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Author: Michael Freedland Publisher: Robson ISBN: Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 304
Book Description
'The irony was that at this time the Communist Party was legal. People were sent to prison for refusing to say if they were communists.' –– Sidney Sheldon It was, in effect, a huge smoke-filled California courtroom, noisy to the point where even the sound of the gavel from the raised desk could barely be heard. It was an unusual courtroom and a very unusual 'defendant'. In the dock was Hollywood itself – placed on trial by the US Congress and, in the summer of 1953, finally coming close to succumbing to a death sentence, a sentence of shame. The UnAmerican Activities Committee finally decided that it had done its job: it had looked for reds under the bed in the film capital and said it had found them. Hollywood was now pronounced 'clean', yet it had never been dirtier. This is the true story of how J. Parnell Thomas, chairman of the Committee (the House of Representatives version of Senator Joseph McCarthy's witchhunts) made a national name for himself by ruining the lives of hundreds of people in the movie industry. Two years later, Thomas would be jailed for embezzling government money but in August 1953 he was riding high. 'Hollywood on Trial' relates the story of the victims of this witchhunt. Through the Committee many of Hollywood's leading lights were denied the right to work. Stars such as Charlie Chaplin and Paul Robeson were denied the passports that would have allowed them to leave America, Oscar-winning writers were forced to give their scripts to noneities to offer in their own names and then shared the proceeds. Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Danny Kaye and John Huston went to Washington in defence of the 'Hollywood Ten', the first writers to be blacklisted, yet when Bogart and Bacall were questioned, they too buckled in. The humiliations continued until the end of the Fifties. The scars, however, have remained to this day.
Author: Michael Freedland Publisher: Robson ISBN: Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 304
Book Description
'The irony was that at this time the Communist Party was legal. People were sent to prison for refusing to say if they were communists.' –– Sidney Sheldon It was, in effect, a huge smoke-filled California courtroom, noisy to the point where even the sound of the gavel from the raised desk could barely be heard. It was an unusual courtroom and a very unusual 'defendant'. In the dock was Hollywood itself – placed on trial by the US Congress and, in the summer of 1953, finally coming close to succumbing to a death sentence, a sentence of shame. The UnAmerican Activities Committee finally decided that it had done its job: it had looked for reds under the bed in the film capital and said it had found them. Hollywood was now pronounced 'clean', yet it had never been dirtier. This is the true story of how J. Parnell Thomas, chairman of the Committee (the House of Representatives version of Senator Joseph McCarthy's witchhunts) made a national name for himself by ruining the lives of hundreds of people in the movie industry. Two years later, Thomas would be jailed for embezzling government money but in August 1953 he was riding high. 'Hollywood on Trial' relates the story of the victims of this witchhunt. Through the Committee many of Hollywood's leading lights were denied the right to work. Stars such as Charlie Chaplin and Paul Robeson were denied the passports that would have allowed them to leave America, Oscar-winning writers were forced to give their scripts to noneities to offer in their own names and then shared the proceeds. Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Danny Kaye and John Huston went to Washington in defence of the 'Hollywood Ten', the first writers to be blacklisted, yet when Bogart and Bacall were questioned, they too buckled in. The humiliations continued until the end of the Fifties. The scars, however, have remained to this day.
Author: Thomas Doherty Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231547463 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 637
Book Description
In 1947, the Cold War came to Hollywood. Over nine tumultuous days in October, the House Un-American Activities Committee held a notorious round of hearings into alleged Communist subversion in the movie industry. The blowback was profound: the major studios pledged to never again employ a known Communist or unrepentant fellow traveler. The declaration marked the onset of the blacklist era, a time when political allegiances, real or suspected, determined employment opportunities in the entertainment industry. Hundreds of artists were shown the door—or had it shut in their faces. In Show Trial, Thomas Doherty takes us behind the scenes at the first full-on media-political spectacle of the postwar era. He details the theatrical elements of a proceeding that bridged the realms of entertainment and politics, a courtroom drama starring glamorous actors, colorful moguls, on-the-make congressmen, high-priced lawyers, single-minded investigators, and recalcitrant screenwriters, all recorded by newsreel cameras and broadcast over radio. Doherty tells the story of the Hollywood Ten and the other witnesses, friendly and unfriendly, who testified, and chronicles the implementation of the postwar blacklist. Show Trial is a rich, character-driven inquiry into how the HUAC hearings ignited the anti-Communist crackdown in Hollywood, providing a gripping cultural history of one of the most transformative events of the postwar era.
