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416 COMMUNISM IN MOTION-PICTURE INDUSTRY guilds, the Screen Actors' Guild was the most active in leading the light against communism in Hollywood, and the earliest organization, I believe, to do so. Mr. Tavenner. Just how did the Communist Party plan to func- tion, or did it function, in its effort to control or to obtain control or influence in these various guilds ? Mr. Dmttryk. Well, besides the extent which I have already men- tioned, they didn't go beyond that. They didn't get to the point, in my opinion, of ever controlling any kind of content in pictures, which is actually what they were aiming for in the long run. The Communists for years have realized the importance of any public mediums of propaganda and education. Lenin said way back that the cinema would probably be the most important medium of propaganda and education, and they were trying to take over that medium. They could not walk in and start controlling the content from the beginning. The only way they could control content was through control of the unions and guilds, so that they could get a stranglehold of the executives. It is very difficult to obtain control, because you have to go through the line, and you would have to have a chain of Communists from beginning to end, five or more, and they never did. Mr. Tavenner. Do you know of any instance in which an effort was made to control the content of a picture ? Mr. Dmttryk. Well, in a vague way, yes. That is, the attempt to control was vague. I know the instance very well because it hap- pened to me. This is the thing that actually got me out of the party. In 1945 Adrian Scott and I made a picture called Cornered. The picture was the story of a Canadian pilot immediately after the war who had been married to a French girl who had been in the underground and been killed, and with very little to go on this pilot started looking for the person who had killed her. Many Germans were reported to have escaped to Argentina, and he followed him there, trying to pin him down. In that picture we had an opportunity to say many things about fascism, which we did. While the first script was being written by John Wexley I found the script had long speeches, propaganda—they were all anti-Nazi and anti-Fascist, but went to extremes in following the party line on the nose. I objected, not because of this, but because the picture was undramatic, too many speeches, and I suggested to Adrian that we get another writer, which we did. We got John Paxton, a very fine writer, who had worked for us previously. And since I have mentioned him, he is not a Communist, by the way. He rewrote the script, we shot it, and made a fairly good melodrama out of it. After they were making prints to go out to the theaters, so that I knew no changes could be made in it, Adrian Scott received a note from Wexley saying lie wanted to have a conference with us. Wexley had had an arbitration on credits and had lost. Mr. Tavenner. What do you mean by credits? Mr. Dmytryk. He wanted a larger share of credit, and there are means of arbitration on writers' disputes about that. They gave Wex- ley adaptation credit.