The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild

by Miranda J. Banks

  The Guild did offer some assistance in the form of legal aid for the Ten. Thurman Arnold, an iconoclastic antitrust lawyer and friend of screenwriter Charles Brackett, was hired to represent the Guild in an amicus curiae brief less in support of the Ten than a call for an injunction against the blacklist, which Arnold called a conspiracy. Charging the industry with collusion against employees seemed one of few options for a legal counterattack.135 And while TSW quickly changed its tone and pulled back from its liberal stance, other small publications attempted to raise their voices on behalf of the blacklisted writers. Hollywood Review and California Quarterly provided some commentary and opinion pieces critiquing the blacklist, but these journals did not have the clout or the reach of TSW, let alone the audience of an industry trade paper or big-city newspaper.

  The right-wing press berated the left-leaning writers mercilessly. In particular, William Wilkerson, the owner and publisher of the Hollywood Reporter, seized the opportunity to declare that the film industry was in crisis: theater attendance had dropped precipitously, and foreign films were threatening the livelihood of Hollywood’s industry. According to Wilkerson, everyone—except the writers—was uniting to support the cause of preserving Hollywood. His outrage toward writers was unbridled:

  SOMETHING MUST BE DONE ABOUT THESE PEOPLE! IT MUST BE DONE IMMEDIATELY! . . . Producers, directors, actors, technicians, labor—all have agreed, WITH BUT ONE DISSENTING VOTE: THE WRITER! The Molotov of our industry! . . . Either the SWG is still dominated and controlled by a Communist bloc that will gladly destroy the industry to protect the Unholy Ten and their fellow travelers since it can’t be captured for the Soviets, OR the sentiments expressed at the meeting Monday night ARE the sentiments of the Guild majority, whether that be left or right. In either case the SWG is rotten to the core.136

  The Taft-Hartley Act also placed unions and guilds in a new and increasingly more defensive position. Members of the CFA began backtracking from their earlier statements of support for the Ten. Humphrey Bogart was pressured by his studio and publicists to write an article for Photoplay called “I’m No Communist.” Fellow A-list actor John Garfield also wrote a mea culpa to fans, “I’m a Sucker for a Left Hook,” declaring that he had been duped. And then in September 1948, the editors of TSW announced that the journal would henceforth be published on a “voluntary basis,” a vague term that seemed to imply that it would continue, but perhaps not for a while. The editors claimed the reason was purely financial: they could reduce the normal cost of $2,000 per issue to $419 by employing a volunteer staff and adding advertisements and paid subscriptions. But that amount still seemed exorbitant if TSW was not to be a “live and dynamic publication.”137 The editors made an appeal to readers to contribute toward the future of the journal. Looking back, it is clear that TWS was far too progressive for its time and that many writers could not or would not support it. The next issue of TSW was its last.

  Out of a concern for diminishing funds and lost time, the Ten agreed that only two among them, Lawson and Trumbo, would stand trial in the US District Court in Washington, DC. Whatever verdict was decided in those trials would be accepted by the other eight in their cases. The trials began in April 1949, and the judge soon found Lawson and Trumbo guilty of contempt of Congress for refusing to answer the questions posed by the Committee. The remaining eight defendants went before a judge and a jury and were convicted as well. Each hearing took less than an hour. After an appellate ruling in 1949 in the Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, Lawson and Trumbo began serving one-year sentences in a federal prison in Kentucky in early June 1950. The eight began serving their same year-long sentences soon after.138 In a strange twist, J. Parnell Thomas, the HUAC chairman, joined Lardner and Cole in a federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, where he served nearly nine months of an eighteen-month sentence for conspiring to defraud the US Treasury by padding his staff payroll.

