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Ronald Radosh, "Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colony's Long Romance with the Left"

Until now, Hollywood's political history has been dominated by a steady stream of films and memoirs decrying the "nightmare" of the Red Scare and how it victimized political innocents. But in RED STAR OVER HOLLYWOOD, Ronald and Allis Radosh tell for the first time the "backstory" behind this myth.

The authors show how the Soviet Comintern decided to make the film capitol a prime target in the late 1920s. They follow the lives of Budd Schulberg, Ring Lardner Jr., Maurice Rapf and other young radicals who went to the USSR in the early 1930s, underwent a political conversion experience there, and came back to Hollywood as apostles preaching a Soviet gospel. They take us inside the cells and discussion groups they and other Party members formed, the guilds and unions they tried to take over, and the studios they tried to influence.

The Radoshes not only prove that the members of the Hollywood Party were loyal first and foremost to Joseph Stalin, but show that in fact many of the screenwriters who later became part of the Hollywood Ten succeeded in using films as a propaganda medium in behalf of Soviet cause. One of their most significant successes was the wartime blockbuster Mission To Moscow, whose inside story the authors document in fascinating detail. The Radoshes' are at their best when writing about the blacklist era. They take us inside the Hollywood Communists' strategy sessions as they prepared to testify in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and show that while others were lionizing them as blameless victims of American nativism and paranoia, the Hollywood Reds themselves were beset by doubts and disagreements about their disloyalty to America and their treatment by the Communist Party. Creating memorable portraits of Dalton Trumbo, Elia Kazan and John Garfield, the authors also trace the afterlives of those touched by HUAC and the blacklist and show how they continued their argument with America and each other over the next half century. RED STAR OVER HOLLYWOOD is an epic work about one of the most discussed and least understood episodes in our political life. Getting behind the denial and apologetics, the Radoshes tell a story whose long half-life continues. The men and women who agitated for communism a half-century ago created a living legacy used by Jane Fonda and others who revived the Hollywood Left in the 1960s, and by figures such as Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins and Sean Penn in the equally turbulent filmland politics of today.

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