Maurice Rapf
| Maurice Rapf | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | 19 May 1914 |
| Died | 15 April 2003 (aged 88) Hanover, New Hampshire, New Hampshire, U.S. |
| Occupation | screenwriter, university professor |
| Spouse(s) | Louise Seidel (m. 1947–2003) |
Maurice Harry Rapf (May 19, 1914 – April 15, 2003) was an American screenwriter and professor of film studies. His work includes the screenplays for early Disney live-action features Song of the South and So Dear to My Heart, uncredited work on the screenplay for the animated feature Cinderella, and several films of the late 1930s. He was a co-founder of the Screen Writers Guild. He was blacklisted in 1947 due to his association with the Communist Party USA. He later taught film studies at Dartmouth College.
Rapf was Jewish, the son of Harry Rapf, an executive and film producer at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, and worked briefly for his father as a child actor. In 1934, while majoring in English at Dartmouth, Rapf visited the Soviet Union as an exchange student, where he was impressed by the presentation of Communism he was shown. Despite the danger for a Jew to visit Berlin at that time, he stopped there on the way home, an experience which he described in his autobiography as convincing him that Communism was the only thing capable of defeating Hitler, and greatly influenced his political views. He graduated in 1935, and moved to Hollywood. In 1947, he married actress Louise Seidel, with whom he had two daughters (Joanna and Geraldine) and a son (William).
In Hollywood, he joined the Communist Party USA, and remained active in the party even after other Jewish sympathizers became disillusioned with it over Moscow's attempted appeasement of Hitler before World War 2. He became an advocate for the rights of creative professionals, and helped found the Screen Writers Guild (one of the groups that formed into the Writers Guild of America, West).
He entered the "family business" of filmmaking, and co-wrote screenplays for We Went to College (1936), They Gave Him a Gun (1937), and The Bad Man of Brimstone (1937). He went on to work on action films such as Sharpshooters (1938) and North of Shanghai (1939). When F. Scott Fitzgerald became incapacitated by drinking, Rapf replaced him co-scripting Winter Carnival (1939), a film about the Dartmouth traditional event, which Rapf later described as a "clinker".
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