James Dalton Trumbo was an American screenwriter who scripted many award-winning films, including Roman Holiday (1953), Exodus, Spartacus, and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944). One of the Hollywood Ten, he refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947 during the committee's investigation of alleged Communist influences in the motion picture industry.
Otto Ludwig Preminger was an Austrian-American theatre and film director, film producer, and actor. He directed more than 35 feature films in a five-decade career after leaving the theatre. He first gained attention for film noir mysteries such as Laura (1944) and Fallen Angel (1945), while in the 1950s and 1960s, he directed high-profile adaptations of popular novels and stage works. Several of these later films pushed the boundaries of censorship by dealing with themes which were then taboo in Hollywood, such as drug addiction, rape and homosexuality. He was twice nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director. He also had several acting roles.
Gentleman's Agreement is a 1947 American drama film based on Laura Z. Hobson's best-selling 1947 novel of the same title. The film is about a journalist who pretends to be Jewish to research an exposé on the widespread antisemitism in New York City and the affluent communities of New Canaan and Darien, Connecticut. It was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won three: Best Picture, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Director.
McCarthyism, also known as the Second Red Scare, was the political repression and persecution of left-wing individuals and a campaign spreading fear of communist and Soviet influence on American institutions and of Soviet espionage in the United States during the late 1940s through the 1950s. After the mid-1950s, U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy, who had spearheaded the campaign, gradually lost his public popularity and credibility after several of his accusations were found to be false. The U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren made a series of rulings on civil and political rights that overturned several key laws and legislative directives, and helped bring an end to the Second Red Scare. Historians have suggested since the 1980s that as McCarthy's involvement was less central than that of others, a different and more accurate term should be used instead that more accurately conveys the breadth of the phenomenon, and that the term McCarthyism is, in the modern day, outdated. Ellen Schrecker has suggested that Hooverism, after FBI Head J. Edgar Hoover, is more appropriate.
Joseph Walton Losey III was an American theatre and film director, producer, and screenwriter. Born in Wisconsin, he studied in Germany with Bertolt Brecht and then returned to the United States. Blacklisted by Hollywood in the 1950s, he moved to Europe where he made the remainder of his films, mostly in the United Kingdom. Among the most critically and commercially successful were the films with screenplays by Harold Pinter: The Servant (1963) and The Go-Between (1971).
John Garfield was an American actor who played brooding, rebellious, working-class characters. He grew up in poverty in New York City. In the early 1930s, he became a member of the Group Theatre. In 1937, he moved to Hollywood, eventually becoming one of Warner Bros.' stars. He received Academy Award nominations for his performances in Four Daughters (1938) and Body and Soul (1947).
Robert Lees was an American television and film screenwriter. Lees was best known for writing comedy, including several Abbott and Costello films.
Irwin Winkler is an American film producer and director. He is the producer or director of over 58 motion pictures, dating back to 1967's Double Trouble, starring Elvis Presley. The fourth film he produced, They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969), starring Jane Fonda, was nominated for nine Academy Awards. He won an Oscar for Best Picture for 1976's Rocky. As a producer, he has been nominated for Best Picture for four films: Rocky (1976), Raging Bull (1980), The Right Stuff (1983), and Goodfellas (1990).
John Howard Lawson was an American writer, specializing in plays and screenplays. After starting with plays for theaters in New York City, he worked in Hollywood on writing for films. He was the first president of the Writers Guild of America, West after the Screen Writers Guild divided into two regional organizations.
Herbert J. Biberman was an American screenwriter and film director. He was one of the Hollywood Ten and directed Salt of the Earth (1954), a film barely released in the United States, about a zinc miners' strike in Grant County, New Mexico. His membership in the Directors Guild of America was posthumously restored in 1997; he had been expelled in 1950.
Abraham Lincoln Polonsky was an American film director, screenwriter, essayist and novelist. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Body and Soul but in the early 1950s was blacklisted by Hollywood movie studios after refusing to testify at congressional hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee in the midst of the McCarthy era.
Claire Dodd was an American film actress.
Mary Louise Comingore, known professionally as Dorothy Comingore, was an American film actress. She starred as Susan Alexander Kane in Citizen Kane (1941), the critically acclaimed debut film of Orson Welles. In earlier films she was credited as Linda Winters, and she had appeared on the stage as Kay Winters. Her career ended when she was caught in the Hollywood blacklist. She declined to answer questions when she was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952.
Martin Gang was an American lawyer. Gang was a graduate of Harvard and the Boalt Law School, and was known for providing legal aid to victims of the 1940s and 1950s Hollywood blacklist. Martin Gang was involved in the founding of the American law firm now known as Gang, Tyre, Ramer, Brown & Passman, Inc., and remained within the firm from 1931 to his death.
John Berry was an American film director, who went into exile in France when his career was interrupted by the Hollywood blacklist.
The Hollywood blacklist was an entertainment industry blacklist put in effect in the mid-20th century in the United States during the early years of the Cold War, in Hollywood and elsewhere. Actors, screenwriters, directors, musicians, and other American entertainment professionals were barred from work by the studios.
Red, Hot and Blue is a 1949 American musical comedy film directed by John Farrow and starring Betty Hutton, Victor Mature, William Demarest and June Havoc. It was released by Paramount Pictures. Hutton plays an actress who gets mixed up with gangsters and murder. Frank Loesser wrote the songs and plays a key role. The film has no connection to Cole Porter's play of the same name.
The Blacklist is an American crime thriller television series created by Jon Bokenkamp and developed by John Eisendrath. It stars James Spader as Raymond Reddington, an international criminal and one of the FBI's Most Wanted fugitives who cooperates with the FBI in hunting down other criminals on his "Blacklist". The series also stars Megan Boone, Diego Klattenhoff, Ryan Eggold, Amir Arison, Hisham Tawfiq, and Harry Lennix.
My Son John is a 1952 American political drama film directed by Leo McCarey and starring Helen Hayes, Van Heflin, Robert Walker and Dean Jagger. Walker plays the title character, a middle-class college graduate whom his parents suspect may be a communist spy.
"Pilot" is the pilot episode of the first season of the American crime drama The Blacklist. The episode premiered in the United States on NBC on September 23, 2013. It was written by series creator Jon Bokenkamp and was directed by Joe Carnahan.
