Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s [Hardcover]

Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 28, 1998

In the fall of 1997 some of the biggest names in show business filled the Motion Picture Academy theater in Beverly Hills for Hollywood Remembers the Blacklist, a lavish production worthy of an Oscar telecast. In song, film, and live performances by stars such as Billy Crystal, Kevin Spacey, and John Lithgow, the audience relived a time some fifty years before, when, as the story has always been told, courageous writers and actors stood firm against a witch-hunt and blacklist that wrecked lives and destroyed careers. Left untold that night, and ignored in books and films for more than half a century, was a story not so politically correct but vastly more complex and dramatic.


In Hollywood Party the complete story finally emerges, backdropped by the great upheavals of our time and with all the elements of a thriller—wrenching plot twists, intrigue, betrayal, violence, corruption, misguided passion, and lost idealism. Using long neglected information from public records, the personal files of key players, and recent revelations from Soviet archives, Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley uncovers the Communist Party's strategic plan for taking control of the movie industry during its golden age, a plan that came perilously close to success. He shows how the Party dominated the politics of the movie industry during the 1930s and 1940s, raising vast sums of money from unwitting liberals and conscripting industry luminaries into supporting Stalinist causes.


In riveting detail, the shameful truth unfolds: Communist writers, actors, and directors, wealthy beyond the dreams of most Americans, posture as proletarian wage slaves as they try to influence the content of movies. From the days of the Popular Front through the Nazi-Soviet Pact and beyond World War II, they remain faithful to a regime whose brutality rivaled that of Hitler's Nazis.


Their plans for control of the industry a shambles by the mid-1950s, the Party nonetheless succeeded in shaping the popular memory of those days. By chronicling what has been left on the cutting-room floor, from "back story" to aftermath, Hollywood Party changes those perceptions forever.



"Mr. Billingsley's book is the best exploration I've seen of the Hollywood blacklist and the Communist Party's role in that conflict. Hollywood Party covers it all with insight, meticulous research, and some wry perceptions."

—Charlton Heston


"For years we've been treated to the left-wing version of the Hollywood blacklist. Now Lloyd Billingsley has provided us with the rest of the story."

—David Horowitz, author of Radical Son


"Now the whole story can be told; the blacklist was never black and white after all, but can only be depicted accurately in shades of gray. From this day forward, no future backstage history of Hollywood can be called complete without taking into account the evidence that Lloyd Billingsley has uncovered."

—Gary McVey, film curator, former director of the Los Angeles International Film Festival


"Hollywood Party is an absolutely captivating achievement."

—Richard Grenier, columnist and author of Capturing the Culture


About the Author

Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley is the editorial director of the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco. He has served as California correspondent for the Spectator (London) and written for the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Daily News, San Francisco Chronicle, and many other publications. He currently divides his time between Sacramento, the Bay Area, and Southern California.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Here's what most people know about the clash between Washington, D.C., and Hollywood involving Communist influence over the film industry: the House Committee on Un-American Activities led an organized witch hunt against writers and actors with left-wing sympathies, creating an environment that led to a blacklist destroying many talented people's careers. But some insist this isn't the whole story. "It's a false parallel. Witch hunt!" wrote Molly Kazan, whose husband Elia testified before the committee, saved his career as a film director, and earned enmity from Hollywood liberals continuing to the present day. "The phrase would indicate that there are no Communists in the government, none in the big trade unions, none in the press, none in the arts.... No one who was in the Party and the left uses that phrase. They know better."

Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley works to fill in some of the historical gaps with Hollywood Party. The information on the role of Communist (and Communist- sympathetic) screenwriters is not particularly revelatory to those familiar with the basic outlines of the story, although Billingsley pushes the Communist angle hard, noting the Party's lockstep support of Stalin and what might charitably be called his "policies," as well as the vicious backlash against any leftist who spoke out against the Communists. His chronicle of Communist efforts to control the studio workers' unions, however, illuminates a less glamorous but perhaps more substantial aspect of the story. Those in search of celebrity dirt will be mildly disappointed; there are several star-studded scenes, but mostly mild anecdotes on the level of Ronald Reagan's gradual realization that, as an SAG activist, he was being played for a dupe by the Reds. Unless, that is, Billingsley is writing about a Communist or a fellow traveler, in which case no personal quirk, from screenwriter Dalton Trumbo's penchant for working in his bathtub to Bertolt Brecht's lack of hygiene to left-wing journalist Ella Winter's mannishly short hair, is overlooked. -- Ron Hogan