Author: Lloyd Billingsley Publisher: Prima Lifestyles ISBN: 9780761521662 Category : Blacklisting of entertainers Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
This engrossing tale of intrigue, passion, betrayal, and violence uncovers the true face of communism in Southern California, and names writers and actresses who were seduced by the party's philosophy.
Author: Gerald Horne Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 052093993X Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 385
Book Description
Before he attained notoriety as Dean of the Hollywood Ten—the blacklisted screenwriters and directors persecuted because of their varying ties to the Communist Party—John Howard Lawson had become one of the most brilliant, successful, and intellectual screenwriters on the Hollywood scene in the 1930s and 1940s, with several hits to his credit including Blockade, Sahara, and Action in the North Atlantic. After his infamous, almost violent, 1947 hearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Lawson spent time in prison and his lucrative career was effectively over. Studded with anecdotes and based on previously untapped archives, this first biography of Lawson brings alive his era and features many of his prominent friends and associates, including John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Chaplin, Gene Kelly, Edmund Wilson, Ernest Hemingway, Humphrey Bogart, Dalton Trumbo, Ring Lardner, Jr., and many others. Lawson's life becomes a prism through which we gain a clearer perspective on the evolution and machinations of McCarthyism and anti-Semitism in the United States, on the influence of the left on Hollywood, and on a fascinating man whose radicalism served as a foil for launching the political careers of two Presidents: Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. In vivid, marvelously detailed prose, Final Victim of the Blacklist restores this major figure to his rightful place in history as it recounts one of the most captivating episodes in twentieth century cinema and politics.
Author: Sydney Ladensohn Stern Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi ISBN: 1617032689 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 455
Book Description
Winner of the 2020 Peter C. Rollins Book Award Longlisted for the 2020 Moving Image Book Award by the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation Named a 2019 Richard Wall Memorial Award Finalist by the Theatre Library Association Herman J. (1897–1953) and Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1909–1993) wrote, produced, and directed over 150 pictures. With Orson Welles, Herman wrote the screenplay for Citizen Kane and shared the picture’s only Academy Award. Joe earned the second pair of his four Oscars for writing and directing All About Eve, which also won Best Picture. Despite triumphs as diverse as Monkey Business and Cleopatra, and Pride of the Yankees and Guys and Dolls, the witty, intellectual brothers spent their Hollywood years deeply discontented and yearning for what they did not have—a career in New York theater. Herman, formerly an Algonquin Round Table habitué, New York Times and New Yorker theater critic, and playwright-collaborator with George S. Kaufman, never reconciled himself to screenwriting. He gambled away his prodigious earnings, was fired from all the major studios, and drank himself to death at fifty-five. While Herman drifted downward, Joe rose to become a critical and financial success as a writer, producer, and director, though his constant philandering with prominent stars like Joan Crawford, Judy Garland, and Gene Tierney distressed his emotionally fragile wife who eventually committed suicide. He wrecked his own health using uppers and downers in order to direct Cleopatra by day and finish writing it at night, only to be very publicly fired by Darryl F. Zanuck, an experience from which Joe never fully recovered. For this award-winning dual portrait of the Mankiewicz brothers, Sydney Ladensohn Stern draws on interviews, letters, diaries, and other documents still in private hands to provide a uniquely intimate behind-the-scenes chronicle of the lives, loves, work, and relationship between these complex men.
