Word: guilds
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Television looked more & more promising. Some of last week's developments: ¶ The Theatre Guild got a well-pedicured toehold in the medium. The first of six Guild-NBC productions, a full-dress treatment of John Ferguson* was presented over NBC. Each play would require four weeks of production, unmentionable costs (mostly paid by NBC). Said Guildsman Lawrence Langner: "We want to communicate culture, not nonsense; to elevate television from the saloon to the living room...
First, each witness produced a statement. Chairman Thomas gave it a hasty, belligerent look and almost without exception refused to admit it. Then Committee Counsel Robert Stripling fired the two questions: "Are you a member of the Screen Writers' Guild?" "Are you or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?" In the witnesses' plan, the second question was the signal for a defiant outburst over the Bill of Rights. Disappointed spectators waiting outside the caucus room could hear the mingled shouts of the witnesses and the thumping of Chairman Thomas' gavel. Cried Scripter Alvah...
Only one witness would stand still long enough to be counted. He was quiet-spoken, 45-year-old Emmet Lavery, president of the Screen Writers' Guild and a member of the New York state bar. Like the others, he challenged the committee's constitutional right to ferret out a man's personal politics. "But," he said, "let me break the suspense immediately. I am not a Communist. I never have been, and don't intend to be. I am a Democrat, who in my youth was a Republican. Now if the committee is interested...
Chairman Thomas hastily assured him that that point was of no interest.* What about Communists in the Guild? They were just a noisy, overrated minority, said Lavery. As for outlawing the party, he agreed with the FBI's boss J. Edgar Hoover: driving the Reds underground would only make them harder to find. The positive way to handle the problem, he thought, was to promote American ideals...
...Winslow Boy (by Terence Rattigan; produced by the Theatre Guild, H.M. Tennent Ltd. & John C. Wilson) was in real life named George Archer-Shee. Not quite 40 years ago his story-which Playwright Rattigan has followed pretty faithfully-became a cause célèbre of Edwardian England; some eight years ago Alexander Woollcott made good quick reading matter of it for snack-loving Americans...