As successful as the Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers were, they
reached perhaps thirty million people all told. The size of that audience may
have been something that novelists such as Dos Passos, Farrell, and Herbst
could only dream of, but at Hollywood's peak it was less than half of the
audience for the movies in a single week. Given the popularity of film during
the Depression, and given many radical writers' fascination with popular
culture (not to mention, of course, the enormous salaries paid to creative
personnel in the movies), it is unsurprising that many leftist writers, actors,
and directors packed their bags and headed for Hollywood, where studios like
Warner Brothers were churning out "social problem" movies about Depres-
sion America.

In 1939 Paramount Pictures released a movie called One-Third of a Nation,
derived from the successful Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspaper of the
same name. This was to be the first Hollywood translation of one of the
modernist documentary dramas that were the hallmark of the Federal Theatre
Project. Written by Arthur Arent and the staff of the Living Newspaper, One-
Third of a Nation premiered in New York in 1937 and subsequently opened in
nine other cities, including Detroit, Cincinnati, Portland ( Oregon), Phila-
delphia, Hartford, and New Orleans. The play ran for two years in San
Francisco, its run ending only with the demise of the FTP in 1939.

As Hallie Flanagan noted, "The press considered One-Third of a Nation the
most important contribution to date." She herself judged it "the most mature

-156-