Hide in Plain Sight: The Hollywood Blacklistees in Film and Television, 1950-2002 [Hardcover]

Paul Buhle (Author), David Wagner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 23, 2003

Hidden in Plain Sight completes Buhle and Wagner's trilogy on the Hollywood blacklist. When the blacklistees were hounded out of Hollywood, some left for television where many worked on children's shows like "Rocky and Bullwinkle." A number wrote adult sitcoms such as The Donna Reed Show, and M*A*S*H while some of them ultimately returned to Hollywood and made great films such as Norma Rae, and Midnight Cowboy. This is a thoughtful look at the aftermath of the horror that was the McCarthy period from two expert historians of the blacklist period.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This encyclopedic, riveting study of the Hollywood blacklist's impact follows the careers of targeted individuals to explore the blacklist's effects on the arts in America and Europe in the last half-century. As Buhle and Wagner (coauthors of Radical Hollywood) demonstrate, expulsion from the mainstream took these artists and their crafts in new directions. Directors like Joseph Losey and screenwriters like Norma and Ben Barzman fled to Europe to work, where aesthetics like neorealism and the subversion of traditional genres (e.g., the western into the "spaghetti western") opened new modes of expression. Many blacklisted artists who didn't emigrate started working in New York's television industry, which was eager for quick, low-priced talent. Thus, as Hollywood restricted itself to "safe" topics, TV started exploring themes of "the outsider" (Maverick, The Fugitive), multiculturalism (The Dick Van Dyke Show) and social justice (The Defenders). By the late 1970s, "the subtle articulation of politics as ethical sentiment" was now "the very oxygen of liberal television." Besides sitcoms and kids' shows, leftists went into B movies, particularly science fiction and horror genres, where themes of human mutation, nuclear holocaust and alien invasion served as (sometimes clunky) vehicles for political messages. The authors conclude with in-depth looks at several blacklistees, including Carl Foreman, Jules Dassin, Dalton Trumbo and Lillian Hellman. Still, is it all just history, as mainstream Hollywood recites its mea culpas, and the key players all die off? No, Buhle and Wagner conclude; Hollywood's potential as a "democratic art form returning the embrace of its vast audience" remains.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Buhle and Wagner complete a three-volume investigation (Tender Comrades [1998] and Radical Hollywood [BKL My 15 02]) into the genesis, development, and consequences of the Hollywood blacklist with an exploration of the ramifications of the talent vacuum that arose in the wake of its exiled writers, actors, and directors, and trace the influence their communist philosophies would have on future entertainment programming. Coincidental with the rise of the golden age of television, many blacklistees established illustrious careers within the new medium, creating classic series such as The Twilight Zone, whose themes and content often satirized the very issues that once stoked the fires of McCarthyism. As the conservatism of the 1950s gave way to 1960s liberalism, these former industry pariahs found extensive opportunities to develop films and television programs that reflected socially relevant issues, often confronting network and advertiser censorship in the same way they battled HUAC witch hunters. Through exhaustive research and synthesis, the authors shed important new light on this infamous period in our country's cultural heritage. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan; 1 edition (August 23, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1403961441
• ISBN-13: 978-1403961440
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,082,918 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Tracking Down the Aftermath, August 24, 2008

By 

Douglas Doepke (Claremont CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hide in Plain Sight: The Hollywood Blacklistees in Film and Television, 1950-2002 (Paperback)

No need to repeat details from earlier reviews. The Buhle/Wagner work remains invaluable for filling out the historical record of the notorious Hollywood blacklist. The inquisition itself (1947-circa 1952) has been recounted in a number of worthy volumes; however, this is the only one I know that tracks down careers during the decades that followed.

One salient point: the book is not research friendly. The material, though fascinating, is not well organized. The text does read like a collection of essays, as one reviewer points out. Thus there's no particular development of themes or chronology. An individual listee may appear in one context and then in another 50 pages later with no connecting thread. The index is helpful, but cannot connect the threads. (Joseph Losey remains a notable exception.) Also, no bibliography or list of interviews is furnished. Thus researchers must piece together from the footnotes. None of this is meant to detract from the excellent research behind the book, nor from the contribution towards understanding how money and politics play out in the entertainment industry. What is clear from the book is that a lot of producers got a lot of high-priced talent for a lot less money as a result of the purges.

A personal note. The other night, I watched a 1957 teen movie, The Careless Years, which posed the typical quandary of 50's lovelorn youth-- Are we too young to marry. Nothing here beyond the banal except for one aspect. The boy's dad works in a machine shop, where he takes the son who wants to work there so he can marry the girl and forego college. Nothing unusual, except Dad (John Larch) goes into some detail about the lamentable work conditions that a machinist must put up with. That detail seemed a little out of sync with the prevailing social theme, but was informative, nonetheless. Come to peel back the writer's credit and, lo and behold-- thank you John Howard Lawson for those few moments of blue-collar reality in an otherwise whitebread 60 minutes. Yes indeed, the big band may have scattered, but the beat goes on, even where least expected.

