Hollywood Left

HOLLYWOOD LEFT. The organized Left in the Hollywood motion picture industry enjoyed a brief existence (from 1936 to 1949) and a limited influence. It centered around the three hundred or so studio employees who belonged to the Communist Party.

Although many Communists were active in organizing guilds and unions, they were not the sole source of trade union militancy. The two most militant labor organizations, the Screen Writers Guild (SWG), organized in 1933, and the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), established in 1941, were organized by non-Communists, as was the more cautious Screen Actors Guild (SAG). However, from the formation of the SWG until the later 1940s, Communists were among the most active and the most willing to take the chance of losing jobs for taking a strong pro-union stand. A Communist, Jeff Kibre, meanwhile masterminded the ultimately unsuccessful effort to organize a Congress of Industrial Organizations-affiliated studio union movement between 1937 and 1939. Communists led less prestigious but closely related unionization projects, such as the Radio Writers Guild and the Screen Readers Guild (that is, studio assistants who provided summaries that executives used to make decisions on which scripts to produce).

Militancy or activism began in Hollywood in 1933, coincident with the New Deal. The most militant talent guild, the SWG, was organized in February, and later that year Lou Goldblatt began to organize the Motion Picture Workers Industrial Union (Association of Motion Picture Employees), or MPWIU, under the auspices of the Communist Trade Union Unity League.

The MPWIU lasted one year, recruiting about one thousand members and issuing a publication, the Motion Picture Worker. In its second number, dated 1 August 1934, it called on studio workers to adopt industrial union tactics, form industrial unions, and take “control of their unions out of the hands of the misleading bureaucratic fakers and [place] it where it should be—with the ‘rank and file’ and rank-and-file committees.” However, before the MPWIU had attracted enough members and strength to test the gangster-dominated, American Federation of Labor-affiliated International Association of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) and the studios, the Trade Union Unity League was dissolved, in March 1935.

Meanwhile, Socialist Upton Sinclair’s 1934 campaign for the governorship of California, the studios’ refusal to recognize the SWG, the continued influx of writers from New York with backgrounds in guilds and left-wing theaters, and the arrival of refugees from Europe noticeably increased the radical temperament in Hollywood. The Communist Party’s interest in writers, especially successful writers, had also heightened. In May 1935 a call for a national writers’ congress was issued. Although only two screenwriters signed the call, early the following year the Communist Party’s “cultural commissar,” V. J. Jerome, and an experienced organizer, Stanley Lawrence, journeyed to Hollywood. They laid the foundations for the Hollywood pattern of organizing by talent branches (writers, directors, actors).

The Communist Party support for black rights, unskilled and semiskilled workers, and women, its antifascism, its connection with what seemed to be the one progressive country in a world saddled with a massive economic depression and collapsing democracies, and its disciplined organization convinced many screenwriters that Communism represented the best vehicle for defending democratic values in the United States. Party hierarchs believed that Hollywood offered skilled writers and speakers and money for party-backed causes.

Between 1936 and 1946, approximately three hundred movie studio employees joined the Communist Party (about one percent of the work force). They joined for various reasons and stayed for varying lengths of time. Screenwriters predominated (145); there were about sixty actors, twenty directors and producers, and somewhere between fifty and a hundred backlot, sound stage, or front-office workers.

Although they could not make openly left-wing films, Communists contributed to film genres across the board, melodrama to comedy, Westerns to “family features.” It surely helped that several of the most famed writers in the US—playwrights Donald Ogden Stewart and Lillian Hellman, along with Oscar-winning screenwriters Ring Lardner, Jr., and Dalton Trumbo—were among them. Nor that future art film notables admired across the world—Joseph Losey and Jules Dassin—had their roots here. Nor that future television writers, for You Are There and Robin Hood, including Lardner, Alfred Levitt, Frank Tarloff and Abraham Lincoln Polonsky—were blacklisted but later vindicated through their successes.

A handful scripted or co-scripted some of the most lauded films of the day, from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and The Philadelphia Story, Lassie Come Home to Hopalong Cassidy and Roy Rogers oaters. More narrowly, in the years after the Second World War, another related handful of Communist writers and directors did much to create the “noir” film, a disillusioned look at American society. Toward the end of their prestige in Hollywood and the onset of the Blacklist, Communist writers and directors turned to the social themes of minorities and returning veterans. Perhaps High Noon (scripted by Carl Foreman) with its mixture of racial and social sub-themes treating a town that did not want to be “saved” by or for virtue, might be said to have closed out the work that the Left had been allowed to do. On the side, the collaboration of leftist intellectuals with technical workers, realized briefly in the pages of the Hollywood Quarterly, pointed toward an industrial democracy that could not be achieved. Meanwhile, the directly political influence of Hollywood Communists occurred in union and guild organizing, support for antifascism, and the election of progressive candidates to public office.