  Around this time, the executive board of the SWG passed a resolution to support a loyalty oath. Some members of the board wanted every Guild member to sign a statement of non-communist affiliation, but others pushed back. Carl Foreman, who wrote High Noon and Bridge on the River Kwai, remembered that “the fights were so bitter, and I stood out against that loyalty oath. And Spigelgass, who had been my commander when I was in his regiment during the war, begged me, crying, not to vote against the loyalty oath. ‘It’ll ruin you,’ he said to me; ‘you’re throwing your career away.’”139 Ultimately, all of the members of the board signed the oath, which stated:

  BE IT RESOLVED that we, members of the Board of the Screen Writers Guild, affirm our anti-Communist position and voluntarily have signed the following oath:

  “I AM NOT A MEMBER OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY NOR AFFILIATED WITH SUCH PARTY, AND I DO NOT BELIEVE IN, AND I AM NOT A MEMBER OF, NOR DO I SUPPORT ANY ORGANIZATION THAT BELIEVES OR TEACHES THE OVERTHROW OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT BY FORCE.”

  AND BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that, deep in the conviction that the Guild is nonpolitical and a professional organization, we will resist any motion or efforts to impose on the Guild’s general membership any loyalty oaths not required by law.140

  The odd language of this statement reveals the conflicted opinions of the board members. Though they describe the Guild as a “nonpolitical” organization, the statement is political. They signed it voluntarily, and yet there is a clear sense that they were concerned about outside persuasion or force that might impose a loyalty oath on SWG members. This resolution became part of the Guild’s constitution in 1951 and remained in effect until 1973. Thus, by agreeing to the MPAA’s loyalty requests, the Guild effectively aided in the institution and enforcement of the blacklist.

  During the court challenge to HUAC, there was a reprieve in Committee hearings for others in Hollywood who had been labeled radicals or subversives. The studios turned their attention to the new realities of vertical deregulation under the Supreme Court’s Paramount Consent Decree, which called for the divestment of theater chains from studios’ holdings. Then, in 1951, with the Ten still imprisoned, HUAC initiated a second wave of hearings in Hollywood and later subpoenaed Hollywood writers to testify before the Committee in Washington. This time, more than a hundred Hollywood professionals (writers, actors, and directors, among others) were called. The Red-baiting began anew and with even greater fervor. At the SWG, the All-Guild board members were inclined to duck and ignore loudmouthed members on the right and the left.

  In fact, both election slates had endorsed Sheridan Gibney for president, believing him to be nonpartisan and a figure who might unite the organization. However, Gibney detested the subpoenaed writers. Nearly thirty years later, he was still incensed: “The Guild almost was destroyed by the Communist-minded members. . . . [T]hey had done the Guild a tremendous disservice by bringing about this situation where the Guild and the Communist Party were identified in the form of dual membership and there was never any attempt on the part of these people to preserve or protect the Guild as an organization for representing writers with a nonpolitical base.”141 Gibney and others felt that some of the Guild’s left-leaning members had misused their organization as an instrument for political causes. To Gibney, this selfish activity seemed like a betrayal of the organization he had been elected to lead.

  IMAGE 14 Carl Foreman at HUAC hearings, c. 1951. High Noon was in the midst of production when Foreman was called to testify.

  Writers Guild Foundation Archive, Shavelson-Webb Library, Los Angeles

  The blacklist proper consisted of individuals whom the government deemed to be under suspicion, disfavor, or attack, and who the studios, in turn, unofficially dictated should not be allowed to work in Hollywood. A HUAC subpoena alone could mean the end of studio employment. Paul Jarrico knew that he had been blacklisted the morning he arrived at RKO and studio security stopped him from passing through the studio gates. The previous day Jarrico had received a subpoena at his home, delivered by a US marshal who happened to be accompanied by a throng of news
reporters.142 His writing partner and friend Richard Collins, who wrote Song of Russia and had been a member of the Communist Party, had named Jarrico among twenty-six individuals he alleged were communists.

  Individuals who were blacklisted had no idea how long their exile might last, nor could they guess the extent to which a HUAC subpoena would destroy their careers.143 While there was no official list of names, several organizations cropped up offering Hollywood and Congress their “assistance” in rooting out the enemy. With America’s entrance into the Korean War in 1950 and Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy’s declaration that 205 communists were currently working in the State Department, the scourge of communism weighed heavily on Americans’ hearts and minds.

