Dec
26
‘Tis the Season to Plead Ignorance
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by Michael Winship
This has been a difficult Christmas season. The ongoing Writers Guild strike meant moving a lot of the usual Yuletide ya-ya to the back burner. Parties and shopping yielded to picket lines, meetings and conference calls.
As I wrote in a letter to the members of the Writers Guild, East, “It’s tough as hell to be on strike during the holidays. Not only are we staging outdoor pickets and other events in the throes of winter’s cold, we’re without work and paychecks at a moment when gift giving and good times are very much on the minds of everyone around us, especially our friends and loved ones.”
But I hit the wall late Friday afternoon. I was lacking in anything much resembling Christmas spirit and felt in danger of having the holiday entirely pass me by. Two strike-related phone calls too many — one on the house phone, the other, simultaneously, on the cell — sent me over the edge.
And so, in the interest of mental health, all else was forsaken and, unilaterally and preemptively, Christmas was declared. In the last 72 hours before the day itself, I managed to jam buying, wrapping and mailing gifts; sending out cards; picking up a wreath; quaffing cider and eggnog; multiple playings of the “Christmas with the Rat Pack” CD; and screening “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “White Christmas” and “The Bishop’s Wife,” the latter twice.
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Dec
18
Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?
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by Michael Winship
“We got a very good writer. You won’t be ashamed.”
“Blacklisted?”
“Impeccably.”
– From the movie, “The Front,”
written by Walter Bernstein.
Last Thursday, at some ungodly hour of the morning, I found myself on the early train to Washington with my friend and colleague, screenwriter Walter Bernstein, and Victor Navasky, publisher emeritus of The Nation magazine.
The three of us were headed to DC for a day of events marking the 60th anniversary of the Hollywood blacklist, a list the very existence of which was denied for years. It kept writers, directors, actors and others in the entertainment business from working if they were suspected of possessing clandestine Communist sympathies or even if they just dared to have left-leaning political opinions.
Walter was blacklisted in the early 1950s, and forced to work under a variety of pseudonyms until 1960. Years later, he was nominated for an Oscar for best original screenplay when he wrote “The Front,” starring Woody Allen as a cashier who poses as a writer for a blacklisted friend.
Victor, now a journalism professor at Columbia, wrote “Naming Names,” an award-winning book considered the definitive account of the Hollywood blacklist.
I was with them to moderate a panel discussion of the blacklist at the National Press Club. Joining us in DC was the articulate and stunning, 90-year-old actress Marsha Hunt, whose promising career as a movie ingénue also was short-circuited by false accusations of disloyalty.
In May 1947, the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union had just begun. The House Committee on Un-American Activities came to Hollywood and heard the testimony of 14 “friendly” witnesses who alleged that Communist propaganda was spreading through the movies. (A suspect line of dialogue: “Share and share alike — that’s democracy!”)
That fall, 19 members of the Hollywood community — including 13 members of what was then called the Screen Writers Guild — were subpoenaed to appear before the committee on Capitol Hill.
Progressives in the movie business, including Marsha Hunt, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Gene Kelly, John Huston, Danny Kaye and Paulette Goddard created the Committee for the First Amendment and flew to Washington to observe the proceedings. They also hoped to testify.
Instead, the committee called the first of the so-called “unfriendly 19,” writer John Howard Lawson, and asked the now famous question, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” Refusing to answer, he and nine others — including Ring Lardner, Jr., and Dalton Trumbo, then the highest paid writer in Hollywood — became known as the Hollywood Ten. On November 24, 1947, all of them were cited for contempt of Congress. The next day, Hollywood studio heads issued a statement that the ten were fired “until such time as he is acquitted or has purged himself of contempt and declares under oath that he is not a Communist…”
They added, “We will not knowingly employ a Communist or a member of any party or group which advocates the overthrow of the government of the United States by force or by any illegal or unconstitutional methods.”
The Hollywood Ten were fined and jailed, the Committee for the First Amendment vanished as quickly as it had been organized, and a grand, hysterical inquisition ignited, burning like arson through the worlds of entertainment, academia, science, government, and organized labor. Thus began what the writer Stefan Kanfer called the plague years and playwright Lillian Hellman dubbed “Scoundrel Time.”
The show business blacklist was a vicious whispering campaign, a witch hunt that bullied and intimidated. It terrorized friends into betraying friends and drove some to suicide, mortal illness and economic despair. It sent writers to prison, uprooted families and attempted to crush the creative spirit of magnificent American storytellers.
In the end, with time and the bravery of intelligent men and women who dared to stand up and declare it a shameful and immoral national disgrace, the blacklist failed. Among them, Edward R. Murrow (as depicted in the George Clooney movie
“Good Night and Good Luck”), and John Henry Faulk, the Texas-born, homespun broadcaster who fought the blacklist and won, although the courtroom battle financially wiped him out.
On Thursday, we came to Washington to honor the talent and invincibility of those who survived the scourge of the blacklist with unstinting courage and grace. At a time when civil liberties are once again at risk, when anti-terrorism has replaced anti-Communism as the cloak behind which villains hide to cast ethnic and religious slurs, or to accuse those who question authority as guilty of treason, we take their experience to heart.
We remember that eternal vigilance is indeed all that protects us from those who would deny our freedom and keep dissenting and creative voices silent. The cry of “Wolf!” is never far from the door.
copyright 2007 Michael Winship
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Dec
4
Rudy’s Numbers Don’t Add Up
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by Michael Winship
Back in the days when I was a publicist, one of the people whose work I promoted was a filmmaker who frequently appeared on television talk shows. From time to time, the host or another guest would challenge his facts and figures, at which point he would spout some important sounding, supporting data from, he said, “a study by Rombauer and Becker.”
There was no such study. Rombauer and Becker wrote “The Joy of Cooking.” Still, it usually shut the other person up.
I’m reminded of this by Rudy Giuliani’s penchant for throwing around spurious statistics to attack other candidates — Mitt Romney and his one term as governor of Massachusetts, for example — and to defend his own record as mayor of New York City.
As the New York Times reported Friday, while bragging about his success reducing crime, “Mr. Giuliani told a television interviewer that New York was ‘the only city in America that has reduced crime every single year since 1994.’ In New Hampshire this week, he told a public forum that when he became mayor in 1994, New York’‘had been averaging like 1,800, 1,900 murders for almost 30 years.’ When a recent Republican debate turned to the question of fiscal responsibility, he boasted that ‘under me, spending went down by 7 percent.’”
The problem is, the Times continued, “All of these statements are incomplete, exaggerated or just plain wrong.” Chicago also has seen crime drop every year since ’94, New York’s homicide record averaged 1514 murders per year in the three decades before Giuliani became mayor, and for most of his tenure, spending increased an average of 3.7 percent.