Communists were active in the fight to gain recognition for the SWG, they helped organize other guilds, they were the core elements in the struggle to supplant the gangsters who dominated the IATSE and restructure the federation on a democratic basis, they aided the effort to organize agricultural workers, and they helped the CSU in its major postwar strikes.

The single Communist-initiated trade union effort began in the spring of 1937. Jeff Kibre, a miniature-props worker, member of IATSE Local 37, and a Communist, with a small group of dissidents, launched a campaign to transform the IATSE. Kibre received advice and a meager amount of money from the leaders of the organizing effort of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in California (Harry Bridges, Goldblatt, and Philip Connelly), and the Communist Party made him a “protected member,” freeing him from usual Party duties and attendance, but provided very little else.

Although Kibre would prove endlessly imaginative and undauntingly optimistic in his two-year effort, he failed to find a means to break through the craft consciousness of studio workers or counter the power and ruthlessness of the IATSE-studio combination. When his main weapon, an unfair labor practice complaint filed with the National Labor Relations Board, bogged down in the board’s efforts to achieve a settlement, and the IATSE had brought the studio labor situation to the verge of chaos, Kibre filed for a representation election. The IATSE, with open studio backing and promises of a wage raise if it won, ran a vicious Red-baiting campaign, winning 4,460 to 1,967.

Kibre did not enjoy the support of Communists in other parts of the country or in Hollywood. The other movie-industry Communists were, for the most part, caught up in their own guild recognition battles, fighting, in the case of the screenwriters, a studio-created rival union and an industry blacklist. In addition, the Communist Party did not make an effort to unite its union-building forces in Hollywood or to mobilize its supporters in the projectionist branches of the IATSE. Communist leaders seemed content with the galaxy of names that could be mobilized behind Party-supported campaigns and the amount of dollars flowing from the movie industry to those campaigns. During the height of the Popular Front era, 1936–1939, the members of the Hollywood branches contributed more to (people’s front) causes than any other geographical group.

A host of Popular Front organizations sprung up in Hollywood. The largest and most effective were the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, the Motion Picture Artists Committee, and the Motion Picture Democratic Committee. Communists provided much of their organizational backbone. They did not dominate them, but they had a strong influence over them when, and only when, Communist and non-Communist policies coincided. When they did not, as happened in the wake of the non-aggression treaty signed by Germany and the Soviet Union in August 1939, the organizations splintered.

Although there was not a mass exodus from the Communist Party in September 1939, when the party line changed from antifascism to anti-imperialism and anti-war, Communists were isolated and their Popular Front groups became powerless rumps. The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 altered the situation and a wartime popular front of left-wing forces was constructed. The Hollywood Left dove into the cause of victory, but not to the exclusion of its prewar beliefs. Communists were very active in the efforts to stanch the racism generated by the Sleepy Lagoon case and the Zoot Suit riots, both of which involved Mexican Americans. A small number wrote scripts for radio plays, critically examining the nature of the peace that was coming; a larger number became active in the various electoral organizations formed by “progressives” to continue the New Deal and block the conservative political trend building since the election of 1938; and almost all supported, in guild meetings and on the picket lines, the CSU strikes that erupted between 1945 and 1946.

The defeat of the CSU coincided with the onset of the domestic Cold War, which would strike Hollywood first and hardest. A coalition of the militant Right (the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals), the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the IATSE, and, after a short resistance, the producers’ associations combined to destroy the organized Left in Hollywood. The Taft-Hartley Act and the blacklist effectively removed radicals from guild and union offices and isolated unions with militant leaders, thus eliminating the Left’s main organizational base in Hollywood.

Buhle, Paul and Dave Wagner. A Very Dangerous Citizen: Abraham Lincoln Polonsky and the Hollywood Left. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Buhle, Paul and Dave Wagner. Hide in Plain Sight: the Hollywood Blacklistees in Film and Television, 1950-2002. New York: Palgrave/MacMillan, 2003.

Buhle, Paul and Dave Wagner. Radical Hollywood. The Untold Story Behind America’s Favorite Movies. New York: the New Press, 2002.

Ceplair, Larry, and Steven Englund. The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1980.

McGilligan, Patrick and Paul Buhle, eds., Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.