With an introduction by Greg Palast, author of bestseller The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Progressive Hollywood features Rampell?s interviews and interactions with Hollywood luminaries such as producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Robert Greenwald; actors Jack Nicholson, Rob Reiner, Mike Farrell, Ed Asner, Martin Sheen, David Clennon, Gore Vidal and Dennis Hopper; directors Michael Moore, Spike Lee, Oliver Stone and Lionel Chetwynd; blacklisted screenwriters Bernie Gordon (who initiated the 1999 protests against Elia Kazan?s lifetime achievement Oscar), Bobby Lees (who injected dialectical materialism into Abbott and Costello comedies) and Norma Barzman (author of 2003's The Red and the Blacklist).
The must-read summary of Ed Rampell's book: “Progressive Hollywood: A People’s Film History of the United States”. This complete summary of "Progressive Hollywood" by Ed Rampell presents his assessment of the relationship between politics and Hollywood, the major movements in the film industry and the rise of the progressive left in entertainment and how it is countering the industry's right wing. He also describes the impacts of Hollywood on society, the limits imposed by politics and the consequences of their infringement. Added-value of this summary: • Save time • Understand how Hollywood and politics often overlap • Expand your knowledge of American politics and culture To learn more, read "Progressive Hollywood" and discover how the rise of the progressive left wing is shaking up the entertainment industry.
Rob Wagner's Script, the film literary magazine published between 1929 and 1949, was Hollywood's only left-leaning, rabble-rousing movie publication that provided its readers with a regular dose of progressive politics, open love letters to the Soviet Union and a forum for such leftists as Dalton Trumbo and Charlie Chaplin. Rob Wagner founded the magazine on socialist principles. Its remarkable success in a company town ruled by conservative studio moguls is testament to Wagner's humorous but sophisticated approach to Depression-era radical politics. Author Rob Leicester Wagner, the great-grandson of Wagner, traces the birth of Script 'to the Red Scare of 1918-1919. The US government spied on Wagner and used his friends to inform on him for his antiwar activities and alleged German sympathies. The government ultimately attempted, but failed, to indict him on sedition charges. In Hollywood Bohemia: The Roots of Progressive Politics in Rob Wagner's Script, the author uses declassified War Department and FBI files and Rob Wagner's own personal diaries to deliver a portrait of a man driven to extol the virtues of socialism in an industry that best illustrates the unstoppable engine of capitalism. Illus., Notes, Index.
In the 1930s as the capitalist system faltered, many in the United States turned to the political Left. Hollywood, so deeply embedded in capitalism, was not immune to this shift. Left of Hollywood offers the first book-length study of Depression-era Left film theory and criticism in the United States. Robé studies the development of this theory and criticism over the course of the 1930s, as artists and intellectuals formed alliances in order to establish an engaged political film movement that aspired toward a popular cinema of social change. Combining extensive archival research with careful close analysis of films, Robé explores the origins of this radical social formation of U.S. Left film culture. Grounding his arguments in the surrounding contexts and aesthetics of a few films in particular—Sergei Eisenstein's Que Viva Mexico!, Fritz Lang's Fury, William Dieterle's Juarez, and Jean Renoir's La Marseillaise—Robé focuses on how film theorists and critics sought to foster audiences who might push both film culture and larger social practices in more progressive directions. Turning at one point to anti-lynching films, Robé discusses how these movies united black and white film critics, forging an alliance of writers who championed not only critical spectatorship but also the public support of racial equality. Yet, despite a stated interest in forging more egalitarian social relations, gender bias was endemic in Left criticism of the era, and female-centered films were regularly discounted. Thus Robé provides an in-depth examination of this overlooked shortcoming of U.S. Left film criticism and theory.
The concept of “un-Americanism,” so vital to the HUAC crusade of the 1940s and 1950s, was resoundingly revived in the emotional rhetoric that followed the September 11th terrorist attacks. Today’s political and cultural climate makes it more crucial than ever to come to terms with the consequences of this earlier period of repression and with the contested claims of Americanism that it generated. “Un-American” Hollywood reopens the intense critical debate on the blacklist era and on the aesthetic and political work of the Hollywood Left. In a series of fresh case studies focusing on contexts of production and reception, the contributors offer exciting and original perspectives on the role of progressive politics within a capitalist media industry. Original essays scrutinize the work of individual practitioners, such as Robert Rossen, Joseph Losey, Jules Dassin, and Edward Dmytryk, and examine key films, including The Robe, Christ in Concrete, The House I Live In, The Lawless, The Naked City, The Prowler, Body and Soul, and FTA.
Investigates how progressivism structured many aspects of understudied era of cinema. Caught between the older model of short film and the emerging classic era, the transitional period of American cinema (1907-1917) has typically posed a problem for studies of early American film. Yet in Cinema and Community: Progressivism, Exhibition, and Film Culture in Chicago, 1907-1917, author Moya Luckett uses the era's dominant political ideology as a lens to better understand its cinematic practice. Luckett argues that movies were a typically Progressive institution, reflecting the period's investment in leisure, its more public lifestyle, and its fascination with celebrity. She uses Chicago, often considered the nation's most Progressive city and home to the nation's largest film audience by 1907, to explore how Progressivism shaped and influenced the address, reception, exhibition, representational strategies, regulation, and cultural status of early cinema. After a survey of Progressivism's general influences on popular culture and the film industry in particular, she examines the era's spectatorship theories in chapter 1 and then the formal characteristics of the early feature film-including the use of prologues, multiple diegesis, and oversight-in chapter 2. In chapter 3, Luckett explores the period's cinema in the light of its celebrity culture, while she examines exhibition in chapter 4. She also looks at the formation of Chicago's censorship board in November 1907 in the context of efforts by city government, social reformers, and the local press to establish community standards for cinema in chapter 5. She completes the volume by exploring race and cinema in chapter 6 and national identity and community, this time in relation to World War I, in chapter 7. As well as offering a history of an underexplored area of film history, Luckett provides a conceptual framework to help navigate some of the period's key issues. Film scholars interested in the early years of American cinema will appreciate this insightful study.
Explaining the major forces at play behind the making of Hollywood films, this text assesses how changing values have influenced censorship in Hollywood. The text also analyses the major cultural, social, legal and religious changes and their effect on Hollywood.
This work concentrates on tracing the evolution of the so-called "red menace" phenomenon as a means of demonstrating the correlation between growing American paranoia and the success of the anticommunist campaign (1935-1955). The House Committee on Un-American Activities 1947 investigation of Hollywood, the nation's most visible industry, served a critical role in conjuring up anti-red hysteria and fanning the flames of virulent anticommunism. Using conveniently unjust tactics, the Committee "painted" targeted Hollywood personalities red and established the infamous blacklist - certified proof in the minds of many that "subversives" were indeed conspiring from within. A failed attempt on behalf of the "Hollywood Ten" to demonstrate the Committee’s undemocratic nature allowed HUAC to forge ahead with its investigation and establish the anticommunist foundation upon which Joseph McCarthy would construct his campaign. Hollywood and Anticommunism stands as an important contribution to McCarthy-era literature and should appeal to all interested in the early Cold War and the impact that unwarranted hysteria has had and continues to have on the growth and development of the nation.
