Interview with Joe McBride, author: What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? (blacklist)

[Hannah Bell]

Orson Welles, the blacklist and Hollywood filmmaking—Part 1

"What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?" is significant for a number of reasons. The title refers sardonically to the attitude of numerous critics toward Welles’s last years...such commentators choose to view Welles as a victim of his own unfortunate career choices or a supposed inability to finish projects...a lazy, overweight “has-been” who had tragically squandered his undeniable talent.

McBride works diligently to dispel such myths. He knew Welles during the last 15 years of the latter’s life and participated in one of the filmmaker’s major unfinished projects...The author makes clear that Welles was willing and eager to work, virtually to the last day of his life...

The book argues convincingly that Welles was blacklisted by the Hollywood studios in the late 1940s. McBride points to “unmistakable evidence, hidden in plain sight, that Welles’s political and cultural activities had caused him to be blacklisted during the postwar era...

Welles was a man of the left, who associated with socialist-minded intellectuals in the New York theater world before his move to Hollywood in 1939...

Welles had already incurred the wrath of right-wing publisher William Randolph Hearst for his theater and radio work, but his audacity in choosing to direct a film for RKO that drew its inspiration at least in part from the media mogul’s life and career, Citizen Kane, made him, in the words of an artistic associate, “a marked man...”

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jun2009/mcb1-j16.shtml




WSWS:

We found your book while searching for material on Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane <1941>. We thought it was especially significant that you emphasized Welles’s political radicalism, and also challenged the conventional wisdom that his career was a downward spiral from Citizen Kane...


Joseph McBride:

...With Welles, people have mistakenly rejected the idea that he was blacklisted. Have you seen his FBI file? The main file is 222 pages long. You can get it online.

One of the problems with the history of the blacklist is that there’s sort of an official list that everybody knows...But there were so many people who were “greylisted” and blacklisted who you don’t really know about. And that’s part of the Kafkaesque nature of the blacklist...

There’s a documentary called Hollywood on Trial, made in 1976, and Ronald Reagan is in it, sitting in front of an American flag and a California flag and wearing makeup. On camera Reagan says there was no blacklist. It’s sort of like Holocaust denial. It’s terrible to go through it, and then another blow is to be told it didn’t exist.

There are a lot of people like African-American actress Hattie McDaniel...somebody who I admire a lot, who were greylisted. But she suffered after the war because she was progressive. And she was also suffering because people in the NAACP and other liberals were criticizing her for the kind of roles she played...she was getting it from both sides. But very few people know that she was blacklisted or greylisted.

So when you do the research, you start finding out that people had these degrees of problems. Some were totally blacklisted and some simply didn’t find much work...

So with Welles, I realized that this was the elephant in the room that nobody ever really talked about...

[Hannah Bell]

1. Reagan tries to join Communist Party:

JM:

"This next story is a bit off the track, but it’s strange. I interviewed the actor Eddie Albert, whose actress wife, Margo, was blacklisted. So they were leftists. He told me an amazing thing that I don’t think has ever been printed. Albert said that in the latter part of World War II, Ronald Reagan approached the Hollywood Communist party and tried to join.


WSWS:

In Paul Buhle’s and Dave Wagner’s Radical Hollywood, they mention that the FBI considered Reagan to be in or around the CP periphery.


JM:

Reagan was considered a liberal, and in his testimony before HUAC he says being a Communist was not illegal, and publicly at that time he opposed the blacklist. However, privately, he was informing to the FBI. So he was playing a double game by that time. Eddie Albert said that Reagan tried to sign up with the CP, but they wouldn’t have him, because they thought he was an infiltrator..."

[Hannah Bell]

2. kick

[gratuitous]

3. The devil's greatest accomplishment was to convince people he didn't exist

The greatest accomplishment of the blacklist, greylist, COINTELPRO imps, and the rest of it, was to persuade the public that it all didn't exist, or wasn't nearly as powerful as its victims made it out to be. Oh sure, they got Ethel Rosenberg executed for little more than being married to Julius Rosenberg, but the idea that they could make or ruin someone's career? Oh, would that it were so! The public was assured over and over again that America was in an ideological fight for its very existence, and while there were a handful of Reds out there looking to throw bombs and subvert the system, most folks were good Americans. Okay, maybe there were a couple of dupes, taken in by high-sounding Commie propaganda, who didn't really know what they were getting mixed up in. Well, yeah, there were some who weren't quite so duped; they were more willing participants. You might say instead of being Commie Red, they were more Pink. Pinkos, if they should be mentioned at all. Then there are the fellow travelers, people who don't even realize that they're associating with a bunch of Reds . . . well, Pinkos, not so much Red. And they're furthering the Communist agenda just as much as the worst of any of the hardest core Commies.

They all need to be dealt with . . .

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