As yet, Hollywood’s political history continues to be dominated by a reliable stream of movies and memoirs decrying the headache from the Red Scare and how it victimized political innocents. But Ronald and Allis Radosh tell for the very first time the “backstory” behind this misconception. They show the way the Soviet Comintern targeted the film capital in the late 1920s, taking us in the cells and dialogue groupings that Communist Party people produced, the guilds and unions they attempted to take over, as well as the studios about Red Celebrity over Hollywood: The Film Colony’s Long Romance using the Still left they aimed to influence. The writers demonstrate that lots of of the screenwriters who later on became area of the Hollywood Ten in fact been successful in using film as a propaganda medium on behalf of the Soviet cause. While others had been lionizing them as blameless victims of American nativism and paranoia, the Hollywood Reds themselves were beset by doubts and disagreements about their disloyalty to America, and their own treatment from the Communist Party. Empty by their previous CP allies, they experienced the blacklist by itself.

Getting behind the denial and apologetics, Ronald and Allis Radosh tell the real story of one of the most discussed but least realized episodes in our political history, whose long half-life is constantly on the impact the equally turbulent cultural politics of today.