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1584 COMMUNISM IN MOTION-PICTURE INDUSTRY Mr. Berkeley. That is the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees, I believe. Mr. Tavenner. If you have occasion to refer to it again it will be proper to refer to it by the initials. Mr. Berkeley. Thank you, sir. Mr. Tavenner. But I wanted the record to show at least once what it is. I believe I interrupted you as you were about Mr. Berkeley. No. I was all through with the actors' fraction. Mr. Tavenner. In the course of your membership in the Communist Party did you become acquainted with a person by the name of Matt Pel lm a n? Mr. Berkeley. I did, sir. Mr. Tavenner. Was he also known as Mike Pell ? Mr. Berkeley. He was Matt Pelhnan, Mike Pell, and Max Apple- man or Applebaum. He was a professional party organizer who had been sent to the west coast to assist V. J. Jerome and had done much party work in Hawaii and China. He was later expelled from the party after a very bitter struggle and has become a very stanch antiparty man. Mr. Tavenner. Did you have occasion to meet him here in Cali- fornia ? Mr. Berkeley. Oh, yes, sir. I met him with V. J. Jerome. We used to chauffeur him around quite a bit. Mr. Tavenner. Can you enlighten the committee as to the reason for Mike Pell's presence in California? Mr. Berkeley. Well, he was sent here to help Jerome organize Hollywood. There was a lot of territory to cover and a lot of work to do, and Mike Pell, which was the name I usually knew him by, was a very hard worker. He did more of the leg work. Jerome did more of the talking and sitting up nights and Mike did the job. Mr. Tavenner. The committee, in its study of the problem facing us in Hollywood, has been anxious to determine just what the purpose of the Communist Party was in its extreme efforts in organizing the party in this area. As a result of your experience and association with it can you tell the committee briefly what the aims and objectives of the Communist Party were in this area ? Mr. Berkeley. Well, the aims, as I understood them from confer- ences, repeated conferences with Jerome, V. J. Jerome and Lou Harris and Mike Pell, were the organization of a Screen Writers' Guild, which we needed very badly. The second objective was to get rid of Browne and Bioff, the labor racketeers who were then the heads of the IATSE, who later served jail terms. Building an organization of extras, because, as I said before, they constituted the main body of actors. The formation of a Directors' Guild. Incidentally, I know nothing about the Directors' Guild. I was not involved in that job at all, except I know that that was one of the purposes of the party. Another task was to build a labor daily out here. They had the Western Worker, which was a very sectarian newspaper. To supply aid to Spain. To expand the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League into a national organization, which would have been done except for the Hitler-Stalin pact, and also the formation of a left-wing Democratic Party organization in Hollywood which flowered at a later date as the Motion Picture Democratic Committee.