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Introduction

Discovering Crossfire: Texts and Contexts

This project grew out of my lifelong passion for novels and movies (especially 1
crime fiction and film noir), a commitment to progressive politics past and
present, and a critical moment of archival serendipity. As I was beginning my
dissertation research, I took a trip to the State Historical Society in Madison,
Wisconsin. At that point, I had a rather vague notion that I would write on the
process of adapting novels to film. Though I had decided already, as a way of
narrowing the field, to focus on crime fiction that became film noir, my list of
prospects was still impossibly long, and I hoped that archival research might help
me narrow the topic further. So I went to Madison on a fishing expedition, and in
the papers of filmmaker Dore Schary, I reeled in a whopper.

Schary was a liberal Jew with a history of progressive activism and a reputation 2
for making "message pictures." Upon taking over as RKO's vice president in
charge of production in early 1947, one of the first movies Schary greenlighted
was Crossfire—a film noir about the murder of a Jew by a bigoted ex-GI. It was
adapted from one of the more obscure novels on my list: The Brick Foxhole by
Richard Brooks, in which the murder victim was a gay man. That seemed
promising for a study of the adaptation process, and I was intrigued by the
cultural politics. I began to madly photocopy material from the Dore Schary
archive: correspondence between Schary and the film's producer, Adrian Scott;
budgets and minutes from production meetings; a copy of the shooting script by
screenwriter John Paxton; results of sneak previews for theater audiences as well
as special screenings for Jewish defense organizations; critical reviews and fan
letters from friends in the industry as well as the general public; a blistering
exchange of letters and articles between Schary and Elliot Cohen, editor of
Commentary; a mountain of press clips, correspondence, and legal documents
concerning the 1947 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings
on subversion in Hollywood, which resulted in contempt citations for the now
infamous Hollywood Ten—a group that included producer Adrian Scott as well as
Edward Dmytryk, Crossfire's director; Schary's deposition in Scott's lawsuit
against RKO for wrongful termination; and more. As literally hundreds of pages
rolled out of the copier, I realized I could throw away my list. I had found my
story.

I rushed home to take another look at the film on video. Set in Washington, D.C., 3
just after the end of the Second World War, Crossfire is a classic Hollywood
manhunt thriller in which an innocent and troubled soldier is implicated in a
disturbing murder—the ubiquitous frame-up that forms the existential backdrop to
so many archetypal film noirs. Crossfire has all the visual hallmarks of the best of
1940s noir: innovative camera angles, high-contrast lighting, a series of
disorienting flashbacks. It has a stellar cast: Robert Young as the world-weary
police detective who realizes that intolerance was the cause of the murder that
seemed without motive; Gloria Grahame as the tough-but-tender B-girl who
provides the critical alibi for the innocent (but potentially adulterous) soldier;
Robert Mitchum as the street-smart soldier who rallies the band of brothers to
vindicate their fellow GI; Sam Levene as the kindly Jewish murder victim; and
Robert Ryan in a chilling tour-de-force as the insinuating and bullying
anti-Semite. Crossfire has moments of pedantry, but overall it is a compelling,
exciting film. It came as no surprise to me to learn that Crossfire was nominated
for Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Director, and Best
Supporting Actor and Actress for Ryan and Grahame, respectively.

Next, I plunged into Richard Brooks's The Brick Foxhole—a disjointed, chaotic, 4
even sordid novel, horrifically overwritten in places, stunningly insightful in
others. Several critical stream-of-consciousness passages read like something
from John Dos Passos's proletarian-modernist epic, the U.S.A. trilogy; the
hypermasculinity, latent homosexuality, and disturbing gender relations reek of
Hemingway; one chillingly banal conversation between a pair of drunken
businessmen might have been plagiarized from Sinclair Lewis's antifascist expose
It Can't Happen Here. Though the novel's murder victim is a homosexual rather
than a Jew, the theme of anti-Semitism runs throughout the text and is a central
element in Brooks's unflinching indictment of intolerance and racism of all kinds. I
immediately understood what producer Adrian Scott saw in The Brick Foxhole and
why he had chosen it as the literary source for his long-contemplated cinematic
exposé of anti-Semitism and the American potential for fascism.

As I forged delightedly ahead, I found that Crossfire occupies an interesting 5

position within the canon of classic Hollywood films. While rating a mention and
sometimes an extended discussion in nearly every major analysis of film noir,
Crossfire has faded in the popular memory, surpassed by such quintessential noir
works as Double Indemnity, The Killers, Out of the Past, Touch of Evil, or even
Murder, My Sweet, the first film by the creative trio that made Crossfire.
Similarly, as a social problem film about anti-Semitism, Crossfire has been largely
overshadowed by Gentleman's Agreement.1 Released only months after Crossfire,
Gentleman's Agreement won many of the Oscars for which Crossfire had been
nominated, including Best Director for Elia Kazan and Best Picture of 1947.2

Nevertheless, Crossfire has enjoyed an unusually wide circulation in the world of 6

academic film criticism. Because it straddles the genres of film noir and the social
problem film, Crossfire is frequently analyzed in terms of film genre and narrative
conventions, or within the context of changing cinematic representations of
ethnicity and Jewishness. In some ways, the film's reputation may have suffered
from the difficulties critics have had in categorizing it. For example, several critics
have suggested that Crossfire's status as a film noir is compromised by the
unfortunate and awkward insertion of the social message. Other critics question
its effectiveness as a social problem film, suggesting that its focus on the "radical
fringe" of anti-Semitism is less socially significant than the mainstream
representation of "genteel" anti-Semitism in Gentleman's Agreement. In
comparison to the cheerful, liberal faith of Gentleman's Agreement that education
will solve the problem of anti-Semitism, Crossfire's representation of explosive
violence and latent homosexuality combined with its link between anti-Semitism
and native fascism seems too dark and complicated. Ironically, perhaps,
Crossfire's representation of the deadly consequences of anti-Semitism—as
important as its visual style to its inclusion in the film noir canon—becomes the
grounds for its dismissal as a flawed social problem film.3

The political issues surrounding the production and reception of Crossfire have 7
also served to bring the film to the attention of critics. In this interpretive mode,
analyses of Crossfire have focused on the struggle to bring the subject of
anti-Semitism to the screen within the confines of the studio system.
Alternatively, several studies emphasize the acrimonious debate among Jewish
organizations over the political uses of Crossfire.4 Revisionist interpretations of
the Old Left in general and Hollywood radicalism in particular have helped to
recuperate Crossfire as a "film made by radicals." This has shifted the interpretive
focus away from strict considerations of genre and narrative toward greater
consideration of the film's historical and political context. In these more nuanced
works, Crossfire is read against the political commitments and activities of
Hollywood progressives as well as the impact of the Cold War, the HUAC hearings,
and other major shifts in political, social, and economic history. In this context,
Crossfire is seen as a key example of the negotiation between creative workers,
the studio system, and the censorship apparatus, and as part of the ongoing
struggle by Hollywood radicals to inject progressive content into mainstream
Hollywood films.5

Numerous scholars have noted that working within the studio system, with its 8
hierarchical power structure and tendency to prioritize profits and entertainment
over art or social content, presented significant challenges for Hollywood radicals.
While the film radicals recognized the political and creative limitations of
Hollywood's mass production system, they still struggled to shift the balance of
power, however slightly. From the campaign to unionize the film industry to the
daily "shop floor" attempts to shape the aesthetic and political content of movies,
they resisted the strictures and indignities of the studio system. Thus, as film
historian Thomas Schatz notes, "[S]tudio filmmaking was less a process of
collaboration than of negotiation and struggle—occasionally approaching armed
conflict."6

This story of negotiation and struggle is at the heart of my analysis of the 9

Hollywood career of Adrian Scott. A key figure in the circle of young progressive
filmmakers working at RKO during the 1940s, Scott worked as a screenwriter
before being promoted to contract producer in 1943. As a "salaried underpaid
producer," Scott occupied a rather different niche in the Hollywood hierarchy than
such independent producers as David O. Selznick and Walter Wanger or powerful
studio production heads as Twentieth Century–Fox's Darryl F. Zanuck.7 I argue,
however, that Scott's status in the studio system is less significant than the
synergy between his creative work and his progressive political commitments. A
member of the Screen Writer's Guild, the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and other
progressive groups, as well as the Communist Party, Scott was in many ways the
quintessential Popular Front Communist: committed to the tripartite agenda of
antifascism, antiracism, and progressive unionism, but inspired less by Marxism
than by the American tradition of radical democracy.8 Screenwriter John Paxton,
his friend and longtime collaborator, saw the wellspring of Scott's radicalism as
his "compassion and great intolerance for any injustice or evil that transcended
any kind of ideology."9 Scott's creative work and commitment to the Popular
Front agenda were inextricably intertwined; like many in this younger generation
of filmmakers, Scott believed movies were both an art form and a powerful
ideological tool.10 With his muckraking faith in the power of film to raise public
consciousness, Scott understood filmmaking as not only his job, but his primary
mode of political activism.11

Early in his Hollywood career, Scott had realized that in order to translate his 10
political and artistic vision into film he would need greater autonomy and control
over the filmmaking process than was ordinarily granted to screenwriters. Though
many of his writing peers sought greater creative control as directors, Scott
understood that it was the producer, with a foot in both the creative and the
business sides of the industry, who held the ultimate power over film product. As
a producer, Scott had significant input into the key elements of the production
process, including the budget, the script, and the choice of writers, directors, and
cast. Scott's production unit at RKO soon established a reputation for low-budget
melodramas that combined noir stylistics and social justice themes to produce
box-office magic. Screenwriter John Paxton and director Edward Dmytryk formed
the backbone of Scott's unit, working with him on four extremely successful
films—Murder, My Sweet; Cornered; So Well Remembered; and
Crossfire—between 1944 and 1947. The breakaway success of Murder, My Sweet
made Scott the hottest producer on the RKO lot, and one friend remembered that,
by the war's end, he was hailed as "the new boy wonder, 'the new Thalberg.'"12

This comparison with MGM wunderkind Irving Thalberg is intriguing. At first 11

glance Scott, a middle-class Irish Catholic who followed his literary aspirations
from Amherst College to Broadway to Hollywood, seems to have had little in
common with Thalberg, a German Jew who chose business over college and
climbed the ranks, from secretary to general manager at Universal, to vice
president at MGM, by his early twenties. Nonetheless, though Scott never
achieved the power or mystique of Thalberg, he too was seen as something of a
young genius during his tenure at RKO, a man of great talent and taste, with a
knack for selecting just the right literary property, cast, and crew to produce films
that appealed to both critics and audiences. And, though Scott was certainly
ambitious, he, like Thalberg, stood out for his quiet integrity and lack of
affectation in an industry notorious for overblown egos, self-aggrandizement, and
pretension.13 In producing Scott found his métier, but he also quickly learned
that, in many ways, producing simply raised the stakes in the complex process of
negotiation within the studio system.

In focusing on the Hollywood career of Adrian Scott, and particularly on the 12

controversial production and reception of Crossfire, I address a number of issues
and questions in film history. First, challenging the auteurist tendency to privilege
the role of the director in film production, I reassess the role of the producer in
the Hollywood studio system and argue that Adrian Scott, not Edward Dmtyryk,
was the creative and political visionary behind Murder, My Sweet; Cornered; and
Crossfire.14 John Paxton, the third member of the creative trio behind these films,
supports this thesis, noting that after Scott was blacklisted, "neither Dmytryk nor
I were ever again involved in films of this particular sort."15 Significantly, Scott
himself would have disdained the elitist assumptions embedded in the notion of
an auteur. For Scott, film was a collaborative art, and he worked hard to make his
production unit a creative team that valued the contributions of all. Paxton
thought Scott was a brilliant producer with an unerring gift for "concepts and
constructions," and he credited him with many of the key plot points and stylistic
innovations in his screenplays, from the flashback sequence in Murder, My Sweet
to the "right-house-but-the-wrong-address" ploy in the denouement of
Crossfire.16 Though Scott did not take screen credit for his script contributions,
he worked closely with his screenwriters and saw his role as inspiring rather than
harassing, frustrating, or intimidating them. For Scott, this collaborative approach
was part of his larger political commitment to challenging hierarchies, whether
within the studio system or within American society as a whole.

Second, I use Scott's Hollywood career to examine the political and creative 13
challenges faced by radicals working in the studio system. In this context, I argue
that the political and cultural significance of Crossfire—and perhaps of any
Hollywood film—cannot be fully understood without close attention to the
adaptation and production process itself. Indeed, film historians Larry Ceplair and
Steven Englund specifically call for studies that document this process, noting
that the "finished film alone cannot provide evidence of how much the producers
changed, or how much they did not have to change as a result of the success of
the studio conditioning process on left-wing screenwriters."17 Reconstructing the
backstory of Scott's work in the 1940s, his interactions with studio heads and the
Breen Office as he maneuvered his films through the production process, offers a
much more nuanced picture of the strategies of accommodation and resistance
employed by radicals working within the studio system. This was particularly
relevant during the 1940s, when the wartime demands for greater realism from
Hollywood films pushed the limits of the Production Code and created new
opportunities for political filmmaking in the postwar period. Scott's work during
this period suggests his growing political engagement and ever-bolder attempts to
subvert the studio system, beginning with the critique of class and corruption in
Murder, My Sweet, through the internationalist antifascism of Cornered, to
Crossfire, the final point on the trajectory of Scott's attempts to meld his creative
and political visions.