  By 1950, the talent guilds had suspended any remaining objections to the existence of the blacklist, and the guilds’ leaders were fully cooperating with HUAC’s agenda. The blustery air of the Cold War became the new reality, not just in Hollywood but throughout the country. The talent guilds began to insist that all members provide a statement of non-communist affiliation.144 The SWG agreed that studios could, without awaiting trial, remove any blacklisted writer’s name from the credits of a film. Writers had worked tirelessly in the previous decade to secure the power to determine their credits in films but now relinquished this right without much resistance. Even having one’s name attached to a project that was retroactively deemed suspect—most notably, films such as Mission to Moscow and Crossfire—could end a career. Walter Bernstein, who was blacklisted during the 1950s, explains the significance of a writer’s reputation: “It was all about your name. . . . They wanted your name. When they were asking you to give the names of people who were in the Communist Party, they already had all those names, they didn’t need it from you particularly. They wanted to be able to say, look he gave his name to us. Essentially, you were collaborating. And they could say, look [Elia] Kazan is one of us. Budd Schulberg is one of us. They cooperated.”145 It was now a liability for a writer even to be in the membership ranks of a suspect labor organization.

  Having one’s name exposed and ending up on the blacklist was a cataclysmic event in people’s lives. In an interview with historian Howard Suber, Joan Scott sadly recalled what it felt like to work in Hollywood during this time: “This is a subpoena commanding me to appear before the Committee. It’s pink and still gives me chills to look at it. When Adrian and I were married, we talked about having our subpoenas framed. We grew up in a time when a very appropriate wedding gift was his and hers bath towels and we thought that we’d have our subpoenas framed side by side saying his and hers. Unfortunately, we were never in that kind of freewheeling position to do that.”146 Adrian and Joan Scott would otherwise have been at the prime of their careers—a young, talented couple, newly married—but instead struggled to make a life for themselves and worked under pseudonyms (both wrote a number of episodes of Lassie). Some writers, like Schulberg and Kazan, felt it was their patriotic duty to expose others. Schulberg concluded that he had no choice: “It’s not easy to do. My own feeling was that while I didn’t like the Committee being so right-wing, I didn’t think it was healthy having a secret organization trying to control the Writers Guild. I felt it was wrong and undermining [to] democracy.”147 Schulberg, like Gibney, felt that leftist partisans within the Guild were destroying their community and, on a larger level, jeopardizing America’s democracy.

  There was another incentive to name names. Guild members who acknowledged previous communist affiliation and gave the Committee the names of other writers were permitted by HUAC to continue to work. In 1952, soon after his success with A Streetcar Named Desire, director Elia Kazan, a previous member of the American Communist Party in New York, identified Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, Clifford Odets (a playwright and screenwriter of Sweet Smell of Success), and others to the Committee. Hammett had already served time in federal prison for contempt of court in connection with his leadership of a “subversive” civil rights organization; he testified about his own activities before HUAC in 1953 but refused to cooperate with his interrogators and was blacklisted. Hammett never published again. Hellman, a celebrated playwright and screenwriter, refused to testify before HUAC in 1952, declaring, “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.” It took her eight years to resurrect her career; she returned to writing plays, but never again wrote for film.

  The list of celebrated writers who were censured is staggering. Sidney Buchman, who wrote Mr. Smith Goes to Washington with conservative anticommunist writer Lewis R. Foster, was cited for contempt of Congress after he refused to supply HUAC with names of communists. The Committee fined him $150 and gave him a year’s suspended sentence, and he found his career halted by the blacklist for ten years. In 1952, Gibney was removed from his office and blacklisted for suspected subversive writing.148 Some members of the SWG, like Borden Chase, who scripted Red River and Winchester ’73, called on the Guild board to demand that individuals who agreed to testify before HUAC be cleared from all past deeds.149 Nevertheless, access to the industry was blocked for all blacklisted employees, and it would remain so for over a decade.

