Books like Naming Names — picked by fans

I always like books that trace the origins of a political movement, because they almost always go farther back than we think.

This one follows the suppression of radical activity in Hollywood from the beginning of the Great Depression of the 1930s, a time that also saw the founding of the Writers’ Guild, a union that gave writers some actual power in an industry that ran on power and often regarded writers as disposable. But even the Writers Guild couldn’t defend those accused of communist sympathies by their government.

It is significant in our current era that no Hollywood Communist, even the real ones, was ever linked to espionage or sabotage, and that evidence of the supposed subversive indoctrination planted in films was nonexistent. 

Oral histories and first-hand accounts bring a past era alive for me in a way that even the best historical narrative can’t.

This book contains the voices of thirty-six victims of the Hollywood Blacklist, including two of the famous/notorious Hollywood Ten, who went to jail for refusing to discuss their personal politics or name their friends before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

We hear from directors, stars, less famous actors, and screenwriters like those jailed by HUAC. We watch their lives unravel, their careers dissolve. Some go to Europe to work, some stick it out in the US, writing anonymously, denied screen credit and decent pay, and some migrate to academia. All provide a chilling account of government persecution for political belief.

While several books have offered accounts of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) hearings and the blacklist in the entertainment industry, Alan Casty questions liberal perspectives on the subject, and develops a distinctive perspective. In particular he challenges what he sees as an overly simple moral take on the actions of those who cooperated with HUAC and those who did not. He discusses the role of the Communist Party in Hollywood and the impact of Cold War politics— and the politics of Stalin and the Soviet Union—on the decisions that politicians and witnesses took. There is particularly interesting material here on Robert Rossen’s experience, as someone who ‘resisted’ the Committee but later cooperated with it. This Is the best account of those that challenge the dominant perspectives in the literature. 

Renowned cultural historian Thomas Doherty provides a granular, blow-by-blow retelling of the events that led to the Hollywood blacklist. He places particular emphasis on the hearings as a ‘media-political spectacle,’ seeing it as the first such media event of the postwar era. He reexamines the events through a close and careful reading of press and media responses of the time. Less cinema-centric than other accounts, and less mesmerized by key individuals, Doherty gives us a cool, skeptical perspective on what is often an emotive or partisan discourse. There is much detail on how filmmakers, activists, politicians, newspaper and radio figures acted, and for what reasons, and how and why the post-war hearings played out as they did. The result is a sophisticated cultural history of the blacklist era.

I loved this book for the personal stories behind the political nightmare.

Radical Hollywood is about the people who, by their politics, caught the communist-hunters’ eye. It is a fascinating, detailed, often affectionate account of the Hollywood Left in film-making’s Golden Age—the behind-the-scenes stories of famous films, writers, and actors, and their impact on the most popular entertainment medium of the time.

I loved this novel for its heroine and for its pitch-perfect recreation of the 1950s, combining Fanny’s blossoming career as a writer of radio serials with the looming danger of the McCarthy-era blacklist.

The author is a child of that time, and her memory is spot-on, from seams in women’s stockings to the cloud of suspicion that gathered around a writer who went to the wrong meeting or subscribed to the wrong magazine, much less flirted with Communism twenty years earlier or even knew someone who had.

Defending oneself against it was impossible. A blacklisted writer or actor simply disappeared. I found echoes of current politics in both the blacklist and the post-war urge to shove women back into the kitchen and nursery. 

An editor of my book, Brian Neve has written extensively on the Hollywood Left, with many books, articles, and chapters devoted to filmmakers such as Cy Endfield, Elia Kazan, Robert Rossen, and Joseph Losey, or more broadly to politics and American cinema. A useful complement to the Ceplair & Englund volume, this astute, engaging, and empirically-grounded study explores how a generational cohort of radical and liberal creative practitioners—including Kazan, Losey, Rossen, Abraham Polonsky, Jules Dassin, John Huston, and Orson Welles—were energized by the political culture of the Depression era and sought, in different ways, to navigate the industrial and commercial constraints of Hollywood to produce socially-engaged films. This project was brutally stifled by the blacklist, with many filmmakers forced to choose between exile or collaboration. 

Rebecca Prime is one of the contributors to my book and her book is a fascinating sequel to that volume. It covers the careers of several blacklisted filmmakers who fled Hollywood and America, seeking to find new work and life opportunities in Europe. Impeccably researched and elegantly written, Prime’s study tells the story of a generation of creative workers that was lost to the USA but which made a vital contribution to European and British cinemas. As she details, many of the exiled filmmakers faced almighty personal and professional struggles to adjust to their new circumstances, and while a few (e.g. Joseph Losey and Jules Dassin) would eventually achieve fabulous success, many other exiles found it difficult to secure regular and fulfilling work opportunities or personal happiness.

One of my favorite novels of any length, Nathanael West’s short 1939 classic is at the very least the most disturbing portrait of Golden Age Hollywood and its hangers-on ever written—hideous, poignant, horribly funny.

West himself wrote scripts for B-movies in the thirties. His death at thirty-three in a car crash was perhaps, in its awful and infuriating ridiculousness, fitting. And it was the day after F. Scott Fitzgerald died.

Bukowski didn't thieve, solve crimes, or use high-tech. In fact, he worked hard and was poor and isolated most of his life. But he lived in the fringe of the noir world, and beat on his machines—manual typewriters, then an IBM Selectric, and finally, with some fame and money, a computer. He was South of his No North, real and genuine for so long that when Hollywood knocked, he was ready for them. This book is his first-hand account of the dumb ego and stupid money that goes into making a movie. Hilarious and dark at the same time. A poet's novel.