Third, I use these three films to explore the relationship between antifascist 14
politics and film noir. Certainly it is important to recognize that "film noir" is a
term applied after the fact: nobody in 1940s Hollywood consciously set out to
make a "film noir"; instead, they saw themselves as making melodramas or
thrillers, and the distinct visual style so associated with noir was often a creative
response to the wartime blackouts, shortages of film stock and matériel for sets,
and the like.18 Nevertheless, I argue that the narrative strategies and visual style
of film noir represented the cutting edge of radicals' resistance to the
representational boundaries of mainstream Hollywood films. Early noirs like
Double Indemnity and Murder, My Sweet, with their exploration of such adult
themes as adultery, murder, and the dark side of human nature, seemed to
transfer the realism of wartime films from the foxholes to the home front. Film
noir's roots in pulp fiction, its exploration of existential themes, of the seamy
underbelly of American society, and of the corruption of the monied classes not
only pushed the envelope of the Production Code, but also reflected the political
ethos of the Popular Front generation. It is no accident that many of the pioneers
of film noir were also closely associated with progressive politics. Between the
end of the war and the onset of the blacklist, a handful of progressive Hollywood
filmmakers tried to meld the emerging noir style with overt political content,
especially concerning fascism and antifascism. Adrian Scott was on the cutting
edge of this trend and, I would argue, led the way in integrating his antifascist
politics with his creative work. Read against his earlier films—both the pioneering
noir Murder, My Sweet and the antifascist thriller Cornered—Crossfire emerges,
not simply as a "political" film noir or an anti–anti-Semitism message film, but as
a specifically antifascist film.

Finally, I contend that Crossfire's stormy public reception—by audiences, film 15

critics, Jewish defense organizations, and ultimately the House Un-American
Activities Committee—reveals the widespread recognition in the postwar period
that Hollywood films, far from being mere entertainment as the studio moguls
insisted, were a powerful tool in shaping public consciousness. Indeed, Hollywood
films played a critical role in mediating the cultural tensions exacerbated by the
Depression, the Second World War, and the emerging Cold War. During the 1930s
and 1940s, moviegoing was the national pastime, and movies were the wellspring
of the national imagination. As Lary May argues, "The movies were perhaps the
most powerful national institution which offered private [cultural] solutions to
public [political] issues."19 By mid-century, then, few cultural institutions could
challenge the power and hegemony of Hollywood in the invention of "imagined
communities."20

Thus, I believe that Crossfire demands a wider interpretive net than has been cast 16
by film historians and cultural critics, and that the career of Adrian Scott and his
films of the 1940s raise questions and issues of significance for the larger field of
modern American history. I argue that Crossfire must be seen as an intervention
in the complex and often contradictory construction of an imagined community of
Americans that dominated much of the twentieth century, a discourse of
belonging and exclusion, of identity and difference, of "us" and "them." As a
Popular Front Communist, Scott's political vision was indelibly shaped by the
American encounter with European fascism in the 1930s and 1940s. For him,
anti-Semitism or any form of racism was decidedly un-American, a repudiation of
the liberal promise that "all men are created equal." Moreover, in the wake of the
Nazi campaign against the Jews and the revelation of the Holocaust, the rising
evidence of anti-Semitism in the United States seemed particularly menacing.
Dramatizing Scott's belief that anti-Semitism was a symptom of fascism, Crossfire
represents both a powerful warning of the potentially violent consequences of
racism and an alternative Americanism that calls upon the United States to live up
to its democratic promise, particularly on issues of race. Ultimately, then, my
analysis of Crossfire and the career of Adrian Scott suggests that the mid-century
discourse on Americanism cannot be fully understood without reference to
antifascism and anti-Communism, both as ideologies and as political movements.

Between the 1920s and the 1940s, the discourse on Americanism underwent 17
profound changes, from the scientific racism that informed the early eugenic and
nativist movements to an embrace of cultural pluralism and universalist tolerance
during the war years. Many factors—social, political, economic, and
cultural—fueled this transformation, but one of the most critical was the rise of
European fascism.21 Though certainly some saw fascism as an admirable social
experiment and even a bulwark against Communism,22 for most Americans by
the late 1930s, fascism represented the ideological Other against which they
understood and self-consciously constructed their own political culture and
imagined community, "their" Americanism. The Popular Front, an antifascist
alliance of radicals and liberals, was particularly strong in Hollywood; indeed, the
war, in encouraging "political" filmmaking, offered Hollywood progressives new
opportunities to integrate their artistic vision with their antifascist, antiracist
politics, significantly shaping wartime constructions of Americanism. The popular
nationalism elaborated during the 1940s represented the Second World War as a
struggle between the "free world" and the "slave world," juxtaposing the
democratic idealism and tolerance of the Allies against the barbarism and racism
of the Axis enemy.23

By the 1940s, the Nazi ideology of Aryan superiority and its campaign against the 18
Jews had led to a troubled reappraisal of the very basis of scientific racism and
fueled a reorientation of American attitudes toward the place of race in a liberal
democracy. One key strategy in this reorientation (with particular significance for
Crossfire) was to bring Jews and other "provisional" whites into the Caucasian fold
under the new rubric of ethnicity. This is not to say that race ceased to be an
issue in the United States. On the contrary, the new taxonomy merely shifted the
terms of the debate, producing a bifurcated system that defined race largely in
terms of black versus white.24 Nonetheless, by the end of World War Two, an
amorphous cultural pluralism had become the primary paradigm through which
Americans reconciled the powerful homogenizing tendencies of industrial
capitalism and mass society with the desire to preserve heterogeneity and
individuality. Most importantly, cultural pluralism during the 1940s was linked
very specifically to nationalism as a key means of articulating the differences
between Americanism and fascism. Thus, by the end of World War Two,
"Americans All" replaced "America for the Americans" as the rallying cry of
popular nationalism.25

Though Americans eagerly embraced the postwar "return to normalcy," the 19

experience of the war itself had provoked a profound existential crisis. The vast
carnage alone—sixty million people dead, including six million Jewish victims of
the Nazis' Final Solution and hundreds of thousands of Japanese victims of the
atomic devastation unleashed by the Americans themselves—radically challenged
the modernist faith in such fundamental concepts as "progress," "civilization,"
and, indeed, "normalcy," and paved the way for postmodernism. Historian William
S. Graebner suggests that the pervading ironies and contingencies of the 1940s
fueled a profound crisis in American national identity in the postwar period:

Was the United States a bastion of isolationism, as it had been in 1940, or

a committed imperial power, as the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall
Plan seemed to demonstrate? Was the nation committed to Franklin D.
Roosevelt's New Deal welfare state—with its implied goal of economic
security for all citizens—or was it, as the popularity of Ayn Rand's novels
suggested, a stronghold of free-enterprise capitalism and individual
responsibility, given to entrepreneurship and risk taking? Were Americans
the stable, rooted beings that appeared in Norman Rockwell's paintings,
or were they, as Oscar Handlin's study of immigration claimed, "the
uprooted"?26

In many ways, the year 1947 marks a unique cultural moment in American 20
history, a pivotal point at which the trajectory and shape of the postwar world
were in transition, and competing visions of Americanism vied for hegemony.27
Two wartime articulations—Henry Luce's "American Century" and Henry Wallace's
"Century of the Common Man"—set the terms of the debate. In 1941, publishing
magnate Luce argued that the United States must reject isolationism and enter
the war in order to position the nation for postwar dominance—political,
economic, and ideological. For Luce, the exportation of the American values of
free enterprise and democracy would produce material abundance and security for
the entire world. In 1942, then–Vice President Wallace offered his alternative to
Luce's rather imperialist vision, calling for the worldwide extension of the New
Deal and the redistribution of economic resources to "humanize" capitalism.
Though Wallace's vision became a rallying point for the postwar left-liberal
Popular Front, his "common man" was less a proletarian hero than a version of
the "average American" constructed by advertisers and social scientists, and
Wallace certainly shared Luce's faith in the relationship between abundance and
freedom. Nonetheless, Wallace's call for international cooperation—particularly
with the Soviet Union—set him fundamentally at odds with Luce, who even in
1941 predicted that the divisions between the "free world" and the "slave world"
would continue into the postwar period.28

In this context, the lingering specter of fascism was critically important. In the 21
postwar period, fascism was equated with Communism under the rubric of
"totalitarianism." Despite their very different ideological roots, the parallels
between the political repression and militarist aggression of Nazism and Stalinism
seemed unmistakable and ominous, and throughout the Cold War, fascism
provided for many thinkers a template for understanding and even predicting the
behavior of the Soviet Union. The American horror of Communism, submerged
during the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, reemerged even before the
war's end; as denazification brought "good Germans" back into the democratic
fold, American fears of fascism were projected onto Communism. Joseph Stalin,
viewed as the friendly "Uncle Joe" during the war years, quickly reverted to an
iron-willed dictator, Hitler's evil twin, and the freedom-loving Russian people who
had been glorified in wartime propaganda were again seen as either duped
automatons or wild-eyed revolutionaries. For most Americans, Communism, like
fascism, was perceived as a profound threat to the American Way of Life, and the
wartime antifascist impulse translated only too easily into the postwar
anti-Communist crusade.29

For American radicals, the fascist model also had great explanatory power in the 22
postwar period. However, rejecting the explanatory lens of totalitarianism, with
its tendency to blur distinctions between facism and Communism, they continued
to see fascism as the primary ideological threat to democracy. For them, the
danger was that the United States would fall prey to fascism, rather than
Communism. Recalling the fascist use of anti-Communist rhetoric to crush labor
and the left and to consolidate reactionary political power in Italy and Germany,
they interpreted the postwar anti-Communist crusade as a harbinger of fascism in
America. In 1947, ominous portents, mirroring the dislocations that had fueled
European fascism after the First World War, were everywhere: fears of rising
inflation and a return of economic depression, concerns about the reintegration of
war veterans, rising anti-Semitism and racism, and a flurry of antilabor
legislation. All were signs suggesting, to the radicals, that America was on the
road to fascism.

These fears were confirmed by the attack on Hollywood by the House 23

Un-American Activities Committee in the fall of 1947. In a nation only too aware
of the uses the Nazis had made of mass culture to win the hearts and minds of
ordinary Germans, the charges of Communist influence in Hollywood provoked
alarm and dismay on both the right and left, though for very different reasons.
During the war years, "freedom of the screen" was touted as one of the
fundamental differences between democracy and fascism; thus, in the contest
between HUAC and Hollywood, each side proclaimed the other un-American. For
the conservatives, the evidence of Marxist propaganda in Hollywood films proved
that an international conspiracy of Hollywood Jews and Communists was
undermining American cultural values and democratic traditions. For the
Hollywood radicals, the HUAC investigation was a harbinger of fascism in America,
the opening salvo in a far-reaching reactionary plan to undermine fundamental
American freedoms.

Indeed, to a certain extent, both sides were right. Hollywood radicals did try, 24
within the confines of the profoundly conservative studio system, to produce
antifascist, antiracist, internationalist, progressive films. And the HUAC members,
recognizing the power of film to shape public consciousness and to reflect the
nation to the world, did want to ensure that Hollywood films reflected their own
conservative version of Americanism. In this context, it is not surprising that
Adrian Scott and Edward Dmytryk were among the nineteen "unfriendlies"
subpoenaed by HUAC in 1947. Scott and, at least at the time, Dmytryk advocated
an alternative Americanism that called upon the nation—both its leaders and "the
people"—to live up to the radical democratic ideals embodied by Thomas
Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and even Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Though Scott
and his radical cohort eagerly participated in the construction of the wartime
popular nationalism, they also recognized the slippage between rhetoric and
reality and condemned liberalism's collaboration with class and racial oppression
in the United States. For Scott, socialism represented the fulfillment of those
particularly American ideals; for him, Communism was, indeed, "Twentieth
Century Americanism," as the Popular Front slogan proclaimed. He believed that
socialism would—and must—come to America, not through armed, bloody
revolution but through popular participation in representational government and
the constant expansion of the state. For Scott the idealist, the state represented
the will of the people, or at least it should; and for him, Roosevelt's New Deal was
proof that, in fact, it could. Scott may have been a Communist, but he had great
faith in the power of the liberal state to transform the lives of ordinary citizens. In
the postwar period, as a member of Progressive Citizens of America and a
supporter of Henry Wallace, Scott advocated an expansion of the New Deal at
home and internationalist cooperation abroad. As a filmmaker, he attempted to
infuse his work with this antiracist, antifascist, internationalist vision. Thus,
Crossfire, the pinnacle of his political and creative achievement, was a very
dangerous film in the eyes of HUAC, and Scott and Dmytryk were caught in the
crossfire of the postwar struggle to identify and contain Americanism and
un-Americanism.

In the struggle between HUAC and Hollywood, the older, xenophobic, antiradical, 25
antimodernist tradition of Americanism was pitted against a new Americanism,
the more cosmopolitan, modernist, and pluralist popular nationalism of the war
years that was broadly shared—and indeed, largely articulated—by the studio
moguls, the liberal activists, and the radical dissidents in Hollywood. The debate
over the Hollywood Ten, however, quickly revealed the fissures within this new
Americanism, as the Popular Front vision of the increasingly isolated leftists was
overwhelmed by the increasingly hegemonic "American Century"
anti-Communism of Hollywood liberals. Though this conflict often played itself out
as an internal industry struggle, in many ways it reflected a larger struggle over
the meanings and uses of Americanism within the culture as a whole.