From Publishers Weekly

The Soviet Union's demise, the release of spy-era files and the 50-year anniversary of the year in which Joseph McCarthy wielded lists of supposed Communists like so many sickles, has prompted new studies on the House Committee on Un-American Activities and Cold War politics. Examining accounts of movie industry unions, money trails between Russian Communists and American Communists, the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and other groups' response to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 and industry insider allegiances and betrayals, Billingsley throws a wet blanket on the gushing self-congratulation with which the entertainment world has memorialized the Hollywood Ten and the era of blacklisted writers and producers. The House Committee and the blacklist it spawned, he contends, were no simple versions of the Spanish Inquisition. Not everyone accused and even persecuted was innocent of the Communist label; not every Hollywood figure told the truth. Heroes and villains, he points out, were not nearly so clear-cut as movies, like the 1991 DeNiro feature, Guilty by Suspicion, and gala events like Hollywood Remembers the Blacklist, a recreation of the HUAC hearings, would have us believe. On this point, Billingsley convinces, supplying what he calls "backstory" to subvert the assumption that the House Committee was pure sham. Filled with specific details of infiltrators and full-fledged activists, his study discloses veins of Communist influence within the studios of that era. But Billingsley also attempts to prove that a battle for control over movies themselves was nearly lost to Communist "seduction," and with this provocative charge, his argument falls apart. The stories he documents of director Edward Dmytryck, writer Dalton Trumbo and countless lesser players, who he accuses of championing themes that were consistent with the Party line, fail to add up to an underground movement to smuggle Communist ideology into American cinema. Its racy subtitle notwithstanding, this volume ultimately fails to provide a convincing picture of those dramatic times.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 365 pages
• Publisher: Prima Publishing; First edition (October 28, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0761513760
• ISBN-13: 978-0761513766
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #597,563 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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38 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You'll never see this movie made, June 10, 2004

By 

Thomas Stamper (Orlando, FL) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s (Hardcover)

The fact that it is called the "red scare" or "McCarthyism" says a lot about how the post World War II communist problem is looked at from the modern perspective. From the earliest times I can remember gavels coming down by angry congressmen as meek witnesses calmly express their disagreement with a committee that would make them "name names." The witnesses seemed real pathetic and the committee chairmen all come off as power mad scoundrels looking for a headline. The poor Hollywood Ten went to jail or fled to Europe to write movies under fictitious names.

What none of the pictures or narration ever told me was that every member of the Hollywood Ten had been a communist at some point in his life and that half of the Hollywood ten were still communists when they went to jail for contempt of court. Since they weren't making the defense in front of Congress that they had the right to be communists, the event was portrayed as a "witch hunt." These were just misunderstood new deal liberals that wanted more socialism than the House Un-American Activities Committee.

What Mr. Billingsley shows in his excellently researched book is that they weren't just a bunch of artistic idealists, but a group of avowed Marxists being funded by and taking orders from Moscow. It's not an open question. They were given orders to get collectivist messages into Hollywood films. They were told not to portray capitalism or businessmen in a good light. Writer Budd Schulberg was criticized by the party because his book "What Makes Sammy Run?" didn't achieve any of the party's goals. Some of these guys were even writing articles for the communist Daily Worker under their own names.

Modern Hollywood liberals make the communist party members the victims of some horrible black period in American history without any thought to what Stalin was doing to his people in Russia (or would have liked to have done here). Somehow, the liquidation and forced starvation of millions is nothing compared to a few screenwriters that have to write under an alias.

Quick can you name one innocent blacklisted person whose life was ruined? I can only think of the fictional Robert DeNiro character from Guilty by Suspicion. The character had to be fictional in order prove their dramatic point. Had they made the movie about a real person who went through such things he would have had to have been an actual communist. DeNiro plays a clueless liberal that is blacklisted because he was at a few parties. There weren't any of these misunderstandings in real life.

