What is hollywood ten

The Hollywood blacklist came to an end in the s. Although the U. The House Un-American Activities Committee was charged with investigating allegations of communist influence and subversion in the U. Committee members quickly settled their gaze on the Hollywood film industry, which was seen as a hotbed of communist activity.

This reputation originated in the s, when the economic difficulties of the Great Depression increased the appeal of leftist organizations for many struggling actors and studio workers. With the dawning of the Cold War, anti-communist legislators grew concerned that the movie industry could serve as a source of subversive propaganda. Although popular Hollywood films of the s and s offered little evidence of an overriding Socialist agenda, the investigation proceeded.

In October , more than 40 people with connections to the movie industry received subpoenas to appear before HUAC on suspicion of holding communist loyalties or being involved in subversive activities. During the investigative hearings, members of HUAC grilled the witnesses about their past and present associations with the Communist Party. Aware that their answers could ruin their reputations and careers, most individuals either sought leniency by cooperating with investigators or cited their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

These men, who became known as the Hollywood Ten, not only refused to cooperate with the investigation but denounced the HUAC anti-communist hearings as an outrageous violation of their civil rights, as the First Amendment to the U.

Constitution gave them the right to belong to any political organization they chose. In November , they were cited for contempt of Congress. After unsuccessfully appealing the verdicts, they began serving their terms in While in prison, one member of the group, Edward Dmytryk, decided to cooperate with the government. In , he testified at a HUAC hearing and provided the names of more than 20 industry colleagues he claimed were communists.

Although Biberman never gained great success in Hollywood, his involvement in politics, especially his early stand against fascism, earned him the wrath of the House Un-American Activities Committee HUAC. While his wife, the Oscar-winning actress Gale Sondergaard, was not part of the original Hollywood Ten, she was also brought before HUAC, refused to testify, and later blacklisted. Produced and written by other blacklisted artists, Salt of the Earth gained the full antipathy of the US Government.

In Europe, the film received distribution and critical attention, but in America, it got a single New York City screening before being banned from exhibition for 11 years. In , Biberman died from bone cancer in New York City. Twelve years later, in , Salt of the Earth was chosen for preservation in the United States National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant. Originally working as a stage actor, Cole eventually moved to Hollywood picking up parts in several silent films, like Love at First Glance and Painted Faces.

In , he was instrumental in reviving the Screen Writers Guild, the union that would eventually become the Writers Guild of America. The next year, Cole confirmed the title when he officially joined the Communist Party.

While he mostly hammered out scripts for crime genres and melodramas, he was quick to add a socially conscious message when possible. This Committee is waging a cold war on democracy. In , under the name J. But after being released from prison, Cole found little screenwriting work. His work on Viva Zapata! Instead he turned to doing any job he could find, be it working as a cook, waiter or day laborer.

For a short period, he moved to London to pursue a playwriting career, which unfortunately went nowhere.

In , he wrote the lion adventure Born Free under the name Gerald L. Copley, a film that brought him many requests to write more animal films, a genre for which he had little interest. Even after the blacklist ended, Cole found people wary of offering him more socially conscious work. We're judged by a different standard. He died in of a heart attack. While Ring Lardner, Jr.

Raised in a family of writers—his father was the humorist and journalist Ring Lardner and his uncle John was a well known sports writer—Ring Lardner, Jr.

Selznick, who gave him his first writing break when he asked him to rewrite dialogue for the A Star Is Born. As a writer, his razor-sharp wit quickly brought him success. In , he received an Oscar for Best Screenplay along with Michael Kanin for the brilliant repartee of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Woman of the Year , the first of several comedies that would pit the two icons against each other.

Staying in Hollywood, Lardner, ever optimistic, believed the blacklist would blow over. In the meantime, he worked unaccredited on a number of films and later TV shows. But as the years dragged on, things got tougher. In , his blacklist officially ended when producer Martin Ransohoff gave him a screen credit for his work on The Cincinnati Kid.

He died in at the age of At age 12, during a tour of Europe, Levy took extensive notes of the foreign productions he attended. Its success pushed him to become a playwright. In , when MGM offered him a writing contract, his playwriting career was still going strong. For the next decade, Lawson would wear a variety of professional hats. In , Lawson brought his politics to the screen with Blockade , a hard-hitting drama in which Henry Fonda stars as a farmer fighting in the Spanish Civil War.

The movie earned him his sole Oscar nomination for Best Story. He also demonstrated a talent for Hollywood action films, penning both the thriller Algiers and the wartime adventure Sahara with Humphrey Bogart.

I don't 'sneak ideas' into pictures. I never make a contract to write a picture unless I am convinced that it serves democracy and … the American people. After prison, Lawson moved to Mexico. Even though it was a British production, Lawson still could not attach his name to it. Both of these men refused to co-operate with the HCUA.

