The Hollywood Blacklist, Explained | Film 101
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- Опубліковано 29 вер 2022
- What was the Hollywood Blacklist? How did this dark chapter of Hollywood history unfold? In the first episode of our new UA-cam series, Film 101, we take a look at who participated in blacklisting Hollywood talent, who fought back, and the lasting repercussions.
Written and Narrated by Tom Reimann
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It would have been better if you had included the NAMES of the Hollywood 10. I'll share them here:Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner, Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo. Alvah Bessie's son is a friend of mine.
Okay, but then you're also going to have to point out that, among them, Dmytryk, like Elia Kazan, recanted to save himself and his career and named names.
All commies
As a film school grad, I dig this. I would love to see more of this series, both here and on the channel itself in-between films!
"Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it." W. Churchill. Truer today than ever before.
The correct quotation is "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it", and it was from George Santayana, not Churchill.
William L. Shirer used the quotation as an epigraph to 'The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich', which is how it became so widely (though often inaccurately) quoted.
dear Mike . one of the truest statements ever . and the world is full of fools who ignore it . we ignore history at our peril we must learn from it . From Michael from Yorkshire and proud of it .
Except today conservatives are being blacklisted.
@@lindakahler4799 yep, and you learned that on faux noise , notnewsmax or disInfowars? Keep spreading the propaganda. It’s ruining our country, trumpster.
Lol, they were commies...
Marcia Hunt (1917-2022) R.I.P.
Great video. This is such an important part of film and American history. I hope to see more documentaries from TCM that raise our social consciousness.
I still watch "Salt of the Earth." One of the best movies about unions, race, immigrants and women's rights that's ever been made - and perhaps more relevant today as when it was made in 1954. The leading actress was deported just before wrapping up the production and they had to shoot her last scenes in Mexico. It was produced by the mine workers union.
John Garfield died trying to clear his name
Only 39 years old
Yes! Please more of this series! 📽🎞
I highly recommend "The Front." It was made after the blacklist, so it lacks the immediacy, but it's an otherwise great look at the lives it destroyed and a lot of the people involved had been blacklisted, including the writer, director, and several of the actors.
That was very good, brief, balanced and well researched, Thanks.
Super cool series here, TCM!
This is great -- so well done and comprehensive. I'd assign it for my film history students if it had closed caption (required at most colleges). 😞
The Blacklist didn't just affect the film industry. In the 1950s, John Henry Faulk was a popular radio personality on CBS-owned WCBS Radio in NYC. Organized Commie hunters named him as "suspect" in their publications, which were widely read in the TV & radio industries. Sponsors, too. Many left his program & WCBS Radio fired him. His career wrecked, he sued the people who had maligned him. I won't spoil how it played out. For that, his book about it all "Fear On Trial" spells out what happened. In 1975, CBS TV aired the made for TV movie based on his book. You can find it on DVD. The film & the book are worth your time!
in 1962 our school district hired a spectacular music teacher (black man named Leroy Dickerson, place Middletown NY) and he was my music teacher in grade 9 and 10 and then he disappeared without a trace. He had us sing Arron Copeland and he played us Marion Anderson. All grade 6 music because we were the best. The best composers of the classic and modern era. Exciting difficult classic/modern pieces and socially conscious music as well. The good moms and pops of our town probably thought he was a ********* since Copeland was already on the HUAC blacklist and Anderson was behind the color line and came out in front of it, right in DC. She could sing too. Some mealy mouth no-talent white hack replaced him and the music went back to BLAH. HOW COULD THEY DO THAT to the best teachers anyone could have? I'm not sure this is why he disappeared but decades later the incident gives me the creeps. I called him up from my telephone company job and thanked him. That was 2 years later when I graduated HS, I was sorry I couldn't ask him for a reference for college admission, but I told him he was the best teacher I ever had. He liked hearing it. AMERICA SHAME ON YOU. I never once heard a loud enough apology from anyone in government..in fact I never heard one at all. The HUAC Blacklist was still raging back then in the early sixties, the physical list was discredited a few years before but many people later on never got a start, as if some people's reality has no right to exist. My first bitter dip into official American racism as well
Wow!! This gave me goosebumps.
