Blacklist Spirit Still Alive, Entertainment Leaders Warn

The subject was censorship.

On Tuesday night, while much of Los Angeles was glued to the championship Lakers game, about 300 members of the movie, television and rock-music industries attended a conference on “Censorship ‘88”--or, “Blacklists, Graylists and Playlists: Repression and the Entertainment Industry.”

The conference was divided into two parts--essentially Hollywood Then, focusing on the 1940s and 1950s of “The Blacklist Years,” with congressional investigations into alleged subversion, the naming of names and hundreds of people thrown out of work--and Hollywood Now, with a look at “Censorship--1980s Style.”

Before the evening was over, the Lakers’ win had been announced and conference participants at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel had concluded that the legacy of the blacklist was quite tangible.

How much censorship do they see today?

Danny Goldberg, president of Gold Castle Records and chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, which co-sponsored the conference with Norman Lear’s People for the American Way, noted that there is “always an opportunistic politician lurking out there ready to get headlines at the expense of artists and entertainers.”

He cited a recent speech by President Reagan in which Reagan “went out of his way to criticize” a scene in the movie “9 to 5” in which Dolly Parton, Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda smoke marijuana. Goldberg quoted Reagan as saying, “Thank God, a script like that would never be made today.”

Goldberg, also president of the Rock Against Drugs Foundation, mentioned a bill before Congress on child protection and obscenity. The bill is an outgrowth of the Meese Commission Report.

He said such a bill, if enacted, would “give the federal government unprecedented powers over the entertainment business.”

Although Goldberg immediately added that he doubted the bill would become law, he warned that even incidents that appear to be “on the fringes” must also be monitored, so that a blacklist never appears again.

“The roof never leaks when it doesn’t rain,” Goldberg said at a press conference before the main event. “We don’t want to wait until after we all have masks over our mouths and can’t speak.”

Christopher Trumbo, a screen and television writer--and son of the late Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood 10 called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947--said there are some subjects today that don’t get written about because they are “too controversial.” Trumbo said it’s not because writers don’t want to write about these subjects, but because if they do, the scripts won’t sell.

For example, a lot of current productions concern Vietnam, said Trumbo, “but I have yet to see a story about a conscientious objector . . . or about someone who went to Canada.” Trumbo has written episodes for “Ironside,” “Quincy” and “Falcon Crest.”

He also criticized TV networks for their “concept of balance,” which he said is often used to “stifle a controversial idea. The concept of balance is always toward being on the conservative and reactionary side.” Why, he asked, did there have to be a miniseries called “Amerika” to balance the nuclear holocaust television movie “The Day After”?

To blacklists and graylists, a new concept was discussed Tuesday night--the “whitelists.”

Susanna Styron--co-producer with Pamela Jones of the documentary “In Our Own Backyards,” about uranium mining on a Navajo reservation, and co-initiator with Jones of the landmark lawsuit over the United States Information Agency’s attempt to obstruct overseas film distribution--talked about the lawsuit that they recently won in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, and said that USIA has a “whitelist” of favored Americans who can be called upon to speak overseas.

Frank Tarloff, a TV comedy writer who was blacklisted during the ‘50s, said the networks have “whitelists” for writers on major projects such as miniseries and two-hour movies, which automatically “blacklist” those over a certain age. The white-haired writer did not specify the cutoff year.

Bob Merlis, vice president of national publicity for Warner Bros. Records, noted sardonically that there wasn’t much concern over rock ‘n’ roll lyrics when the music was primarily the province of black people. He worried that too much criticism of lyrics would lead to a loss of “nuance.”

He added: “Rock and roll is supposed to annoy the parents. It’s a kid’s right to annoy his parents”--subject only to the decisions made within “the court” of each family.

“If you were to stop the average person on the street,” said Ramona Ripston, executive director of the ACLU Foundation, “he or she would tell you that censorship no longer exists in America. ‘The ‘50s were terrible but we’re in the ‘80s. . . .’

“It isn’t overt, but it’s there. It’s covert and sometimes it’s self-censorship. . . . It’s censorship when the State Department denies visas to speakers whose political views are at odds” with those of the government.

Among examples she cited were Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Italian playwright Dario Fo.

“It’s censorship when KPFK (Pacifica Radio’s FM station in Los Angeles) is threatened with a criminal prosecution after they played a portion of the play ‘The Jerker’ at 10 p.m. with appropriate warnings because the (Federal Communications Commission) did not like the description of sexual activity it contained. The play was about AIDS,” Ripston said, “and it was an attempt to warn about the disease.”

Before the panelists came on stage, there was art.

It was a night of nostalgia, a blend of horror and humor as the audience watched a bearded Ed Asner play the “committee chairman,” shouting and pounding his gavel with ear-splitting intensity, in excerpts from “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?” an L.A. Classic Theatre Works Production. Compiled by Eric Bentley, the script came from actual HUAC transcripts from 1940-1956.

There were also excerpts from Judy Chaikin’s documentary “Legacy of the Hollywood Blacklist,” and some of the laughter was in hindsight as the audience viewed newsreels of Gary Cooper at the 1947 HUAC hearings saying he never read Karl Marx “beyond what I’ve picked up from hearsay” but “from what I’ve heard I don’t like it,” and Adolphe Menjou saying approvingly that “Texans would kill them (subversives) on sight.”

The personal legacy of the Hollywood blacklist appeared to be mixed.

At the beginning of his remarks, Tarloff said that he was going to talk about “the lighter side” of the blacklist and told some amusing stories of his “black-market” days when he used the nom de plume of David Adler on productions such as “The Danny Thomas Show.”

Tarloff particularly praised producer Sheldon Leonard for allowing him to work--”there will always be a small altar in our home for him”--and Thomas, “who knew (who I was), who let me know he knew. . . .”

At the end, Tarloff spoke with pride. “There are some people who will never forgive themselves” for not having been blacklisted, he said, adding that he knows those who have “subpoena envy.”

Tarloff noted that when he gives talks at colleges and universities, he always ends by saying: “I knew that someday it would end for me, but for those who informed, it would never end. So I’m the hero today, and they’re the villains.”

However, writer Joan Scott, wife of writer/producer Adrian Scott, who had been one of the Hollywood 10 and who died in 1972, said:

“I censor myself in terms of a pervasive fear. I still have the reaction that someone is looking over my shoulder. Just because they call you ‘paranoid’ doesn’t mean they’re not after you. . . .

“To this day,” she added, when she comes across the blacklist issue, “I get a little kick in the gut.”

Scott, who was called before HUAC in the early 1950s, said that, despite herself, she worried even now about participating in this conference: “My God, someone is going to see it, and I’ll be in trouble.”