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 HOLLYWOOD MOTION-PICTURE INDUSTRY 3533 Mr. Eoberts. Yes; definitely was, and so was Mrs. Trivers. Mr. Tavenner. How long were you a member of this second group ? Mr. Roberts. I was a member of this second group for probably 2 or 3 months, and I complained very bitterly that if they wanted me back in terms of fighting or working in the guild, I certainly was accomplishing nothing with this group. The meetings were a pure farce. The prime purpose of these meetings was to discuss the role of the cultural worker. This is a strange phrase which is used in Communist Party circles to define what you do with Hollywood people. They must remain anonymous. They will not do door-to- door work. They have no real function at all except to give money and to use their names as far as prestige is concerned to front causes, not as far as the Communist Party as such; and, therefore, there would be endless wrangling as to how these people could actually function. There was another meeting, strangely enough, in terms of how to give the women more to do. I was the only bachelor in the group- and I suggested asking the women. I was completely ruled down. After bitter complaint I was transferred to a writers' fraction to deal primarily with guild problems, which is why I was supposedly asked to come back. This was a group consisting for the most part of writers, a few actors, and a few directors, who dealt with screen writers' guild problems, and the labor problems of Hollywood. The big reason that they insisted that the party be the important wheel here was that no one could serve as a liaison between the three guilds except the Communist Party. Otherwise, the actors would never speak to the director; the directors would never speak to the writers. These meetings, all of them, were held about every 2 weeks at the home of Mr. Abraham Polonsky. Mr. Polonsky was a writer and a director and I actually feel the successor to Mr. Lawson in the Hollywood picture. If Mr. Lawson appeared, it was always as an elder statesman, not as an active force. If you like, I can discuss several of the issues that were discussed within this writers' group. Mr. Tavenner. We would be very glad for you to do so. Mr. Roberts. First of all, the Screen Writers Magazine, which was originally designed to do a public-relations job for all writers, was to make newspaper critics aware of the function of the writing of motion pictures. The Communist Party took another track entirely. They saw it as a house organ, as a means of exploiting their particular ideas. Now, a great deal of the magazine was very good and was merely about honest screen writing. But the Communists did not want to lose control of this, and fought very hard to prevent the magazine from going out of existence, and they lost it; and I think rightly so. The second thing involved, or the most important thing, was the question of the CSU. There were constant reports on the Conference of Studio Unions. They seemed to get nowhere, absolutely nowhere, with trying to do what they wanted to do, and at this point various actors and directors came into the picture, since they, too, were dealing with Sorrel 1. Now, if you would like the names of the writers in this group, we had Lester Cole, Dalton Trumbo, John Howard Lawson, Gordon Kahn, Edward Huebsch, Hugo Butler, and Richard Collins.