Both were held in contempt of the HCUA and went to jail. When Dmytryk emerged from his prison term he did so with a new set of principles. He suddenly saw the heavenly light, testified as a friend of the HCUA, praised its purposes and practices and denounced all who opposed it. Dmytryk immediately found work as a director, and has worked all down the years since.

Adrian Scott, who came out of prison with his principles intact, could not produce a film for a studio again until He was blacklisted for 21 years.

To assert that he and Dmytryk were equally victims is beyond my comprehension. These people those he named , if they had it in them, could have written books and plays. There was not a blacklist in publishing. There was not a blacklist in the theatre. They could have written about the forces that drove them into the Communist Party. They were practically nothing written. Nor have I seen these people interested in social problems in the decades since.

They're interested in their own problems and in the protection of the Party. In most cases the informers picked a route that seemed to them an easy solution to a difficult problem; in other words, they could handle their own friends, whom they testified against, better than they could handle the U.

Schulberg just has to explain one thing: Why did he become an informer when they forced him to? And why didn't he become an informer before they forced him to? The reason was that before, he thought it wasn't a good thing to do. The Nazis pointed a gun up against his head and said, "Look, give us some names," and he says, "Yeah, I hate those guys anyway.

I wish they had acted better, but they're not all Adolf Hitler's. That's all. I myself don't want to have anything to do with them. After all, I was on the ship and they got off and let us go down. In fact, the only way they could get off was by putting us down. That's the peculiar feeling: it wasn't only that they took the lifeboats from the Titanic , you know; they pulled the plugs.

I don't want to dwell on the past, but for a few moments to speak of the future. And I address my remarks particularly to you younger men and women who had perhaps not established yourself in this industry at the time of the great witch hunt. I feel that unless you remember this dark epoch and understand it, you may be doomed to replay it.

Not with the same cast of characters, of course, or on the same issues. But I see a day perhaps coming in your lifetime, if not in mine, when a new crisis of belief will grip this republic; when diversity of opinion will be labeled disloyalty; and when extraordinary pressures will be put on writers in the mass media to conform to administration policy on the key issues of the time, whatever they may be.

If this gloomy scenario should come to pass, I trust that you younger men and women will shelter the mavericks and dissenters in your ranks, and protect their right to work. The Guild will have the use and need of rebels if it is to survive as a union of free writers. This nation will have need of them if it is to survive as an open society. From to , your ability to work in Hollywood's motion picture industry strictly depended on whether or not your name appeared on a list of suspected Communist activists or sympathizers.

The blacklist. Based on the growing threat of Communism at that time; the era was a full-scale assault on individuals and groups who had promoted political change and social reform in America since the start of the Great Depression in This attack on personal freedom was led by the Congress of the United States.

It was strongly supported by an alarmingly diverse band of helpers ranging from our government's executive branch to the AFL-CIO to church groups, the Veterans of Foreign Wars and employers in America's media, information, and educational industries. Dozens of citizens were jailed, hundreds moved to other countries, and thousands lost their jobs.

Several of the accused died from the stress and strain of having their personal beliefs and opinions ominously questioned by their own government and the labor unions to which they belonged.

Those who were not personally or professionally persecuted became self-censoring and timid in order to keep their paychecks and avoid being publicly condemned and denounced. As a result, a pall of mediocrity settled over cultural and artistic production in America. The quality of American movies produced during the blacklist era did not suffer simply because several hundred screen artists were denied work in their chosen professions for well over a decade.

The blacklisted were not necessarily the leading or most proficient practitioners of their individual crafts. There were hundreds of other artists just as capable of doing their work, and, as always, many younger artists eager to take work wherever it could be found.

Nor did the content of domestic films decline because of the absence of the blacklisted. The quality of movies suffered because studios and producers were simply afraid to make movies that appeared in any way critical of the United States, and artists, mainly writers, began censoring themselves.

To regain the favor of HUAC and Congress, the studios started turning out dozens of manipulative anti-Communist movies and films celebrating American military power like Bombers B His prospects began to improve when he arrived at RKO in His first success came the next year with Hitler's Children , one of the earliest Hollywood films to tackle conditions in Nazi Germany.

The plot concerned a German girl educated in America who returns to visit her native country and is caught up in the new ideology; it made a star of Bonita Granville and became a "sleeper" a small picture that performs much better than expected. Dmytryk's first 'A' picture was Tender Comrade , behind which many later detected Communist propaganda.

About war widows who set up a commune along socialist lines, it was written by Dalton Trumbo another member of the Hollywood In fact, the film was in line with contemporary thinking on Soviet Russia, which was then America's wartime ally. More sinister was Cornered , made the next year, an apparently innocuous picture about a Canadian pilot who travels to Argentina in search of the Nazi who killed his wife during the war.

It was written by the "radical" John Wexley and, according to Dmytryk, the original script was full of anti-Fascist speeches that "went to extremes" in following the Communist Party line. Dmytryk found them undramatic and advised the producer, Adrian Scott, to bring in a second writer, whereupon Wexley requested a meeting at Dmytryk's house.