Weaving together industrial practices, cultural texts, and changing historical 26

contexts, this study attempts to locate and understand the significance of
Crossfire to the construction of Americanism at this critical cultural moment.
Chapter 1, "Reel Reds, Real Americans: Politics and Culture in the Studio
System," paints a sweeping portrait of Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s,
examining the political and cultural negotiations between Hollywood progressives
and the studio executives, the culture of the Communist Party U.S.A. (CPUSA)
and the Popular Front in Hollywood, and the early careers of Scott, Paxton, and
Dmytryk. Chapter 2, "Raising the Cry of Alarm: Popular Nationalism, World War
Two, and the New Political Filmmaking," explores the popular discourse on
fascism and antifascism, nationalism, nativism, and anti-Semitism from the 1930s
through the end of World War Two, emphasizing Hollywood's role in the
construction of a wartime popular nationalism. Chapter 3, "The Progressive
Producer in the Studio System: Film Noir and the Production of Murder, My
Sweet," examines Scott's promotion from screenwriter to producer and his first
collaboration with Paxton and Dmytryk on the film noir classic Murder, My Sweet.
Chapter 4, "They Must Not Escape: Cornered and the Specter of Postwar
Fascism," examines significant transformations in the immediate postwar period;
it focuses on national and international political developments, particularly
ongoing concerns about fascism, as well as heightened expectations of the
possibilities for postwar political filmmaking, through an analysis of the 1945
Scott-Paxton-Dmytryk film Cornered. Chapter 5, "You Can't Do That: From The
Brick Foxhole to Crossfire," reads Richard Brooks's novel The Brick Foxhole as an
antifascist counternarrative that challenged key tenets of wartime popular
nationalism, paying particular attention to representations of masculinity and
Jewishness; this chapter also examines Scott's early efforts to shepherd The Brick
Foxhole through the studio system. Chapter 6, "It Can Happen Here: Noir Style
and the Politics of Antifascism in Crossfire," examines the adaptation and
production of Crossfire as a case study of political filmmaking within the studio
system, reading the screenplay in the context of the novel, exploring the
significance of changes within the various versions of the screenplay, and finally
reading the film itself as a distinct cultural product. Chapter 7, "Is It Good for the
Jews? The Jewish Response to Crossfire," examines the heated debate between
the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee over the social
uses and political meanings of Crossfire for American Jews. Chapter 8, "Hate Is
Like a Loaded Gun: Shaping the Public Response to Crossfire," examines the
popular and critical response to Crossfire, as well as the studio's attempts to
shape the public reception of the film first through a complex program of previews
and audience testing, and then through specific publicity and advertising
strategies. Chapter 9, "Americanism on Trial: HUAC, the Hollywood Ten, and the
Politics of Anti-Communism," examines the postwar negotiation of Americanism
engendered by the 1947 HUAC investigation of subversion in the film industry and
the subsequent blacklisting of the Hollywood Ten. This chapter focuses
particularly on the political uses of "radical" and "Jew" and the juxtaposition of
fascism and Communism within the Cold War discourse on Americanism and
un-Americanism. Chapter 10, "The Triumph of Anti-Communist Americanism: The
Blacklist and Beyond," focuses on the post-HUAC fortunes of Adrian Scott, Edward
Dmytryk, and Dore Schary in order to examine the impact of the blacklist on
Hollywood films and filmmakers and on the Popular Front in the postwar period.
The conclusion, "Freedom of the Screen? The Politics of Postwar Cultural
Production," comments briefly on the impact of the blacklist on film content and
Cold War American culture.

Notes

Note 1: A recent example of the historical overshadowing of Crossfire is the March 1999
National Public Radio story on the controversy over Elia Kazan's Lifetime Achievement Oscar,
which identified Gentleman's Agreement as the first Hollywood film to deal with
anti-Semitism.
Note 2: It is not all that surprising that Crossfire lost out at the Academy Awards, since
Scott and Dmytryk had just refused to testify for HUAC, been fired from RKO, and
blacklisted in the film industry. How could Crossfire possibly have been recognized by the
Academy under these circumstances? Recognizing Gentleman's Agreement, the "safe"
anti–anti-Semitism film, however, might have assuaged those in the film industry who
wanted to encourage and reward social problem filmmaking and show the world that
Hollywood had not been cowed by HUAC.
Note 3: The literature on film noir is extensive, and the term itself, in fact, continues to be
hotly debated. Though all agree that the term was coined by French critics after World War
Two, the consensus ends there. The history and terrain of the debate are examined in more
detail in James Naremore's delightful book More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Other key works that offer more than a
cursory mention of Crossfire include Foster Hirsch, Film Noir: The Dark Side of the Screen
(New York: Da Capo Press, 1981), and Frank Krutnik, In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre,
Masculinity (New York: Routledge, 1991). Peter Roffman and Jim Purdy, The Hollywood
Social Problem Film: Madness, Despair, and Politics from the Depression to the Fifties
(Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1981) discusses Crossfire primarily as a failed
message movie. Judith E. Doneson, The Holocaust in American Film (Philadelphia: The
Jewish Publication Society, 1987); Patricia Erens, The Jew in American Cinema
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984); and Lester Friedman, Hollywood's Image of
the Jew (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1982) focus broadly on representations of Jewishness
in Hollywood films and tend to emphasize Crossfire's inadequacies in comparison to
Gentleman's Agreement. See also Leonard Leff and Jerrold Simmons, "Film into Story: The
Narrative Schema of Crossfire," Literature/Film Quarterly 12:3 (1984): 171–179.
Note 4: Eric Goldman, "The Fight to Bring the Subject of Anti-Semitism to the Screen: The
Story of the Production of Crossfire and Gentleman's Agreement," Davka 5:3 (Fall 1975):
24; Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York:
Anchor Books, 1988); and Stuart Svonkin, Jews Against Prejudice: American Jews and the
Fight for Civil Liberties (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) explore the debate
among Jewish organizations. In contrast, Thomas Cripps, in Making Movies Black: The
Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1993), makes insightful connections between the anti–anti-Semitism films
of 1947 and the important postwar cycle of "message films" that significantly altered
Hollywood representations of African Americans.
Note 5: See, for example, Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood:
Politics in the Film Community, 1930–60 (New York: Doubleday, 1980); Brian Neve, Film
and Politics in America: A Social Tradition (New York: Routledge, 1992); Bernard F. Dick,
Radical Innocence: A Critical Study of the Hollywood Ten (Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky, 1989); Keith Kelly and Clay Steinman, "Crossfire: A Dialectical Attack," Film
Reader 3 (February 1978): 106–127; and Darryl Fox, "Crossfire and HUAC: Surviving the
Slings and Arrows of the Committee," Film History 3 (1989): 29–37. Several of the works
discussed earlier—particularly those by Cripps, Gabler, and Naremore—are also particularly
well historicized.
Note 6: Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era
(New York: Pantheon, 1988), 12.
Note 7: Recent studies reevaluating the critical role of the producer in the studio system
include George F. Custen, Twentieth Century's Fox: Darryl F. Zanuck and the Culture of
Hollywood (New York: Basic Books, 1997) and Matthew Bernstein, Walter Wanger:
Hollywood Independent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
Note 8: Scott never wrote publicly about when or why he joined the Communist Party of the
United States of America (CPUSA), though there is little doubt that he was a member.
Norma Barzman, screenwriter and one of Scott's closest friends, remembers that he was in
the Party at the same time as her husband Ben, who joined in 1939. The FBI file on Scott,
however, dates the beginning of his Party involvement to the early 1940s. Norma Barzman,
interview with author, April 1999; Barzman, interview with Larry Ceplair, in Patrick
McGilligan and Paul Buhle, Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist (New
York: St. Martin's, 1997), 5. See also Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition in Hollywood, 116,
and Dick, Radical Innocence, 122–123.
Note 9: John Paxton to Keith Kelly and Clay Steinman, July 1977, in Paxton Biographical
File, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences [AMPAS], Los Angeles, California.
Note 10: Barzman, interview with author, April 1999; Neve, Film and Politics in America,
87.
Note 11: In addition to his work on progressive feature films, Scott was a founding member
of the Motion Picture Guild, an independent group dedicated to making socially relevant
documentaries and shorts. Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition in Hollywood, 116; Dick, Radical
Innocence, 122–123.
Note 12: Marsha Hunt, interview with Glenn Lovell, in McGilligan and Buhle, Tender
Comrades, 318.
Note 13: On Thalberg the man and the myth, see Gabler, Empire of Their Own, 218–236.
Note 14: I was surprised to find how completely Adrian Scott has dropped off the historical
radar. Though the blacklist explains much, Scott's work has not benefited particularly from
the revisionist project to reclaim the work and reputations of the blacklistees. In a fairly
representative example, Andrew Dickos, in his otherwise very informative recent history of
noir, lists some of the producers who "distinguished themselves in noir production,"
including Hal Wallis, Mark Hellinger, Joan Harrison, Edward Small, and Bob Roberts—but not
Adrian Scott. Dickos even commends Dore Schary, "who, as production head at RKO,
allowed from 1947 to 1949, the biggest concentration of noir filmmaking to be done"—but
fails to mention RKO's leading producer of noir, Adrian Scott. Andrew Dickos, Street with No
Name: A History of the Classic American Film Noir (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press,
2002), 173.
Note 15: Paxton to Kelly and Steinman, June 20, 1977, in Paxton Bio File, AMPAS.
Note 16: Paxton to Keith Kelly and Clay Steinman, n.d. [July 1977], in Paxton Bio File,
AMPAS.
Note 17: Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition in Hollywood, 323.
Note 18: On film noir and Hollywood's wartime shortages, Sheri Chinen Biesen, Blackout:
World War II and the Origins of Film Noir (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005),
especially chapter 2.
Note 19: Lary May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion
Picture Industry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 238.
Note 20: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread
of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1983, 1991).
Note 21: The American response to Japanese fascism was markedly different. Indeed, the
subtle and overt racism of American representations of the Japanese enemy during World
War Two illustrates the limitations of inclusion in wartime popular nationalism. See John
Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986).
Note 22: On the appeal of fascism, see John P. Diggins, "Flirtation with Fascism: American
Pragmatic Liberals and Mussolini's Italy," American Historical Review 71 (January 1966), and
Benjamin L. Alpers, Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture: Envisioning the
Totalitarian Enemy, 1920s–1950s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
Note 23: For general discussions of wartime rhetoric and ideology, see Eric Foner, The
Story of American Freedom (New York: Norton, 1998), especially chapter 10; William S.
Graebner, The Age of Doubt: American Thought and Culture in the 1940s (Boston: Twayne
Publishers, 1991); and Philip Gleason, "Americans All: World War II and the Shaping of
American Identity," The Review of Politics 43 (1981): 483–518. On Hollywood during the
war, see Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics,
Profits, and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (New York: Free Press, 1987); Thomas
Doherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1993); and Lary May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the
Politics of the American Way (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), especially chapter
4. For a concise summary of the Popular Front, see Mark Naison, "Remaking America:
Communists and Liberals in the Popular Front," in New Studies in the Politics and Culture of
U.S. Communism, ed. Michael Brown et al. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993), 45–74.
Note 24: See Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants
and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998); Karen
Brodkin, How the Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998); and Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of
Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States Between the
World Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Note 25: Gleason, "Americans All," especially 497–512.
Note 26: Graebner, The Age of Doubt, 54–55, 146.
Note 27: A number of key events in 1947 signaled the rollback of the New Deal agenda and
a definitive shift to the policies and mentality of the Cold War and anti-Communist
Americanism, including passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, the Truman Doctrine and the
Marshall Plan, and the founding of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Note 28: Henry R. Luce, The American Century (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, Inc.,
1941); Henry A. Wallace, Century of the Common Man: Two Speeches by Henry A. Wallace
(New York: International Workers Order, Inc., 1943), in Wallace File, Southern California
Library for Social Studies and Research, Los Angeles; Foner, The Story of American
Freedom, 232–233; Olivier Zunz, Why the American Century? (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1998), xi–xii, 101.
Note 29: The literature on Cold War anti-Communism is exhaustive. The general texts I
have found particularly useful include David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist
Purge under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978); Richard M.
Fried, Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1990); Robert Griffith and Athan Theoharis, eds., The Specter: Original Essays on the
Cold War and the Origins of McCarthyism (New York: New Viewpoints, 1976); Norman N.
Markowitz, The Rise and Fall of the People's Century: Henry A. Wallace and American
Liberalism, 1941–1948 (New York: Free Press, 1973); Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound:
American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Mary Sperling
McAuliffe, Crisis on the Left: Cold War Politics and American Liberals, 1947–1954 (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1978); Richard H. Pells, The Liberal Mind in a
Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (New York: Harper and
Row, 1985); and Stephen Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1991). On the rhetoric of totalitarianism, see Les K. Adler and Thomas K.
Patterson, "Red Fascism: The Merger of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the American
Image of Totalitarianism, 1930s–1950s," American Historical Review 75:4 (April 1970):
1046–1064; Abbot Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1995); and of course, Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
(1951; New York: Harvest Books, 1973).
Chapter 1

Reel Reds, Real Americans:

Politics and Culture in the Studio System

I liked the old studio world. I miss it sometimes. It was comfortable. You
knew who your friends and enemies were. Your enemies were up there in
the front office, making inter-studio deals, playing gin-rummy in Palm
Springs, or off somewhere consorting with exhibitors. Your friends were
all the other writers, the salaried underpaid producers, directors, editors
and analysts you had coffee with in the commissary. The Communists,
that's who they were to be perfectly honest. The Reds. You could tell
them because they were always talking story—theme, plot, and
motivation. Always hitting you up (in the men's room usually) for a
contribution to something like milk for rickety babies in rural Georgia, or
some such subversive cause. . . . They were gentle patriots . . . , a
friendly if often pedantic group, incessantly interested in ideas and
humanity.
—John Paxton

Screenwriter John Paxton captures some of the Hollywood "studio world" in the 1
1930s and 1940s, as well as the appeal and aura of the progressive film
community during the period of the Popular Front. Paxton chose to remain aloof
from organized politics, but Adrian Scott, one of his closest friends and his
collaborator on the films that launched Paxton's screenwriting career, was a
Communist. So—for a time, at least—was Edward Dmytryk, the third man in the
creative triumvirate responsible for Murder, My Sweet; Cornered; So Well
Remembered; and Crossfire.

