


This was usually done on the basis of their membership in, alleged membership in, or sympathy with the Communist Party USA, or on the basis of their refusal to assist Congressional investigations into the party's activities. Actors, screenwriters, directors, musicians, and other American entertainment professionals were barred from work by the studios. The blacklist involved the practice of denying employment to entertainment industry professionals believed to be or to have been Communists or sympathizers. The Hollywood blacklist was an entertainment industry blacklist put in effect in the mid-20th century in the United States during the early years of the Cold War, in Hollywood and elsewhere. | Motion pictures - Political aspects - United States.Members of the Hollywood Ten and their families in 1950, protesting the impending incarceration of the ten | Blacklisting of entertainers - United States. | Communism and motion pictures - United States. Screenwriters - California - Los Angeles. Their plans for control of the industry a shambles by the mid-1950s, the Party nonetheless succeeded in shaping the popular memory of those days. From the days of the Popular Front through the Nazi-Soviet Pact and beyond World War II, they remain faithful to a regime whose brutality rivaled that of Hitler's Nazis. He shows how the Party dominated the politics of the movie industry during the 1930s and 1940s, raising vast sums of money from unwitting liberals and conscripting industry luminaries into supporting Stalinist causes.Ĭommunist writers, actors, and directors, wealthy beyond the dreams of most Americans, posture as proletarian wage slaves as they try to influence the content of movies.

Using long neglected information from public records, the personal files of key players, and recent revelations from Soviet archives, Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley uncovers the Communist Party's strategic plan for taking control of the movie industry during its golden age, a plan that came perilously close to success. Left untold that night, and ignored in books and films for more than half a century, was a story not so politically correct but vastly more complex and dramatic. In the fall of 1997 some of the biggest names in show business filled the Motion Picture Academy theater in Beverly Hills for Hollywood Remembers the Blacklist, a lavish production worthy of an Oscar telecast. Hollywood party : how communism seduced the American film industry in the 1930s and 1940s / Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley Book Bib ID
