Communist infiltration of Hollywood motion-picture industry : hearing before the Committee on Un-American activities, House of Representatives, Eighty-second Congress, first session (1951)

COMMUNISM IN MOTION-PICTURE INDUSTRY 421 Mr. Dmytryk. Yes. That is the way I got into the party. Proba- bly as early as 1942 I had begun to be interested in what later became, although I didn't know it at the time, Communist fronts. I knew it before I joined the party, however. There was a school started that eventually became the People's Educational Center. Before that it was a small school, and there was one class for readers, and they wanted me to come and give them a talk on cutting, the editing of pictures, which I did. Most crafts in Hollywood are learned pragmatically. There are no texts telling you how to write a play, or how to cut. Everything I had learned about cutting I had learned from experience. In preparing a lecture I had to try to arrive at certain theories of cutting, and in doing this I found I was finding out things about my profession—which I still did on my own pictures—which I had never learned before. I was very excited about that. I was asked to repeat the lecture, which I did, and improved on it. About this time, in 1943, the People's Educational Center was organized, and one of the classes was a class in screen direction. It was actually an orientation course. We had 12 lectures by directors— how a screen play is directed, technicolor, cutting, and so forth. I became one of the lecturers. Some of the lecturers were Communists, but most of them were not, and most of the students were not Com- munists, and I personally never heard of any Communist Party line followed; certainly not in our class. I lectured there also on related subjects having to do with screen direction, and I liked it very much. Then I learned the Communists were running this organization. It was during the war, and I didn't say, "How horrible." I said, "The Communists are doing something I think is good." The Writers' Congress was held about 1943. This was a meeting of writers from all over the country and from foreign countries. We had quite a few refugees in this country at that time. A message from President Roosevelt was read at the congress. Gordon Sproul was honorary chairman. I think Daryl Zanuck was in it. I later found that some of the people connected with the Congress were Communists. This was a good thing. I thought one of the things we needed was a meeting of cultural minds. I attended several of the seminars and found them very good. They were all concerned with the craft and with various related artistic endeavors. When I found out this, too, had been organized by Communists, I thought it showed the Communist Party was engaged in good things. The Writers' Mobilization was formed about this time. The Writers' Mobilization, Emmett Lavery testified in 1947, got a medal for work they did for the war effort. They were writing speeches for patriotic organizations, writing scripts for USO, and that sort of thing. This, too, I found out had been very largely organized by a few Communists. I was active in that a while. I was interested in that, too. I did not know too much about it because I was not a writer, but I did chair a seminar on the Nature of the Enemy. Also during this time I had made acquaintances and shown interest in these activities, so I was approached by people—I can't say by whom—to join the Communist Party. I was curious. I had tried to read Marx, but never got beyond the first chapter. So I agreed