CORRESPONDENCE

To the editor:

Richard Schickel, in reviewing “The Bad and the Beautiful: Hollywood in the Fifties” by Sam Kashner and Jennifer MacNair (Book Review, June 9), manages somehow to leave out the most obvious, the most pertinent criticism to be leveled at the book: The ‘50s were the period of the blacklist and the McCarthy era, when more than 300 screenwriters couldn’t work anymore in Hollywood, when the climate of fear was so great that the movies made during those years, were, in Schickel’s own words “bland and banal.”

Schickel’s omission was undoubtedly due to his not wanting to admit that the films of the left during the ‘30s and ‘40s had been a substantial and humanist contribution to our culture.

Norma Barzman

Beverly Hills

Editor’s note: Screenwriters Norma Barzman and her late husband, Ben, left Hollywood for Europe in 1949 because of the blacklist.

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To the editor:

In his review of “Radical Hollywood” (Book Review, May 12), Richard Schickel recommends that the reader search out “Part of Our Time,” by Murray Kempton, which he says contains “the best short summary of Hollywood’s communists.” I suspect he finds Kempton’s summary congenial not for its truth, but because it serves his purpose; it is hardly a flattering portrait Kempton paints of them.

Not long after Kempton’s book was published, Dalton Trumbo (one of the Hollywood Ten) wrote to Kempton, chiding him for his inaccurate portrayal of the Hollywood left. Kempton replied with an apology, in which he said, “ ... I have come to believe that it is the greatest of crimes to write about a man whose face you have never seen, since writing is related to the subject more than the audience, and a man you have never seen is unlikely to recognize himself in what you say about him, and thus no engagement is possible. The book is full of that, and my only hope is that it taught me something.”

Kempton goes on to say that if his book were to be reprinted, “I should make the condition that you [Trumbo] write the introduction.” Kempton clearly thinks much less of his summary than Schickel does, and anyone relying on it should be forewarned. (The complete exchange between Trumbo and Kempton--well worth reading--was published on May 5, 1999, in the Nation and is available on the Nation’s Web site.)

Schickel goes on to agree with the position that “the communist left--mostly screenwriters--did not appreciably or subversively affect the content of American films during the popular front decade (from the mid-’30s to the mid-’40s)” and proposes that they wrote nothing more subversive than their Democrat and Republican colleagues. Democrats and Republicans, it seems, created films just as subversive as their leftist colleagues. Yet Schickel asserts that the “lives and careers” of many of the Hollywood left were “ ... derailed ... by the Hollywood hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the studio blacklist they engendered.”

Let’s examine that: Having written material substantially no different than their Republican and Democrat colleagues, the Hollywood left caused the blacklist to happen. They brought it on themselves. There was nothing else for the studios to do. The blacklist was the only answer. The left made them do it. What nonsense. If Schickel could get these parts of what appears to be his polemic straight, I would be more likely to entertain the ideas he puts forth in its remainder.

Christopher Trumbo

Beverly Hills

Editor’s note: Christopher Trumbo is the son of Dalton Trumbo.

Richard Schickel replies:

I, of course, disagree entirely with Norma Barzman. I think virtually every distinguished “substantive and humanist” film of the ‘30s and ‘40s was written or directed by people whose commitment was first to the art (or, if you prefer, the craft) of movies, and only secondarily to an ideology (“Citizen Kane” anyone?). I have no doubt that the majority of the writers and directors responsible for those movies were liberals of some sort. It is, I am always pleased to observe, ever thus in all the arts. But the sad fact is that very few movies of this period that we still attend with pleasure and intellectual profit were created by communists or those aligned to them.

There is not space here to “name names.” But I urge interested readers to compare the filmographies of the admitted communists with those of the non- and anti-totalitarian left and see whose pictures have best stood the test of time. Particularly during World War II, they squandered their talents on popular front twaddle. Party hacks as Hollywood hacks. Or vice versa. It is difficult to tell the difference.

