In Con Temp(t)
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60TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE HOLLYWOOD TEN & BLACKLIST
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Los Angeles remembers the “Inquisition in Eden”
The 60th anniversary of the Hollywood Ten and Blacklist is being remembered with coast-to-coast commemorations, including live performances, films, books, a symposium and play. These observances not only recall the Cold War witch-hunt of the motion picture industry that trampled civil liberties, but raise questions about the Bush regime’s repression of dissent.
On Oct. 26, 2007 -- the exact 60th anniversary of the original Hollywood Fights Back! broadcast – a nationwide radio program with stars such as Judy Garland, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall attacking the congressional investigation of “subversion” in the movies -- will be reenacted at Los Angeles’ Skirball Cultural Center. The cast includes actor Ed Asner, actor James Whitmore, writer Larry Gelbart, Camryn Manheim, Catherine Dent; Hollywood Ten relatives and other Blacklist survivors, Norma Barzman (blacklisted with her husband, Ben); Chris Trumbo (son of Dalton Trumbo), Becca Wilson (daughter of Michael Wilson); ACLU/F Executive Director Ramona Ripston, ACLU President Isabelle Gunning, and PEN USA Development Director Christine Lanoie-Newman; and remembrances from Ray Bradbury and Norman Corwin. Ninety-year-old Marsha Hunt, who observed the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings back in 1947 with Bogart, Bacall and their start-studded contingent, and whose husband, Robert Presnell, Jr., co-wrote the original radio show, headlines the reenactment and will speak the words she broadcasted that night. Hollywood Fights Back… Again is presented by the ACLU Foundation of Southern California and PEN USA.
From Oct. 17-21, Galileo -- starring Stacey Keach as the persecuted Italian scientist -- was performed at L.A.’s Skirball Cultural Center for future broadcast on public and satellite radio’s The Play’s the Thing program. Galileo was written by German playwright Bertolt Brecht, who testified during the Hollywood Ten hearings, hoodwinked the modern day grand inquisitors then escaped to East Germany. At the premiere, director Martin Jarvis referenced the Hollywood Ten and called Galileo "the Venetian One."
La-La-Land’s Leftists Under Fire
In September 1947, the HUAC’s anti-Communist inquisitors subpoenaed 45 members of the motion picture industry to testify in Washington. HUAC included notorious anti-Semites and segregationists: Mississippi Congressman John Rankin, Committee counsel Robert Stripling (a southern white supremacist who’d previously assisted the pro-Nazi German Bund’s ex-publicist), Rep. Richard Nixon. Rankin claimed he was investigating "one of the most dangerous plots ever instigated for the overthrow of the government… The information we get is that [Hollywood] is the greatest hotbed of subversive activities… We’re on the trail of the tarantula..."
The "Hollywood Nineteen" stood on their constitutional rights, refusing to cooperate with HUAC. Tinseltown’s progressives rallied; John Huston, the Gershwins and others organized the Committee for the First Amendment. Bogart and Bacall led a contingent that attended the congressional hearings. The evening before the first "unfriendly witness" testified, a star-studded radio program called Hollywood Fights Back! was broadcast nationwide.
Actor-singer Judy Garland told the audience, "There are a lot of stars here to speak to you. We’re show business, yes. But we’re also American citizens. It’s one thing if someone says we’re not good actors; that hurts, but we can take that. It’s something else again to say we’re not good Americans! We resent that!"
Musician Artie Shaw warned listeners "of a crime wave that has sprung up in America: the crime of disagreement… [I]f you disagree with certain people on certain matters you can get your name on a secret file and wind up facing an investigating committee… Hitler and Mussolini used it."
Actor Robert Young and comedian Lucille Ball quipped: "The, uh, Un-American Committee is not a new idea... a similar committee on Un-Italian activities subpoenaed Galileo… a committee on Un-French activities subpoenaed Joan of Arc… a committee on Un-New England activities 300 years ago burned old women in [Salem’s] witch-hunt…"
Actor William Holden protested: "Decent people dragged through the mud of insinuation and slander. The testimony of crackpots and subversives accepted and given out to the press as if it were the Gospel truth. Reputations ruined and people hounded out of their jobs."