Until I read Mr. Billingsley's book I had no idea that Hollywood was plagued by violent strikes in the 1940s whose purpose was bringing all the Hollywood trade unions under the control of communist, Herbert Sorrell. John Howard Lawson was trying to gain control of the Screenwriters Guild at the same time with the overall plan of controlling the content of Hollywood movies. Isn't it a little scary that this was being funded by a totalitarian government?

None of the facts of this period are ever discussed. It's simply boiled down to communists as idealists and anti-communists as opportunists. In order to perpetuate that myth, Hollywood has since ignored the many opportunities to present the horrors of Communist Russia the way they have presented the horrors of Nazi Germany. The recent film, The Pianist, about Jewish life in World War II Warsaw, Poland doesn't even once mention that the Nazis and Russians divvy up Poland at the beginning of the war. All you hear is that the Germans invade in 1942 and the Russians liberate in 1945. That misses the whole point of what happened to Poland in the 20th Century. But it does perpetuate the myth.

The tactic used in front of the committee hearings was to pretend that it was no one's business what their political affiliation was. That's cute, but would Hollywood have stood up for Nazis or Ku Klux Klan members under the auspices of first amendment freedom? The answer is readily available today. Mel Gibson's movie "The Passion of Christ" was roundly criticized for having the "wrong kind" of independent thought. They tend to like the kind of independent thought that also coincides with their prejudices like "Fahrenheit 911." Now that's free expression worth getting behind.

Mr. Billingsley's book is so on target with what isn't discussed by Hollywood when they cry about the blacklist that it will forever be an indictment of those people who perpetuate the common myth.

38 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hollywood's blacklist and reality, June 15, 1999

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[e-mail] (Oak Lawn, Illinois) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s (Hardcover)

We have been educated in the myth. During that reign of terror known as the McCarthy era, congressional witch-hunts of Hollywood led to blacklisting that shattered the lives of thousands of innocents.

A recent book, "Hollywood Party," is an effective antidote to the prevailing Leftist version of what happened 50 years ago. Author Kenneth Billingsley details the Communist-Hollywood connection.

Lenin himself recognized the power of cinema, saying "Communists must always consider that of all the arts the motion picture is the most important." His successor Stalin viewed film as "not only a vital agitprop device for the education and political indoctrination of the workers, but also a fluent channel through which to reach the minds and shape the desires of people everywhere."

Communist infiltration of the American motion picture industry began in the trade unions. Expanding into the ranks of actors, writers, directors and producers wasn't terribly difficult. One writer for the Communist Daily Worker claimed that the established view among party leaders was that 99 percent of movie people were "political morons." Judging by the antics of today's Hollywood personalities, that figure hasn't improved.

During the 1930s Communist opposition to the Nazi threat attracted substantial support from film stars and other influential folks from Hollywood. They ignored the obvious similarities between these two faces of Leftism - the mass murders and torture, the secret police, the suppression of the most basic rights, the intimidation, the focus on government rather than the individual, the total ignoring of man's spiritual side - and contributed their fame, money and time to Communist front organizations.

Red influence in Hollywood was pervasive. One former Communist screenwriter noted that there were a number of "awful writers" who managed to get jobs only because they belonged to the party.

For many Hollywood luminaries, anyone who opposed Hitler was their friend. Being a Communist was considered the same as being a Republican or Democrat or Prohibitionist or Vegetarian. It was simply a matter of which party you felt best represented your interests.

The problem with that theory is that Communism was never just another political party; it was the only one directed from a foreign country. It was the only one that would have shredded the Constitution and immersed the U.S. into the subhuman slavery of totalitarian terror. It was the only one that considered Stalin, who made Hitler look like a piker when it came to slaughter, a god.

Of course, not everyone joined the party or one of its many fronts purely for philosophical reasons. One actor told a potential recruit that "you will make out more with the dames" if he'd sign up. So he did.