Paxton's statement suggests several of the major themes of this work: the power 2
of the studio system and its near-monolithic control of filmmaking; the conflicts
engendered by the hierarchical power relations within the studio system; the
presence and relative influence of a radical minority in the film community; the
relationship between sociability and political engagement that inspired the
creative community, and the confluence of politics and culture during the 1930s
and 1940s. This quote also points clearly to the conflicted nature of the studio
system, a conflict readily evident in Paxton's description of the studio system as a
nexus of "friends and enemies." His is the language of struggle, of a battle in
which the lines were clearly drawn. The "enemies" were the men in the front
office, the money men, the deal makers—a very different group from the film
workers. Paxton's description of "friends" also reflects the profound gulf between
studio management and the studio workforce—a gulf that was simultaneously
economic, cultural, and political.
And yet, Paxton's nostalgia for the old days is clear. His description of the studio 3
system as "comfortable" reveals the ways in which the predictability of conflict
between the front office men and the film workers created friends as well as
enemies, and details the construction of imagined communities within the film
industry.1 The industrial structure that produced the phenomenal success and
international hegemony of American movies also stringently divided film workers
by craft and class, and separated them from the studio heads. The hierarchies of
the studio system thus created an "us and them" mentality that ultimately
enabled a broad-based solidarity among film workers, an imagined community of
cultural workers. Defined in contrast to the perceived cultural crassness and
political conservatism of the studio moguls, the cultural workers made their
imagined community "real" by their own creative engagement and progressive
political commitment.

Despite the constraints of working within the studio system, the amalgam of 4
sociability, politics, and creativity made Hollywood an exciting, challenging place
to work during this period. As Hollywood movies became a cultural front line in
the war against fascism for this class of Left intellectuals, the reality of fascism
dissolved the boundaries between high culture and low culture, at least
momentarily. Significantly, the writers who came to Hollywood in the late 1930s
and 1940s—Scott and Paxton among them—did not have the same conflicts as
those of an earlier generation, who often considered themselves "serious artists"
and felt that they had sold out to Hollywood. The younger generation, though
they struggled mightily against the indignities of mass production within the
studio system, did not have the same fear and loathing of "mass culture" that
marked the "literary" film workers. Rather, as Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund
note, they "regarded the film form as a high art. Raised on 'fine' films, they
understood the potential of the medium in a way that their 'greenhorn' forebears
did not. Much less torn by the desire to be recognized as novelists or playwrights,
they devoted themselves to movie writing."2 This commitment to the craft of
moviemaking—Paxton's "theme, plot, and motivation"—created a common
creative ground that helped to bridge the ideological and artistic differences within
the film community.

Adrian Scott: Starting Out in the Thirties

Born on February 6, 1911, Robert Adrian Scott grew up in Arlington, New Jersey, 5
one of the centers of the American textile industry, a key site in the history of
industrial capitalism and a hotbed of radical labor agitation. Arlington was only
twelve miles to the south of Paterson, where the 1913 strike of 25,000 silk
workers brought together socialists, Wobblies, and Greenwich Village intellectuals
and inspired a massive fundraising pageant performed at Madison Square Garden.
In 1926, when Scott was fifteen years old, 20,000 textile workers in nearby
Passaic, New Jersey, closed down the mills. One of the first mass walkouts led by
the Communist Party, the strike remained in the national headlines for more than
a year;3 surely it entered the consciousness of the young man at some level.
Though the Irish Catholic Scott family was relatively affluent—Adrian's father
worked in middle management for the New York Telephone Company—certainly
the dark, gray, and dirty mills, factories, and working-class neighborhoods of
Adrian's childhood left a lasting impression on him and helped to shape his later
political commitments.4

Another significant influence on the young Adrian Scott lay across the Hudson 6
River from Arlington: the lights of Manhattan, America's cultural mecca, home to
Broadway, the "Great White Way"; to the bohemian communities of Greenwich
Village; to Tin Pan Alley and Harlem, sources for ragtime and hot jazz, the
soundtrack of American modernism. The theater was an early passion of Adrian's,
encouraged perhaps by his older brother Allan, a playwright (and later
screenwriter) whose comedy Goodbye Again ran on Broadway for most of 1933.
Perhaps hoping to follow in his older brother's footsteps, Adrian Scott was
particularly active in theater productions at Amherst College, where he majored in
English and history. His drama professor F. Curtis Canfield remembered, "No
student was more popular and respected than Adrian. He was quiet, serious and
extremely capable in his college work."5 The Olio, the Amherst yearbook, offered
a charming and quite telling portrait of the artist as a young man:

Hat cocked back at a rakish angle, cigar in the corner of his mouth, his
fingers playing nimbly over the typewriter keys, the inimitable R.A.L.
Scott is again displaying his versatility by creating a Lee Tracy
atmosphere while pounding out a thesis for his Genetics course. Among
his other weaknesses are: an uncontrollable passion for high pressure
music (Black Jazz, Tiger Rag and Maniac's Ball being among the most
offensive). . . . An irresistible personality, tolerant and understanding, he
is one whose friendship is well worth acquiring. A mild Epicurean, he lends
conviviality and constructive thought to any party. . . . Smooth, always
the gentleman, this curly haired young man merrily and unconcernedly
goes his way, unenvious of fame or fortune, but content. To predict his
future is an impossibility. Nevertheless, it seems certain, despite his
dislike of publicity, that he will be heard from. His talents are too many to
go unnoticed.6

After graduating from Amherst in 1934, at the lowest point of the Depression, 7
Scott went west to seek his fortune in Hollywood. His brother Allan had moved
from Broadway to Hollywood in 1934, working at RKO on several major Fred
Astaire–Ginger Rogers musicals including Top Hat (1935), Swing Time (1936),
and Shall We Dance (1937). Allan's presence at the studio probably was a factor
in Adrian's being hired at RKO in 1934 as a $25-a-week technical consultant on
Gridiron Flash, a college football drama for the studio’s low-budget B-unit, though
he did not receive screen credit for his contributions. For a young writer with a
burgeoning social consciousness and dreams of becoming a serious dramatist, his
relegation to such low-budget B-unit films as Gridiron Flash must have been
difficult to swallow. And without screen credits, he had no hope of being assigned
to more challenging projects. After three frustrating years, Scott left Hollywood
for New York to try his luck writing for the theater.7

In 1937 he was hired as assistant editor for film at Stage Magazine, and another 8
desk was squeezed into the office—a "dungeon" behind the filing cabinets—that
he would share with another aspiring playwright and Stage's assistant editor for
drama, John Paxton. Scott and Paxton had much in common. Like Scott, John
Paxton came from a fairly affluent Anglo family, though he was raised Protestant
rather than Catholic. Paxton was born (a mere two months after Scott) in Kansas
City, Missouri. Horrified at the idea of going into business and sitting at a desk all
day, Paxton studied journalism at the University of Missouri. However, he was
equally drawn to the theater, which he felt was more social than writing and had
the added attraction of "pretty girls and excitement." Like Scott, he graduated
from college in the depths of the Depression. When he was unable to find
newspaper work, he spent several months traveling around the country with an
acting troupe. Eventually settling in New York, intending to pursue a career as a
writer rather than as an actor, Paxton worked in industrial publicity and managed
a playwriting contest for the Theater Guild before moving to Stage Magazine in
1937.8 The two young men quickly became friends and often ate lunch together,
talking endlessly about drama. At this point, Scott was writing plays on the side,
and "had a great ambition to be a playwright." Paxton recalled that he and Scott
had an "immediate rapport on an artistic level, and it never ended. We went on
from there."9

The 1930s was a decade of enormous excitement and innovation in the New York 9
theater world. The Federal Theater Project (FTP), created under the auspices of
the New Deal's Works Progress Administration to provide work for unemployed
stage artists and to bring theater to a broad cross-section of Americans, had
revitalized theater throughout the country. From the FTP's 1936 production of a
stage version of Sinclair Lewis's antifascist novel It Can't Happen Here, to the
appropriation by its Living Newspaper troupe of the strikes and radical upsurges
that dominated headlines, the FTP created a new model of socially conscious and
federally subsidized theater. The Mercury Theater burst onto the New York scene
from 1937 to 1939; through their productions of Julius Caesar and a
groundbreaking Macbeth with an all-black cast, collaborators Orson Welles and
John Houseman hoped to "democratize elite culture, expropriating the cultural
wealth of the past for the working classes." Perhaps the pinnacle of experimental,
left-wing theater, however, was the Group Theater, whose 1936 production of
Clifford Odets's Waiting for Lefty had brought the audience spontaneously to its
feet, not in applause, but as participants in the drama, blurring the line between
performers and spectators.10 Though there is no evidence that either Paxton or
Scott was associated with the FTP, the Group, or the Mercury Theater during their
time in New York, it is simply impossible that these two young aspiring writers,
who shared a love of and commitment to "serious" drama, could work in the New
York theater world in the mid-1930s and be unaware of these significant new
cultural formations.

Stage Magazine, however, was far removed from the radical ferment in 1930s 10
theater. A slick magazine whose pages featured as many glossy ads for liquor,
restaurants, and tony department stores as serious articles and reviews, Stage
was "a country cousin of the New Yorker," in the words of John Paxton, who noted
that the magazine was constantly in financial crisis. Nevertheless, Stage was an
incredible opportunity for the fledgling writers, who routinely served as
ghostwriters for articles published under the bylines of American and European
notables from a broad range of political persuasions and cultural fields. Through
their work on Stage, Scott and Paxton were immersed in a heady world of ideas
and culture, as they interviewed or corresponded with such intellectuals as John
Strachey and Max Eastman; theater luminaries from Kurt Weill and Max Reinhardt
to Eve La Gallienne and Robert Sherwood; literary figures from John Steinbeck to
James Thurber; and Hollywood heavyweights from Alfred Hitchcock to Frank
Capra and Charles Laughton. Paxton remembered, "There was a point where Allen
Churchill, Sidney Carroll, Adrian and I were writing the whole magazine." By
1938, however, financial difficulties finally forced Stage to cut back its staff, and
Scott was one of the casualties. After seven months in New York, he left to take
another shot at Hollywood. Paxton stayed in New York, working at Stage until it
finally folded in 1939, and then as a play analyst and publicist at the Theater
Guild, before he, too, headed west to Los Angeles.11

Stage provided an invaluable apprenticeship for Scott and Paxton, cementing 11

their friendship as well as their sense of themselves as belonging to the world of
theater, writing, and "Culture." It is also significant that much of their work at
Stage was a sort of literary performance, training them to write not only for
others, but as others. Thus, instead of finding their "authentic voices," Scott and
Paxton learned to mimic and reproduce the voices of well-known and easily
identifiable others—a chameleon exercise that prepared them well to work in
Hollywood. Indeed, despite his notable success as a screenwriter, John Paxton
always described himself as a "script doctor," a writer who fixed or "cured" the
sick and ailing words of others, rather than as an "original" artist: "I was never
that kind of writer," he insisted. Thus, though both men had left the theatrical
world for the film industry by the end of the decade, their brief years in New York
had a lasting impact on their work. Both valued "exaltation and ennoblement" in
drama and wanted to "transfer the seriousness and integrity of Broadway to
Hollywood."12

Friends and Enemies: Working in the Studio System

Hollywood during the studio era was a quintessential site of insiders and 12
outsiders, a company town in which filmmaking dominated all aspects of life,
personal as well as professional. Many, especially those who had earned success
and reputation in the world of theater or literature, found Hollywood appalling and
déclassé, filled with rubes and poseurs. In some ways, this was not untrue. The
image of Hollywood glamour, decadent nightlife, and rampant promiscuity was
generally overrated. Certainly the divorce rate was no higher in Hollywood than in
other major cities, and many contemporary observers remarked on the relative
parochialism and banality of the film colony. Transplanted New Yorkers—drawn by
the possibility of big money, if not the opportunity to create great art—particularly
scorned the lack of sophistication and intellectual stimulation; songwriter Harry
Warren even described living and working in Hollywood as "like being in Iowa."13
Indeed, despite—or perhaps because of—the worldwide dissemination and
circulation of Hollywood films and lives, the film community in the 1930s and
1940s was remarkably insular. The very phrase "film colony," which had broad
currency during this period, evokes not only Hollywood's cultural imperialism, but
also suggests a small band of settlers circling the wagons to protect themselves
from incursion by unknown, outside Others. The strict division of labor within the
studio system shaped the very patterns of sociability, as seen in the "writers'
table" or the "ingenues' table" in the studio commissaries. Similarly, though gala
openings or large affairs drew "mixed" audiences, off the lot, screenwriters tended
to socialize with other screenwriters, actors with other actors, studio heads with
other studio heads.14

At the pinnacle of Hollywood's hierarchy of communities, imagined and real, were 13

the studio heads. Though competition within the film industry could be ruthless,
the ties that bound the studio moguls together were far stronger than the power
struggles or personalities that divided them. The moguls consistently presented a
united front that enabled control of the industry, stabilization of markets and
profits, and protection from external threats and internal "subversion." In short,
the Hollywood studios were, in the words of Ceplair and Englund, "one large
family financed by the same banks, taking the same risks, making the same
product with the same conventions, interchanging a stable corps of artists,
battling common enemies, and adopting standardized policies in a whole range of
areas, from foreign and domestic public relations and marketing to labor contracts
and trade union policies."15

Power relations within the studio system, as well as the unmistakable style and 14
ideological thrust of the film genres associated with classical Hollywood, grew out
of the fact that by the 1930s, the film industry was dominated by a handful of
Eastern European Jewish immigrants who came of age on the fringes of American
culture, poor and hungry to succeed. Though the earliest filmmakers had been
largely native-born, bourgeois Protestants, the Hollywood Jews entered the
business and exhibition end of the industry in the 1910s, and they presided over
its transition to the centralized studio system through the 1920s, applying
entrepreneurial skills learned in the garment industry and other retail trades to
the marketing of films and theaters in a way that helped transform moviegoing
into the great American pastime.16 Of the major players who dominated the film
industry into the 1950s—Jesse Lasky, Adolph Zukor, Carl Laemmle, Cecil B.
DeMille, William Fox, Louis B. Mayer, Marcus Loew, Samuel Goldwyn, Harry Cohn,
Joseph and Nicholas Schenk, David O. Selznick, Irving Thalberg, Darryl F.
Zanuck, and Sam, Harry, Albert, and Jack Warner—only DeMille and Zanuck were
not immigrant Jews.17

These men, along with a handful of American-born Jews (often sons, nephews, or 15
sons-in-law) and a few Gentiles who shared their imperial vision, were Paxton's
"front-office men"—a phrase that points to the rigid hierarchies that defined the
relations of power in Hollywood. Within the studio system, the studio
executives—whether in New York or Hollywood—operated as a bloc, wielding an
almost autocratic power over the process of filmmaking. Though ultimate
authority rested with the "money men" in the New York offices, the studios in
Hollywood were dominated by powerful production heads who wielded enormous
authority over the daily running of the studio, as film historian Thomas Schatz has
described:

These men—and they were always men—translated an annual budget

handed down by the New York office into a program of specific pictures.
They coordinated the operations of the entire plant, conducted contract
negotiations, developed stories and scripts, screened "dailies" as pictures
were being shot, and supervised editing until a picture was ready for
shipment to New York for release.18

If the studio heads were remarkable in their homogeneity and cohesion, 16

Hollywood's creative workers—who often defined themselves in contradistinction
to the moguls, as seen in Paxton's juxtaposition of "friends and enemies"—stand
out for their diversity: Protestants, Catholics, and Jews; native-born, ethnics, and
émigrés (though almost universally white); radicals, liberals, and conservatives;
men and women (though far more men than women); the famous and the
unknown. At times it seemed the only unifying thread was their common struggle
to produce meaningful creative work within the studio system. Nevertheless, that
very sense of solidarity in opposition was the foundation of the other significant
imagined community in the film industry: the "cultural workers," a broad-based
constellation of leftists and liberals that coalesced around the art and politics of
the Popular Front.

