Finally, no single study has been devoted exclusively to HUAC’s Hollywood year.” Though the Hollywood Ten will always get top billing, thirty-one other witnesses - and myriad players in the gallery and commentators on the sidelines – have tales worth telling. He wanted to be even-handed and to avoid the pitfalls of listing either to the Right or Left, to examine “overlooked backstories and to expand the cast of characters caught in the crossfire. Anyone presuming to add another entry should offer a few words of justification.”ĭoherty chose to re-examine the pre-McCarthy hearings because, he argues, those hearings set the pattern for subsequent congressional-media confrontations because they gave birth to the blacklist and because their focus was squarely on the motion picture industry. government during World War II, it is probably the most chronicled slice of history from the golden age of the studio system, not to say a raw wound that, even into the twenty-first century, rips open whenever a ghost from the past is resurrected or a blacklist-themed melodrama enters the pop-cult bloodstream.
With the exception of the storied alliance between the motion picture industry and the U.S.
It includes “academic studies, edited volumes, memoirs, oral histories, documentaries, and, lately, blogs and websites. “The scholarship generated by the decision of the House Committee on Un-American Activities to go Hollywood is voluminous,” writes the film historian and Brandeis Professor of American Studies. It seems mandatory for Thomas Doherty, whose Show Trial centers on the nine-day HUAC hearings of October, 1947 that resulted in the blacklist. One prominent national book fair organization requires authors who wish to be invited to audition come up with an “elevator speech” touting their book a recently-added New York Times feature asks authors to “persuade someone to read it in 50 words or less.”ĭefending and justifying has long been part of the drill for doctoral candidates and other academics, I thought.
Over three million books are now being published every year, so writers are increasingly called on to testify to the value of their efforts. Columbia University Press, 424 pp., $29.95.
Show Trial: Hollywood, HUAC, And the Birth of the Blacklist by Thomas Doherty. Thomas Doherty’s fragmented, stop-and-start-again style dilutes narrative authority and further complicates an already very complicated story.
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