Echoes Of Laurel Canyon - CIA In Hollywood - Part Two
From First Days Of CIA And HUAC, It Was All About Compromise In LaLa Land
In this series, we have been chronicling how Washington DC took over Hollywood with the formation of the CIA after World War II in something I call Operation Hollywood.
The best way to get Hollywood writers to write scripts that you like is not to hold a Hollywood pool party with lots of nice hors d’oeuvres. The best way to get the attention of Hollywood writers is to put ten of them in jail for writing what you don’t want.
In the last post, we talked about the Hollywood Ten writers who were jailed for writing “pink” scripts that were sympathetic to the former World War II ally, the Soviet Union. These writers weren’t directly accused of being Communists, but rather, they were accused of writing scripts that were “UnAmerican.” That’s because a Congressional Committee that had begun before World War II and the CIA, the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, HUAC, was going to be repurposed in the Cold War propaganda, making any characterization of the Soviet Union in friendly terms a felonious activity.