Hollywood's cultural workers were part of a larger political and cultural 17

transformation during the 1930s and 1940s. Though historians have vigorously
debated the relative radicalism or conservatism of this era, all agree that this was
a period of significant transformation.19 Among political and labor historians, the
realignment that took place during these decades is often conceptualized as the
age of FDR, the New Deal era, or the age of the CIO. Among cultural historians,
this period is being reconceptualized as a "second American Renaissance" that
transformed the relationship between modernism, mass culture, and progressive
politics and profoundly shaped the generation of artists and intellectuals who
came of age during these decades. Michael Denning makes reference to "the
cultural front." Saverio Giovacchini speaks of "Hollywood modernism." Lary May
describes what he calls the politics of "the American Way." All agree, however,
that Hollywood played a key role in this political and cultural realignment,
challenging Manhattan as the center of American modernism and, indeed, often
siphoning off major New York talents, such as Dorothy Parker and F. Scott
Fitzgerald, as well as attracting a cadre of European émigré artists and
intellectuals.20 For this cosmopolitan Popular Front generation, movies—like jazz,
cartoons, radio, and the other "lively arts"—were both quintessentially modern
and quintessentially American. Though Hollywood had often been disdained by
the "high modernists" of the 1920s as a site of Fordism, frivolousness, and false
consciousness, for the Popular Front generation Hollywood "promised the
construction of a democratic modernism, a common language, able to promote
modernity while maintaining a commitment to democracy as well as the political
and intellectual engagement of the masses."21

Indeed, political engagement was at the heart of this realignment, and the 18
cultural workers in Hollywood, both liberals and radicals, embraced a
wide-ranging and interconnected political agenda that included industrial unionism
and social democracy, antifascism and antiracism, cosmopolitanism and
internationalism. To this end the European émigrés (often refugees from fascism)
and New Yorkers (often from working-class or ethnic backgrounds) who
converged on the film industry in the 1930s and 1940s called for a greater
realism in filmmaking, urging Hollywood to bridge the gap between the popular
and the political, between entertainment and art, and to make films that both
spoke to and enlightened "the people." Though painful, incomplete, and highly
contested, the emergence of this "culture of the masses" created a surge of
excitement among Hollywood progressives such as Adrian Scott and John Paxton,
who hoped to integrate their political commitments into their creative work.
Though Paxton remained somewhat aloof from the political activism that
animated many of his peers, he felt he was "able to contribute because of this
thing [he] had inherited from Anderson and the theater. . . . And this meant
dealing with real material. [They] all did feel that we were the beginning of a new
age."22

Certainly, the desire to make good movies was universal in Hollywood; however, 19
the cultural workers and the front-office men often defined that goal quite
differently, and conflict between the two groups—sometimes friendly, sometimes
not—was a constant feature of work in the studio system. At stake in this
struggle between the film workers and the studio heads were two interrelated
issues: 1) the relative autonomy of the creative workers within the studio system;
and 2) the relative power of each group to influence film content. In this, the
studio moguls clearly had the upper hand, but the conflict was exacerbated by the
autocratic manner in which the studio heads managed their employees. The
situation of the screenwriters—who resisted the control of the studios most
intensely and consistently—illustrates the nature of the conflict. Though the film
industry was irrevocably dependent upon writers, the moguls steadfastly refused
to abdicate their authority and control. In their minds, writers were less artists
than hired hands. Ceplair and Englund note that "the producers willingly paid
gargantuan salaries to the best actors, directors and screenwriters, but
steadfastly resisted any encroachment on creative decision-making. In fact, the
high salaries were partially intended to secure the producers' autocracy, that is,
to sooth the itch for artistic autonomy with the balm of wealth."23 Indeed, Neal
Gabler suggests that serious writers such as Fitzgerald or Faulkner were not hired
for their literary skills as much as for "the distinction they brought to the men
who hired them." To the Hollywood Jews, the screenwriter was "simply another
affectation along with the racehorses, the mansions, the limousines, the tailored
suits. He was a reproof against accusations of vulgarity . . . , a scapegoat for the
indignities they felt they had to suffer for their lack of education and
refinement."24 Having escaped the shtetls of Eastern Europe, having pulled
themselves out of the immigrant ghettos to become some of the wealthiest men
in the country, the Hollywood moguls saw themselves as quintessentially
American Horatio Algers. The American Dream had become their personal reality,
and that reality in turn shaped the often romanticized vision of America they
projected through their films.

At the same time, however, the studio heads shared a sense of being on the 20
outside looking in during an era of raging xenophobia and anti-Semitism. The
Hollywood moguls, producer Milton Sperling explained, "felt that they were on the
outside of the real power source of the country. They were not members of the
power elite . . . that New England–Wall Street–Middle West money."25 This sense
of alienation and desire for respectability spurred in the Hollywood Jews a
"ferocious, even pathological" drive to repudiate their "foreignness" and be
accepted as "real" Americans.26 Significantly, once the Hollywood Jews
consolidated their control of the film industry, Jewish characters and themes
virtually disappeared from the screen. Jewish characters—and indeed, Jewish
actors—were de-ethnicized, and even the rare films about anti-Semitism, such as
The Life of Emile Zola, were vague and indirect. Both assimilationist desires and
fears of the charge of "Jewish domination" of the film industry fed into this
trend.27

Still, the very fact of their success convinced the Hollywood Jews that they knew 21
better than anyone, including the writers, what the public wanted to see. And
they were in a position to make sure the public got what it wanted. For example,
left-wing screenwriter John Wexley remembered watching with Louis B. Mayer the
rushes for MGM's Song of Russia—a film that had deep political significance for
Wexley. Mayer was outraged to see that one of the actresses had dirt on her face:

"The heroine! In all the pictures we have ever made the heroines never
have dirt on their face! I won't have my lead actress shown with dirt on
her face, and by the way, her hair should be dressed properly!" Wexley
objected, saying, "Your heroine is running through bombs. How can she
look like she just came from the hairdresser?" Mayer took him outside
and told him, "Look, I built this studio on this policy. So don't tell me what
to do. You're only a writer."28

Countless incidents such as this fueled the resentment and frustrations of the 22
cultural workers and confirmed their perception of the studio heads as philistines.
Indeed, Paxton's rather contemptuous description of the "work" performed by
these studio heads reveals his sense that the executives were superfluous, if not
deliberately counterproductive, to the creative process of making movies.
Paxton's reference to their "consorting with exhibitors" is a reminder that
Hollywood films were ultimately products to be purchased and consumed, thereby
generating profits for the studios. It was the exhibitors and the audiences who
needed to be wooed, not the studio employees. His image of the moguls "playing
gin-rummy in Palm Springs" suggests the incredible wealth and leisure the studio
heads claimed for themselves, a constant source of resentment for many in the
film industry. His pointed sarcasm clearly reflects his resentment of the top-down
structure of power in Hollywood, and perhaps more importantly, reveals his sense
that the studio moguls were a kind of cabal whose loyalty lay with one another
rather than with the people who worked for them—giving lie to the "family"
rhetoric employed by studio heads like Louis B. Mayer.

Thus, in the nexus of "friends and enemies," Paxton aligns himself with the 23
middle strata of film workers: "the other writers, salaried underpaid producers,
directors, editors and analysts." There is a crucial distinction here between the
"salaried underpaid producers"—like Paxton's friend Adrian Scott—who were
dependent upon the largess of the studio, and an independent producer such as
David O. Selznick, whose financial resources and creative autonomy—and
Jewishness—put him far closer in status and power to the studio heads, or
writer-producer-actor-director Orson Welles, whose wunderkind reputation and
personal charisma gave him astonishingly free rein at RKO during the early
1940s. Paxton's emphasis on the "inter-studio deals" of the studio executives
further suggests the relative powerlessness of film workers, who were generally
hired on long-term, ironclad contracts that left them little room to maneuver or
control the conditions of their work, and who were subject to loan-outs on the
whims of management or assignment to stories or projects not of their own
choosing. Thomas Schatz notes that "because of the different stakes involved for
each of these key players, studio filmmaking was less a process of collaboration
than of negotiation and struggle—occasionally approaching armed conflict."29

Indeed, for every literary star such as F. Scott Fitzgerald or Dorothy Parker, there 24
were dozens of lesser-paid contract writers and hundreds more unemployed
aspirants or freelancers bouncing from studio to studio. Anthropologist Leo Rosten
described the vulnerability of most Hollywood writers:

For two decades [1921–1941] the movie writers in the low salary
brackets (of whom there are plenty) were not given the protection of
minimum wages or minimum periods of employment. They were
discharged with no advance notice; their employment was sporadic and
their tenure short-lived. They were laid off for short-term periods, under
contract but without pay. They worked on stories on which other writers
were employed, without knowing who their collaborators (or competitors)
were. Their right to screen credits was mistreated by certain producers
who allotted credit to their friends or relatives or—under pseudonyms—to
themselves. They were frequently offered the bait of speculative writing
without either guarantees or protection in the outcome.30

The lack of autonomy and creative control—experienced by all creative workers 25

under the studio system, despite the relatively high salaries of some—spawned
intense and convoluted struggles throughout the 1930s to unionize key sectors of
the film industry. In 1927 the studio executives had banded together to form the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) as a company union
embracing producers, directors, actors, writers, and technicians. The Academy
succeeded in forestalling labor unrest for five years, but when the studio
executives used the occasion of Roosevelt's bank holiday in 1933 to cut
screenwriters' salaries (though not their own), the writers rebelled. The Screen
Writers Guild (SWG) was founded in April 1933; the Screen Actors Guild (SAG)
was formed three months later. The studio executives fought unionization with
belligerence and divisiveness. Though the 1935 National Labor Relations Act
authorized collective bargaining, it was ignored by the studios. The threat of an
actors' strike two years later finally forced the studios to recognize SAG in 1937,
but the bread-and-butter concessions they made to the actors did not threaten
the executives' authority in any fundamental way. The screenwriters' demands,
on the other hand, struck deep into the heart of power relations within the studio
system. The SWG's left wing drew up a platform with three goals: "1) a union
strong enough to back its demands by shutting off the supply of screenplays; 2)
alliances with the Dramatists Guild and other writers' organizations so as to be
able to stop the flow of all story material at the source; and 3) remuneration on a
royalty basis that would give authors greater control over the content of their
work by making them part owners of the movies based on their scripts." The
platform caused bitter splits within the SWG, not only between progressives and
conservatives, but also between liberals and radicals. In 1936, the right-wing
screenwriters formed the Screen Playwrights, a company union to which the
studios immediately awarded a five-year contract. The SWG responded by filing a
representation petition with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). In August
1938, the NLRB certified the SWG as the sole bargaining agent for Hollywood
screenwriters; however, it took the writers and executives three years, until May
1941, to agree on a contract. This bitter and protracted battle with the studios
reinforced the participants' sense of themselves as cultural workers and gave
birth to a highly politicized, progressive cadre in Hollywood. Indeed, one
screenwriter joked that Louis B. Mayer had "created more Communists than Karl
Marx."31 The left wing of this movement, particularly, had a profound impact on
the film community through the end of the 1940s.

