Show Trial by Thomas Doherty

Author:Thomas Doherty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS036060, History/United States/20th Century, PER004030, Performing Arts/Film/History & Criticism
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2018-04-09T16:00:00+00:00

John Howard Lawson: “I’m not on trial here! The committee is on trial before the American people!”

The man who would strike the first blunt-force rhetorical blow against HUAC from the witness chair was the personification of the “ideological termite” the committee had come to flush out and step on: not only a card-carrying Communist, but a Communist organizer, a contributor to the Daily Worker and the New Masses, and the unofficial “cultural commissar of Hollywood.” Neither the FBI nor HUAC was needed to expose John Howard Lawson’s true colors. The screenwriter was a proud, strident, and very public Red. For Lawson, it wasn’t a double life but the same life: worker, writer, union activist, agitator, and Communist party apparatchik.10

Born in New York in 1894, Jewish, college educated, a radical in politics and literature, Lawson experienced his class-conscious epiphany during World War I while serving as a volunteer driver in the Italian Ambulance Service with novelist John Dos Passos, who converted him to Marxist-Leninism. Dos Passos ultimately veered hard right; Lawson never strayed from the faith. In 1927, he was arrested in Boston for protesting the death sentence of Sacco and Vanzetti; in 1934, he was arrested in Birmingham for protesting the death sentence of the Scottsboro Boys.11

Lawson brought the same ideological commitment to his writing. In 1928, his play The International was blurbed as “the FIRST COMMUNIST play to be produced in an American theater” with “the red blood of Revolution” flowing in its veins.12 As experimental in his art as he was orthodox in his politics, Lawson pioneered Brechtian techniques before they were named after his Unfriendly Nineteen comrade: Lawson’s characters broke the fourth wall and directly addressed the audience as playwright mouthpieces.

In 1929, Lawson earned his first screenplay credit for Dynamite, directed by, of all people, Cecil B. DeMille, a lavish extravaganza about exploited coal miners and high society swells, in which DeMille’s pagan epicureanism smothered Lawson’s Marxist earnestness. In 1932, Lawson scored an eponymous success with Success Story, a play about a ruthless Jewish businessman who sells his soul to the devil—that is, forsakes his radical ways—for pieces of silver. Success at Any Price (1934), the Hollywood version, de-Judified the unscrupulous protagonist, but took advantage of its pre-Code license to inject an element of prostitution, the metaphor of choice for all capitalist labor. By then, Lawson had signed a generous three-picture deal with RKO, for ten thousand dollars per picture, allowing him to write from his Long Island home. Perhaps the radical playwright was suspicious that the high life in Holly­wood would corrupt him.13

Fat chance. Luxury Lawson enjoyed—by 1938, in addition to the twenty-two-acre summer home in Moriches, he owned plush digs in Hollywood—but he never lost his spiritual solidarity with the workers of the world.

The studio moguls must have regretted ever luring Lawson out west. No sooner had he arrived in town than he began agitating for a screenwriters union. As founder and first president of the SWG, he was on the front lines in the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.