The screen writer (Apr-Oct 1948)

and-up per week class. "The producers" could here be generous, a gesture the individuals I knew always liked if it didn't cost too much. So I couldn't understand how this situation could exist. I kept buttonholing people, urging them to name names and smoke out the bastards who wouldn't rehire our veterans. The closest I could come to a real name was a policy pooh-bah at a Valley studio who turned out, on close inspection, not to be a producer at all, not, that is, if you define a producer as a man whose name appears on film. I never did find out who "the producers" were that the speaker referred to. He obviously didn't mean Carey Wilson or Jerry Wald or Nat Perrin or Joe Sistrom or Bob Bassler or Darryl Zanuck. He meant a kind of monster who exists only during the heat of a Guild debate. It taught me one lesson, however. Now when I sit at meetings, I don't go looking for people to sock and I don't forget that the purpose of talk is communication and you can't have communication without accurate definition. From that meeting on, I save my anger for the right parties and I direct and channelize it where it'll do the Guild some good. * * * * A footnote to the veteran-rehiring business : The very speaker who was steaming us all up about the baseness of "the producers" in not hiring our people back, turned up shortly after that meeting at a studio where I was working. He was brought in to collaborate with a newly-returned veteran on a script. A couple of days later the speaker went to his producer and said he wanted the veteran relieved of the assignment. He could do it, he thought, better without the veteran. This, of course, never hit the floor of the Guild, which is the place for noble speeches. A new member coming into the Guild is struck at once by its vigor and its massive talent for dissipating that strength and energy. The member has a choice of sitting with the Hatfields or the McCoys and if he is inclined to ask, "What've factions to do with the issue at hand?" people tend to regard him as a new boy still in the dark. I don't care a tinker's dam one way or the other about what happened ten years ago. A lot of bitterness has been stored up in the time since then, but I think that the people who keep that bitterness alive and won't let us forget it are doing the Guild a disservice, as the politicians say. I've heard enough names of the people who formed the Guild, fighting for its existence in the days when the studios set up a blacklist of Guild members and used every means to break the back of this organization while it was weak, to realize they include writers of every political persuasion. And what of it? The Guild came into being for straight economic reasons. There are a lot of things this Guild can't do. It can't certify us as competent writers merely because we're members, for example. What it can do is to try to get all of us a fair share of the economic proceeds of the industry to which we devote time and talent. That's a longhand way of saying the Guild can get us dough. And recognition, which spells dough in this industry. I am sick to death of nervous ladies who've got me on their mailing lists and send me dreadfully composed missives, every other word in all-caps, begging for my proxy to defeat the lousy Reds. I'm all for defending democracy, but I don't see why this always has to take the form of some matter currently before the Guild. I also think some members underestimate my political awareness when they try to tie up the workaday business of our Guild to the sharpening crises of our time. The nervous lady may be right and the guy with the great platform manner may be right, but I say, Our business in the Guild is dough, more dough and still more dough. And that's all. The people who formed the Guild knew this in those first days. Those of them who think they can make of this outfit something else are kidding themselves or are willing for some other purpose to make of themselves Guild wreckers, potential or real. 3jf '.jt 7J» «)s As writers we ought to be trebly sensitive to the cliche and the hackneyed phrase. For heaven's sake, then, will people stop identifying themselves as either "Left" or "Right" or — this is usually said with a purr of selfcontent— "Middle" ? * S T * Herewith a Modest Proposal: When a large administrative body, governmental or corporate, finds that its work is being hampered by constant reference to a particular issue which it cannot resolve by itself, what it does is to create a subordinate body to handle that issue so that itself it may continue to function efficiently. I propose the Guild immediately set up a Bleeding Hearts Association. Our members can take their pick. Does your heart throb with Miss Davies' at the plight of those dear little bow-wows cruelly being cut inch by inch on the lab tables of the nation's scientists? Let's have a Doggie Division in our B.H.A. Are you losing sleep because of the Tidelands Question? I say, you, too, are welcome in the B.H.A., Oil Division. Myself I have strong feelings on the Kuomintang, the death of Petkov, the Italian elections, MacArthur, Henry Wallace, the PCA, Bob Taft, Stalin and Rocky Graziano, but I don't see what this has to do with the Guild and its proper activity. But precisely this kind of thing has been hamstringing us for too long. Let each little strong feeling have a Division all its own in the Bleeding Hearts Association. We'll get more unity that way. ^tr1 < > I— I Z < H z w w H e< The Screen Writer, April, 1948 23