  In Naming Names, Victor Navasky assessed the wider damage: “Ultimately it was the informer’s contribution to spoil the possibility of trust and thereby the sense of community. People in Hollywood lost not only their myths (of the happy ending, among others), their careers, possessions, place, status, and space, but also their sense of self. . . . And for many the trauma came as much in reaction to being disconnected from a familiar network of unspoken understandings as from any job or other loss suffered directly as a result of being called a Communist or being up on a list.”150 This period of inquisition, stigmatization, and exile devastated Hollywood artisans, craftspeople, and their families’ sense of trust in the industry and in their community. The collective memory of the industry, the guilds, and their members would be forever scarred by the choices people made during these years.

  Beyond the blacklist, so-called graylists captured the names of another three hundred individuals, who were smeared in publications and pamphlets like Red Channels, Alert, and Counterattack. Red Channels was a privately distributed pamphlet that focused on suspected communists within American broadcasting. Larry Markes, who later wrote for The Dean Martin Comedy Hour, explained why some Americans found the idea of communist-affiliated radio and television writers more insidious than film writers with checkered pasts: “The networks were very pure and upstanding guys who said, ‘Look, it’s one thing to have a commie write a movie because you don’t have to go and see that movie. . . . But we’re coming into these people’s houses with these communistic viewpoints and that’s why they were blacklisted, because we’re coming right into their living rooms, we’re mind-washing the children.’”151

  The adoption of signed anticommunist oaths became the industry standard not only in film but also in the newly devised television contracts. Producers would deny screen credit to all subpoened writers who refused to testify before HUAC, or to any writer who falsely signed an oath denying communist affiliations. And, in keeping with the decisions of other talent guilds’ leadership, the SWG board authorized its president to disclose private union records to HUAC.152

  In 1952, Ring Lardner Jr. resigned his membership after what he called the Jarrico Resolution, when the SWG board agreed to permit the staunchly rightwing Howard Hughes to remove Paul Jarrico’s name from the film The Las Vegas Story. Mary McCall Jr., then president of the SWG, tried to prevent the erasure and consequently endured an admonishment by HUAC herself. Lardner accused the board of assisting in the blacklisting of writers. Consequently, he declared, the SWG no longer represented him, and he had no reason to pay dues. Though he continued writing under various pseudonyms and ultimately under his own name again, Lardner did not rejoin the Guild until the early 1960s.153

  By 1954, when HUAC finally ceased its long inquiry into the entertainment industry, more than 320 film and television professional
s had been censured. Many writers who had been blacklisted resigned from the SWG or were removed from Guild membership for nonpayment of dues. A vast number of other writers just kept their heads down and tried to stay out of the crossfire. Many of them years later said in interviews that they wished they had done more—or even done something at all.

  Writing Under the Blacklist

  The public is not to be protected from my work, however beguiling and subversive it may be. The public is only to be protected from my name.

  —Paul Jarrico, quoted in Dick Vosburgh, “Paul Jarrico: Obituary,” The Independent [UK], 5 November 1997

  By the early 1950s, the entire American film industry was undergoing a radical metamorphosis. The studio system was dying. On a global scale, currency freezes in all of the major European markets (Great Britain, France, Germany, and Italy) locked up American finances, and the studios had to search for new ways not only to make money internationally but also to spend it. On a national scale, the Supreme Court’s Paramount Consent Decree forced the studios to divest their theater chains; consequently, they were no longer assured distribution for all the films they produced. At the same time, the staggering success of early commercial television was keeping more viewers at home.

  With the marketplace for cinema shrinking, the blacklist became a means for the studios to downsize. Jon Lewis argues that the blacklist bailed out the studios at a moment of crisis:

  The blacklist was a first step in a larger transformation of the film industry from its roots in entrepreneurial capital to a more corporatist, conglomerate mode. Impending deregulation—and what can only be characterized as industry-wide panic in response—prompted change that the Red Scare made not only possible but easy. In the final analysis, the blacklist did not save America from films promoting Communism, liberalism, or humanitarianism. Instead, it encouraged studio owners to develop and adopt a corporate model more suited to a future new Hollywood, one in which, despite market deregulation and stricter self-regulation of film content, studio owners would maintain profitability and control.154