Hide In Plain Sight: The Hollywood Blacklistees In Film And Television, 1950-2002 (review)

More Nuanced

There is both good news and bad news about the historians of the American left to be taken from Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner's latest book, Hide in Plain Sight. Buhle was co-editor with Patrick McGilligan in 1997 on Tender Comrades, an entertaining and valuable oral history of survivors of the Hollywood blacklist. He and Dave Wagner have collaborated on three other books on the blacklist, including Radical Hollywood (2002), a look at the work of leftist filmmakers in the 30s and 40s. The current book is a sequel of sorts to the latter and shares at least some of its flaws, but it is in general more nuanced.

The bad news first. Buhle and Wagner have been a lot sloppier factually in Hide in Plain Sight than they and most left wing film historians have previously been. Some of the errors may just be typos, such as spelling Spyros Skouras's last name "Scouros." Some errors suggest they have not seen the films they are writing about, such as saying that Creature From the Black Lagoon has the Creature "pursuing the bikini-wearing Julie Adams through miles of swampy footage." It was a white one-piece, and most of the chase was underwater. In the bizarre error category the authors have Robert Towne married to screenwriter Carol Eastman and helping create the television series The Monkees, they have Phil Silvers and Buster Keaton in the Broadway production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, or they say Carmen Jones "could have been a major musical success, but not in white America." The film cost $750,000, and had film rentals of $2,500,000. A substantial hit, in other words.

More typical of many left wing film historians is what might be called "misattribution." Since so much of their valuable work makes clear what the contributions of the blacklistees were, it is both ironic and disconcerting that they tend to overvalue the work of the people they are writing about. In the section on Robert Towne, they write he "scripted Bonnie and Clyde." Towne's contribution to David Newman and Robert Benton's script for Bonnie and Clyde was in the nature of minor rewrites, as Towne himself has said. An even more irritating example is their discussion of the television series The Defenders. After admitting earlier that Reginald Rose wrote the Studio One teleplay which became the basis for the series, the authors then on page 53 seem to give more credit for the series to producer Herbert Brodkin and Albert Ruben, a writer who came on the series in the second year. Rose is reduced in the second paragraph of the section to "Among the other writers was Reginald Rose (1920-2002), who wrote many of the first year's shows." Rose was the show runner, and Brodkin said of Rose in a TV Guide interview, "He created it. He lives with it. He provides a consistent point of view." Perhaps the authors should look at more non-leftist sources.

All right then, what is the good news? As mentioned above, this book is a more nuanced look at the blacklistees and their work than Buhle and Wagner's previous books. They do seem to accept that people other than those of a leftist bent, and even, gulp, those who were friendly witnesses, may have actually contributed something to American film and television. A case in point is their handling of Roy Huggins, who was a friendly witness, and who later went on to create Maverick and The Rockford Files. He is portrayed with a degree of sympathy that is unexpected in Buhle and Wagner's work. The authors are also good at showing...