Red Hollywood: Politics and Culture of the Popular Front

Adrian Scott's return to Hollywood in 1938 coincided with a period of intense 26

political activity in the film colony. During this period Scott worked to define
himself as an artist and to integrate his emerging political vision into his art. The
political commitments he formed during this period, the friends that he made, and
his experiences as a struggling screenwriter profoundly shaped his approach to
filmmaking, the kind of producer he became, and the kinds of films he made. This
was a transformative period for him, and his ongoing struggle to succeed as a
screenwriter was interspersed with work on other creative projects outside the
studios, as well as a burgeoning interest in the political issues that shaped
Hollywood in the late 1930s, from the struggles to unionize the film industry, to
the fight against European fascism, to the campaigns against racism and
discrimination. The Communist Party of the United States of America (the CPUSA
or simply CP) was on the front lines on all these issues and, for many, seemed to
be the only organization that was consistently fighting for fundamental social and
political change. Though there is no doubt that Scott's interest in progressive
politics led him to join the Party at some point during this period, he never spoke
or wrote publicly about being a Communist. But according to Joan Scott, Adrian's
third wife, he was deeply affected by the terrible suffering of the Depression: "The
CP was the only place he could find that addressed it all. He was in his late
twenties and was very impressed by the Communists. Adrian was like anyone else
who came to good politics at that time: he was a good decent person, who cared
about other people's welfare and couldn't just walk away."32

The 1930s and 1940s were the heyday of American Communism, with interest in 27
the Party catalyzed initially by the Great Depression and the growing sense that
neither capitalism nor liberalism offered solutions to—and indeed, might be the
root cause of—the economic and political dislocations that wracked much of the
world.33 It was the rise of fascism in Europe, however, that truly transformed the
Left during this period, both internationally and in the United States. As fascist
regimes in Germany and Italy cracked down on labor and Communist
movements, the Soviet Union was one of the first nations to feel threatened; and
in 1935, the Comintern stepped back from its agenda of worldwide revolution and
embraced the ideology of a Popular Front, an alliance of radicals and liberals
against the forces of reaction and fascism. This was a sea change in international
Communist Party policy, with political and cultural implications that reverberated
throughout the world. During this early period, the Soviets led the charge against
international fascism, particularly in their support for the Republicans in the
Spanish Civil War, a conflict that many on the Left saw as a dress rehearsal for
another world war.34

The shift in policy toward support of a Popular Front against fascism electrified the 28
American Communist Party and particularly captured the imagination of the
younger generation of radicals. As Party activist George Charney described it:

Everything seemed right—the emphasis on the struggle against fascism,

the overriding urge for unity. Overnight we adjusted our evaluation of
Roosevelt and the New Deal. Where we had been prone to damn all things
American, we were now reassured that patriotism was not necessarily
reactionary or the "last refuge of scoundrels," that there was a difference
between bourgeois democracy and fascism, that we had to cherish
democratic traditions, and, above all, that transcending the class struggle,
a basis existed for common action between the Soviet Union and the
bourgeois democratic nations of the West.
Charney also notes that while American Communists had been prepared to work,
however "sluggishly," within the framework of the old policies, they were thrilled
by the prospect of "a policy that was natural, that heeded reality, and that could
unleash our creative talents and energies."35

The Popular Front in America operated as a loose coalition of organizations 29

committed to four primary goals: pressing the Roosevelt administration toward a
worldwide antifascist alliance; supporting defenders of democracy and victims of
fascist militarism, particularly the Spanish Loyalists in their struggle against
Franco; countering domestic fascism; and defeating the attempts of big business
to thwart the labor movement and social-reform legislation. Particularly significant
for the Hollywood progressives, the Popular Front also shifted the Party's priorities
away from notions of "art as a weapon" and the proletarian fiction of
working-class and African American writers, toward "a strategy aimed at aligning
bourgeois literary and screen luminaries into the anti-fascist mobilization." For
many members of the Hollywood film community, including Adrian Scott, the
Popular Front's commitment to solidarity and a united stand against fascism was
enormously appealing and helped sustain the collaboration between liberals and
radicals in their struggles to unionize the film industry and their campaigns
against racial discrimination.36

A number of historians, including Michael Denning and David Roediger, have 30

argued that the emphasis on the CPUSA (or, indeed, the Comintern) in analyses
of the Popular Front is misleading. They suggest that the historical "fixation" with
the model of a Party "core" and a "periphery" of liberals and sympathizers
ultimately reduces the Popular Front to a cynical formulation of the Party line or a
fleeting political coalition of leftists, liberals, and "fellow travellers." Denning, in
particular, argues that, within the cultural front (though not necessarily in the
labor movement, for example), the non-Communist socialists and independent
leftists—such as Orson Welles, Richard Wright, Carey McWilliams, Louis
Adamic—were the Popular Front and worked to create a "culture that was neither
a Party nor a liberal New Deal culture." In Denning's formulation, the Popular
Front is more productively viewed in Gramscian terms, as a "historical bloc uniting
industrial unionists, Communists, independent socialists, community activists, and
émigré anti-fascists around laborist social democracy, anti-fascism and
anti-lynching." Denning also offers a corrective to interpretations that suggest
that the Popular Front represented an unfortunate retreat from earlier "real"
radicalism (particularly on race and gender) that ultimately compromised the
influence of the Left and undermined the revolutionary impulse and cultural
legitimacy of proletarian art and literature.37

While I agree with the sentiment behind Denning's call for a shift away from 31
Communist Party–centered interpretations—many of which are motivated by a
not-so-subtle antiradicalism38—the exceptional influence of Party members within
the Hollywood progressive community, as well as the issue of Party membership
in postwar attacks on Hollywood and on Adrian Scott, Edward Dmytryk, and
Crossfire, in particular, mandate an extended analysis of the role of the Party in
the film industry. Though Scott himself remained silent about his CP membership,
some of his friends and comrades in the industry have written powerfully of their
experiences, and their memories offer a window onto that world—the urgency of
the times and the issues that "made them feel it was important to be a
Communist. In that way, and in that way only, could people overcome what they
felt was the major political action in the world, which was becoming Fascist."39

The strength and appeal of the Party—the romance of American Communism, as 32

Vivian Gornick has called it40—in the 1930s and 1940s was such that every
progressive in America had to grapple at some point with the question: "Should I
join?" Many chose not to. Some were put off by the hierarchical structure of the
Party, others by the rigidity of some of the Communists themselves. Some joined
and then left, disturbed by reports of purges and atrocities in the Soviet Union or
abrupt shifts in the ideological line. Many, both inside and outside the Party, were
deeply disturbed by the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939, and were alternately amused
and outraged by the overnight transformation of the Party position on the war,
from intervention to isolationism in 1939, and then back to interventionism again
in 1941, after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. These sudden ideological shifts
gave credence to charges that American Communists blindly followed orders from
Moscow and created suspicions that undermined the left-liberal solidarity of the
Popular Front period.41

Nevertheless, the Party's appeal to social idealism gave it a strong toehold among 33
Hollywood progressives, and in fact, many Hollywood Communists have insisted
that their experiences within the Party were markedly different from those of
Communists in other industries or locales. From the beginning, the Party's desire
to attract Hollywood luminaries translated into a relaxation of both discipline and
dogma. Founded in 1934, the Hollywood branch of the CPUSA was answerable
only to the Party leaders in New York, giving the Hollywood Communists an
unusual degree of autonomy. From an initial membership of four screenwriters,
the section grew to over one hundred members within a year and nearly three
hundred within three years. The section was advised intermittently by the Party's
cultural commissar, V. J. Jerome, while John Howard Lawson ran the section on
the local level.42 According to Abe Polonsky, Party member and writer-director of
several important films noir, including Body and Soul and Force of Evil,

The Party style of Marxism didn't have a chance here, or in New York
 either, among intellectuals. The leadership's behavior violated the whole
intellectual life of Marxism, and the Party itself also did that constantly. . .
. [V. J. Jerome] would raise hell with about eleven people. We didn't give
a shit. The cultural leadership obviously didn't know what they were
talking about. We ignored them out here, and we did a lot of wonderful
things despite them.43

The Party leadership in New York also chose to overlook the divergences between 34
many of the Party's avowedly revolutionary goals and the more mainstream social
passions of the film community—the defeat of the Axis powers, the success of the
labor movement, and the eradication of racism in America. Ceplair and Englund
note that "these interests were not mutually exclusive; in fact, there was
considerable tactical and strategic overlap. Nevertheless, these divergences
created a basis for confusion." Screenwriter Guy Endore's statement is particularly
telling in this context:

I wasn't really a Communist. I didn't agree with [all the Party's doctrines].
[What] united me with it was simply the fact that they represented the
most extreme protest to what I saw going on in the world. . . . I was a
Communist only in the sense that I felt it would stop war and it would
stop rac[ist] feelings, that it would help Jews, Negroes, and so on. I
wasn't a Communist in wanting the Communist Party to run the world or
in wanting the ideas of Karl Marx to govern everything.44

Such divergences between Party dogma and the political consciousness of most 35
Hollywood Communists help to explain Paxton's characterization of the "Reds"
with such rare sympathy. He scoffs at the idea of the Communists as dangerous
revolutionaries through the example he gives of their political activity—dunning
him for money in the men's room to buy milk for rickety children in Georgia.
Instead, he describes them as "gentle patriots." Indeed, the "Americanized"
rhetoric of the Popular Front period not only helped to make the Party more
palatable to liberals in the film community, but also transformed the radicals'
perception of themselves, as George Charney describes:

It was as though a new day had dawned for the American movement. We
were not only Communists, we were Americans again. . . . [W]e were
readily convinced that [Marxism and Americanism] were not only
compatible but inseparable. . . . We became Jeffersonians, students of
American history, and as we rediscovered our revolutionary origins, we
reinterpreted them in Marxist terms. . . . We even projected a flamboyant
slogan, 'Communism Is Twentieth-Century Americanism,' to dramatize
our new outlook as well as to suggest a historical link between democracy
and communism.45

Though some have suggested that the Party's newfound patriotism was merely
cynical posturing, Ceplair and Englund argue that the Hollywood Communists
were "courageous American radicals in the Jeffersonian, or abolitionist traditions,
who joined [the CPUSA] not as a response to class exploitation, but because they
regarded it as the most effective means to live out their principles in the
twentieth century."46

Indeed, John Bright, one of the founders of the Hollywood branch of the Party, 36
proudly defined himself as an "indigenous" radical, and credited his family's
history of antiracist work as the inspiration for his avid support for the Scottsboro
Boys. He described the Party as: "the only organization in the country that cared
and did something about what I believe is the great cancer in this country—racial
prejudice. The Socialists didn't do anything about it, and certainly the Democrats
and Republicans didn't do anything about it. But the Communist Party did. That
attracted me originally, and I went all out."47 Bright's sentiments were echoed by
many others in the film community who were politicized during this period. In the
words of screenwriter Anne Froelick, "You couldn't see what happened during the
Spanish Civil War any other way: it was the Communists against the Fascists. For
a writer in Hollywood, the Communists in the Screen Writers Guild were the ones
raising our professional standard, winning our rights in various ways. And they
were way, way out in front of everyone else on Negro rights." Howard Koch, a
lifelong progressive, though not a member of the Party, recalled the early 1940s
as "a high point in his life, a time when, with Roosevelt in the White House and
'the Depression in back of us,' everything seemed possible." Koch characterized
the political commitment of Hollywood progressives—liberals and leftists—in
simple terms: they were "involved in the struggle against fascism, in whatever
form it appeared, and in working for a more democratic society, economically and
racially."48 This was certainly the case for Adrian Scott, and this alternative
Americanism is evident throughout his creative work as a filmmaker.

Another fundamental appeal of the Hollywood Left was its sociability. Paxton's 37
remembrance tells us a great deal about the appeal of the studio system for its
creative personnel, emphasizing the seamlessness between work and life that was
so compelling and seemed so absent, ordinarily, in the modern world. Paxton's
warm memory of drinking coffee in the commissary with the comrades, "always
talking story" with idealistic, socially conscious friends, is an apt metaphor for the
desire for belonging and meaning that was extremely powerful for Hollywood
progressives. Actress Betsy Blair Reisz frequently attended Marxist discussion
groups when she lived in New York, but found that in Hollywood talk of politics
was as much a part of the social scene as of organized political activity: "All of my
theoretical discussions were at Schwab's [Drugstore] or at the delicatessen across
the street from the Actors Lab, where, believe me, with people like Arnie Manoff
and Jack Berry screaming and yelling, we had big political discussions about
everything."49 Abe Polonsky, a more theoretically sophisticated Marxist than most
of his radical peers, tellingly described the Party in Hollywood as a "kind of social
club."50 Activist Ella Winter, who was married to screenwriter Donald Ogden
Stewart, wrote in The New Republic in early 1938: "There is hardly a tea party
today, or a cocktail gathering, a studio lunch table or dinner even at a producer's
house at which you do not hear agitated discussion, talk of 'freedom' and
'suppression,' talk of tyranny and the Constitution, of war, of world economy and
political theory." Indeed, liberal screenwriter Mary McCall complained at the time,
"We're up to our necks in politics and morality. . . . There are no gatherings now
except for a Good Cause. We have almost no time to be actors and writers these
days. We're committee members and collectors and organizers and audiences for
orators."51

Hollywood cultural workers were impressed by movies with progressive themes, 38

particularly biopics such as Juarez, The Story of Louis Pasteur, and The Life of
Emile Zola, or stories of "little men" or "the people" such I Am a Fugitive from a
Chain Gang, and The Grapes of Wrath. These were the kinds of films that they
tried to write as well. The Party held workshops to help writers engage politically
in their cultural work. The Writers Clinic was an informal board of successful
left-wing screenwriters, including George Sklar, Albert Maltz, and John Howard
Lawson, who read and commented on screenplays submitted by writers. Though
the Party was interested in helping writers develop politically and meld their
politics and their creative work, the leadership did not attempt to formally censor
screenplays. Ceplair and Englund assert that while the criticisms from the Writers
Clinic might be "plentiful, stinging and (sometimes politically) dogmatic," the
writers were free to embrace or ignore them without repercussions.52 Norma
Barzman found Sklar's critiques of her work in a Party-run clinic very helpful and
"a wonderful example of how writers could work together. The atmosphere among
Communist writers in Hollywood was like no other. People cared about each
other, about ideas, about doing good things. It sounds Pollyannaish, but they
enjoyed working together." Anne Froelick agreed, though she thought the Party
discussions about screenwriting "sounded like harangues, and the books about
theory were just terrible. . . . But the Party made you feel that your favorite
friends were all working together and that you were helping the world to be a
better place in small ways."53 Significantly, it was on the terrain of creativity that
Hollywood radicals tried to win over liberals in the film colony. As Ceplair and
Englund report, "Scarcely a liberal or sympathizer in Hollywood missed getting an
invitation, between 1936 and 1946, 'to come talk films with us.' Those who
accepted found themselves, to their amusement or consternation, at a weekly
get-together of a [M]arxist study group. . . . [N]ew people in Hollywood, or
old-line liberals, were considered fair game."54