Throughout the 30s many in Hollywood, encouraged by comrades, agitated for America to assume an active role in crushing Nazism. Rallies, ad campaigns and fundraisers were held. America had a moral obligation to get involved.

All of that changed immediately in 1939 when Hitler and Stalin joined in a pact. Now, the party line was that the U.S. had no business in interfering with the internal affairs of other sovereign nations. President Roosevelt was denounced as a warmonger.

Even some of the dimmest bulbs started figuring it out when the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League transitioned into the Hollywood League for Democratic Action overnight. All they were saying, is give peace a chance.

Less than two years later, when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, it was back to Plan A. Lurching back and forth didn't present any difficulty for the true believer. The party always knew what was best and no independent judgement was needed.

Penetration of the film industry was sometimes subtle. One Red screenwriter and instructor counseled his students to get just five minutes worth of party propaganda in each film. Try to get the message across in dialogue from one of the major stars. This would make it less likely to be edited out of the movie.

Sometimes the penetration wasn't subtle. Producer Hal Wallis, learning of an intended anti-Communist film, said not to even bother. The party would toss stink bombs into any theater attempting to show it. Rumors were started about actors who opposed the party. They'd be portrayed as pro-Nazi, knowing that Jewish producers would not be inclined to hire them.

Controversy surrounded the honoring of director Elia Kazan at this year's Academy Awards. Kazan had done the unthinkable. He'd actually named names.

His wife, Molly, has written about what many in Hollywood still characterize as witch-hunts: "Those witches did not exist. Communists do. Here, and everywhere in the world. It's a false parallel. The phrase would indicate that there are no Communists in the government, none in the trade unions, none in the press, none in the arts, none sending money from Hollywood to Twelfth Street. No one who was in the Party and left uses that phrase. They know better."

Readers of "Hollywood Party" will know better, too.

29 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An interesting survey from a conservative perspective., March 4, 2003

By 

Richard W. Haines (Croton-on-Hudson, New York United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s (Hardcover)

Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley has done an excellent job of telling the story of the Hollywood blacklist from a conservative perspective which has been missing from most books on the fifties. He accurately depicted the subversive activities of the communist party and their influence on unions and screenplay content.

I used his text as a reference for my own chapter on the blacklist in my new book, "The Moviegoing Experience 1968-2001".
I researched this topic extensively and discovered it's even more complicated than Billingsley suggests.

It probably was fairly safe to hire "Reds" in the thirties since the nature of the studio system kept them in line. There's no question some were talented writers, directors and actors.
The staunch Catholocism of Joseph Breen who ran the Production Code combined with the conservative worldviews of most of the moguls like Meyer, Disney, Warner and Zukor along with conservative exhibitors kept movies within a mainstream context.
To get a movie written, produced, released and exhibited meant you had to go through channels which meant that most Marxist references would've been removed along the way so as not to alienate viewers. There's no question that writers like Dalton Trumbo would've liked to turn cinema into a propoganda medium but those in power made that difficult.

It was the changes in the post-war era that made these same individuals a threat during a major industry upheaval.
The 1948 consent decree which forced the majors to sell off their theater chains combined with an increase in independent production and television competition caused the entire studio
system to unravel. It was at this point that the Hollywood communists made their move and tried to dominate the industry and/or stir up labor problems with a never ending series of strikes often accompanied by violence and indimidation. The same screenwriters or actors who were kept in line a few years earlier began to undermine the production and distribution system. Billingsley didn't really examine these events in relation to the CPUSA as fully as he should have in my opinion.

I have a copy of "Red Channels" and it would've been useful if the author actually made a list of the 324 people who were blacklisted (out of an industry total of 17,500 personnel) and indicated why they were fired. How many were Party members, how many were part of Communist fronts and how many were innocent dupes. There was a difference between these groups and the level of danger they posed to their employers. Whereas all Stalinists were bad people, not all Leftists were Stalinists nor were they necessarily bad people although their ideology turned out to be wrong.

In any event, I think the author has added a new perspective on the subject which will assist others in further analysis of the period.

Richard W. Haines
Author "Technicolor Movies" and "The Moviegoing Experience 1968-2001"