Actor Paulette Goddard noted, "no one has been able to point to any character… scene, or… line from any picture which… advocate[s] the overthrow of our government."
The next day at the HUAC hearing, Oct. 27, 1947, the first of the "unfriendlies" -- John Howard Lawson, who’d written Bogie’s WWII flicks Action in the North Atlantic and Sahara – testified. The screenwriter sparred with Committee Chairman J. Parnell Thomas; Tinseltown’s Torquemada banged his gavel 16 times, breaking it. Authorities dragged Lawson – reputedly the Hollywood Reds’ "grand Pooh-Bah" – away from the stand. Like nine other uncooperative witnesses, Lawson invoked the First Amendment, refusing to answer HUAC’s-$64,000 question: "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?"
These defiant testifiers came to be called the Hollywood Ten: Lawson, Dalton Trumbo, Albert Maltz, Alvah Bessie, Samuel Ornitz, Ring Lardner, Jr., Lester Cole, Adrian Scott, Herbert Biberman, Edward Dmytryk. Eight were screenwriters (Scott also produced); Biberman and Dmytryk were directors. All were at some point "card carrying" Reds.
On Nov. 24, 1947, the Hollywood Ten were cited for contempt of Congress. The next day, after a secret producers’ powwow called the "Waldorf Conference," the Motion Picture Association of America announced: "We will not knowingly employ a Communist or a member of any party… which advocates the overthrow of the government…"
The Hollywood Blacklist was on.
Recently, Chris Trumbo explained: "A blacklist is an organized way to suppress opinion… You don’t have a forum, a voice." His father, Dalton Trumbo, had been Tinseltown’s highest paid screenwriter, writing "commie propaganda" such as Ginger Roger’s line "Share and share alike – that’s democracy," in 1943’s Tender Comrade, and 1944’s "subversive" morale booster Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, about the Doolittle Raid.
In 1948 the Hollywood Ten were tried for contempt of Congress. All were convicted, fined up to $1,000 and served up to one year in prison. By 1950, the Ten lost their appeals and were imprisoned for their beliefs.
By 1951, a new wave of HUAC hearings persecuted La-La-Land’s leftists. Some, like director Elia Kazan, informed on ex-friends and denounced themselves to save their necks. Those refusing to confess and name names were denied employment.
HUAC pressured actor Larry Parks to inform; in 1951 he pleaded with the grand inquisitors: "I don’t think this is American justice to make me… crawl through the mud… This is what I beg you not to do… frankly I am probably the most completely ruined man you have ever seen. I am fighting for a principle… I don’t think this is fair play [and] in the spirit of real Americanism."
Purged of an estimated 300 of its most dynamic talents, a vapid Leave It to Beaver culture of conformity descended upon Cold War America. Some screenwriters earned 10 cents on the dollar working under the table, using pseudonyms or fronts (As dramatized in 1976’s The Front, starring Woody Allen). Others fled overseas to make movies; although smeared as Soviet agents, no American-born artist moved behind the Iron Curtain.
Tinseltown’s reign of terror lasted until at least the 1960s; few reestablished their careers, although blacklisted screenwriters co-wrote classics, including: The Defiant Ones, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Born Free, Midnight Cowboy, M*A*S*H, and Coming Home.
Films, Books, Symposia & a Play Remember the Blacklist
This September the documentary Trumbo premiered at the Toronto Film Festival; the all-star cast includes Michael Douglas, Donald Sutherland, Paul Giamatti, etc., reading the screenwriter’s letters. The doc adapts the play by Chris Trumbo. (Chris is currently writing a book about his father, who won an Oscar under an assumed name for 1957’s The Brave One, and broke the Blacklist with screen credit for 1960’s Spartacus and Exodus.)
Several books about the Blacklist appeared this year, including two about Lawson: Gerald Horne’s biography The Final Victim of the Blacklist and Jonathan Chambers’ Messiah of the New Technique. Historian Larry Ceplair’s The Marxist and the Movies biography of blacklisted screenwriter Paul Jarrico was published this month. Jarrico produced 1953’s Salt of the Earth, a film about Latino strikers, including women in leadership roles, that attempted to break the Blacklist, and is considered to be the birth of Chicano, feminist and indie filmmaking.
