62 years ago today: The Hollywood Ten

62 years ago today, the United States Supreme Court refused to review the case against The Hollywood Ten. Subsequently each of the Ten, nine screenwriters and one director, were transported to prison to serve a one-year sentence. Their crime? During HUAC (House on Un-American Activities Committee) hearings in 1947, these ten witnesses refused to answer this question: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” That they exercised their Constitutional rights as guaranteed by the 5th Amendment made no matter. Given the madness of the era, even political affiliation was a threat to one’s professional and personal livelihood.

The Hollywood Ten were: Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner, Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo.

Here is something you may never have seen, but you should watch: these 10 men arguing their position. They do so in a powerful way:

The Hollywood ‘blacklist’ and the entire Red Scare is an object lesson in dehumanization. And that is the road to perdition with the Holocaust as the ultimate symbol of prejudice and hatred.

You’d think we would learn our lesson, yet we live in troubling times with much name-calling, stereotyping, and demagoguery occurring on all sides of the political spectrum.

Ironically movies generally convey a completely different theme: We are all different, we are all the same. As writers, we explore this infinite mystery again and again in our stories. Unless we traffic in snuff films, racist propaganda, or big dumb action movies that portray the universe as a morally simplistic, how can we not? Characters, as a reflection of actual human beings, are by definition multilayered and complex. You can not dehumanize a person if at the same time you explore their humanity.

We need to remember event and people like the Hollywood Ten as a reminder of the potential of human beings. Both positive, the talent of these 10 filmmakers to create such movies as M*A*S*H, Papillon, and Woman of the Year, and the negative… to put these men behind bars simply for the conviction of their beliefs.

For more on the Hollywood blacklist, go here.

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