Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film ... (ISBN 0761513760)

Amazon.com Review:
Here's what most people know about the clash between Washington, D.C., and Hollywood involving Communist influence over the film industry: the House Committee on Un-American Activities led an organized witch hunt against writers and actors with left-wing sympathies, creating an environment that led to a blacklist destroying many talented people's careers. But some insist this isn't the whole story. "It's a false parallel. Witch hunt!" wrote Molly Kazan, whose husband Elia testified before the committee, saved his career as a film director, and earned enmity from Hollywood liberals continuing to the present day. "The phrase would indicate that there are no Communists in the government, none in the big trade unions, none in the press, none in the arts.... No one who was in the Party and the left uses that phrase. They know better." Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley works to fill in some of the historical gaps with Hollywood Party. The information on the role of Communist (and Communist- sympathetic) screenwriters is not particularly revelatory to those familiar with the basic outlines of the story, although Billingsley pushes the Communist angle hard, noting the Party's lockstep support of Stalin and what might charitably be called his "policies," as well as the vicious backlash against any leftist who spoke out against the Communists. His chronicle of Communist efforts to control the studio workers' unions, however, illuminates a less glamorous but perhaps more substantial aspect of the story. Those in search of celebrity dirt will be mildly disappointed; there are several star-studded scenes, but mostly mild anecdotes on the level of Ronald Reagan's gradual realization that, as an SAG activist, he was being played for a dupe by the Reds. Unless, that is, Billingsley is writing about a Communist or a fellow traveler, in which case no personal quirk, from screenwriter Dalton Trumbo's penchant for working in his bathtub to Bertolt Brecht's lack of hygiene to left-wing journalist Ella Winter's mannishly short hair, is overlooked. -- Ron Hogan

You'll never see this movie made:
The fact that it is called the "red scare" or "McCarthyism" says a lot about how the post World War II communist problem is looked at from the modern perspective. From the earliest times I can remember gavels coming down by angry congressmen as meek witnesses calmly express their disagreement with a committee that would make them "name names." The witnesses seemed real pathetic and the committee chairmen all come off as power mad scoundrels looking for a headline. The poor Hollywood Ten went to jail or fled to Europe to write movies under fictitious names. What none of the pictures or narration ever told me was that every member of the Hollywood Ten had been a communist at some point in his life and that half of the Hollywood ten were still communists when they went to jail for contempt of court. Since they weren't making the defense in front of Congress that they had the right to be communists, the event was portrayed as a "witch hunt." These were just misunderstood new deal liberals that wanted more socialism than the House Un-American Activities Committee. What Mr. Billingsley shows in his excellently researched book is that they weren't just a bunch of artistic idealists, but a group of avowed Marxists being funded by and taking orders from Moscow. It's not an open question. They were given orders to get collectivist messages into Hollywood films. They were told not to portray capitalism or businessmen in a good light. Writer Budd Schulberg was criticized by the party because his book "What Makes Sammy Run?" didn't achieve any of the party's goals. Some of these guys were even writing articles for the communist Daily Worker under their own names. Modern Hollywood liberals make the communist party members the victims of some horrible black period in American history without any thought to what Stalin was doing to his people in Russia (or would have liked to have done here). Somehow, the liquidation and forced starvation of millions is nothing compared to a few screenwriters that have to write under an alias. Quick can you name one innocent blacklisted person whose life was ruined? I can only think of the fictional Robert DeNiro character from Guilty by Suspicion. The character had to be fictional in order prove their dramatic point. Had they made the movie about a real person who went through such things he would have had to have been an actual communist. DeNiro plays a clueless liberal that is blacklisted because he was at a few parties. There weren't any of these misunderstandings in real life. Until I read Mr. Billingsley's book I had no idea that Hollywood was plagued by violent strikes in the 1940s whose purpose was bringing all the Hollywood trade unions under the control of communist, Herbert Sorrell. John Howard Lawson was trying to gain control of the Screenwriters Guild at the same time with the overall plan of controlling the content of Hollywood movies. Isn't it a little scary that this was being funded by a totalitarian government? None of the facts of this period are ever discussed. It's simply boiled down to communists as idealists and anti-communists as opportunists. In order to perpetuate that myth, Hollywood has since ignored the many opportunities to present the horrors of Communist Russia the way they have presented the horrors of Nazi Germany. The recent film, The Pianist, about Jewish life in World War II Warsaw, Poland doesn't even once mention that the Nazis and Russians divvy up Poland at the beginning of the war. All you hear is that the Germans invade in 1942 and the Russians liberate in 1945. That misses the whole point of what happened to Poland in the 20th Century. But it does perpetuate the myth. The tactic used in front of the committee hearings was to pretend that it was no one's business what their political affiliation was. That's cute, but would Hollywood have stood up for Nazis or Ku Klux Klan members under the auspices of first amendment freedom? The answer is readily available today. Mel Gibson's movie "The Passion of Christ" was roundly criticized for having the "wrong kind" of independent thought. They tend to like the kind of independent thought that also coincides with their prejudices like "Fahrenheit 911." Now that's free expression worth getting behind. Mr. Billingsley's book is so on target with what isn't discussed by Hollywood when they cry about the blacklist that it will forever be an indictment of those people who perpetuate the common myth.

