Samuel Ornitz

Samuel Ornitz, a novelist and screenwriter best remembered now as as one of the "Hollywood Ten" of accused communists who defied the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and was blacklisted, was born on November 15, 1890 in New York, New York, at the height of the Progressive Era of American politics. His father was a prosperous dry-goods merchant, but Samuel did not follow his two older brothers into the business world but became an artist, a left-wing artist determined to replace the capitalist system. The precocious Samule made his first progressive speech in public just after the dawn of the new 20th Century, at the tender age of 12. He became a writer, and had a success with his 1923 novel of Jewish immigrant life, "Haunch Paunch and Jowl". In 1929, he was one of the writers for director Josef von Sternberg's The Case of Lena Smith (1929) at Paramount (which soon would be headed by B.P. Schulberg, whose son Budd Schulberg would be a pivotal figure in the witch trials of the late 1940s),a nd then moved over to William Randolph Hearst's Cosmpolitan Pictures for William A. Wellman's Chinatown Nights (1929). In 1932-33, he worked at R.K.O., the company capitalist-extraordinaire Joseph P. Kennedy created in the late 1920s from a vaudeville chain, poverty row studio, and film booking office, before moving on to Universal in 1934, where he labored on horror films and other programmers. He bounced around, working for the majors such as Paramount and 20th Century Fox, the major-minors such as Columbia, and Povery Row outfits such as Colonial Pictures. His last credited picture, Circumstantial Evidence (1945), was made by Monogram and released in 1945. As a screenwriter, Ornitz never lived up to his early promise as a writer. However, he did have a major impact on Hollywood as an early organizer and board member of the Screen Writers Guild, the trade union organized in the mid-1930s as an answer to the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences, the industry's company union. The SWG was the first and most radical of the Guilds, and despised by the powers that be in Hollywood for its success in organizing labor. Ornitz also distinguished himself as also one of the most outspoken m embers of Hollywood's left-wing/progressive community. However, his doctrinaire, party-line communism alienated many of his liberal colleagues and friends, such as his dogged insistence that there was no anti-Semitism in Iosif Stalin's Soviet Union. (he later backed off of this assertion.) In 1947, Ornitz was arraigned by the HUAC. He and other members of the Hollywood Ten refused to answer the HUAC's questions about their involvement in the Communist Party, adopting a common front and maintaining party discipline. Ornitz was fined and sentenced to a year in prison for contempt of court, during which time he published his last major novel, "Bride of the Sabbath". Ornitz was blacklisted by Hollywood, and never again wrote for motion pictures, but continued writing novels until his death. Samuel Ornitz died of cancer on March 10, 1957 in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles. He was 66 years old.