One question of intense interest to Hollywood progressives was the degree to 39

which they were able to influence the content of the films on which they worked.
Alvah Bessie remembers receiving conflicting advice when he arrived in Hollywood
after writing cultural criticism for the New Masses. John Howard Lawson told him,
"You can do good work here, if you understand the limitations of this medium in
this particular system." Daniel Fuchs, on the other hand, warned him: "Everything
you are given here will be shit. And you cannot make anything out of it except
shit. That is all you can do with it. But . . . if you play your cards right, you can be
on the top of the heap in a year, making big money." Even Communist Party
leader William Z. Foster had an opinion. Speaking at a meeting of the Hollywood
section, he told the writers, "You can't really do very good work in this industry
because they won't let you. But you can prevent them, if you know how to do it,
from making really anti-black, anti-woman, anti-foreign-born,
anti-foreign-country pictures. You can prevent them from making anti-human
pictures, and that is a very worthy thing to be doing."55 Comedy writer Allen
Boretz believed, "Content could be made an integral part of the structure of a
film, if it lived up to its dramatic purpose and was not inserted willy-nilly.
Otherwise it would stand out like a sore thumb. Everything depended on the
effect it was supposed to have. It could be too strong, but it could also be too
subtle, in which case it was useless."56 Betsy Blair Reisz insisted,

Of course, there was a Communist conspiracy in Hollywood. There was a

conspiracy to get a black character into a movie or to express a liberal
idea in a movie. It's a joke that it was a Communist conspiracy to
overthrow the country. It was a conspiracy to do good work and establish
the movie unions. People sneer at the 'champagne socialists.' . . . But it is
false to think that you couldn't take those people seriously and that they
were doing it for show. . . . Everybody I knew was doing it
idealistically.57

Film historian Brian Neve concludes that "the radical writers may not have had a
radical aesthetic about film, or any significant power base within the studio
system, but the interest of the Community Party in the craft of the screenwriter,
and the discussions in their writers' clinics, had some effect in a period when the
new Hollywood interest in politics and messages increased the prestige and
bargaining power of the writer."58

The interplay of politics and culture was a heady mix for Hollywood progressives 40
during this period, and despite the constraints of working within the studio
system, the amalgam of sociability, politics, and creativity made Hollywood an
exciting, challenging place to work during this period. Ceplair and Englund note
that "virtually all screenwriters were held fast by the large salaries and by the
unique, peculiar, and undefinable sense of challenge and accomplishment
presented by their craft."59 This was certainly the case for Scott and Paxton, who
were drawn together initially by a shared love of the theater and a desire to
translate the seriousness and integrity of theater to film. By the end of the
decade, their commitment to realism in art was inseparable from their progressive
political commitment, and for Scott, membership in the Communist Party. Paxton
remembered that the artists he worked with, whether or not they were
Communists, shared an "enormous social conscience. . . . Today they'd say 'Tell it
like it is.' The town at that time was feeling a surge of excitement, and film was
the most exciting medium there was."60

Adrian Scott in Hollywood

Like many young screenwriters during this period, Scott hoped to integrate his 41
burgeoning radical politics into his creative work. At this point in his career,
however, Scott was still struggling to make a name for himself within the studio
system, working as a freelancer and under short-term contracts with no tangible
success for more than a year. His frustrations with screenwriting, and his
emerging political vision, soon led him outside the studio system to documentary
filmmaking. Richard Pells suggests that the documentary impulse of the 1930s
grew out of the sense that fiction and drama were inadequate to explain the
"intolerable confusion and disorder" and loss "of control over their institutions,
their environment, and their lives" felt by many Americans, conditions created by
the Depression at home and fascism abroad. As writer Elizabeth Noble argued in
the New Masses in 1937, "With real events looming larger than any imagined
happenings, documentary films and still photographs, reportage and the like have
taken the place once held by the grand invention." In his desire to reflect the
"truth" of his times, Scott joined many literary luminaries including James Agee,
John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, and Louis Adamic. Pells
also suggests that the documentary impulse allowed writers to address their own
internal discord as well as that of the society. He argues that "by portraying what
he saw as truthfully and completely as possible, the artist could feel that he was
engaged in a purposeful enterprise, that he had regained control over some
portion of his life, that he had recovered his competence and self-respect. To this
extent, the documentary became for many writers a natural response to social
chaos and inner turmoil."61 This analysis seems particularly applicable to Adrian
Scott during this transitional period in his life, as he struggled on a number of
levels to define himself and to integrate his aesthetic and political visions.

Abe Polonsky offers another perspective on the appeal of documentaries, 42

suggesting that the constraints and frustration of working within the studio
system itself forced Hollywood artists to question their career choices:

According to Marxist theory, no decent picture could be made in

Hollywood. In the meetings of the Hollywood clubs—a word we preferred
to cells—one of the great discussions that used to go on all the time was:
Should I be in Hollywood, and should I be writing movies? Or should I,
 say, do documentaries? Or should I try to make films apart from
Hollywood that would in some way deal with the theoretical basis of why
we are in fact in the Communist Party? . . . But when you want to get into
making movies, and if you're fascinated with movies and care about
movies, then there's only one thing to do: you try to make feature films
for studios. It may not be the best solution to an artistic problem. It may
end in the total defeat of every impulse that the writer, the director, and
the actor has. But the fact of the matter is, that's the only choice, and
that is why so many people who became Communists in Hollywood didn't
rush to go elsewhere.62

Nevertheless, in April 1939, in an attempt to make an end run around the studio 43
system, a handful of left and liberal filmworkers, including Adrian Scott, as well as
Nathanael West, John Wexley, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Lillian
Hellman, Budd Schulberg, and John Garfield formed the Motion Picture Guild
(MPG). This progressive film group planned to make a series of socially relevant
films and short documentaries on key topics close to the heart of the progressive
film community, from union campaigns to the New Deal to the evils of fascism. In
1939, the MPG purchased the rights to School for Barbarians by Erika Mann, who
had barely escaped Nazi Germany in 1938 with her father, the novelist Thomas
Mann. Scott was particularly interested in working on a film version of this exposé
of the propaganda techniques aimed at the Hitler Youth.63 The project never
materialized, but Scott's interest in Mann's book and his involvement with the
MPG reveal that by 1939 he was running in the more radical circles of the
Hollywood progressive community. In all likelihood, Scott had joined the
Communist Party at this point.64

During this period Scott also hoped to adapt Paul de Kruif's 1938 book, Fight for 44
Life, as a series of short films on diseases like pellagra, tuberculosis, and polio
that had reached epidemic proportions in the 1930s. Film historian Bernard F.
Dick argues that Scott saw his own political vision reflected in de Kruif's premise
that "humankind has a right to life and that whatever endangers that right (such
as poverty and disease) must be eradicated . . . and that the fight for life was a
people's fight that could be won only through a national health program." Scott
took his idea for a documentary series to RKO, an ideal choice since the studio
owned the distribution rights for both Pathé News and The March of Time.
However, filmmaker Pare Lorentz—best known for the documentary The Plow that
Broke the Plains, a vivid exposé on the plight of the Okies—was also interested in
de Kruif's book, and he beat Scott to the punch. Lorentz's documentary on the
squalid conditions in maternity wards for the poor was released in 1939 as The
Fight for Life. Though Scott wrote a script based on de Kruif's chapter on
tuberculosis and pitched it to RKO, it was rejected by Pathé's Frederick Ullman Jr.
as being too expensive to film.65
Even as he was exploring the possibilities of writing and producing 45
documentaries, Scott also worked as a freelance screenwriter, though he did not
receive on-screen credit. For example, in late 1939, Scott wrote a screenplay at
Columbia with Bernard Feins entitled March of Crime that was deemed
"unacceptable" by the Breen Office for its violence and depiction of the corruption
and lawlessness of American society.66 During this period, Scott also may have
worked on any number of other projects that did not materialize, as had been the
case with his work on documentaries. Indeed, the memoirs of Hollywood
screenwriters are filled with stories of ideas pitched to no avail, scripts started or
finished and shelved, or turned over to another writer and revised into something
unrecognizable to the original writer. Finally, at MGM in 1940, Scott received his
first screen credit, for Keeping Company, which he described as "one of the
horrors of all time." The following year, he made credited contributions on two
more screenplays: We Go Fast at Twentieth Century–Fox and The Parson of
Panamint at Paramount, which he scornfully remembered as "one of those things
starring Wallace Beery."67

Nevertheless, The Parson of Panamint, the story of a thriving mining town that 46
has fallen on hard times, offers some insights into Scott's early attempts to invest
his writing with a social message. In Scott's revision of Harold Schumate's original
script, the townspeople of Panamint hire a minister who wins over the gamblers
and prostitutes, helping to revitalize and bring respectability to the town.
However, the parson also challenges the complacency of the townspeople,
warning about the danger that flooded mines pose to the safety of the town, and
preaching sermons in defense of the poor and hungry. According to Bernard F.
Dick, "For all his idealism, [Scott] was not blind to the darkness of the heart; it is
that darkness, in the form of venality and hypocrisy, the destroys the town of
Panamint and leads to the persecution of its parson, whose gospel of brotherly
love falls on deaf ears."68

In the summer of 1941, as The Parson of Panamint was being readied for release, 47
John Paxton arrived in Hollywood, on an extended vacation following the close of
the New York theater season. In Hollywood, Albert McCreery, who had covered
the Little Theater circuit for Stage, had turned to screenwriting and needed help
with a script. Paxton was amused, having heard this story before. McCreery was
an idea man, not a writer (though he eventually became a successful director); in
the late 1930s, he was about to be fired from Stage when Paxton stepped in as
McCreery's ghostwriter, earning $15 a month (which translated for him into three
good dates at a steakhouse, with wine). Now, McCreery had successfully pitched a
story to director Mitchell Leisen, but wasn't able to follow through on paper and
was about to be fired again. Paxton was on vacation and wasn't interested, but he
relented after McCreery "cried and carried on." Though he had never even seen a
screenplay before, he jumped in with both feet, writing "two lines ahead of the
camera." The film was released by Columbia in 1942 as The Lady is Willing, with
Albert McCreery as the credited screenwriter. Scott, after reading the script, told
Paxton he had a "knack." At that point, Paxton was still planning to return in the
fall to his job as a publicist for the Theater Guild, but Scott convinced him to stay
in Hollywood, promising him, "We'll work together, we'll make it together."69

Paxton wrote several more scripts for McCreery, as well as several on his own (all 48
uncredited). In the interim, in July of 1942, Scott was put under contract again at
RKO, earning $300 a week—12 times his salary in 1934. Soon afterward, Scott
and Paxton finally collaborated—with disastrous results—on a screenplay for The
Great Gildersleeve series, produced by the RKO B-unit. Producer Herman Schlom
insisted that they write a treatment before proceeding on to a full-length script.
After turning in the treatment for Great Gildersleeves on Patrol, they discovered
that Schlom believed that if a story was good, he could tell it without having to
refer to the written word. Scott and Paxton endured daily sessions during which
Schlom would begin narrating the story, only to stumble at a certain (and always
the same) point and announce that the script was in trouble. Scott and Paxton
repeatedly referred him to the treatment on his desk, but Schlom insisted that he
must tell the story without prompting. As Paxton remembered,

Adrian endured this for about a week. He'd always come in every day and
stretch out on the sofa and take off his shoes, usually cover his face while
Herman would laboriously go from the opening to the door of the library
with the man with the knife in his back and then get stuck. [Eventually]
Adrian got the most typical case of hysterics I've ever seen. Laughing,
crying, he got up, couldn't find his shoes, walked out of the studio
barefoot and never came back. That was the end of that project.70

During this period, discussions of such frustrations were common among Scott's 49
close friends, who included John Paxton and Ben Barzman, a writer who was also
under contract at RKO, and Ben's fiancée, Norma, also a screenwriter as well as a
reporter for the Los Angeles Herald. Norma remembers these men as "the three
Musketeers—they were so close and really loved each other." By the early 1940s,
Scott was almost certainly a member of the Party, as were Norma and Ben.
Though Paxton was not a "joiner," he "agreed with all the left positions straight
down the line;" Norma describes him as a "progressive who stayed out of the
Party, as opposed to an active liberal like Eddie North," one of Scott's friends from
Amherst.71 For this intimate circle of politically committed artists, experiences
like The Great Gildersleeve debacle were too frequent and too far from the hopes
and expectations they had, not only for their own work but for the great social
potential they saw in Hollywood movies. Adrian, Ben, and Norma had all attended
the Party's writers' clinics (Paxton was not impressed with the claims that the
clinics would make him a better writer) and were deeply committed to the
principle of political filmmaking. Nevertheless, the yawning chasm between their
political vision and the realities of working within the studio system sometimes
seemed unbridgeable.

This was also a difficult time for Scott personally. In January 1943, his wife of two 50
years, model Dorothy Shipley, sued him for divorce, and he went to live with Ben
and Norma Barzman, who had been married only days earlier.72 Clearly, Scott
and the Barzmans were exceptionally close, and Norma was particularly fond of
Scott: "Adrian was a very sweet person, an extraordinarily lovely person."
Nevertheless, Norma felt that unintentionally, the men, who were "so close and
already had a history together," shut her out. While Norma cooked their meals
and did the dishes, they talked about movies.73 As Norma remembers, "Adrian
and Ben used to talk away about making good, cheap pictures . . . pictures about
something. Their dream was to do it all: write, produce, direct. They were
intensely interested in this, and they were always looking for ideas for
projects."74

As Brian Neve points out, for the younger generation of filmmakers like Adrian 51
Scott, "the aspiration to make better films was linked to the desire to make more
progressive films."75 Many screenwriters—including Robert Rossen, Abe Polonsky,
and Nicholas Ray—turned to directing in search of artistic autonomy within studio
filmmaking. However, Scott believed strongly that as a producer, with the ability
to pick and choose projects, to assign writers and directors, to make casting
decisions, and to influence the film's budget, he would have the autonomy
necessary to fulfill his artistic and political agenda.76 At this point, fascism and
the war in Europe dominated Scott's political vision, but he was not yet in a
position to truly express that vision artistically. Scott finally got his chance in the
1940s, particularly after the American intervention in World War Two, as the
Hollywood studios rallied to the antifascist cause, producing hundreds of feature
films and documentaries that raised the cry of alarm and explained to the
American public "why we fight." This wartime elaboration of an antifascist popular
nationalism inaugurated a new era of political filmmaking in Hollywood and helped
to legitimize the vision of radical filmmakers like Scott.