Untangling Revisionism:
We all think we know it, because we've seen the newsreels, we've heard the interviews with the "Unfriendly 10" and read the ghastly legacy of what we assumed was the only "blacklist" that kept Hollywood craftsmen and women out of important films during the 20th century. But with a careful layout of the truth as it shows up in American Communist and Moscow newspapers, citing of interviews of actors who felt that they were "duped" by the Communists to paint HUAC and the US government in general as evil and disregarding craftsmens' rights Lloyd Billingsley creates a credible argument that we do not know the whole story. Perhaps most troublingly, Billingsley systematically cites evidence of American Communists in Hollywood marching strictly to a tune from Moscow, not their own masses: galvinizing the Anti-Fascist (eg Anti-Nazi) effort whole heartedly....until the day Stalin signed the anti-agression pact with Hitler. Suddenly, Pete Seger was singing peace-at-any-cost songs instead of string-the-fuehrer-up songs; Lillian Hellman was silenced when she had been so vocal about our duty to protect what she was heard to call "the motherland". Then, when Hitler invaded Hellman's precious "Motherland", Hollywood elite's communists' tune changed again, as evidenced by The Daily Worker and New Masses....a Communist paper popular in Hollywood. Could there be better evidence that CPUSA was the marionette in Stalin's paws? And what a prize for him! Being able to use Hollywood as his vessel for agit-prop must have made Goebbels a little jealous, talented as Lenni Riehfenstahl was. Aside from the fact that socialist rhetoric often runs amok in 30's and 40's films --- capitalists bad, poor people good----Billingsley lists at least 3 unapologetically pro-Soviet films made during the war, ostensibly to boost understanding of our ally, but laced with untruth. The book is not just a review of the early years of the House Un-American Committee ( another myth dispelled: this was pre-McCarthy, who came onto the committee long after the Hollywood 10 were dispersed for refusing to simply admit they were in the Communist Party....which of course, was not a crime.) It is a survey, through earlier interviews, articles from The Daily Worker and New Masses, and material available for a brief period after the collapse of the Soviet Union that verified the ties between the Soviet and American parties and the US party's dependence on "Moscow gold", which of course made it hard for them to disobey "Moscow's demands". Explanations are given for seemingly popular leaders stepping down suddenly; for Pulitzer Prize winner Walter Santy lying about the Ukranien famine (he was being blackmailed); for people recanting when they wrote articles stating perhaps we shouldn't worry about making sure so much Marxist dialectic gets into our films (other Hollywood elites would lock them in a house and basically "debrief" them until they came to the "right" conclusion....or,until they simply stormed out and said "this is b.s."). It is also about learning of "ambassadors" like Paul Robeson, who betrayed Jewish friends when for the hundredth time he travelled to the USSR and when told they were to be murdered, came back here & assured us that Russia was purely pro-Semitic. (His friends were murdered soon after; Robeson, in an anguished memoir, recanted his mistake years later). In brief, this is a book that gives us a sight of very normal people in fancy clothes; union leaders, communist bosses, congressional committee members, actors and actresses, with heroism and weaknesses on all sides. Billingsley's seemingly "revisionist" telling is well cited in thourough end notes that I've enjoyed following up on in the texts mentioned, especially those drawing from the briefly-opened KGB archives.

Outstanding Book:
This book is outstanding,the author tells the story of the union - studio wars of the late 1940's and the Communist Party's role in the conflict. The author forever shatters the myth that the infamous "Hollywood Ten" were innocent victims of a witch hunt. One area I would love to have seen the author delve into more was people's attitudes torward Communism at the time. Another myth the book destorys is that the communists were defeated by right-wing MC Carthyites. The heroes who saved the labor movement in Hollywood from falling into Communist control were the New Deal era liberals of the time.