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tracking Down the Artistic Contributions of the Blacklisted!, March 14, 2004

By 

Donald Mitchell "Jesus Loves You!" (Thanks for Providing My Reviews over 109,000 Helpful Votes Globally) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hide in Plain Sight: The Hollywood Blacklistees in Film and Television, 1950-2002 (Hardcover)

While many books, essays, television shows and movies have made us all more sensitive to the dangers of McCarthyism, most of us don't quite know what happened to those who were blacklisted after the HUAC meetings in the early 50s. Hide in Plain Sight filled that void for me, and expanded my understanding of both the event's consequences for society and of the artists involved.

The book uses a variety of methods for capturing the subsequent history of those who were blacklisted. Some chapters focus on particular forms of artistic expression, while other sections look at individual producers, directors, writers and actors. As a result, there's some redundancy . . . so the book often feels like a series of essays rather than one seamless nonfiction book. That quality, however, makes the book easier to use for those who just want to read about a single person or genre.

I was very surprised to learn that almost every adult television show that I liked during the 1950s and 1960s involved blacklisted writers. Perhaps it's just because my tastes run to history, underdogs, unusual approaches and conflict, but what was interesting about television then (and often isn't now) came from those with a strong ideological bent toward Marxist or antifascist thought. This book forms an important document in helping all Americans to understand how dialogue in our society needs to be maintained through providing free access to all media. Much great work would have been lost if these blacklisted writers, directors and performers had lost their artistic lives.

I found one aspect of the book to be tedious though. Every person was characterized by her or his political beliefs. In most cases, this was done with a simple label (antifascist, Marxist, liberal, etc.). That way of characterizing people seemed to me to make the book overly political. As a result, the book constantly displays a battle between left and right . . . and almost leaves the audience out in the process.

I did not know many of the films that were described, especially those that were done in Europe. I appreciated the care with which the films were described. In several cases, I learned important back stories about the meaning of metaphors that added to my understanding of the films.

A real strength of the book is showing how the careers of individual blacklisted people were affected. The analyses of how their subsequent works developed (especially those of Joseph Losey) were quite extensive and intriguing to think about.

The final paragraph is unusually eloquent:

"Hollywood was always about money. It still is. But at its best it was and eventually might once again be something a great deal more--a glimmering of a democratic art form returning the embrace of its vast audience with equality sncerity and the sense of a common fate."

As I finished the book, I was reminded of John Donne's famous poem. "Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee." As badly as individual lives were harmed by the blacklisting, our democracy and culture were harmed even more. In realizing the full depths of that loss, we are all the losers.

7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gerald McBoing Boing and the radical movement!, October 23, 2003

By 

Louis Proyect (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hide in Plain Sight: The Hollywood Blacklistees in Film and Television, 1950-2002 (Hardcover)

"Hide in Plain Sight" is the latest book co-authored by Paul Buhle on the Hollywood blacklist and its impact. As is the case with the previous books, this is as much a celebration of what radicals in the entertainment accomplished as it is about the terrible loss when they were purged.

For people who came of age in the 1950s, the book is an exceptional treat. Who knew that many of our favorite television shows drew upon the talents of writers, directors and actors hounded out of the Hollywood film industry? Covering the period from 1950 to 2002, it proves dramatically that the radical politics of the 1930s never really disappeared but found ways to express itself through popular culture. The television shows and Hollywood movies of this period were just as important a link to the New Left as the folk music revival and leftwing beat poetry.

As is the case with every book in this series, the index can provide a kind of shortcut into the treats within its pages. For example, a reference to "You Are There" reveals that some of the 1953-1955 teleplays were written by Walter Bernstein, Arnold Manoff and Abraham Polonsky--3 blacklistees. Each show was pegged to a real historical event. The central drama of such shows involved heroic efforts by figures such as John Peter Zenger to stand up for democratic principles against a repressive government. Such messages were not lost on baby boomers, including myself.

While it is not too difficult in retrospect to detect the footprints of radicals in such a show, there were others that were more cleverly subversive at camouflaging their true intent. For example, the children's cartoon show "Gerald McBoing Boing" was a product of United Productions of America, which was launched by John Hubley, a New Deal era radical. Fellow UPA'er Dave Hilberman had been fingered by Walt Disney for the sin of having "spent considerable time at the Moscow Art Theater".

Not that Gerald McBoing Boing was about socialist tractors and the struggle against fascism. Instead it is about a child who speaks entirely in sound effects. The real inspiration for this cartoon was not Marxism, but the playful inventive spirit of the Hollywood left going back to Charlie Chaplin and a host of others open to surrealism.

Very highly recommended.