John Howard Lawson

John Howard Lawson September 25 1894 August 11 1977 was an American writer He was for several years head of the Hollywood division of the Communist Party USA He was also the organizations cultural manager and answered directly to VJ Jerome the Partys New Yorkbased cultural chief He was the first president of the Writers Guild of America West after the Screen Writers Guild divided into two regional organizations Lawson was one of the Hollywood Ten the first group of American film industry professionals to be blacklisted during the 1950s McCarthy era Before going to Hollywood Lawson wrote several minor pieces before World War I After the war he wrote a few more pieces and was drawn to European cubist futurist and constructivist plays In 1928 Lawson moved to Hollywood where he wrote scripts for films such as The Ship for Shanghai Bachelor Apartment and Goodbye Love In the winter of 19301931 it was at this time during the Great Depression that Lawson wrote Success Story The Theater Guild rejected the script but Harold Clurman a reader for them had recently just formed the Group Theater and needed new scripts Clurman and Lawson reworked the play during the summer of 1932 and Success Story opened on September 26 1932 for 121 performances Lawson would also pen the screenplay based on the play Success at Any Price in 1934 During the 1930s leftists accused Lawson of having a lack of ideological and political commitment New Playwrights Theater associate Mike Gold attacked him in The New Masses on April 10 1934 calling him a A Bourgeois Hamlet of Our Time who wrote adolescent works that lacked moral fiber or clear ideas Lawson responded a week later in The New Masses in the article Inner Conflict and Proletarian Art he cited his middleclass childhood as the reason why he could not fully understand the working people He also recognized that his prosperity and Hollywood connections were suspect in the fight for workers rights Due to the criticism he joined the Communist Party and began a program of educating himself about the proletarian cause He would soon travel throughout the povertystricken South to study bloody labor conflicts in Alabama and Georgia While in the South he would submit articles to the Daily Worker which got him arrested numerous times These experiences would inspire his next play Marching Song It was put on by the radical Theater Union and it opened on February 17 1937 and ran for sixtyone performances Lawson who joined the American Communist Party in 1934 made several films that were political including Blockade 1938 which starred Henry Fonda It was a film on the Spanish Civil War for which he received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Story Lawson also wrote CounterAttack 1945 a tribute to the SovietUSA alliance during the Second World War He also wrote more innocuous films such as the critically acclaimed Algiers 1938 and the Humphrey Bogart vehicles Sahara and Action in the North Atlantic in 1943