Alan Campbell : Biography

Alan Campbell, the son of Harry L. Campbell and Hortense Eichel Campbell, was born in Richmond, Virginia, on 21st February, 1904. He graduated from the Virginia Military Institute and moved to New York City where he worked as a journalist and actor.

In 1932 he met Dorothy Parker, an extremely talented writer. She also published two collections of short stories: Laments for the Living (1930) and After Such Pleasure (1931). They married in 1934 in Raton, New Mexico, and moved to Hollywood. They signed ten-week contracts with Paramount Pictures, with Campbell earning $250 per week and Parker earning $1,000 per week. This would later be increased to over $2,000 a week. Parker later recalled: "Through the sweat and the tears I shed over my first script, I saw a great truth - one of those eternal, universal truths that serve to make you feel much worse than you did when you started. And that is that no writer, whether he writes from love or from money, can condescend to what he writes. What makes it harder in screenwriting is the money he gets. You see, it brings out the uncomfortable little thing called conscience. You aren't writing for the love of it or the art of it or whatever; you are doing a chore assigned to you by your employer and whether or not he might fire you if you did it slackly makes no matter. You've got yourself to face, and you have to live with yourself."

Over the next five years the couple worked on fifteen movie scripts including Hands Across the Table (1935), The Moon's Our Home (1936), Suzy (1936), Three Married Men (1936), Lady Be Careful (1936), A Star is Born (1937), Trade Winds (1938), The Cowboy and the Lady (1938) and Sweethearts (1938).

Campbell and Dorothy Parker held left-wing political views and with Donald Ogden Stewart they formed the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. He was also a strong supporter of the Popular Front government in Spain and during then Spanish Civil War was a member of the Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee and the Motion Picture Artists Committee to Aid Republican Spain. In October 1937 Parker visited Spain and made a broadcast from Madrid Radio.

Left-wing writers such as Campbell was attacked by Martin Dies, the chairman of the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Parker responded by arguing: "The people want democracy - real democracy, Mr. Dies, and they look toward Hollywood to give it to them because they don't get it any more in their newspapers. And that's why you're out here, Mr. Dies - that's why you want to destroy the Hollywood progressive organizations - because you've got to control this medium if you want to bring fascism to this country."

Other screenplays by the couple include Weekend for Three (1941), The Little Foxes (1941), Tales of Manhattan (1942) and Forever and a Day (1943). During the Second World War he served in Europe as an officer in Army Intelligence. He attained the rank of captain and after leaving the army he wrote Woman on the Run (1950).

Alan Campbell and Dorothy Parker

In the late 1940s the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), chaired by J. Parnell Thomas, began an investigation into the Hollywood Motion Picture Industry. The HUAC interviewed 41 people who were working in Hollywood. These people attended voluntarily and became known as "friendly witnesses". During their interviews they named nineteen people who they accused of holding left-wing views.

One of those named, Bertolt Brecht, an emigrant playwright, gave evidence and then left for East Germany. Ten others: Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Albert Maltz, Adrian Scott, Samuel Ornitz, Dalton Trumbo, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson and Alvah Bessie refused to answer any questions. Known as the Hollywood Ten, they claimed that the 1st Amendment of the United States Constitution gave them the right to do this. The House of Un-American Activities Committee and the courts during appeals disagreed and all were found guilty of contempt of congress and each was sentenced to between six and twelve months in prison.

Leo Townsend, Isobel Lennart, Roy Huggins, Richard Collins, Lee J. Cobb, Budd Schulberg and Elia Kazan, afraid they would go to prison, were willing to name people who had been members of left-wing groups. If these people refused to name names, they were added to a blacklist that had been drawn up by the Hollywood film studios.

In June, 1950, three former FBI agents and a right-wing television producer, Vincent Harnett, published Red Channels, a pamphlet listing the names of 151 writers, directors and performers who they claimed had been members of subversive organisations before the Second World War but had not so far been blacklisted. The names had been compiled from FBI files and a detailed analysis of the Daily Worker, a newspaper published by the American Communist Party.

A free copy of Red Channels was sent to those involved in employing people in the entertainment industry. All those people named in the pamphlet were blacklisted until they appeared in front of the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and convinced its members they had completely renounced their radical past. As a result both Alan Campbell and Dorothy Parker were blacklisted.

The couple left Hollywood and moved back to New York City. In 1960 Dalton Trumbo became the first blacklisted writer to use his own name when he wrote the screenplay for the film Spartacus. Based on the novel by another left-wing blacklisted writer, Howard Fast, is a film that examines the spirit of revolt. Trumbo refers back to his experiences of the House of Un-American Activities Committee. At the end, when the Romans finally defeat the rebellion, the captured slaves refuse to identify Spartacus.

Parker and Campbell now decided to return to Hollywood. They worked together on a number of unproduced projects. Alan Campbell committed suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills in Los Angeles on 14th June, 1963.