Scott was born in Arlington, New Jersey, the son of successful Irish Catholic parents — his father worked in middle management for the New York Telephone Company.
Arlington is 12 miles south of Paterson, where the 1913 strike of 25,000 silk workers brought together socialists, Wobblies, and Greenwich Village intellectuals.
He worked on the script for Keeping Company (1940) at MGM, We Go Fast (1941) at 20th Century Fox, and The Parson of Panamint (1941) at Paramount.
He went on to produce Murder, My Sweet (1944), an adaptation of Farewell My Lovely by Raymond Chandler by John Paxton that was directed by Edward Dmytryk.
The cast included Dick Powell, who revitalized his career in the role of Philip Marlowe, and Anne Shirley, whom Scott married.
Edward Dmytryk, another of the Hollywood Ten, chose to become a 'friendly' witness and testified before the HUAC in 1951 that Scott pressured him to put communist propaganda in his films.
In 1955, Scott published an essay titled "Blacklist: The Liberal's Straightjacket and Its Effect on Content" in Hollywood Review.
Scott attempted to make a return to feature-film production in 1967 by producing a new adaptation of Monsieur Lecoq;[8] the film was never finished.
Shortly before his death, Scott made a television adaptation of The Great Man's Whiskers and was credited with his legal name.