In April, three Hollywood museums commemorated the 75th anniversary of a dark period in film history: the Hollywood Blacklist. A series of film screenings, panel discussions, and exhibits looked at the legacy of screenwriters, directors, and others who suffered under the weight of 1940s and 1950s anti-communist hysteria. One of those people was John Howard Lawson.
Jack Lawson was a successful playwright lured from Broadway to Hollywood in the early days of sound film. By 1933, he co-founded and was elected the first president of the Screen Writers Guild. Lawson’s screen credits include 1938’s “Algiers,” starring Hedy Lamarr and Charles Boyer as dapper jewel thief Pepe le Moko, and WWII morale boosters, including two starring Humphrey Bogart in 1943, “Action in the North Atlantic” and “Sahara.”
Lawson was Oscar-nominated for Best Writing, Original Story for the 1938 Spanish Civil War drama, “Blockade.” He wrote big screen vehicles for stars such as Henry Fonda, Don Ameche, Paul Muni, Susan Hayward, Sidney Poitier, and Humphrey Bogart. But Lawson is arguably best known for the real-life political drama that played out in front of newsreel cameras and radio microphones.
On Oct. 27, 1947, Lawson was subpoenaed to testify by the House Un-American Activities Committee, investigating allegations of subversion of the movie industry as the Cold War revved up. He was accused of being the High Lama of La-La-Land’s Left and was the first of the blacklisted talents called “the Hollywood Ten”—mostly screenwriters—summoned to appear in Washington, D.C.
Before Lawson took the stand, “friendly” witnesses who had “cooperated” with HUAC, including Screen Actors Guild President Ronald Reagan, actor Gary Cooper, and animator Walt Disney, were permitted to read statements as part of their testimony. The committee chairman, J. Parnell Thomas, however, took a confrontational posture toward Lawson, repeatedly asking if he was “a member of the Screen Writers Guild?”
Lawson protested the question as “an invasion of the right of association under the Bill of Rights of this country.” Thomas pounded his gavel “jackhammer style” and demanded that the “officers, take this man away from the stand.” Amidst applause and boos, “six uniformed members of the Capitol police closed in around Lawson,” according to Thomas Doherty in his 2018 book, “Show Trial: Hollywood, HUAC, and the Birth of the Blacklist.”
Lawson and nine other “unfriendly witnesses” were blacklisted by the motion picture industry; he served a year in federal prison for “contempt of Congress,” along with Dalton Trumbo, reputedly Hollywood’s highest paid screenwriter.
Now, Lawson’s story is being told in the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures’ film series, “The Hollywood Ten at 75.” The film, “Red Hollywood” by Thom Andersen, features Lawson’s granddaughters, Andrea K. Lawson and Nancy Lawson Carcione, both of whom sat down with me for their first in-depth interviews.
Her grandfather, Andrea recalls, “was really interested in creating a new form of theater, the way Bertolt Brecht did, the way Europe had its own new theater.”
Radical in form and content, Lawson’s plays included 1923’s “Roger Bloomer,” about a typical Midwestern young man who goes to New York to find himself; 1925’s “Processional”; 1927’s “Loud Speaker”; 1928’s “The International” and 1937’s “Marching Song.” “He was frustrated, like lots of writers, that they didn’t really have a lot of say,” Andrea says. “You can’t have the movie without the writers, but they weren’t treated like a very important part of the process.”
After Lawson’s Guild presidency ended in 1934, he continued to serve on SWG’s board and at the bargaining table. In between writing a dozen-plus screenplays and plays, Lawson lobbied for FDR’s New Deal government in Hollywood, New York, and Washington, D.C., on behalf of the Guild. It wasn’t until 1942 that SWG negotiated an agreement with producers recognizing the Guild as screenwriters’ exclusive collective bargaining agent. (Members of what is now the Writers Guild of America were, as of this writing, voting on whether or not to authorize a strike.)
Although their grandfather led a bicoastal lifestyle writing for stage and screen, first cousins Nancy and Andrea spent their early years in Laurel Canyon and around Los Angeles, studying fine art and art history. Until recently, Nancy worked for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Andrea, who lives near Seattle, is a painter.
Jack Lawson’s testy 1947 testimony was controversial. According to Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund’s “The Inquisition in Hollywood,” Hollywood Ten screenwriters Samuel Ornitz “thought Jack was splendid on the stand,” while Ring Lardner Jr. considered it “not very good public relations.”
But the cousins stand by their grandfather. “I love his testimony because it was so to the point and he never wavered,” Andrea says. “It was so strong for democracy, what democracy is, and freedom of expression. When I listen to it, I get kind of emotional because it’s so strong. I’m really proud that he did that.”
Nancy recalls seeing her grandfather’s testimony in a 1960s documentary on television. “I was in third grade, trying to understand as much as I could. Seeing the film clip of our grandfather subpoenaed at the HUAC hearing. Then the next day, going to school, having the students say to me, ‘Oh, I saw that last night. Your grandfather was great!’ … Growing up in Hollywood and still living in Southern California, lots of people knew at that point who Lawson was, in a positive way. I’ve never actually had anybody talk to me in a negative way about it.”
Andrea notes that her grandfather “never denied being a communist. He was really interested in the communist ideas. He thought it was a way to have equality for workers. … Because he really was so strong in his views and wanted to make serious changes to society, not just talk about it. Remember, the Communist Party is and was a legal political party in the US.”
The two cousins collaborated on an homage to Lawson presented in February 2020, the 70th anniversary of Lawson’s imprisonment. It was a multimedia tribute to Lawson’s stage, screen, and activist contributions, emphasizing free expression. Andrea “got the idea to do the dream as a dance, so I asked my daughter, Heather Hamilton, who’s done some choreography, to create the dance, tallroot hum. Heather directed the five dancers who improvised and performed her choreography.”
Unlike fellow Hollywood Ten member Dalton Trumbo, Lawson’s career never recovered from the motion picture purge. Lawson told the New York Times: “I’m much more completely blacklisted than the others. I’m much more notorious and extremely proud of that. It had much to do with the fact that I helped to organize the Guild.” According to his granddaughters, there are “proposals, drafts” for films never shot in the prolific storyteller’s archives at the Morris Library at Southern Illinois University, in Carbondale, Illinois.
In the 1960s, presumably wishing to behold what he believed, Lawson visited the Soviet Union.
“He believed in [what Marx said about] ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,’ ” Andrea says, referring to Marxist theory, if not its practice. “I think that’s what he was thinking. I don’t think [American Communists] knew what Stalin was doing. And I don’t think he was necessarily approving of Stalin. The idea that there was this experiment going on in the Soviet Union and it was really interesting.”
Later, Andea continues, Lawson was, like many other people, “shocked” to learn about Stalinism’s excesses. “I think it was difficult for him to see the dream of Marxism deteriorate with the dictatorship of Stalin. My opinion is that it must have been really hard for him because he was so involved in the philosophy of Marxism as an ideal.”
“He was interested in the rights of workers, [that] they were fairly compensated and could form together,” adds Nancy. “That was a big part of the ideology.” It’s no coincidence that in 2001’s Hollywood Blacklist-themed The Majestic, Jim Carrey plays a HUAC-subpoenaed screenwriter who finds refuge in a town named “Lawson.”
For info about the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures’ “The Hollywood Ten at 75” film series see a link via the online version of this article.
Ed Rampell is a film historian and critic based in Los Angeles. Rampell is the author of “Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States” and he co-authored “The Hawaii Movie and Television Book,” now in its third edition. This first appeared at Progressive.org.
From The Progressive Populist, May 15, 2023
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