Inside ‘Blacklist: The Hollywood Red Scare’ at the Skirball Cultural Center

As she immersed herself in work on “Blacklist: The Hollywood Red Scare,” Cate Thurston, the curator of the new exhibit at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, found herself thinking of the present as much as the past.

“What is surprising and scary to me is how relevant it feels,” Thurston says. “The questions that this exhibition is asking – through using the blacklist as a case study – give us a critical lens in the present.

“The tensions between security and privacy,” she continues. “Can we be held accountable in our professional life for private associations? Can our political opinions be held against us?

“These feel just as fresh to me in 2023 as they do looking at 1947. I think there’s a certain degree of shock when you really immerse yourself in it because of how contemporary this issue feels.”

“Blacklist: The Hollywood Red Scare” revisits a dark time in American history. As fears of communist influence in America flourished in the years after World War II, the House Un-American Activities Committee convened hearings of suspected communists in Hollywood in 1947.

Ten witnesses – eight screenwriters, one director and one producer – refused to answer the committee’s questions. The so-called Hollywood 10 each were sentenced to a year in jail.

In reaction to the sensationalized hearings, Hollywood bigwigs, meeting in secret, agreed to make an unofficial blacklist. If there was a hint of communist activity or associations about you, you ended up banned from working in the film industry. Lives and livelihoods were destroyed in the years that followed.

The exhibit originated at the Jewish Museum of Milwaukee in Wisconsin. The Skirball Museum’s director Sheri Bernstein and deputy director Michele Urton saw the exhibit when it traveled to Baltimore and decided to bring it to Los Angeles.

“They thought it was such a good fit for us,” Thurston said. “It’s a local story. It certainly makes sense for our Jewish cultural center.

“There were some really rich threads there, both in the people involved as well as a threat of antisemitism that pervades much of the hearings,” she says. “We thought it was a really dynamic show for us.”

Expanding the exhibit

One issue – the Skirball space is much larger than the exhibit – got quickly resolved when the Milwaukee Museum agreed to let the Skirball expand the exhibit with new material. The Los Angeles show, which runs May 4 to Sept. 3, added about 100 artifacts to the exhibit, Thurston says.

“We start a little bit earlier now – before the 1947 hearings,” she says. “We wanted to paint a picture of what Hollywood was like in the ’30s and ’40s to contextualize one of the show’s many questions, which is: What does it mean to be a patriot?”

Many in the Hollywood 10, and many more who found themselves on the blacklist, had produced or worked on films that were part of Hollywood’s war effort doing World II, for instance.

“And just a few years later, their activism in anti-fascism and the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League was held against them,” Thurston says. “We wanted to play with that question and expand it.”

Other new sections in “Blacklist” included a section called Talented & Targeted, which looks at the role racism and antisemitism played in the Hollywood blacklist, or its less-strict sibling, the graylist.

“It teases out players like (Black actor-singer-activist) Paul Robeson, or Hazel Scott, who was the first Black woman to have a show on television, and it was canceled two days after the hearings,” Thurston says.

“John Garfield is one of those people who’s really interesting because, I mean, he was a star,” she says of the Jewish actor. “He may be underrecognized today, but one of the ways I’ve been describing him to people is he was all of the Chrises. He was Pine, he was Hemsworth, he was everything.”

Fronts and affronts

The show also helps clear the fog of history from the Hollywood blacklist and its place in the anti-communist fervor of the times. For instance, the House committee that held the 1947 hearings that led to the Hollywood 10 and the Hollywood blacklist had nothing to do with U.S. Sen. Joe McCarthy, whose anti-communist witch hunts arrived three years later.

“Larry Ceplair, who organized a blacklist exhibition for the Academy in the aughts had this great line about just that,” Thurston says. “It was that McCarthyism predates McCarthy.

“I think that’s a really smart way to frame that,” she says. “One of the things I think the show does really well is make it clear, the sort of swirling elements between the FBI, Congress, additional players like that. While we are focusing on HUAC, there are other players involved carrying those threads forward.”

Thurston grew up with a measure of personal insight into the topics the Skirball show covers. Her grandparents were studio story analysts who wrote on the side. When they were graylisted for their political beliefs, they were forced to leave the Benedict Canyon home they built in the ’30s, she says.

“They sold the house and they lived in a little beach shack on a stretch of coastline right before Carpinteria,” Thurston says. “They went from having studio jobs to my grandfather fishing and trading the fish for vegetables. But even with that background, I didn’t really know the depth of it until I started working on this project.”

Some who were blacklisted found work under assumed names – “fronts,” as they were known. The blacklist started to weaken in the late ’50s. The 1960 film “Spartacus” carried the true name of its writer, Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood 10, thanks in large part to producer and star Kirk Douglas’s influence.

Many point to that as the end of the blacklist, but its damage to lives and careers reverberated for years after.

Tangible effects

The Skirball exhibition explores both the big themes of the Hollywood blacklist and the small, personal ways in which it touched individual lives, with hundreds of artifacts complementing the text on walls and in displays that tells its history.

Thurston is quick to answer when asked to discuss a few of her favorite pieces of the exhibit.

“I think one of the things that really stands out to me is a memo – and I know, you’re asking for exciting things and I’m like, ‘Let me show you a memo!’” she says, laughing.

But the memo in question is a powerful piece of history, she explains, written in 1945 by someone who overheard Mississippi congressman John Rankin, chair of the House Un-American Activities Committee, talking loudly in the congressional lunchroom about his plans to “do a quick job on Hollywood.”

“He’s going to call in, particularly, screenwriters and the goal is to attack guilds and weaken unions,” Thurston says. “It’s so naked, seeing it written out. And then two years later, that’s exactly what they did.”

One display includes a 1970 letter from screenwriter Alvah Bessie, an Oscar nominee for the story for the patriotic war movie “Objective Burma,” asking for help finding an agent for a formerly blacklisted writer.

“I mean, my God, that’s 20 years of his life where he’s been struggling to get by,” Thurston says. “We also have some beautiful letters from him while he was incarcerated, poems he wrote to his children.”

The show includes several items related to screenwriter Trumbo. There’s the Oscar he won for the 1956 film “The Brave One,” written under the blacklist pseudonym Robert Rich, and only given to Trumbo in 1975.

More poignantly, there is a collection of typewriter ribbon tins that Trumbo used to store mementos during his year in prison, which he spent for refusing to testify about the political activities and beliefs of his friends, colleagues and himself.

Occasionally, despite the seriousness of the topic, small moments of levity shine through in the displays.

“We have this really funny memo from Lenny Bruce, the comedian, to Alvah Bessie asking him to help him rework a script,” Thurston says. “He’s saying, ‘The characters are weak; I need your help,’ but then he says, “And none of that social activism stuff. It’s bad enough everyone thinks I’m a drug addict, I don’t want them to think I’m a commie.’”

“History informs our national imagination in a way that few disciplines do,” Thurston says of the role the exhibit can play in understanding the past and illuminating the future. “I often think though that when we focus on the macro we lose what makes it meaningful.

“We lose the ability to imagine ourselves in it and to imagine how people would act,” she says. “And by telling these stories, these really personal stories, I don’t think the lives feel so far away from us.”