Hollywood Writers Mobilization and the School for Writers

HOLLYWOOD WRITERS MOBILIZATION AND THE SCHOOL FOR WRITERS. The League of American Writers, a prestigious Popular Front entity established by the Congress of American Writers, and with major public events during the second half of the 1930s, effectively dissolved after the announcement of the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939. Its Hollywood section, however, turned out to be more than a lively ghost. It managed only a single public event, but its influence on individual screen writers, albeit indirect, remained until at least the Hollywood Blacklist and arguably, for decades after.

The final phase of the LAW had origins as unique as Hollywood itself. The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League (HANL) had, for its few years of existence, been a major source of publicity and mobilization for antifascist sentiment. It was also, like the Hollywood branch of the Communist Party, an important source of funding for the assorted and related causes of the Popular Front, Spanish Civil War and labor mobilization within the studios.

In 1938, John Weber, a talented Communist organizer previously uninvolved with film or cultural activities of any kind, was dispatched to Hollywood. His assigned task was to create a quiet, unofficial and almost secret “school” to encourage Marxist understanding among the budding world of young and talented screenwriters. The idea evolved, independently from Party leadership in New York or Los Angeles, into classes that actually assisted would-be screenwriters in their careers by helping them develop a wider sense of context for the sake of their writing skills. The informal school itself ended classes with the coming of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, but a tradition of sorts had been established.

The last major event of the League of American Writers proper was held in Los Angeles, in June, 1941, by coincidence shortly before the German invasion of Russia abruptly shifted the Communist Party line from isolationism to anti-fascism. The Party proper was still barely returning from a certain disgrace in liberal circles but had been strong enough in Hollywood to stage a peace mobilization while exposing some leading writers to anti-Semitic rhetoric and potential blacklisting.

Theodore Dreiser, the famed novelist, served as formal Chair of the LAW. At the dais along with Dreiser could be found Donald Ogden Stewart, hugely talented and prestigious playwright and screenwriter. Other notables solidly with the Left on hand included Hollywood Communist leader John Howard Lawson and leading political activist John Bright, the co-screenwriter of James Cagney hit, The Public Enemy. Paul Strand, the admired documentary film maker, personified the near-communist who stood close enough to Party positions to risk a career.

For the first time openly, the LAW here foregrounded open screenwriting discussions with a distinct leftwing flavor. A lively and realistic discussion of what the screenwriter might expect in a rapidly changing Hollywood scene was well attended, and fairly set the stage for Hollywood activities to come, especially in respect to one of immediate concern to most attendees. With the German invasion of Russia on June,22, 1941, the LAW had come to a final if understated climax. Even before the League had formally dissolved in 1943, a People’s Educational Center emerged with some of the same participants and most definitely the same antifascist spirit of the earlier, informal school several years earlier.

On Dec.14, 1941, only days after the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor, a Hollywood Writers Mobilization was announced, and one its most useful mechanisms was a School for Writers, within the new PEC. This agency quickly attracted a faculty that included some very big names, including Donald Ogden Stewart and Robert Rossen and yet more prestigious allies such as Irwin Shaw, Dory Schary, Irving Rice and Meyer Levin (several of whom were destined to give “Friendly” testimony in the hearing a decade or so later, to save their careers). With 150 students on hand, classes on US history, literature, radio, motion picture analysis and so on competed with the more popular classes on screenwriting, which quickly turned into formal classes that swiftly turned into workshops. With good contacts in the studios, these classes could lead to viable careers and did, including that of Carl Foreman, later of High Noon, among others.

Activists meanwhile threw themselves into the Hollywood Writers Mobilization, and a “Congress” to follow, in 1943, formally co-sponsored by UCLA. A flurry of events attracted some of the grandest luminaries for the October congress, with studio executives like Darryl Zanuck joined by exiled intellectuals like Thomas Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger, radio writer Norman Corwin, lyricists Hanns Eisler, Oscar Hammerstein II, and Earl Robinson, with salutatory messages from communications giant Paul Lasersfeld and sociologist Robert K. Merton, not to mention Vice President Henry Wallace.

The proceedings found a home at UCLA’s own press, and the volume elicited high praise from the likes of The New York Times. Amidst the crusade against fascism, the moment seemed to have arrived, a reviewer explained, for the creative people to transform the industry.

To say that this transformation did not happen, could not possibly have happened, is a considerable understatement. But the League of American Writers and its Congresses in New York had led to intellectuals’ gathering in the most influential sector of American creative life, i.e, the film industry. The Hollywood Quarterly, launched in 1945 with an editorial board reflecting the imprint of the Popular Front (and more quietly, the Communist Party), found its publisher in UCLA.

Flourishing as a journal with contributions from across the spectrum of Hollywood occupations, the Hollywood Quarterly ran into the juggernaut of Cold War threats by 1948. Following the resignation of its leftwing editors and withdrawal of its leftwing writers, it survived as the Film Quarterly. The left-based schools for screenwriters had long since closed.

Buhle, Paul, and Dave Wagner. Radical Hollywood. New York: New Press, 2002.

Ceplair, Larry. The Marxist and the Movies. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2007.

McGilligan, Patrick, and Paul Buhle. Tender Comrades. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997.

Writers’ Congress: The Proceedings of the Conference Held in October, 1943, under the Sponsorship of the Hollywood Writers’ Mobilization and the University of California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1944.

Hollywood Writers Mobilization collection. UCLA Library, Special Collections.