On Nov. 5 Boston’s Emerson College is presenting panels, a play and screenings of films regarding the HUAC/McCarthy era, including George Clooney’s 2005 Good Night and Good Luck. There will be a staged reading of a play about the origins of the blacklist, The Waldorf Conference. The symposium is called "What the Hollywood Blacklist and the Patriot Act Have in Common." (See sidebar.)
The Blacklist’s Relevancy to Our Own Age of Repression
As the symposium’s title indicates, remembering the Hollywood Ten and the Blacklist is more than a history lesson. In examining an earlier era of repression, Americans learn about our age of homeland security, warrant-less wiretapping, rendition, Gitmo, diminished habeas corpus, torture, politicized Justice Department, voter suppression, signing statements, preemptive/ preventive war, KBR detention centers, dictatorial executive orders/presidential directives, unitary executive, etc.
Today, when artists such as Bruce Springsteen criticize administration policy, rightwingers -- Fox "News," Laura Ingraham, Anne "Helter Skelter" Coulter, etc. -- question their patriotism. Blacklisting has been replaced by the "Don’t-tase-me-bro!" culture of "Dixie Chicking" talents who dissent from the Iraq War and Bush. This includes: violent threats against Natalie Maines, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, Janeane Garofalo, Stephanie Miller, Linda Ronstadt and Michael Moore; Cat Stevens’ deportation; Dan Rather’s toppling; prohibiting Joan Baez from performing for wounded troops; preventing "Live Earth" from performing at Washington’s National Mall; Fox censoring Sally Field’s antiwar Emmy acceptance speech; etc.
The Hollywood Ten and other blacklistees deserve a Congressional apology, star on Hollywood Blvd.’s "Walk of Fame" and special Oscar. We must remember them, as well as Edward R. Murrow’s 1954 CBS-TV speech exposing fascistic Senator Joseph McCarthy: "We will not be driven by fear… if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men -- not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular."
Those who forget the past are doomed to rerun it.
For more information
Hollywood Fights Back… Again -- For information call: (213)977-5252.
Galileo By Bertolt Brecht – Broadcast Dec. 1 on KPCC.
What Price Freedom? What the Hollywood Blacklist and the Patriot Act Have in Common
A Symposium at Emerson College
Marking the 60th Anniversary of the Creation of the Hollywood Blacklist
Monday, Nov. 5, 2007
Panel: noon-2 p.m.
"The Blacklist and the Patriot Act"
Panel Participants:
Carol Rose, Executive Director, ACLU of Massachusetts
Arnie Reisman Writer/Producer, Author of The Waldorf Conference
Nat Segaloff Writer/Producer, Author of The Waldorf Conference
Daniel Kimmel Film Critic/Journalist, Author of The Waldorf Conference
Tony Kahn Writer/Producer/Broadcast Journalist
Christopher Trumbo Writer, Author of the 2007 documentary Trumbo,
about his father, screenwriter Dalton Trumbo
Panel: 4-6 p.m. "Free Speech Across the Disciplines"
Moderated by Maureen Shea, Project Director of "What Price Freedom?" this panel features Emerson College faculty working on free speech issues in their respective fields.
Staged Reading: 7-9 p.m. The Waldorf Conference
A Play, by Nat Segaloff, Daniel Kimmel and Arnie Reisman
A work of speculation that reveals the passions and intrigues that transpired in a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in NYC on Nov. 24, 1947, when a group of the most powerful men in Hollywood met in secrecy – apparently with government approval – to weigh the Constitution against their own pocketbooks. When this "conference" ended, the Blacklist had begun.
Talkback: 9 p.m. "Meet the Playwrights"
Immediately after the reading, hear from playwrights Nat Segaloff, Daniel Kimmel and Arnie Reisman about their motivations for writing the play, their process and the play’s production history thus far.
Screenings: Oct. 15-Nov. 15
In conjunction with this Symposium, there will be screenings of Spartacus, Papillion and Good Night and Good Luck on the Emerson Channel (screening schedule TBA).
For more information, contact Maureen Shea, Project Director, at maureen_shea@emerson.edu or by calling 617/824-8361.
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