Author: Scott W. Stern Publisher: Beacon Press ISBN: 0807042757 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 370
Book Description
The nearly forgotten story of the fight against the American Plan, a government program designed to regulate women’s bodies and sexuality “A consistently surprising page-turner . . . a brilliant study of the way social anxieties have historically congealed in state control over women’s bodies and behavior.” —New York Times Book Review Nina McCall was one of many women unfairly imprisoned by the United States government throughout the twentieth century. Tens, probably hundreds, of thousands of women and girls were locked up—usually without due process—simply because officials suspected these women were prostitutes, carrying STIs, or just “promiscuous.” This discriminatory program, dubbed the “American Plan,” lasted from the 1910s into the 1950s, implicating a number of luminaries, including Eleanor Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller Jr., Earl Warren, and even Eliot Ness, while laying the foundation for the modern system of women’s prisons. In some places, vestiges of the Plan lingered into the 1960s and 1970s, and the laws that undergirded it remain on the books to this day. Nina McCall’s story provides crucial insight into the lives of countless other women incarcerated under the American Plan. Stern demonstrates the pain and shame felt by these women and details the multitude of mortifications they endured, both during and after their internment. Yet thousands of incarcerated women rioted, fought back against their oppressors, or burned their detention facilities to the ground; they jumped out of windows or leapt from moving trains or scaled barbed-wire fences in order to escape. And, as Nina McCall did, they sued their captors. In an age of renewed activism surrounding harassment, health care, prisons, women’s rights, and the power of the state, this virtually lost chapter of our history is vital reading.
Author: Peter Stanfield Publisher: Rutgers University Press ISBN: 0813543975 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 368
Book Description
The concept of “un-Americanism,” so vital to the HUAC crusade of the 1940s and 1950s, was resoundingly revived in the emotional rhetoric that followed the September 11th terrorist attacks. Today’s political and cultural climate makes it more crucial than ever to come to terms with the consequences of this earlier period of repression and with the contested claims of Americanism that it generated. “Un-American” Hollywood reopens the intense critical debate on the blacklist era and on the aesthetic and political work of the Hollywood Left. In a series of fresh case studies focusing on contexts of production and reception, the contributors offer exciting and original perspectives on the role of progressive politics within a capitalist media industry. Original essays scrutinize the work of individual practitioners, such as Robert Rossen, Joseph Losey, Jules Dassin, and Edward Dmytryk, and examine key films, including The Robe, Christ in Concrete, The House I Live In, The Lawless, The Naked City, The Prowler, Body and Soul, and FTA.
Author: Janet Wasko Publisher: SAGE ISBN: 9780761968146 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 260
Book Description
This volume details the processes involved in turning raw materials and labour into feature films. Janet Wasko surveys and critiques the policies and structure of the current United States film industry, as well as its relationships to other media industries.
Author: Anthony Chase Publisher: ISBN: 9781565847002 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 204
Book Description
The popular culture of American law has never played a larger role than it does today in shaping the way we think about lawyers and the legal system. Our very definition of justice is now inseparable from motion picture and television images and popular legal narratives, from Hollywood westerns and O. J. Simpson to Law and Order and John Grisham. In Movies on Trial, law professor and movie aficionado Anthony Chase sorts out some of the complex and often contradictory notions Americans have about the legal system. He uses movies to investigate and inventory many of our deepest beliefs about law and politics, and provides a strong historical and intellectual context throughout. Analyzing Dirty Harry and True Believer for their commentary on the Miranda ruling and criminal procedure, and explaining tort law via The Verdict and A Civil Action, Chase also employs Three Kings to reveal changes in international law and The Rise to Power of Louis XIV to explore the rise of the modern state. Through the lens of film, he is able to describe and analyze the symbiosis between the image of law and its actual practice in our cultural imagination, in a genuinely illuminating and entertaining book.
Author: Norman K Denzin Publisher: SAGE ISBN: 9780803975453 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 256
Book Description
In this insightful book, one of America's leading commentators on culture and society turns his gaze upon cinematic race relations, examining the relationship between film, race and culture. Acute, richly illustrated and timely, the book deepens our understanding of the politics of race and the symbolic complexity of segregation and discrimination.
Author: Michael Freedland
Author: Michael Freedland
Author: Thomas Doherty
Author: Lloyd Billingsley
Author: Gerald Horne
Author: Sydney Ladensohn Stern
Author: Scott W. Stern
Author: Peter Stanfield
Author: Janet Wasko
Author: Anthony Chase
Author: Norman K Denzin