Copyright © 2011 by University of Nebraska–Lincoln, all rights reserved. Redistribution or republication in any medium, except as allowed under the Fair Use provisions of U.S. copyright law, requires express written consent from the editors and advance notification of the publisher, the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
Hugo Butler wrote motion picture stories and scripts for three decades. Born in Calgary, Alberta, on May 4, 1914, he soon abandoned the Canadian Prairies. His British parents divorced after World War I, and his father, Frank Butler, who worked for the Canadian Pacific Railway, relocated to Hollywood and a career as an actor and writer, while young Hugo moved with his mother to Victoria, British Columbia.
After studying journalism at the University
of Washington, Butler left without a degree for
a junior writer's job at MGM. Credited with
eleven movies there, he specialized in adapting
children's classics. He soon joined the fledgling
Screen Writers Guild, while his father opted
for the rival, industry-endorsed Screen Playwrights
Inc. Hugo Butler's cowritten story,
Butler and his wife, Jean Rouverol Butler, were active Communist party members, and they were identified to the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947. They fled a 1951 huac subpoena with their children, choosing exile in Mexico over Butler's native Canada, because Butler disliked Canada's cold climate. Butler continued to write pseudonymously for Luis Buñuel and Robert Aldrich, contributed to scripts without credit, and codirected two documentaries as Hugo Mozo (Hugo the Houseboy). In Italy in the 1960s he wrote again for Aldrich and the also-exiled Losey. Returning to Hollywood in 1964 and about to rise from the blacklist with Aldrich's
In 1997 his rightful credits were restored to five films cowritten during the blacklist. Butler's films include