Son of "Hollywood Reporter" owner apologizes for the paper's role in the Blacklist

[Ken Burch]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-20408094

The son of Hollywood Reporter founder Billy Wilkerson has apologised for the trade paper's role in the 1940s witch-hunts that saw many in the industry ostracised for having communist ties.

The actors, writers and directors on the so-called blacklist suffered huge damage to their careers as a result.

Willie Wilkerson's apology for what he called "Hollywood's Holocaust" was published in The Hollywood Reporter.

He said his father had wanted to take revenge against "studio titans".

According to his son, Billy Wilkerson tried to establish his own studio in the late 1920s before founding The Hollywood Reporter in 1930.

"For whatever reason, the movie brass refused him entry into their 'club' and squashed his dream," Mr Wilkerson goes on. "So he found another one: exacting revenge."

So many good people destroyed, for so little reason. An apology, years later...for whatever it's worth.

[Ken Burch]

1. more from the article:

After World War II, Wilkerson Senior supported the blacklist by using his paper to publish a series of editorials that attacked communist sympathisers and their supposed influence in Hollywood.

"In his maniacal quest to annihilate the studio owners, he realised that the most effective retaliation was to destroy their talent," wrote Willie Wilkerson of his father.

"In the wake of this emerging hysteria surrounding communism, the easiest way to crush the studio owners was to simply call their actors, writers and directors communists.

"Unfortunately, they would become the collateral damage of history."

[DanM]

7. Quite interesting.

Something to think about!

[frazzled]

2. I just watched Woody Allen's "The Front" on TV the other night

Written, produced, directed, and (mostly) acted by former blacklisted Hollywood talents. Although a comedy of sorts, it's also extremely moving.

I was thinking: we get so upset over even the idea of government scanning the Internet for information, but it seems actually quite benign (at least so far) in comparison to the techniques they used to get people to rat on other people for the smallest suspected connection to Communism. So many lives and careers were ruined.

I once spent a day and evening with the blacklisted director Jules Dassin ... in his late 80s at the time ... who had to leave the country to find work and never came back. (Of course, he ended up marrying the beautiful Melina Mercouri, and spent his last decades in Greece, so it turned out ok for him in many ways.) Too bad we lost his great talent here, and that he had to exile himself from his own country.

[Ken Burch]

3. Here is Wikipedia's entry on the Blacklist

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist

It's probably not totally comprehensive...but it gives you some sense of the scale of the injustice.

[Ken Burch]

5. And this song, "In Contempt" which was written by Aaron Kramer and Betty Sanders,

as a challenge to the Blacklist.

One of the most common ways to end up on the Blacklist was to be found "In contempt of the committee(HUAC)", usually for refusing to "name names", that is, to publicly reveal the names of people who were or had been members of the Communst Party(the government actually HAD the names of every CPUSA member that had ever in its files; the only reason they demanded that people "name names" was to force those called before the committee to publicly denounce and repudiate people simply for having been party members...even if those people had quit the party years before in some cases-to carry out what Victor Navasky of The Nation, in his book "Naming Names" described as "a degredation ceremony&quot .

[bluedigger]

4. He didn't need to apologize, but it's nice to know about.

Hard to believe somebody would destroy so many innocent lives to carry out a personal vendetta.

[DanM]

6. +1 n/t