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McCarthy was helped by the “business union” model adopted by the big trade union federations, which actively worked to police the left: In 1952, the US Chamber of Commerce recommended barring “Communists, fellow travelers and dupes” from jobs as “teachers and librarians”, and from posts in “any school or university.” Specifically targetted were “the entertainment field” and “any industrial plant large enough to have a labor union”. Of these 5,000, around 1,500 were Federal Bureau of Investigation informants. Party membership fell from 80,000 in 1944 to 5,000 in the mid-1950s. The Communists thus lost both political possibilities and members.
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Instead they were increasingly integrated into the developing conservative and anti-Communist Cold War consensus. Unlike the 1930s, which was characterized by large social struggles, workers failed to break in large numbers away from the system and towards the Communist Party. The 1950s had started badly for the left in the United States, as Stefan Bornost explains: The blacklist was a small part of what was going on in this country at the time”. Norma Barzman, who was forced into exile by the blacklist, explains: “They attacked Hollywood because it was high profile and made it easier to create a climate of fear. Its aim was to root out radical opinion and social resistance. Although McCarthyism is now often thought of primarily as a Hollywood phenomenon, its purview was much wider. In every city and province, lists of the disloyal have been compiled.” Trumbo knew that his name could be found on similar lists that had been compiled much more recently. At one point, the Roman senator Crassus declares, “The enemies of the state are known, arrests are in progress, the prisons begin to fill. Trumbo’s script reminds us of the indignities that he continued to suffer. Spartacus was created in a Hollywood still reeling from the McCarthyite witch-hunts. By the end of 1960, Spartacus was the year’s highest-grossing film. At the Los Angeles première, the 1,500 guests were met by only 36 pickets. By proudly displaying Trumbo’s name, Spartacus openly challenged the repressive status quo-and the anti-Communist witch-hunts weren’t what they used to be. Others carried on writing, albeit at a much lower rate of pay, under assumed names. Some got jobs as labourers, some left the country. Since 1945, no film had been prepared to publicly acknowledge his contribution, even though he had won two Oscars in this period for screenplays he had written under pseudonyms.įor the 12 years following their 1948 trial, none of the Hollywood Ten could openly work in the US film industry. He was part of the so-called Hollywood Ten, a group of screenwriters and producers who challenged McCarthy’s right to investigate their connections to the Communist Party and paid heavily for it. Trumbo had spent 11 months in prison after he refused to testify in front of Joseph McCarthy’s House of Representations Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Spartacus was the first film to carry his name on its end credits for over a decade.
#I'm spartacus movie
The “Commie scriptwriter” behind the movie was Dalton Trumbo. 5 Still, the film went on to win four Oscars at the 1961 Academy Awards. 4 Hedda Hopper, a columnist close to the Legion, wrote that “this story was sold to Universal Pictures from a book written by a Commie and the screen script was written by a Commie, so don’t go and see it”. The Legion had sent out 17,000 letters encouraging patriotic war veterans to protest the film. 3 People entering the film had to brave picket lines organised by the right-wing American Legion. 2 Long-standing New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther was less excited, dismissing the film as “heroic humbug”, adding that “the middle phase is pretentious and tedious, because it is concerned with the dull strife of politics”. 1 Time Magazine celebrated “a new kind of Hollywood movie: a superspectacle with spiritual vitality and moral force”. On 6 October 1960, the film Spartacus opened in New York City’s DeMille Theatre.