Reverse Angle on Reagan

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Reagan is making the rounds and the establishment media wonder about the timing. The film, starring Dennis Quaid, emerges during a presidential election campaign, and on March 30, 1981, President Reagan survived an assassination attempt. Former president Donald Trump did the same on July 13, 2024, and both survivors are conservative Republicans. In another parallel, Ronald Reagan was a key combatant in a cultural and political battle like the one now going on in America.

Reagan came up through the Hollywood studio system, for the left a perfect model of monopoly capitalism. The moguls lived like royalty and held full sway over actors, directors and workers alike. In Hollywood: The Dream Factory, anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker compared it to a system of slavery. For his part, Lenin admired the cinema’s ability to alter reality and considered it the greatest of all art forms. Communist International (Comintern) official Willi Munzenberg sought to wrest the American movie industry from the moguls and turn it against them.

During the 1930s the Communist Party USA, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Soviet Union, achieved deep inroads in the back-lot union and so-called talent guilds. As Budd Schulberg (What Makes Sammy Run?) noted, the Party was the only game in town. In the studio system the Communists held little sway over movie content, but Party activists enjoyed great success at quashing projects that portrayed America, capitalism and religion in a favorable light. In the waning days of World War II, the conflict broke wide open.

The Communists sought to unify all studio labor in a single organization they controlled, the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU) headed by Herb Sorrell of the painters’ union. The Communists were also strong in the Writer’s Guild, where Party straw boss John Howard Lawson (Blockade) held forth. Stalinist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (Kitty Foyle) wrote speeches for pro-CSU actresses such as Katharine Hepburn. New Deal Democrat Ronald Reagan was initially on their side but became aware of Communists efforts to shift policy toward the CSU.

Reagan found support from performers such as Olivia de Havilland, who won a landmark ruling against the studios’ seven-year contracts. Reagan’s ally in the backlot unions was fellow New Deal Democrat Roy Brewer, a former projectionist who headed the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE).  As I described at length in Hollywood Party, the battle soon raged outside every studio.

The Communists found another ally in Stalinist longshoremen’s union boss Harry Bridges, who sent goon squads from San Francisco. For a time the outcome was in doubt, but the Reagan-Brewer alliance prevailed. The bulk of the conflict took place before the 1947 Hollywood hearings, an event still shrouded in leftist mythology.

The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA) was looking for Comintern agent Gerhart Eisler, whose brother Hanns Eisler was a composer in Hollywood. When the committee came to interview him, many actors and writers came forth with stories about battles with the Communists. These insiders became the committee’s “friendly witnesses,” while some 45 others hostile to the committee became the “Unfriendly 19.” Only a few were talented, quipped Billy Wilder, the rest were just unfriendly.

The 19 were then cut down to the famous Hollywood Ten: Alvah Bessie, Herb Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr.,  John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott and Dalton Trumbo, who in 1945 wrote the speech of Secretary of State Edward  Stettinius at the opening of the United Nations. As they say, politics is downstream from culture.

In hearings before a California committee, some of the ten had testified that they were not Communists, so to admit Party membership to the HCUA would be troublesome. In the famous 1947 hearing, the ten simply bellowed nonsense, to the great disappointment of liberal supporters such as Humphrey Bogart and John Huston.

Before the hearings, studio bosses said they would not fire Communists but after the Ten’s performance they changed their tune. This led to the famous “Hollywood Blacklist,” which Trumbo dodged by writing under fake names. By the 1960s the blacklist was over and Trumbo scripted films including The Sandpiper and Papillon, in which he appears as a prison commandant.

By the 1950s Reagan’s best film work was behind him, but the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) leader made a mark as a television host before going into politics. As governor of California, Reagan called out Angela Davis, winner of the Lenin Peace Prize and Communist Party USA candidate for vice president in 1980 and 1984 on a ticket with the Stalinist Gus Hall. Ronald Reagan and George Bush trounced them, and the Democrats, both times. As president, Reagan’s war with the studio Stalinists served him well.

His strategy on the Cold War was “we win, they lose,” which infuriated the Hollywood left, by then making a comeback of sorts. The big screen featured leftist hagiography such as Warren Beatty’s Reds, Woody Allen’s The Front and Irwin Winkler’s Guilty by Suspicion. The common villain in these movies is “McCarthyism,” though the senator from Wisconsin had nothing to do with Hollywood. Senators do not sit on House committees and it was the studios, not the government, that blacklisted the Stalinist screenwriters. Their disciples weren’t so much pro-Soviet as anti-American.

As Richard Grenier (The Marrakesh One-Two) explained, for the Hollywood left America is evil and capitalism is bad – except for their three-picture deals, bank accounts, Malibu mansions and such. So no surprise that they slapped a blacklist on movies about Communism. For example, film fans see little if anything on the Stalin-Hitler Pact that started World War II in September 1939, when both totalitarian regimes invaded Poland.

During the Pact, Stalin handed Jews directly to the Gestapo, as Margarete Buber-Neumann explained in Under Two Dictators, Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler. That exchange has yet to reach the big screen and film fans don’t see Communists killing people, which they did by the multi-millions. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge murdered from 25-47 percent of a population of seven million, many by beatings, strangulation, hanging or cut throats.  The Killing Fields, from 1984, shows only the bones of the dead, but viewers do see American planes dropping bombs.

One of the few examples of cinéma vérité on Communism is Disney’s 1982 Night Crossing, about the Strelzyk and Wetzel families escape from East Germany in a homemade hot-air balloon. At the Brandenburg Gate on June 12, 1987, Ronald Reagan told Soviet boss Mikhail Gorbachev to  “tear down this wall.” Two years later the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, duly smashed to rubble by people yearning to breathe free and speak above a whisper. For the most part, Hollywood looked the other way, but the studio Stalinists remained a hot property.

The 2015 Trumbo disguised the Communist scribe as a misguided liberal, persecuted for his political beliefs. By contrast, the anti-Communist Ronald Reagan didn’t get a feature film until 2024 and the people seem to like it. It’s now safe, and profitable, to portray American patriots in a favorable light, regardless of political party.

When Ronald Reagan was battling the Hollywood Communists, future president John F. Kennedy was in Hollywood working as a journalist. Peter Collier wrote about it in his last book, Things in Glocca Morra. As Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) might say, that’s a terrific story and many actors would love to play JFK in his 20s. So filmmakers have at it. If you don’t capture the culture, somebody else will.