Martin Berkeley

Martin Berkeley (August 21, 1904 – May 6, 1979) was a Brooklyn-born performer, playwright, and screenwriter whose career spanned Broadway, Hollywood, and television. He began his professional life as a stage performer, appearing in several Broadway productions between 1925 and 1929, including the plays A Lady's Virtue, Starlight, and The Grey Fox.

Berkeley also contributed to Broadway as a writer. He co-authored the comedy Seen But Not Heard with Marie Baumer, which ran for several weeks in 1936. His drama Roosty reached Broadway in 1938 but closed after one week of performances.

His transition to Hollywood brought him to MGM, where he worked from 1940 to 1945, followed by a five-year tenure at 20th Century Fox from 1945 to 1950. His screenwriting output during this period was substantial, with credits that included So Dark the Night (1946), Dr. Gillespie's Criminal Case, Gypsy Colt (1954), Revenge of the Creature, Tarantula! (1955), and The Big Caper (1957), among others. He also wrote the first draft of Kangaroo. In 1949, his work on Green Grass of Wyoming earned him a Writers Guild of America Award nomination for Best Written American Western.

Berkeley's name became widely known in connection with the House Un-American Activities Committee investigations of the 1950s. After screenwriter Richard Collins identified him to the committee, Berkeley initially denied Communist Party membership, despite having belonged to the party until 1943. Friends organized a defense fund on his behalf before he reversed course, admitted his membership, and agreed to cooperate fully with the committee's investigation. He testified publicly on September 19, 1951, and again in closed sessions in 1953. Estimates of the number of individuals he named to the committee range from 155 to 161, with researcher Victor Navasky noting that many of his identifications were inaccurate. Among those he named were Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, Dashiell Hammett, Edward Chodorov, and Michael Gordon. He described writer John Howard Lawson to the committee as the "grand Poo-Bah of the Communist movement" who "speaks with the voice of Stalin and the bells of the Kremlin." HUAC investigator William Wheeler reportedly cautioned Berkeley that he was supplying more names than the committee required. Berkeley was represented throughout by attorney Edward Bennett Williams. Following his testimony, he joined the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, an organization dedicated to exposing Communist influence in the entertainment industry.

Berkeley subsequently built an extensive career in television, contributing to series including Tales of Wells Fargo, Shotgun Slade, and Tombstone Territory. He died on May 6, 1979, in Brandon, Florida. A collection of his scripts and screenplays is held by the Performing Arts Special Collections at UCLA.