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COMMUNISM IN HOLLYWOOD MOTION-PICTURE INDUSTRY 3477 not my business. It meant to me, if I may say it this way, a loss of integrity. And so I persisted in going along on my own line and saying and writing what did come out of my true center. And when- ever this happened, I got this violent opposition in that press and I became further disgusted and estranged from them. Mr. Tavenner. Then that was an effort on the part of the Com- munist Party to dictate to you what you should write about and how you should treat your subject? Mr. Odets. I would say so. Mr. Tavenner. And, if I understand you correctly, you rebelled against that type of Communist Party discipline. Mr. Odets. I did. I did except that they had no ties on me so that I could rebel from the ties. By then I had, so to speak, loosened these ties, and I had no connection with them. So one read what they said as one read other criticisms, as you read the review in the New York Times or the morning Herald Tribune. If one could learn something from it, that was fine. If you couldn't learn something from it, there was nothing there for you. Since I had made up my mind there was nothing I could learn from the left cultural fronts I didn't pay much attention to it. I was much more apt to be interested in what a critic like Stark Young would say in the New Republic or Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times. Mr. Tavenner. If I understand you correctly, the Communist Party had its own methods of thought control in dealing with the writers who were members of the Communist Party. Mr. Odets. You may say so, sir. They tried that, but they drove all of the good writers away. They drove every first-grade writer away. This is what finally happened, this was finally the result. So far as I know o if hand they don't have a first-grade writer connected with them, and they haven't for years, because of these tactics. Mr. Tavenner. Now let us return at this point to the criticisms of your plays because it is rather difficult to follow those criticisms. At times the reviewers praised your works very highly. At other times they criticized, usually in matters of form, according to my study of them. But let us have the instances in which you state that there was a criticism of a severe type. Mr. Odets. Well, here is one—may I go ahead? Mr. Tavenner. Yes. Mr. Odets. Here is one from the Daily Worker review of the Wait- ing for Lefty production in February of 1935, by Nathaniel Buchwald: The very gush of his dramatic say has resulted in a woeful looseness of play structure and its strident overtones all but vitiate his message * * * exhorta- tions which now and then deteriorate into mere sloganism or rhetoric * * * though each episode is eloquent in itself, all of them put together fail to make a play. Mr. Tavenner. Who was the reviewer ? Mr. Odets. That was Nathaniel Buchwald. That was the original production of Waiting for Lefty. He said some other good things. He said I had talent. Mr. Tavenner. Yes. and he says in that very review of—what was the date that you gave ? Mr. Odets. All I have is February 1935. Mr. Tavenner. February 3 ? Mr. Odets. I just have February 1935.