Screen Guilds Magazine (May 1936)

Ail Open Letter To Rupert Hughes Dear Rupert: Y OU and I have known each other a good many years—actually since 1921, when as a writer-director you were successfully measuring a pro¬ ducer's promise to give writers of distinction an opportunity to learn the rules and place their own works on the screen. In more recent years we have been intimately associated in an effort to protect both writers and producers from the thoughtless excesses of a large scale industry, and to bring con¬ sidered order into the writer-producer relation. In view of these facts, I am shocked to find in your recent public utterance a charge that I have been intimately associated with (and by inference am myself one of) a group of potential tyrants with a lust for power over the picture industry and writers in particular. My astonishment is sufficient to make me review our associa¬ tion in an effort to discover where one of us has departed from what I had with some justification considered a generally like point of view; and why. Long after your part in the formation of the early Screen Writers' Guild and its social auxiliary, the Writers' Club, it was pleasant and gratifying to discover that your vital interest in a uniformity of the broader relations be¬ tween writers and producers had not been diminished by increasing individual success, prestige nor by maturity. During my incumbency as president of the reorganized Screen Writers' Guild, in 1934-5, you gave a devoted attention to the work of the Executive Board to which you had been elected, took part in its deliberations and decisions, and appeared by your expression and activities to be in sympathy with its rationalizing purposes. Your part in the clear statement of aims for which The Screen Writers' Guild has come to stand was not inconsequential; your responsibility for these aims is equal to mine, and I assure you that I find it the height of absurdity to have to contemplate that these long worked out approaches to complex problems should suddenly have become anathema to you. If there is tyranny in them now, there was tyranny in them then; for which you must, with the rest of us, be held accountable. In 1934, you accepted appointment to the bargaining committee for writers under the Federal Motion Picture Code. You disagreed honestly with the other members of the committee on one point; all others you not only defended in conference with the producers' committee but you went so far as to acidly point out in your own unique manner the contradictions in which producers by their arguments involved themselves. These thirteen out of fourteen points which you were defending, I must again remind you, were the Code of Working Rules of the Guild. I have heard you say many times in recent years that you were not actively engaged in writing for the screen, and that you could not be classed as a studio employee. I always took it as a modest warning when we sought your advice that we could expect your point of view on the principles involved but not an intimate knowledge of facts. I must have been wrong, because now quite suddenly I find you abandoning this rule of modest counsellor and be¬ coming a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night to lead the op¬ pressed from the bondage of those Egyptians with whom you have so long consorted. Your right to speak and act thus is unassailable; but I confess my reason rebels at such a transformation. M Y spirit lifts a little when I read that producers have already "promised (you) complete cooperation in the solution of problems and the righting of wrongs". These are fine things to anticipate and I hope they may come true. But I have heard words like these before, even if you haven't. I hope I may be forgiven for wondering at the easy optimism by which you dismiss the oppression in some studios these recent weeks. I wonder too how much protection writers can expect from self styled champions who ride to parley so casually. It is true these new friends of yours, Rupert, have brought off great things in the war they have inflicted on their fellow writers. Is it possible their valor has now frightened the once doughty producer into quick submission? In my series of amazements, not the least is your stand on the Authors' League of America. If it has constructed a "power of dictatorship" as you seem to think, where have you been while this was going on? You have been on hororary vice-president of the League I don't know how many years, a member of the Authors' Guild and on the Council of that Guild and the League. As a member of the Authors' Guild Council I assume you were ac¬ quainted with its changes and developments, and voted on them in the light # 2 The SCREEN GUILDS’ Magazine Volume 3 May, 1936 Number 3 Contents Page An Open Letter to Rupert Hughes. 2 History Repeats Itself . 3 Mr. Pascal Asks a Question—By Ernest Pascal.... 4 The Truth About Tuller. 5 Cooking A Goose—By Dudley Nichols. 6 To Richard—With Love—By Dorothy Parker. 8 An Old Actors' Home In The West By Ivan Simpson . 9 The Theatre Could Die Tomorrow By Melvyn Douglas .....-. 10 See The Birdie Department .... 1 1 Best Performance of April... 12 Best Screen Play of April. 12 A Chapter On Radio—By Homer Croy. 13 News of the Screen Actors' Guild. 14 News of The Screen Writers' Guild... ... 15 Extra Wage Schedules Now In Effect. 16 Los Angeles Releases . 25 Screen Writers' Assignments .-... ... 30 Fitting Rule Clarified . 32 Staff HONORARY EDITORS Ernest Pascal Robert Montgomery Norman Rivkin...Editor Kenneth Thomson....Managing Editor Donald W. Lee...Associate Editor Barbara Pascal ...-.Art Editor Maurice Hanline .Camera Editor MAGAZINE ADVISORY COMMITTEES of The Screen Writers' Guild Robert N. Lee Mary C. McCall, Jr. Arthur Sheekman Wells Root of The Screen Actors' Guild Jean Muir Murray Kinnell Ivan Simpson Seymour L. Simons.Advertising Manager PUBLISHED JOINTLY BY THE SCREEN WRITERS’ GUILD OF THE AUTHORS’ LEAGUE OF AMERICA AND THE SCREEN ACTORS’ GUILD. Copyright, 1936, by the Screen Actors’ Guild and the Screen Writers’ Guild of the Authors’ League of America. Published Monthly at 1655 North Cherokee Avenue, Hollywood, Cali¬ fornia. Entered as third class matter at the Post Office at Los Angeles, California, under the Act of March 3, 1879. Sold by subscription only—$2.00 a year in the U. S. A. of such familiarity. If you were against them, is it that your interpretation of democratic procedure allows you to deny a vote of a majority? Or are you merely reacting to League business letters based on such decisions, but couched in lang¬ uage less Chesterfieldian than your own? I have laughed many times at your tales of experience in the picture industry. In the recollection of their viewpoint, I find myself hoping that you are not taking yourself into a blind alley. I hope also for the sake of your comfort and your conscience you will not sometime find yourself assuming the role of "tyrant" to obtain agreement in deed and action from those who have before pledged their word to cooperate with you in the solution of problems and the righting of wrongs. RALPH BLOCK. The Screen Guilds’ Magazine