A new book on the ‘blacklist’ – Red Star over Hollywood by Ron and Allis Radosh – has been recently published and is creating quite a stir for its revisionist view of this sacred moment in American radical history. Tom Wolfe himself has been quoted as saying the work puts an end to “the poignant myth of the Hollywood blacklist”.
I haven’t read it yet, but the book is on the top of my list after reading this intriguing review by Clive Davis in the London Times Online (link here is to Davis’ blog to avoid the firewall). I am doubly interested because when I first joined the Writers Guild more than thirty years ago, the aftermath of the ‘blacklist’ was still very much in the air and I met many of the players of the time. In 1970 I attended my first WGA awards dinner and, as luck would have it, it became a famous event. The keynote speaker was the best known of the ‘Hollywood Ten’ – Dalton Trumbo – who that night made his speech “Only Victims,” hoping to reconcile both sides from the blacklist era. It was not well received by a number of his screenwriting colleagues, including yours truly who regarded such an attitude in those days as liberal pap. I’ll be curious how I react when I read this new book. (FULL DISCLOSURE: The Radoshes’ work is published by Encounter Books who will be publishing my book, when I finish it. [Stop blogging already-ed.])
MORE: The NY Sun’s view here.
My father was not a political man but he used to say that there were communists in Hollywood. It was just a matter of fact to him entaling no real judgment.
I think we forget that just because it is a witch hunt, it does not follow that there are never any witches.
I know I used to wonder about Reagan’s part in all that.
Roger,
Where did Clive get the quote from you?
Like bedwetting, it’s only embarrassing for people if they’re still doing it (or are still Communists in the 1950s) when they’re 40 years old–not if they were just a bedwetter (or Communist) once in their youth. I think in most cases what they didnít want known is, they were still Communists twenty years later and couldn’t be trusted to be loyal to the United States.
I’ll look forward to your review.
Terrye, ask and ye shall receive, one man’s opinion.
How Ronald Reagan Cleaned the Communists from the Screen Actors Guild and effectively ended the Communist Party in Hollywood.
http://oraculations.blogspot.com/2004/06/1-four-trillion-deficitronald-reagans.html#comments
Oops, I wanted to include maybe Roger can confirm the bits he knows?
I’ve always looked upon Kazan’s “On the Waterfront” as capturing the true essence of the industry from which he was ultimately evicted simply because he took a stand against those very same thugs who intimidated him into following the collective communist Hollywood whole.
Roger:
This is something I have said before but the failure of the left to put the support of Stalin and the USSR on trial is one of the reasons that it is still chic in some quarters to wear the hammer and cycle or to bear the images of the Communist heroes of the past, Che for example. If you wear the swastika you are correctly shunned and considered part of the fringe. Hollywood continues to spew out the myth that somehow the Soviet Union and all it stood for do not deserve the same treatment. Even as late as a year or two ago Hollywood put out a love poem to Frida Kahlo. This is the woman who had a picture of Stalin put in her coffin for burial. I am not an artist and I am not going to pass judgement on her art but if Picasso had been buried with a picture of Hitler in his coffin his life would not be celebrated. Yet Hollywood ignores the fact that many of their heroes supported one of the greatest murderers of all time. And that some of them would have pushed for a Moscow led revolution for this and many other countries.For some it was a lark and meant nothing. For others it was a life long passion.