discussions it generated were progressive; the writers involved saw it as an opportunity to galvanize support for the war.

  But for some in the studio front offices and for politicians like Jack Tenney, a Republican state senator from California who already saw Red whenever he looked at Hollywood writers, the conference came to represent an example of dangerous political behavior and provided evidence of communist infiltration in the motion picture industry.43 Tenney and his California Senate Factfinding Subcommittee on Un-American Activities (known as the Tenney Committee) had been ready to attack Hollywood liberals for a number of years. Once the war was over, the time seemed ripe to investigate the industry’s war efforts and, specifically, the Hollywood Writers Mobilization.