They were all communist...that's he problem.
Mind. Blown. Good Grief CB.
The actual name was the House Committee on Un-American Activities. HUAC is easy to remember though. J. Parnell Thomas was the head of the Committee until he was sent to prison for monetary corruption. Martin Dies was the original chairman of the Committee in the 30s. He resigned from Congress in the 40s due to health issues.
The Soviet Union was neither communist nor socialist - in fact, it called itself democratic, and also "communist," as the Bolshevik Revolution had been underpinned by popular Marxian ideals, which were immediately abandoned by Lenin upon gaining power, and further cast aside and forgotten by Stalin. The USSR was an oligarchic totalitarian society. A Marxian society would have seen workers controlling their own workplaces democratically (this is almost the Only explicit tenet of Marxism, which did Not prescribe autocratic control by a maximal leader, but rather Social control (democracy) over one's work and institutions (which we also never have had in America, though, in theory, our system allows for that possibility); in a Communist society - a thing which has never existed - workers would been their Own bosses.
We're in such a poorly educated country that people think the Democrats are Left. These are the same people who think it's ok for them to get Medicare though.
They had NO shame!!!!
History is repeating itself 😢
dear Angela we forget history at our peril . From Michael from Yorkshire and proud of it .
It was a very dark time in our country.
We are seeing it now with people in the industry who are conservative.
@@alexanderg1297 good.
@@degamispoudegamis no not good at all. Even people who are silent or in the middle are being forced out of the industry
@@degamispoudegamis . what on earth is good about it ? . From Michael from Yorkshire and proud of it .
@@michaelspilman5220 hello Michael from Yorkshire and proud of it
The House Committee was formed in 1940, and initially was interested in searching out fascists and Nazis. It was not form after WWII, but merely turned it's attention to the issue in 1947.
this era was what we now call cancel culture, but on steroids. the Hollywood Ten and their supporters like Bogart, Bacall, Huston, E.G. Robinson, thought the 1st Amendment protected their political opinions, and it should have, but now that WWII was over we suddenly had no enemy to fight, and the Cold War was gearing up…the 10 et al had faith in the Constitution to protect them, but the country’s mood had turned fearful. the studios were facing strong pressure to unionize, and some of the moguls’ anti-communist fervor was fueled by that (the studios were dependent on cheap labor). the number of people who were blacklisted or graylisted is huge-I keep finding out more names whose careers were destroyed or hobbled for a decade or more, many of them who had never been members of the Communist Party of America but who might have signed a petition a decade before, or in some cases who had never even flirted with communism and whose work just suddenly disappeared and who couldn’t even find out why so they could try to clear their names…Marsha Hunt one of these. All it took was for someone to suggest maybe you weren’t 100 percent, and the word would go out. Clearing your name meant writing a cringing letter confessing to your nonexistent wrongdoing and swearing you were now on the side of the “good guys.” Hunt had too much integrity to do that. She was never able to find out who had said she was a communist or what they said proved it… She was lucky, her screenwriter husband was never named and so she wasn’t without income as so many others were, and she worked on the stage. but radio and TV were often closed to the blacklisted as well. Garfield’s fatal heart attack is partly attributed to the stress of pressure fro HUAC. Orson Welles left the country during this era. At least one blacklisted person died by suicide. I used to condemn those who named names (which in the case of actual Party members the government already had, btw), but a lot of them were facing ruin, losing their house and not being able to provide for their families, and I now understand that it’s a complex thing, nuanced, and can’t be viewed as black and white. but 20 years later, when Jerome Robbins was directing A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum on Broadway, two blacklist victims, Zero Mostel and Jack Gilford, refused to work with him-the scars were that deep.
Do not forget what was done to Mady Christians and how it shortened her life!