To Christopher Trumbo, let me say this: Unlike Murray Kempton, I did see the face of his father--I conducted an extensive interview with him in the early ‘70s and had an all too brief correspondence with him thereafter. He had about him a flair, gallantry and wit that I found altogether admirable. His collection of letters, “Additional Dialogue,” is one of the most delightful volumes in my library, and I often return to it simply for the pleasure its prose affords. And his great “Only Victims” speech to the Writers Guild in 1970 is one of the few truly humane documents to emerge out of a bad time.

That Kempton politely turned aside Trumbo’s wrath in the manner his son cites does not surprise me. I would have done the same thing myself. He was a difficult man to argue with. But that does not invalidate Kempton’s account of the Communist left in Hollywood. Nor, I am sorry to say, does it validate Trumbo’s career as a screenwriter. He wrote one excellent screenplay (“Gun Crazy”) while he was blacklisted, and there are passages in some of his other work (“Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo,” “Our Vines Have Tender Grapes”) that are quite fine--sweet-spirited and, yes, “humanistic.” In any case, they were much less bloodthirsty than the wartime writing of such Communist colleagues as Albert Maltz. On the other hand, there is the lunatic “little guy” speech that concludes “Tender Comrade” in a flood of popular front banalities that is indefensible by any reasonable standard.

That sort of tough-tender trash was always the fatal flaw of the Communist writers and it was different in tone and intent from the writing of Christopher Trumbo’s “Democrats and Republicans.” It has always interested me that the best of the Communist writers (Dalton Trumbo and Ring Lardner Jr.) were at their best when they were at their least overtly ideological, when they let their people talk and behave naturalistically instead of gaseously speechifying about the virtues of the common man (or the Soviet Union). But then, I’ve never argued that the communists deserved to be blacklisted for bad writing. I do think, however, that their strategy of silence about their allegiances in the face of HUAC’s inquiries--a strategy that many among them disputed--did their own cause a disservice--and surely was one of the forces that dragged many non-Stalinist leftists into the pit with them.

These letters and this response, like those published here two weeks ago, stray far from the intent of the review that occasioned them. This was simply to point out that “Radical Hollywood” is a bad book, disastrously sloppy in its historiography and less than honest about its ideological biases. Beyond that, I must say, the fervor of these letter writers is dismaying. Everywhere else in American culture, the Stalinists and their heirs are held in richly deserved contempt. They didn’t deserve to lose their jobs because of their “ideas,” but they were ever the noisy (yet also conspiratorial) supporters of a murderous system of beliefs. It is only in Hollywood history that they are regarded as martyr-heroes in the cause of free speech. It was against this deification of them that Dalton Trumbo spoke so eloquently to the Writers Guild--and received for his pains the contempt of his sometime Communist colleagues. It is long past time that we stop accepting their own inflated evaluations of their contributions to screen history and their own falsely innocent evaluations of their role in the social and political history of their era.

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To the editor:

It seems not much has changed since the 1980s when I started my broadcast career as a sports reporter. A “girl” sports reporter. I left sports for hard news after having tobacco juice spit on my shoes one time too often.

Bill Plaschke dismisses Elizabeth Kaye’s insights in “Ain’t No Tomorrow: Kobe, Shaq, and the Making of a Lakers Dynasty” (Book Review, May 19) as those of a “nosy organizer of the annual block party.” Please. Plaschke would never use such a line if the writer of the book was a guy. Apparently nothing has changed over the last two decades. Girls still aren’t invited to the big game.

Kitty Felde

Pasadena

Editor’s note: Kitty Felde is host of “Talk of the City” on KPCC-FM (89.3).

Bill Plaschke replies:

As one who has had tobacco juice splattered across his loafers many times, I understand Felde’s characterization of the sports world. But to say that “girl” sports reporters are not welcome there is as offensive to all journalists as those brown stains, and is certainly not relevant to Elizabeth Kaye, whose hard work opened the doors that led to the writing of this book.

I characterized her as “the nosy organizer of the annual block party” because of her information, not because of her gender. That Felde would offer such a stereotype inspires me to invite her to my neighborhood’s next block party which, if last year was any indication, will be organized by a man.