Famed Author to Hollywood: Stop Lying About the ‘Blacklist’

Alternate headline: Blogger Discovers Keynote Speaker for the Anti-Communist Film Festival. And yes, I’ve alerted Mark Judge, except he’s been on the effort for almost three months. 

Back in March, Mark wrote about a new novel from best-selling author James Ellroy, whose novels Hollywood had made into films such as the James Woods thriller Cop, Brown’s Requiem, The Black Dahlia, and most famously, L.A. Confidential. Mark noted the publication of Ellroy’s latest novel, Red Sheet, set in Ellroy’s favorite setting of 1950s Hollywood, only with a surprising and audacious twist. The novel takes the position that the so-called Blacklist was not only a Hollywood studio manipulation, but that the anti-Communists at the time were right about the Soviet influence operation targeting the American entertainment industry:

Red Sheet is an anti-communist novel. It stands foursquare in the tainted tradition of Ayn Rand and Mickey Spillane. Ellroy is out to scramble your long-held perceptions and force you into a state of jumped-up disavowal.

Red Sheet scorns the mock-martyred Hollywood Ten and ballyhoos the Blacklist and the ’47-’48 HUAC hearings. Red Sheet forces you to live within the twisted and oddly tender soul of Richard M. Nixon. Red Sheet spotlights the Spanish Civil War and atrocities committed by the commie-infested International Brigade, heretofore held as heroic. Red Sheet lionizes name-naming kingpin Whittaker Chambers and bestows kudos on ratfinks Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg.

The question at that time was what Ellroy intended to say with Red Sheet. Did he just want to tell a provocative tale with a counterfactual premise, along the lines of speculative fiction such as If the South Had Won the Civil War and The Man In the High Castle? Or did Ellroy believe he was telling the real tale of the ‘blacklist’ and exposing Hollywood’s decades-long propaganda that deflects from the disloyal truth?

Wonder no longer. The Hollywood Reporter sat down with Ellroy, who had no trouble setting the record straight from his perspective. He reminds Seth Abramovitch that the Hollywood blacklist was a studio-driven creation rather than a government mandate, and even then, a mainly corrupt filter that intended to duck responsibility for the infiltration of the industry. Ellroy explains that the real heroes of the so-called Blacklist Era were Whitaker Chambers, Richard Nixon, and Elia Kazan – who himself got blackballed by his own industry when the propaganda started:

“The Hollywood 10 — they were either ex-Party or Party,” Ellroy tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Everybody knew what Stalin was doing. They just threw in their lot with Stalinists and with the enemies of America. … That’s who [these] people were.” … 

The plot of Red Sheet, though, only grazes the surface of Ellroy’s unique historical perspective. He believes a genuine Moscow-controlled espionage network was operating in Hollywood back in the 1950s, that the Soviet threat was grave and that history has gotten the era’s heroes and villains exactly backwards. The Nixon he remembers was a benighted figure who would slip his handlers and quietly roam America’s streets. “He would lose himself and walk into the inner city,” Ellroy tells THR. “Not looking for women, not looking for anything in particular.” His Trumbo is certainly a lot darker than Bryan Cranston’s saintly version: a “fat-cat wealthy Hollywood screenwriter” and FBI informant who “named names in private” while performing martyrdom in public. And Kazan, the director of On the Waterfront and A Streetcar Named Desire, who notoriously named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952, was simply a man who did the right thing — unlike half the attendees at the 1999 Academy Awards who sat on their hands when Kazan finally received an honorary Oscar.

The big reveal here may well be that THR is willing to let Ellroy make the argument, on one of the most important industry print-media platforms. Not only do they give Ellroy an honest headline – “James Ellroy Says You Have the Hollywood Blacklist All Wrong”  – they allow him to make that argument verbatim in the article. Abramaovitch recaps the conversation up front, but then provides the transcripts so Ellroy’s argument gets published without filters.

For instance:

Your book flips the script. And I don’t think you’re just doing it dramatically. I think you actually believe it. Am I right?

Yes. There are some things here. The government didn’t mandate the Blacklist. It was the studio heads. It was Harry Cohn and Louis B. Mayer, Dore Schary and — who else? Jack L. Warner, and the gentile crew over at 20th Century Fox. They were the ones who initiated that. And it was very, very loose from the beginning. Some guys worked if the studio guys liked them, and let them work under pseudonyms. And that was that. … 

The Hollywood 10 — they were either ex-Party or Party, and they were mandated. The hatchet man, of course, was John Howard Lawson, and his boss was a man named V.J. Jerome [the Communist Party USA’s longtime cultural commissar]. I can give you one example. They thought that Budd Schulberg’s very fine Hollywood novel, What Makes Sammy Run?, wasn’t proletarian enough. And they held him up, in an apartment off of Hollywood Blvd. and Fairfax Ave., hostage. He finally quit the Party over that.

Everybody knew what Stalin was doing. They just threw in their lot with Stalinists and with the enemies of America. And in effect — this is the core of it — a grand jury was impaneled, and you’re not allowed to cite either the First Amendment or the Fifth in a grand jury, you have to answer the questions or you go to the can for a year. So the Hollywood 10 guys, most of them didn’t even make the one-year mark. They just cut them loose. And a bunch of them, like Dalton Trumbo, were FBI [informants] in four months and named names in private. That’s who the people were.

Is Hollywood ready for that kind of truth-telling? Probably not. It still won’t depart from the Blacklist Era mythology that Ellroy decries. The closest it has come was in the Coen Brothers film Hail Caesar!, which packaged it into an absurdist comedy. Mark and I disagree on the construct of this film (although we both enjoy it); he sees it as a straightforward anti-Communist comedy, where I see it as a parody of what an anti-Communist film might do with the blacklist. The way the film treats the central character, Eddie Mannix – a real-life Hollywood figure played as a scrupulously ethical exec by Josh Brolin – is the tell. The real Eddie Mannix is much closer to Bob Hoskins’s portrayal in Hollywoodland, which depicts Mannix as a malevolent Hollywood fixer. The Coen Brothers reset the ethical center for satirical purposes, and likely also to give their Hollywood colleagues a winking acknowledgment that they weren’t really departing from the blacklist mythology. (Although, the film’s reception shows that effort may have been too cute by half.) 

You can safely bet that no studio will touch Red Sheet for a film adaptation, although Mark would certainly love to premiere that film in a future Anti-Communist Film Festival. He’s already invited Ellroy to attend the inaugural version later this year. Perhaps Mark, Ellroy, and I can have a fun conversation about Hollywood mythmaking and Ellroy’s long focus on its deconstruction, on stage or off. 

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