Blacklisting is topial in November 2023 as we see on a daily basis people being threatened with blacklisting and boycotts for questioning Israel or USA support of Israel.
who's side you wanna be on, Judas lol
This, like most Tales of the Blacklist, is mythology. HUAC was not engaged in a 'witch hunt'. There were actual Communists sneaking propaganda into Hollywood movies in the 1940s. John Howard Lawson being the most obvious., as he'd been sent from NYC theater out to Hollywood by the CPUSA for the express purpose of organizing Party activities there. One of the Hollywood Ten, Edward Dmytryk tells the factual story in his memoir 'Odd Man Out'. The reality was that Dmytryk joined the CPUSA because he thought it would be good for his career (so powerful was the Party at the time). When he found out what the Communists were really up to, and that Communist writers were ruining his movies he rebelled, and got kicked out of the Party for his troubles.
Even George Clooney had to admit there was Communist propaganda in movies--see his film, 'Hail Caesar'. As for fighting fascism, Dalton Trumbo had no problem accepting the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that allowed WWII to start in Poland. Same for Lillian Hellman.
Destroying the lives and careers of people because they were or even might have been members of the Communist Party was absolutely wrong.
Yea, he commies invented that they were persecuted when they were openly communists who wanted our Republic to fall.
I think I rode in an elevator with a communist. He told me that he's rather be a commie than a Romney. Well, at least he didn't strap his dog to the top of his car like Mitt did.
Well that was an objective unbiased account. NOT. Red panic/hysteria was excessive, but Stalin, the USSR, the Cold war and yes, Communists in Hollywood and gangsters in U.S. dockworker's unions were real. ON The Waterfront wasn't a documentary but it also wasn't complete fiction either.
It is a fact that the anti-Communists were not hurt. Walt Disney built a multi-million (now billion) dollar empire to wide American respect even adoration. Gary Cooper, then and now was a respected star of the past. Ginger Rogers, director/producer C.B. DeMille, Donald Crisp, Adolph Menjou, Barbara Stanwyck, Robert Taylor, and directors Victor Fleming, Michael Curtiz, King Vidor, Leo McCarey, and John Ford were all anti-communist.
🖕HUAC
Well, this was a little less biased than I thought it would be, but not by much.
The blacklist was a good thing. Those who joined the communist party we're betraying their country.
"alarmist about suspected links to communism" .....and "Liked some of the things communism offered" lol bro
Wow, TCM! Why don't you tell us how you really feel. Great video....not biased at all! ( Here's to hoping you all can pick up on the sarcasm here)
So it was ok to jail people for either communist party membership or for refusing to name those who may have been? The ridiculousness of all these pro-HUAC comments is that you think communism was ever going to take hold of the country. Even at its most popular, the wealthy and powerful were always going to win. Greed is baked into every aspect of American life.
The film speaks of Communists being "vilified by the media and politicians just as badly as fascists and the Nazis had been" - so demonstrating that the writer of the script either does not know the meaning of "vilify", or is genuinely of the opinion that the Nazis and fascists were defamed by the American press.
I watch tcm because I'm disgusted with the woke lecturing of modern Hollywood. If TCM is going to continue down that road and embrace all the infinity stones of wokeness I will abandon this channel the same way I have abandoned the current box office. I don't know a lot of other under 40 year olds like myself who regularly watch TCM but of the ones who do, we talk about this regularly.
what's woke about pointing out that people had their careers ruined for having their own private opinions in a country where you're allowed to believe whatever you want?
And what's wrong with challenging people being mistreated for their race, gender, national origin, sexual orientation and so forth? It's unbelievable how fragile a lot of Americans are that opening doors that had been closed to others is so threatening. It's pathetic.
Let's celebrate those who admired Stalin.
as opposed to those who admired Joe McCarthy? Those caught up in this real witch hunt didn't admire Stalin - but that was too simple for DirtyJoe to understand. Doubt he even understood what socialism is.
You mean the guy who killed 8 million people in his fascist country?
What do you expect from TCM? They’re Leftists.
As opposed to celebrating those who admire Putin?
dear George I am a left winger . but a democratic one . and I dislike Stalin . I'm sure most leftwingers are the same .From Michael from Yorkshire and proud of it .
This shouldnt be on TCM official channel .. Opinioniated rant
Historical facts