The Commies are Coming:
Like all good conspiracy theories emerging from the U.S. (JFK being the most notorious), Billingsley's account of communist conspiracy in Hollywood has just enough facts to offer support for the rickety structure of hyperbole and paranoia that structures *Hollywood Party*. Yes, there were communists in Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s. And, yes, they did attempt to influence screen content while they were there. But beyond these two fairly obvious statements, Billingsley finds his argument in treacherous waters of circumspection, anecdote, and purple prose. Let me state up front: I am Left; I am a film professor, and my scholarship concerns investigating the Left in Hollywood from the 1930s to the 1940s. In all of the works I have read about Communism in Hollywood, Billingsley offers nothing new, albeit his writing is slightly more engaging for a lay reader than the typical histories on this period. Even more ironic is the fact that Left academics offer much better accounts of this period than Billingsley, though he seesm grossly unaware that such studies have been made. One of the best studies is Larry Ceplair's and Steven Englund's *The Inquisition in Hollywood*, written twenty years before Billingsley's book (1979) and far more superior. The real problem with Billingsley's book is that he sniffs out communist in any vestige of Left activity: within studio strikes, influencing all screen content, support of emigres from Nazi Germany. Communists did indeed have a presence within Hollywood, yet their control is far from the extensive web of control that Billingsley supposes. Communists actually were of the minority within Hollywood. The majority were the Popular Fronters: individuals who either were liberal, socialist, anarchist, social democratic, Christian socialist, New Dealers, and so on who at times became "fellow travelers" with Communists in their attempts to stop fascism, be pro-union, and fight racism. The story Billingsley tells (and the one that is still by far the predominant one told today) is that these fellow travelers were DUPED by the communists, unwittingly led astray by Moscow Gold and smoke-and-mirrors. But the real story of Hollywood (and the 1930s in general) were how the Communist Party USA needed to become more moderate in its stance to adopt to a general liberalism that permeated the entire nation. And if one is going to critique the CPUSA for its at times firery rhetoric, then one must also critique the American Legion, a bastion of patriotism and conservatism, that wrote in 1932, "The principal causes of the present situation are in general such that they cannot be promptly and efficiently met by existing political methods." So, although it might be true that Communists wanted to influence Hollywood films in more liberal directions, so too did hundreds of other non-Communist actors, directors, writers, etc. The question really isn't: how did the communists get control of Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s? Instead it is: what made some aspects of communism and their political fights appealing to a large segement of the studio community? And, in essence, this leads one to the question of: what was the Popular Front that united communists, socialists, catholics, liberals, New Dealers into a powerful formation that felt it could influence Hollywood in progressive directions? The only book to take into account this question is Michael Denning's *The Cultural Front*, one of the best books on this period and its relation to Left politics. Other good resources are: Daniel Aaron's *Writers on the Left,* Gerald Horne's, *Class Struggle in Hollywood,* and Saverio Giovacchini's *Hollywood Modernism: Film and Politics in the Age of the New Deal*. It would be much more informative and useful for a reader to explore the aforementioned works than waste one's time with Billingsley, unless you are looking for a good laugh, or for conservative vitrol to simply support one's ignorance. As for the one reviewer who claims that liberal professors offer a general elegy for the poor blacklistees, I suggest that he/she immediately transfer from the college he/she is in and go to a better school where the faculty is more well-informed. Although McCarthyism was nothing short of a legalized crime, Left film-workers most certainly wanted to influence Hollywood films in progressive directions where non-whites would not be stereotyped, where community was as valued as the individual, and where the trials and tribulations imposed upon everyday laboring Americans by their employers were represented. If the Hollywood Communists were guilty of anything, it was in their naivety in believing that the U.S. provided an ideal land where anyone could hold any political view without the fear of imprisonment, retaliation, or persecution (a fact that the Red Scare of 1919-1920 should have quickly disabused them of). Their attempt to challenge the mandates of American hyper-capitalism led them into the proverbial frying pan when the country regained its economic balance after WWII. One must remain accountable for the political fights one makes-- this is the true lesson of the Blacklist. As for lamenting what happened to the Hollywood Blacklistees, I heed Heywood Broun's dictum, "Don't mourn. Organize."

An Amazing Book:
All the 5-star reviews here say it better than I could. This book is invaluable at shattering the myths surrounding the "Hollywood 10" and their comrades, who supported a political ideology so murderous that in terms of body count made Nazi Germany look like a drive-by shooting in comparison. Look at the numbers if you don't believe me. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, etc. I especially liked the quotes from Ayn Rand, a brilliant woman who- unlike these fanciful Hollywood types- actually LIVED under communist rule and offered a firsthand account of it's terrors. Her testimoney was completely unassailable- and completely ignored by the Hollywood Commies, who continued to refer to Russia as "The Motherland"(see Lillian Hellman)and championed it's "culture". Rand's response to this drivel was typically sharp and to the point: "What culture? The culture of concentration camps? DON'T let yourself be fooled when Reds tell you that what they want to destroy are men like Hitler or Mussolini. What they want to destroy are men like Shakespeare, Chopin and Edison." Communism is evil, folks. I'd rather deal with Nazis because at least that breed is honest with their evil. Nazis let you know right up front who they are, what they stand for and what they intend to do. Unlike communists, who come as your "friends" and want to "take care" of all you poor, lost souls.... That's when the knife gets inserted into your back.