The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild by Miranda J. Banks Read Free Book Online Page A

the Writers Guild Oral History Project, 1978
    The real-life spectacle and legal theatrics of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, filmed in the hallowed halls of Congress in October 1947, read like an A-lister’s screenplay. But the ending would prove too depressing a scenario for a Hollywood silver screen drama. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, American conservatives on the political right attacked Hollywood Reds, studios fired scores of writers (among other employees), and—perhaps most painful of all—writers betrayed other writers. Without question, this era was the most damaging in the history of the writers and their union, and the story of faithlessness and shame continues to haunt the Guild to this day.
    First, Washington politicians placed Hollywood at the center of a campaign to rid American cultural institutions of any hint of communism. Then ten individuals—eight of them writers—were tried, convicted, and jailed for contempt of court. Studio moguls and Guild members crusaded against their peers as fear-mongering and anxiety over reprisal forced Hollywood’s practitioners to take sides. Thus began a long, drawn-out period of studio executives and employees naming names and destroying hundreds of their fellow employees’ careers. Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund consider the period from 1947 to 1953 the most shameful time in the SWG’s history: “The Guild had been weak in the past, but the price of its weakness was never so high nor exacted so completely from its own membership.” 1
    In May 1947, key members of House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC or “the Committee”) boarded a plane to Los Angeles, bound for a strategy session with studio heads. Eric Johnston, then president of the Motion Picture Association of American (MPAA), greeted HUAC’s new chairman, J. Parnell Thomas (Republican of New Jersey), and promised full cooperation. Johnston even went so far as to suggest to studio heads that MPAA members terminate employment for any worker “proven” to be a communist, but the executives, though willing to work with the Committee, struck down this proposal. Still, members of HUAC visited each of the studio heads, leaning on them to assist the Committee. Just before the hearings began, Ronald Reagan, then president of SAG, declared his organization’s full willingness to cooperate with HUAC. 2 He would subsequently be revealed to have been an informant for the FBI since 1943.
    The Committee chair called one big-name witness after another as a phalanx of newsreel cameras captured the Hollywood pageant—produced and directed on this occasion by Washington politicians on location in opulent hotel rooms. Appearing in this drama were studio heads Jack Warner, Louis B. Mayer, and Walt Disney, actors Ronald Reagan, Robert Montgomery (the past head of SAG), Adolphe Menjou, Robert Taylor, and Gary Cooper. Their testimony helped the Committee members narrow the focus of their attack. Assessing the inquiry in Los Angeles, Thomas flatly declared to the press: “Ninety percent of Communist infiltration in Hollywood is to be found among screenwriters.” 3 Two screenwriters, James K. McGuinness and Rupert Hughes, gladly volunteered information as so-called friendly witnesses. Notably, both men a decade earlier had served as leaders of the reactionary Screen Playwrights group. These two, along with screenwriter Howard Emmett Rogers, were members of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPAPAI), a right-wing organization of high-profile film industry conservatives based, like the Screen Playwrights, at MGM. Philip Dunne later argued, “In a way . . . the Committee hearings were offshoots of the battle between the Screen Writers Guild and the Screen Playwrights. . . . It was being fought on a new field now. They called in the Congress of the United States on their side.” 4 Hughes declared that the Guild he had once helped create (meaning the social