ABSTRACT
Writers in particular were confident that they would play an important part in the filmmaking of the peace, as they had in wartime production. Dalton Trumbo and Gordon Kahn were the first editors of the journal The Screen Writer, which aspired to become the voice of the Screen Writers Guild. In an editorial in the first edition they included a ringing declaration, affirming their ‘primary convictions that the motion picture is the most important of all international cultural mediums and that the screen writer is the primary creative force in the making of motion pictures’. One young writer referred to the experiences of writers in wartime documentaries, and to the expectation that, if this experience could be transferred to the post-war feature film, more honesty, realism and maturity on the screen might result. An editorial in the first issue of Hollywood Quarterly declared that the ‘“pure entertainment” myth’, which had encouraged ‘social irresponsibility and creative impotence’ on screen and on radio, had been an early casualty of the war.
