History MediaNotes / TheHollywoodBlacklist

After the blacklist was enforced, those who were invited to Washington to testify as a "friendly witness" were offered a SadisticChoice: they could admit that they were (or once were) Communist and "name names" and renounce their convictions and former associates, or they could be barred from employment for an indefinite period and kiss their careers goodbye. Many of the people who came to the committee noted that they ''already'' had all the names, meaning the investigations were technically useless and did not fish out new communists and subversives but primarily worked as a means to intimidate and bully the film fraternity. The blacklist would later be regarded as the OldShame of Hollywood, where the film industry were turned on each other and friends and colleagues who worked together collaborated with the government to destroy each other's careers all in fear of losing their own. Some historians noted that the paranoia of this climate was reflected in the FilmNoir of its time, and brought a darker edge to several '50s films and a more jaded post-war Hollywood culture which coincided with the UsefulNotes/FallOfTheStudioSystem.

* Creator/JosephLosey - Losey was a theater and radio director who worked on Creator/BertoltBrecht's ''Galileo'' with Charles Laughton. His films often featured AllOfTheOtherReindeer themes, especially ''The Boy With Green Hair''. His FilmNoir ''The Lawless'' criticized the racism against Mexican laborers while ''Film/The Prowler1951'', which was co-written by blacklistees Hugo Butler and Dalton Trumbo, featured TakeThat and RealitySubtext against the HUAC. After his exile, he went to England and France where he made several acclaimed films with Nobel Prize winning playwright Creator/HaroldPinter and recovered his career fully.

The blacklist had its roots in the Popular Front of the 1930s (which anti-Communists would later call the "Red Decade") and the Anglo-American-Russian alliance of UsefulNotes/WorldWarII. This was a period of widespread cultural opposition to Fascism and sympathy for Communism, even in America and most especially in the arts. It also took roots in [[UsefulNotes/UnionsInHollywood the labor movement in Hollywood]], where the Writers Guild, the Actors Guild, and the Directors Guild were first formed, which in turn led many studio bosses, including Creator/WaltDisney and Creator/CecilBDeMille, to complain of Communist influence. Though Hollywood studios before the war had remained politically neutral (so that they wouldn't risk having their movies banned in foreign markets), their contribution to the war effort had included shamelessly pro-USSR movies such as ''Film/MissionToMoscow'', ''Film/TheNorthStar'', and ''Song of Russia'' (whose portrayal of GloriousMotherRussia was denounced before the HUAC by none other than Creator/AynRand). In the late '40s and early '50s, Hollywood movies such as ''The Red Menace'', ''I Married a Communist'', ''I Was a Communist for the FBI'', and ''My Son John'' would portray the Soviet Union and Communism in a [[RedScare much harsher (if no more accurate) light]].

* Joseph Losey - Losey was a theater and radio director who worked on Creator/BertoltBrecht's ''Galileo'' with Charles Laughton. His films often featured AllOfTheOtherReindeer themes, especially ''The Boy With Green Hair''. His FilmNoir ''The Lawless'' criticized the racism against Mexican laborers while ''The Prowler'' (1951), which was co-written by blacklistees Hugo Butler and Dalton Trumbo, featured TakeThat and RealitySubtext against the HUAC. After his exile, he went to England and France where he made several acclaimed films with Nobel Prize winning playwright Creator/HaroldPinter and recovered his career fully.

Of course, Chaplin was lucky enough to be independently wealthy. Unluckier were screenwriters, directors, and actors who had no money, and the loss of career upset several marriages and families. In the cases of actors John Garfield, Canada Lee, Mady Christians, Edward Bromberg, Philip Loeb and Don Hollenback, the blacklist is strongly believed to have hastened their early deaths. A few of them, like Abe Polonsky, Dalton Trumbo, John Berry, Joseph Losey and Creator/LillianHellman, refused to "name names" on general principle, while others like Creator/EliaKazan and Broadway choreographer Jerome Robbins, both of whom had been Communist Party members for only a few years, despite their opposition to the hearings willingly provided names to the committee. Kazan was the only major left-wing artist to take such a public stand and stood by it and even took a front page defending his decision, an action which he [[NeverLiveItDown never lived down]] and which haunted him to the end of his life, though he also noted in interviews [[IRegretNothing he didn't regret his stand]].[[note]]Kazan himself noted that the Committee had all the names and everyone he named was going to be blacklisted anyway, with the hearings being by and large a sham to create consent by lip service. ''Film/TheFront'' noted that this was basically being a tool of HUAC, as the protagonist was told to name a dead man, and refused to because he realized they were using him as useful propaganda.[[/note]]