Notes

Note 1: In some ways, Hollywood itself can be seen productively as an imagined

community. Just as the star system was built on the imagined personas of individual actors,
carefully cultivated for public consumption via advertising, publicity, and fan magazines, as
well as the movies themselves, so the image of Hollywood was self-reflexively constructed
and disseminated to the American public, with the help of a constellation of "outside"
publicists, from journalists and film critics to the advertising industry and merchandisers,
and even to intellectuals, such as anthropologist Leo Rosten, whose 1941 ethnography,
Hollywood: The Film Colony, the Movie Makers, lent the weight of academic analysis to the
imagined community. On the one hand, Hollywood presented itself as "Tinseltown" or the
"Glamour Capitol of the World," a construction that emphasized the wealth, beauty, style,
and youth of the stars and filmmakers and paraded their opulent and exciting lifestyles for
vicarious consumption by voyeuristic fans. On the other hand, the film colony presented
itself as "Hollywood, U.S.A.," a construction that worked both to combat images of
decadence and depravity by insisting on the "normality" of life in the land of sunshine,
oranges, and eternal youth, and to suggest that Hollywood was simply a microcosm of the
rest of the nation, sharing similar values and mores, and that its film products fully and
naturally reflected that nation back to itself. For a fascinating discussion of this process, see
Ronald L. Davis, The Glamour Factory: Inside Hollywood’s Big Studio System (Dallas, Tex.:
Southern Methodist University Press, 1993), particularly chapter 16 on social life in
Hollywood.
Note 2: Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film
Community, 1930–60 (New York: Doubleday, 1980), 4–5.
Note 3: George W. Carey, "Paterson Strike of 1913," and David J. Goldberg, "Passaic Textile
Strike of 1926," both in Mari Jo Buhle et al., eds., Encyclopedia of the American Left
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 558–560, 562–563.
Note 4: Joan Scott, interview with author, April 1999, Los Angeles.
Note 5: Canfield's comments were made in support of Scott's request for parole in 1951;
quoted in Robert Kenny to Scott, typewritten letter, January 5, 1951, in Robert W. Kenny
and Robert S. Morris Papers (hereafter, Kenny-Morris Papers), B10-F5.
Note 6: Scott bio from the Olio (1934), the Amherst College yearbook. I am grateful to
Jonathan Kauffman for sharing this with me.
Note 7: Joan Scott, interview with author, April 1999, Los Angeles; Bernard Dick, Radical
Innocence: A Critical Study of the Hollywood Ten (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,
1989), 121-122.
Note 8: John Paxton, interview with Larry Ceplair, June 29, 1977, Los Angeles. I am
grateful to Larry Ceplair for sharing his notes with me.
Note 9: Virginia Wright, Los Angeles Daily News, April 16, 1946, in Paxton Papers, folder 5,
AMPAS; Dick, Radical Innocence, 121; Sarah Jane Paxton, interview with author, April 1999,
Los Angeles; John Paxton, taped interview [n.a.], 1977, Los Angeles. Sarah Jane Paxton
graciously loaned me her copy of this tape.
Note 10: Jane DeHart Mathews, The Federal Theatre, 1935–1939: Plays, Relief, and Politics
(Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1967); Michael Denning, The Cultural Front:
The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1996),
362–371; Wendy Smith, Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931–1940
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990). The Group Theater's historical reputation is often based
on its pioneering approach to acting—emotional realism or The Method, as it is popularly
called. Inspired by the example of the Moscow Art Theater, which had toured the United
States in the 1920s, the Group also envisioned a radically different working relationship,
based on the priority of the collective over the individual. The members experienced a
personal transformation through their commitment to the Group. Their experience taught
them about the interconnections between culture and politics, the personal and the
political—that art is, or should be, for the people. The primary goal of the Group was to
break down artificial barriers: between actors, between playwrights and production
companies, and most importantly, between the players and the audience. In the fall of 1937,
while Paxton and Scott were both working at Stage, the Group produced Golden Boy, the
second major play by Clifford Odets to receive stellar reviews and enhance the reputation of
the theater troupe. Included in the cast were a number of Group actors who would later
move to Hollywood: Jules (later John) Garfield, Luther Adler, Frances Farmer, and Elia
Kazan. See Smith, Real Life Drama, especially 432.
Note 11: Sarah Jane Paxton, interview with author, April 1999. Bernard Dick says that
Scott's writing was never published in Stage and that John Paxton wrote only a handful of
articles (Dick, Radical Innocence, 121). However, John Paxton makes clear in the 1977
taped interview that he and Scott, with several other staff members, were responsible for
many of the articles that appeared under the names of others.
Note 12: Paxton, interview with Ceplair, June 29, 1977; Paxton, taped interview, 1977.
Paxton believed that his work as a critic undermined his originality as a writer: "I know what
critics hate. I start originals, see all the pitfalls, and I usually stop. . . . I have to have
something to go on, a novel, a short story, however slight, before I can write." J. D.
Marshall, "The Greeks Had Another Word for It, Meaning—Exaltation—John Paxton"
[interview with Paxton], in J. D. Marshall, Blueprint in Babylon (Tempe, Ariz.: Phoenix
House, 1978), 258.
Note 13: Davis, The Glamour Factory, 324–325.
Note 14: Distinct circles of sociability—the "Irish Mafia" group of former New York actors
such as James Cagney, Pat O'Brien, and Spencer Tracy; the expatriated New York writers
such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, John O'Hara, Dorothy Parker, and Lillian Hellman who gathered
at the Garden of Allah Hotel; the Holmby Hills group that formed around power couples like
Joan Bennet and Walter Wanger and Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart; or the group of
men drawn together through their interest in sports shooting (Clark Gable, Fredric March,
Gary Cooper, Robert Taylor, and Fred McMurray)—reflected the hierarchies of craft and
status that were endemic to the studio system. Actress Betsy Blair Reisz, who was married
to dancer Gene Kelly during this period, remembers that their social set was composed
almost exclusively of old friends from the New York stage and new ones from the MGM
production unit that worked on Kelly's musicals. Their sense of identification with the MGM
group was such, she remembers, that "we didn't socialize with people from the other
studios. The people in musicals at Fox, for instance, were people we scoffed at—Betty Grable
and Cesar Romero." Davis, The Glamour Factory, 333–335; Betsy Blair Reisz, interview with
Patrick McGilligan, in Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle, Tender Comrades: A Backstory of
the Hollywood Blacklist (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), 546.
Note 15: Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition in Hollywood, 1–2.
Note 16: By the 1920s, the storefront nickelodeons had given way to opulent pleasure
palaces, a definitive sign that the movies had become respectable entertainment. However,
these theaters also represented the democratizing power of the movies, as filmgoers of all
classes (though not necessarily all races) sat together in the dark, mesmerized by the
images on the silvery screen. Particularly after the arrival of "talkies" in the late 1920s, the
public appetite for movies appeared insatiable. The weekly film audience was between 20
and 30 million in the 1920s, and the majority of American recreation dollars was spent on
movies. By 1946, the weekly film audience had skyrocketed to 90 million. Lary May,
Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 163–166, 202; Davis, The Glamour Factory, 368; Neal
Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York: Anchor
Books, 1988), 1–4; Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: How
Politics, Profits, and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (New York: Free Press, 1987),
4; Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (New
York: Pantheon, 1988), 5–6.
Note 17: Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood
Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 78.
Note 18: Schatz, Genius of the System, 6–7.
Note 19: Historians have hotly debated the relative radicalism and long-term impact of
these political, social and cultural transformations of the 1930s. Many argue that the New
Deal, rather than being a sharp break with the past, should be viewed not only as the logical
culmination of the trend toward government bureaucratization and centralization, but also as
a fundamentally conservative attempt to preserve capitalism and the status quo. These
historians, noting the continuities between the New Deal and the old deal of the Progressive
era, emphasize the ways in which the outwardly innovative and inclusionary reform policies
actually worked to buttress the traditional socioeconomic order and reinforce existing class
and race relations. See, for example, Barton Bernstein, "The New Deal: The Conservative
Achievements of Liberal Reform," in Towards a New Past, ed. Barton Bernstein (New York:
Pantheon, 1968); Thomas Ferguson, "Industrial Conflict and the Coming of the New Deal:
The Triumph of Multinational Liberalism in America," in Rise and Fall of the New Deal,
1930–1980, ed. Gary Gerstle and Steve Fraser (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1989); Ellis Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1966); and Gabriel Kolko, Main Currents in Modern American History (New
York: Pantheon, 1975). Similarly, in the cultural arena, Warren Susman has argued that the
new Americanism was profoundly conservative and conservatizing, and that the "Red
Decade" was an aberration, a brief fling with cultural radicalism and labor insurgency that
evaporated, with few long-term effects, with the defeat of fascism and the return to
normalcy and prosperity after World War Two. See Warren Susman, Culture as History: The
Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984).
For a similar argument from the perspective of labor history, see Melvyn Dubofsky, "Not So
'Turbulent Years': A New Look at the 1930s," in Life and Labor: Dimensions of American
Working-Class History, ed. Charles Stephenson and Robert Asher (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1986).
Note 20: In the past decade or so there has been a flurry of innovative work on the
intersections of politics and culture, particularly in Hollywood, during the Popular Front era.
The books that I have found particularly helpful include Michael Denning, The Cultural Front;
Saverio Giovacchini, Hollywood Modernism: Film and Politics in the Age of the New Deal
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001); and Lary May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood
and the Politics of the American Way (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
Note 21: Giovacchini, Hollywood Modernism, 5.
Note 22: Marshall, "The Greeks Had Another Word" [interview with Paxton], 264–265.
Note 23: Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition in Hollywood, 18.
Note 24: Gabler, Empire of Their Own, 325.
Note 25: Quoted in Gabler, Empire of Their Own, 5.
Note 26: For example, in the late 1940s, screenwriter Ben Hecht was soliciting money and
support for Palestine and met with a wall of refusal from the Hollywood Jews. Hecht
approached David O. Selznick, who told him he didn't want to have anything to do with
supporting a Jewish homeland or a Jewish political cause. "I'm an American and not a Jew,"
Selznick informed Hecht. "It would be silly of me to pretend suddenly that I'm a Jew, with
some sort of full-blown Jewish psychology." Hecht, amused and more than a little annoyed,
made a bet with Selznick: Hecht would call any three people Selznick chose and ask them
whether they thought of Selznick as an American or a Jew. If even one agreed with Selznick,
Hecht would stop pestering him. Selznick took the bet and had Hecht call Martin Quigley,
publisher of the Motion Picture Exhibitors' Herald; Nunnally Johnson, prominent—and
liberal—screenwriter, perhaps best known for adapting Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath;
and powerhouse agent Leland Hayward. All agreed that—forced to choose—they would
identify Selznick as a Jew. Leland Hayward snapped, "For God's sake, what's the matter with
David? He's a Jew and he knows it." Otto Friedrich, City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in
the 1940s (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 359–360.
Note 27: Lester Friedman, Hollywood's Image of the Jew (New York: Frederick Ungar,
1982), 57–64. For an exhaustive discussion of this issue see Steven Carr, Hollywood and
Anti-Semitism: A Cultural History up to World War II (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2001).
Note 28: John Wexley, interview with McGilligan and Ken Mate, in McGilligan and Buhle,
Tender Comrades, 715–716.
Note 29: Schatz, Genius of the System, 12.
Note 30: Leo C. Rosten, Hollywood: The Movie Colony, the Movie Makers (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1940), 136, quoted in Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition in
Hollywood, 21.
Note 31: Tino Balio, ed., The American Film Industry (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1976; 2d rev. ed. 1985), 271–275; Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition in Hollywood,
16–46; Albert Hackett quoted in Gabler, Empire of Their Own, 322.
Note 32: Joan Scott, interview with author, April 1999.
Note 33: There is a vast literature on the Communist movement in the United States. While
the older works on the CPUSA tend to be painfully anti-Communist, some of the more useful
general works include: Michael Brown et al., eds., New Studies in the Politics and Culture of
U.S. Communism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993); Vivian Gornick, The Romance of
American Communism (New York: Basic Books, 1977); Maurice Isserman, Which Side Were
You On? The American Communist Party during the Second World War (Middletown, Conn.:
Wesleyan University Press, 1982); and Harvey Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism:
The Depression Decade (New York: Basic Books, 1984). There are also many excellent
biographies and autobiographies of individual Communists. I found Dorothy Ray Healy and
Maurice Isserman, California Red: A Life in the American Communist Party (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1993), particularly useful in placing the Hollywood Communist
Party in a larger regional context. For general works on radical cultural production, see
Richard H. Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the
Depression Years (New York: Harper and Row, 1973; Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1998); and Alan Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist
Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987).
Note 34: The major European powers, as well as the United States, meanwhile, held to a
policy of nonintervention, offering limited humanitarian supplies to the beleaguered
Republicans but no military aid. In 1938, nonintervention was replaced by outright
appeasement, as British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, reneging on Britain's treaty
agreement with Czechoslovakia, agreed not to challenge Germany's takeover of the
Sudetenland.
Note 35: George Charney, A Long Journey (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968), 59.
Note 36: Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition in Hollywood, 55–57.
Note 37: Denning, The Cultural Front, especially 4–6. One very persuasive example of the
argument that the Popular Front marked a step away from radicalism, particularly on gender
and feminist issues, is Paula Rabinowitz's Labor and Desire: Women's Revolutionary Fiction
in Depression America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). On proletarian
literature, see also Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary
Communism (1961; rpt. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); Walter Rideout, The
Radical Novel in the United States, 1900–1954 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1956); and Alan Wald, "Culture and Commitment: U.S. Communist Writers Reconsidered,"
in New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism, ed. Michael Brown et al. (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1993), 281–306.
Note 38: See, for example, the relentlessly anti-Communist screed by Ronald Radosh and
Allis Radosh, Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colony's Long Romance with the Left (San
Francisco: Encounter Books, 2005).
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