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273 While this manuscript was being reviewed, two things occurred that reinforce the roles of both the Hollywood blacklist and allegorical interpretation as important parts of contemporary film culture. First, on November 19, 2012, the Hollywood Reporter issued a public apology for its role in the blacklist, some sixty-five years after it was instituted. Written by W.R. Wilkerson III, the son of the magazine’s founder, the article claims that the Hollywood Reporter’s virulent anti-Communist campaign had its roots in Billy Wilkerson’s failed attempt to establish his own studio. Blaming the studio brass who seemingly crushed his dream, Wilkerson used the Hollywood Reporter as a “bully pulpit” to exact revenge.With the threat of international Communism emerging as an important political issue, Wilkerson retaliated against the studio bosses by destroying the talent essential to the industry’s success. “Unfortunately,” Wilkerson III writes, “they would become the collateral damage of history.”1 Initially, the Hollywood Reporter’s coverage of the apology treated it as an attempt to heal a rift in the industry that has lasted for decades. In a segment on KCRW’s Which Way LA? blacklisted actor Marsha Hunt praised Wilkerson’s public gesture, saying, “For this apology to be issued now, I can’t tell you how much it means.”2 Not everyone was so sanguine. On November 20 blacklisted writer Norma Barzman blasted the apology in an interview conducted with a local CBS affiliate. “The apology just gets me furious!” declared Barzman.“I think it’s below comment.”3 The children of blacklisted writers also chimed in, claiming that the apology seemed like a hollow gesture, one incommensurate with the damage that Wilkerson did to people’s careers.4 Producer Howard Koch offered one of the stranger comments on the apology, limning the themes of later films made about the Hollywood blacklist: “The real victims of the Blacklist were those who had Conclusion Old Wounds and the Texas Sharpshooter 9780520280670_PRINT.indd 273 9780520280670_PRINT.indd 273 04/02/14 3:39 PM 04/02/14 3:39 PM 274 / CONCLUSION the wrong last names or went to communist meetings just to pick up girls.”5 Hecky Brown, The Front’s tragic victim of the blacklist played by Zero Mostel, couldn’t have said it better. Whereas the controversy surrounding The Hollywood Reporter’s apology shows an industry still coming to grips with its dark past, the second event—the 2013 release of Room 237—reflects continued interest in the interpretive practices associated with film criticism. Rodney Ascher’s documentary yokes together five different readings of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980).Ascher treats these interpretations as the treatises of obsessive fans, but at least three of them would not seem out of place in an academic film journal. Indeed, one of Ascher’s interviewees is Professor Geoffrey Cocks of Albion College, someone whose professional livelihood depends on producing novel analyses of historical artifacts.6 Room 237 is an ideal addendum to my own study insofar as the interpretive strategies portrayed in the film dovetail with the ones I’ve discussed. Like the critics who saw postwar genre films as commentaries on the blacklist , the five armchair analysts in Room 237 appeal time and again to Kubrick’s status as The Shining’s true author. Citing the director’s reputation for meticulous preparation, they invest every aspect of The Shining’s mise-en-scène and cinematography with latent significance. This even takes on a comical dimension when Room 237’s interviewees treat apparent continuity errors as evidence of Kubrick’s monomaniacal control. The analysts in Room 237 also display other similarities with the blacklist criticism described herein.As David Bordwell points out,these interpretations deploy the “punning” heuristic as a time-tested technique for developing evidentiary support: “Snow White’s Dopey on Danny’s door suggests that the boy doesn’t yet realize what’s going on;but when the dwarf disappears,Danny is no longer ‘dopey.’ A crushed Volkswagen stands for Kubrick’s telling King that his artistic‘vehicle’ has obliterated the novelist’s original‘vehicle.’”7 Such interpretive moves are akin to what blacklist-themed criticism did in equating “Reds” and “Redskins” in analyzing Broken Arrow or the “cell by cell” motif in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Room 237’s interviewees also show evidence of certain mental heuristics that more generally inform the framing of interpretations. Bill Blakemore, for example, freely admits that part of the reason he fastened on...

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