Numbers

The Hollywood Nineteen

• Alvah Bessie, screenwriter (one of the Hollywood Ten)
• Herbert Biberman, screenwriter and director (one of the Hollywood Ten)
• Bertolt Brecht, poet, playwright, and theater director
• Lester Cole, screenwriter (one of the Hollywood Ten)
• Richard Collins, screenwriter
• Edward Dmytryk, director (one of the Hollywood Ten)
• Gordon Kahn, screenwriter
• Howard Koch, screenwriter
• Ring Lardner Jr., screenwriter (one of the Hollywood Ten)
• John Howard Lawson, screenwriter (one of the Hollywood Ten)
• Albert Maltz, screenwriter (one of the Hollywood Ten)
• Lewis Milestone, director
• Samuel Ornitz, screenwriter (one of the Hollywood Ten)
• Larry Parks, actor
• Irving Pichel, director
• Robert Rossen, director
• Waldo Salt, screenwriter
• Adrian Scott, producer and screenwriter (one of the Hollywood Ten)
• Dalton Trumbo, screenwriter (one of the Hollywood Ten)

How It's Used

"A liberal postwar atmosphere was interrupted in 1947, when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which sought to 'eliminate every writer who has un-American ideas,' gained a foothold in the film capital by issuing subpoenas to 19 industry workers believed to be Communists. Hamilton carefully re-creates the climate of the infamous witch hunt that culminated in gray- and blacklisting, but he glosses over the important anti-Semitic aspect of the proceedings. Over half of the Hollywood 19 were Jews, and HUAC often equated Jews with Communists, unless they were assimilated Republican studio heads who cooperated with the committee."

"But as post-war conflict turned American opinion against communism, those who had supported it, or were suspected of supporting it, came under scrutiny. A group of writers, producers and actors, known as the Hollywood 19, were called before Congress to answer questions. For the next decade, dozens of film, radio and television workers were penalized for their personal politics. Some went to jail for refusing to answer questions, others were denied work...

"[Marsha] Hunt was never a member of the Communist Party and had little interest in politics, until a couple of her friends were pulled in as part of the Hollywood 19. She joined a troupe of artists—Ira Gershwin, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, among them—who chartered a plane for Washington to attend the hearings and stand up for their fellow artists. Little did she know that would make her suspect."

"Ms. Bosworth's account of the Hollywood Ten trials portrays Crum as caught in the liberal quandary of trying to defend by open constitutional principles people with a hidden agenda. Drawing from his contemporary journals, she cites his differences with the party lawyers who ran the defense of the 'Unfriendly 19,' 10 of whom were indicted for contempt of the committee and sent to prison."

"In addition, the book describes the aftermath of the blacklist as it was presented in films such as 'The Front' and 'Guilty by Suspicion' as well as books by members of the Nineteen Unfriendly Witnesses and the Hollywood Ten.”

"By that time, [Elia] Kazan, like many others, had acquired new, better and more pressing obligations—to family, to the hard-learned truth about a secretive political party controlled virtually on a day-to-day basis by Moscow and, above all, to the art that defined him more accurately than any politics. This, incidentally, was the same harsh truth confronted earlier by some of the 19 'unfriendly' witnesses (later winnowed down to the Hollywood 10), who had left or were leaving the party but who felt obliged to stand with their former colleagues in the first round of HUAC hearings."

Also Known As (AKA)

The Hollywood 19, The Unfriendly 19, The 19 Unfriendly Witnesses

Links