John Garfield was a popular Hollywood actor whose career was destroyed by the Red Scare; he suffered a heart attack and died in 1952.

      Unidentified publicity photo, authors’ personal collection.

In retrospect, the people targeted by HUAC during these years were disproportionately Jewish, homosexual, non‐white, or people struggling to organize the working classes – in other words, people who were legitimately critiquing the elitism of the white patriarchal capitalist ruling class. The heads of the studios used the Red Scare to weaken the power of labor unions in Hollywood, since unionizing seemed dangerously close to communism in those trying times. (A number of other industries also used this gambit against unions.) This type of communist “red baiting” came to an unofficial end around 1954 when Senator Joseph McCarthy (one of the leading alarmists who had used the Red Scare for his own political gain) was discredited and censured by Congress, after he alleged that the US Army itself was infiltrated by communists. Yet the blacklists that had been created in Hollywood and many other industries lingered well into the 1960s.

      Partly in response to the Red Scare, mainstream American culture throughout the 1950s stressed conformity to white patriarchal capitalist ideals, under the assumption that even discussing cultural difference or social inequity would be misconstrued as un‐American. Hollywood filmmakers deliberately avoided making films that might be understood as in any way critical of American foreign or domestic policy. Social problem films and film noir dried up as filmmakers became afraid that such movies could get them fired and/or blacklisted. Musicals, melodramas, lush historical romances, and Biblical epics became the mainstay of 1950s Hollywood film production, as these genres were felt to be safe and apolitical. The 1950s is often spoken about nostalgically as a time when people migrated to crime‐free suburbs to raise perfect nuclear families. Yet underneath that facade lay ugly reminders of social inequity that many people choose to forget. Many of those perfect neighborhoods were zoned to keep out blacks and/or Jews, women often chafed under the restrictions placed on them, and gay and lesbian people could be arrested and fired from their jobs for merely meeting in a bar.

      The Red Scare was not the only problem facing the Hollywood studios after the war. Postwar migration to the suburbs took customers away from urban areas where film theaters were located, and many preferred to stay home with their new television sets rather than drive to the movies. By 1960, about 90% of all American homes had TV. In an attempt to hold onto its audience, Hollywood responded with expansive technologies that TV did not have – widescreen formats, stereo sound, and color, as well as novelty techniques such as 3D. Even more dire, the Supreme Court declared in 1948 that the Hollywood industry had formed an illegal and oligopolistic business trust. The Paramount Consent Decrees (as the rulings became known) forced the Hollywood studios to dismantle their vertical integration throughout the 1950s. Hollywood companies chose to sell off their exhibition outlets as a way of complying with this decision. However, without guaranteed theaters to show their films, and with the loss of filmgoers to TV, the Hollywood studios were again forced to cut back production and whittle down their employee rosters. Many stars, directors, and writers became independent agents, no longer tied to one particular studio. This development, along with theaters that were now free to book non‐studio‐produced films, encouraged more independent filmmaking, even as the political climate of the 1950s did not exactly encourage independent thinking.

While Hollywood filmmakers aimed for a broad appeal that would offend no one, some independent filmmakers slowly ventured into less‐traveled territories. Rather than trying to sell films to everyone, many independent filmmakers aimed at smaller, specialized sections of the audience – teenagers, intellectuals, the socially concerned. Independent filmmakers learned that their films might alienate some customers, but would draw in others eager to see something more complex than the usual Hollywood fare. The Supreme Court had reversed itself in 1952 and declared that film was indeed an art form guaranteed protection under the First Amendment, and thus independent filmmakers began to deal with topics considered taboo by the Production Code, such as miscegenation or homosexuality. Yet most independent films during this period (and the Hollywood studio films that sought to imitate them) raised these topics only to uphold traditional beliefs.

      More forthright explorations of mid‐century social issues were to be found in other art forms and movements. Poets and artists who comprised the Beat movement criticized American class consciousness and sexual hypocrisy. The civil rights movement, fighting for equal rights for African Americans, burgeoned throughout the 1950s and eventually became more vocal, militant, and successful. By the 1960s, Native Americans, Hispanics, women, and homosexuals were also protesting for their civil rights. Many of these movements were closely linked to protests against American military involvement in Vietnam, and all of these movements were connected by a larger youth movement that openly challenged the conformity of the 1950s. The term counterculture is often used to describe this broad patchwork coalition of leftists, liberals, and libertarians who wanted to increase freedom for all members of society and bring an end to what they felt was an unjust war. “Sex, drugs, and rock and roll” became a mantra of this new social force. Since the personal was equated with the more broadly political, it was felt that social freedoms could be increased by expanding personal freedoms and vice versa.

      Hollywood had a difficult time dealing with the social changes of the 1960s. Many younger Americans, people of color, and women began to reject the stereotypes and simplistic formulas of Hollywood films, and turned instead to independent, foreign, and avant‐garde films (both as audiences and as filmmakers). As a result, by the end of the decade, several of the Hollywood majors were again on the verge of bankruptcy. As part of these financial shake‐ups, most of the major studios were being bought out by larger non‐filmic corporations such as Gulf and Western (absorbing Paramount) and Kinney (absorbing Warner Brothers). These new corporate managers were desperate to make Hollywood profitable once again, and they began to experiment with different sorts of movies and film styles in an attempt to address the counterculture’s concerns. Slowly, a few women and African American men began gaining a small degree of power in Hollywood. The studios began targeting specific sections of the population, most notably in what came to be known as blaxploitation films – cheaply made genre pictures that featured African American protagonists. However, still being Hollywood films, most of them failed to address in any significant way the deeper political issues of 1960s America.

“New” Hollywood and the Blockbuster Mentality

During this same period (the late 1960s and early 1970s), in yet another effort to tap into the interests of younger audiences, studios began to hire a new generation of filmmakers who had learned their craft in the growing number of film departments in American universities. Mostly white, male, and heterosexual, these so‐called Film School Brats (including George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola) reinvigorated the Hollywood industry throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Having studied film as an art, this new generation made films that reflected their knowledge of Hollywood (and global) film history. The Film School Brats revamped traditional genre formulas that