What's not taken into account then and even now is that the Hollywood Communists were by no means a unified contingent taking orders from Moscow. Several of them, like Ring Lardner Jr., Abe Polonsky and E. Y. Harburg, were inspired by Marx but did not associate with the party, citing the Moscow Show Trials and especially the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact as evidence of the Soviet Union's corruption. Indeed, some of the people blacklisted had no ties at all to Communism or the party aside from a broad sympathy for leftist causes like the Spanish Civil War and what was termed at the time as "premature anti-fascism" — that is, opposing Hitler and Mussolini before it was cool and okay for America to enter the war. Some of the historians and survivors (including Abe Polonsky) even argued that the Committee collaborated with Studios to institute [[ThePurge a purge]] in Hollywood of more liberal artists as part of the more conservative post-war climate, which made the House Committee similar to the Soviet Union (contrary to Dalton Trumbo's parting words to the HUAC, America never established concentration camps for Communists, though a law authorizing such camps in case of a national emergency remained on the books from 1950 until that section was repealed in 1971).

The UsefulNotes/ColdWar never made as big a mark on American culture as in 1947, the year in which the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities (commonly known as the HUAC, which is not an exact acronym; this [[MaliciousMisnaming may have been intentional]]) began conducting a series of investigations into Hollywood actors, screenwriters, and directors, inquiring into whether or not they were Communists and whether or not they tried to use the movies to covertly spread Communist ideas and subversive elements to the American public at large. Also in 1947, three former {{FBI agent}}s founded a private organization called American Business Consultants, which unofficially supplemented the HUAC's investigations and the Attorney General's list of subversive organizations with its newsletter ''Counterattack: Facts to Combat Communism'' and the 1950 book ''Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television'', which became known as "the Bible of Madison Avenue" due to its influence over advertisers.

The UsefulNotes/ColdWar never made as big a mark on American culture as in 1947, the year in which the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities (commonly known as the HUAC, which is not an exact acronym; this [[MaliciousMisnaming may have been intentional]]) began conducting a series of investigations into Hollywood actors, screenwriters, and directors inquiring into whether or not they were Communists, and whether or not they tried to use the movies to covertly spread Communist ideas and subversive elements to the American public at large. Also in 1947, three former {{FBI agent}}s founded a private organization called American Business Consultants, which unofficially supplemented the HUAC's investigations and the Attorney General's list of subversive organizations with its newsletter ''Counterattack: Facts to Combat Communism'' and the 1950 book ''Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television'', which became known as "the Bible of Madison Avenue" due to its influence over advertisers.

* Dalton Trumbo - Perhaps the most notable member to be blacklisted, he wrote screenplays for several films, including the Academy Award winner ''The Brave One'' (1957), written under the pseudonym "Robert Rich." He also wrote the Academy Award-winning screenplay for Creator/WilliamWyler's ''Film/RomanHoliday'' (1953), which was credited to a friend of Trumbo's, Ian [=McLellan=] Hunter, before the award was posthumously reinstated to Trumbo forty years later (Hunter himself would later go on to be blacklisted). He also anonymously wrote Joseph Lewis' ''Gun Crazy'' and several other notable films, until finally being given credit publicly for ''Film/Exodus1960'' and ''Film/{{Spartacus}}'' which officially ended the blacklist. Trumbo served a sentence of 11 months in 1950 as did several of the Hollywood Ten.