In Remembrance: Maurice Rapf

     Screenwriter Maurice Rapf, who had worked on the screenplays for such Disney films as Song of the South and So Dear To My Heart, passed away on April 15, 2003. He was 88.

     Rapf was born in New York, the son of producer Harry Rapf, who had helped found Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios. Rapf grew up spending much time on the studio lots. There, he befriended future author Budd Schulberg, son of producer B.P. Schulberg. Rapf and Schulberg would go on to serve as part inspiration for the character of Cecelia Brady in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon.

     He was educated at Dartmouth College. While in college, Rapf traveled to Russia to attend the Anglo-American Institute. That trip, along with a 1934 visit to Nazi Germany led to an interest in communism, though he never became a party member.

     Graduating Dartmouth in 1935, Rapf returned to Hollywood and started working as a writer on such pictures as They Gave him A Gun (1937) with Spencer Tracy, Sharpshooters (1938), Jennie (1940) and Brotherhood of Man (1945). When F. Scott Fitzgerald was fired for drunkenness from Winter Carnival (1939), Rapf returned from his New Hampshire honeymoon early to finish the script for the Dartmouth-based story. He co-wrote Song of the South for Disney in 1946.

     Friends with writer Lillian Hellman, Rapf became an advocate for the rights of screenwriters and helped found the Screen Writers Guild, later renamed the Writers Guild of America.

     Blacklisted in 1947 because of his support for the Communist Party and his union work, Rapf later moved east with his family. Settling in Norwich, Vermont, he helped establish the Dartmouth Film Society, the country's first college film society. He continued to write for films and television using fronts and a pseudonym. It wasn’t until 1998 that he was to receive credit for the Alec Guinness crime comedy The Detective (1954).

     He returned to Dartmouth College in 1967 where he began a long career as a teacher of film, eventually founded the college's film studies program.

     In the latter years of his life he authored two books, the autobiography Back Lot: Growing Up With The Movies (1999) and All About the Movies: A Handbook for the Movie-Loving Layman (2000).

-Rich Drees