Arthur Meiselman

The American film industry, especially Hollywood, is a montage of "Arts&Poltics" and "Politics&Arts". It began with the flood of immigration toward the end of the 19th century.

In the early 20th century, some American Jewish merchants, who had learned merchandising in the merchandising mecca of New York City, recognized that the new entertainment of moving pictures had a promising future. They merchandised the hell out of it. They became distribution kings. As with all good business plans, they looked to control their product. So they began manufacturing it. And as with all good production plans, they looked for better and cheaper. At that time, there didn’t seem to be anywhere better and cheaper than the sunshine-drenched Los Angeles basin (still true today, depending on how you define better and cheaper). That’s where they went, along with a number of other entrepreneurs who were not Jewish. Together they created Hollywood; the rest is hyperbolated history.

It’s important to note that most of Hollywood's power (the money), even during the so-called "Golden studio" era was and still is controlled by banks and financial groups that were and are… not controlled by Jews–that were and are… controlled, in large part, by White Anglo-Saxon Christians. It’s also important to note that most powerhouse media organizations, print, radio, television are controlled by the same indigenous pale-faced cultural group.

And it’s important to note that during the notorious Blacklist period of the 1950’s, a disproportionate majority of those who were condemned and a disproprtionate majority of those who did the condemning by naming names… were Jewish, heralded in a disproportionately Christian Congress, police establishment and media. This during the reign of the pale-faced  president, Dwight Eisenhower, who was proportionately and appropriately in office. 

Amidst all the myth-making, haunting hoopla of “McCarthyism” and the terror that it invoked, there was an insidious piston that drove its engine: the House Un-American Activities Committee. This limb of the American Congress found its true calling just as the Cold War froze America’s paranoia in place. It wasn’t an aberration. American history begins with the hunting of witches and carries this cultural purgative through the 20th century right through today. In 1919, the then Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, went out across the land gathering up communists: over 3000 were arrested. In 1938, HUAC was born, headed by a belching Texas Congressman, Martin Dies, whe was savvy enough to realize where to find his 15-minutes of fame: he attacked Hollywood, of course. But first, he launched a hunt to sterilize the only comprehensive move toward a publicly supported, nationwide theatre: The Federal Theatre Project. Dies effectively dismantled it. 

World War II and the off-again, on-again alliances with the Soviet Union quieted the urge to hunt. After the war, HUAC emerged with a new mandate and a new chairman, Parnell Thomas (also on that committee – Richard Nixon). Standing behind them, in the shadows, America’s unrestrained hunt-master, J. Edgar Hoover. Their agenda: homosexual, liberal, Jewish Hollywood. (What stunning irony that so many of our loudest, most strident cross-burners are secret-sharers in the “sin”, a much studied pathology.... remember Jimmy Swaggert amd his fellow-travelers?) So it was uncovered, some years later, that both Thomas and Hoover were closeted cross-dressers. Thomas was eventually booted off the committee, out of Congress, and into prison for screwing with the committee’s expense budget. And Nixon – well, we know where he went.

Parnell Thomas and friend

The headline highlight of HUAC’s Hollywood harangue was the “Hollywood 10”, a group of some of the best writers and directors who refused to genuflect to the committee. This was borderline suicide because anyone who refused to cooperate with the committee was cited for contempt and jailed. Anyone who did cooperate had to “name names” – slander themselves and others. And anyone who invoked their Constitutional right not to self-incriminate, as guaranteed by the 5th Amendment, was branded and Blacklisted – end of career, end of livelihood, end of membership and its privileges of money, glamour and special status in the Hollywood Club (a culture unlike any on the planet). Almost everyone in a position of power, for a diversity of reasons, accepted and employed the Blacklist. Lester Cole, a prolific screenwriter of the time  told the story of his summons into the office of MGM’s Louis B. Mayer who insisted – “why don’t you give up this communist crap and I’ll let you direct your own picture. All you writers want to be directors. Do it!” Cole didn’t and he lost almost everything.

It was all a searing horror. It was a no-win situation that destroyed many careers and killed many of the people who were tainted.

The “10’s” tactic was not to refuse to cooperate, not to invoke the 5th, rather to stand behind their right to free speech, the 1st amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Their novel stance was that this right also guaranteed their right to be silent. They would appear but they would not answer. Thomas and HUAC gaveled their position into dust and down the line, the U.S. Supreme Court also dismissed it. 25 years later, the Supreme Court reversed its decision on silence and free speech in a case that involved a religious group. The Ten were cited for contempt and sent to prison for a year at Danbury, Connecticut.

Now who do you think they ran into in their early days at Danbury, why Mr. J. Parnell Thomas, now inmate, the man who sent them there.

The immediate conundrum that overwhelmed members of the Hollywood "club" was a terrible nightmare. In 1952, Elia Kazan received his subpoena to appear before HUAC. He faced the same double-edged sword. His career was riding high and as he said many years later, those people were wrong and he wasn’t going to sacrifice everything he had achieved for them. He testified in an executive session (behind closed doors) and “named names”, especially his comrades in the famous New York Group Theatre of the 1930's. Just as the news of his testimony broke the next day, so did an ad by Kazan in the New York Times, which explained, apologized and self-justified his position.

Kazan was a powerful figure at that time both on Broadway and in Hollywood. Some believe that Kazan was “too important” to be trampled by the committee had he appeared as a hostile witness. They believe that he might even have been able to break the Blacklist by refusing to cooperate. 

There was an issue at hand, however, that was larger than the questions of patriotism and the street-wise morality of to-be-or-not-to-be a stool pigeon. It was what the House Un-American Activities was, what it represented, what its corrosive process did to the individual rights and freedoms of American society.

It was this: Cooperation, collaboration with the committee made the process legitimate, legitimized the “witch hunt.”

Kazan was a good theatre director, not a great director, but a major influence during the time that “method acting” was mopping the stages of New York. He was also a good film director, not a great one, and certainly not a 'filmmaker'. But he won his Oscars and he wielded influence in that medium as well. When Film broke loose in technology and form, audiences changed with it, Kazan found himself unwilling or unable to grow with the change. So he turned to writing. He was a mediocre writer, but he made a lot of money from it with his name and his insider reputation.

As with all good directors, Kazan began his career as an actor. He was at the core of the Group Theatre in the 1930’s  and even appeared in a film or two. He founded The Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg and broke away from it because he found Strasberg to be a ‘menace’, but mainly to follow his own ambitions. It’s the mirror image of Kazan, as mirrors will have it where the face is flipped and the hands look strange, it’s that image that haunted the man. And it appeared during the Hollywood witch-hunt of the early 1950’s.

An immigrant Greek kid, Kazan had scrapped his way into the New York theatre and beyond. In this nightmare, he refused to take the risk. It was a decision that haunted him until he died. Over the years, he maintained a striking silence, refusing to discuss what he did or why in any detail. As Victor Navasky noted, in his landmark book, Naming Names (Viking), “His silence...has resonance.”

When Hollywood decided to give Kazan an honorary Academy Award (1999) in recognition of his lifetime achievement, there was another uproar and protests and the surfacing of 47 years of bad feelings. Kazan was still pushing the stone.

Film, cinema, the art form of the 20th century, an unyielding often unfortunate source of information and history for too vast a majority of the planet's population. It reigns defacto in these early years of the 21st. Film/cinema with its nom de plume, Hollywood, bathes with and permeates politics far beyond its entertainment purpose but rarely beyond one of its primary motives: the making of money. Another primary motive... enter Harvey Weinstein and the upright image (fist? whatever!) of macho power.

 Over the past 66 years, what's changed? How many times are we going to quote Santayana?