When filmmaker Arnie Reisman contacted former California governor and actor Ronald Reagan in the mid nineteen-seventies, he hardly expected an answer. Indeed Reisman had never spoken to him previously and was early in his career.
But he received a fateful call days after filing a request. Governor Reagan was all ears over the new project.
"Are you Mr. Reisman?" he heard Reagan's assistant inquire on the other end of the line. Seconds later, he was speaking to the governor himself.
"I'll do it," said Reagan. "Happy to." Reisman was a documentarian based in New York who hadn't yet scheduled a production trip to Los Angeles. "I'm not going to be there for a while," he explained. Reagan didn't hesitate. "Fine, so I'll do it when you get here."
That interview along with several others became the basis for Reisman's Academy-Award nominated documentary film, Hollywood On Trial released in 1976. It told the story of ten Hollywood artists who had been placed on a national blacklist dating back to the 1950's. Blacklisted individuals were threatened, ostracized and lived in fear of their neighbors for speaking on topics considered related to Communism or allegedly belonging to the Communist Party.
As a result of being on the blacklist, the artists profiled in Reisman's project were fired from their jobs, jailed and subsequently prevented from operating openly in Hollywood, although several continued to do so in secret.
By the time Reisman began work on the project, the Vietnam War was coming to a close. Screenwriters and producers on the unofficial but notorious list that existed throughout Los Angeles were still fearful to finally reveal, nearly twenty years since the blacklisting had started, that such a list existed. The implications of being on the list had been terrifying enough that some worried about being identified even once production of his film got underway.
"When people heard what we were making a film about, they didn't want to speak to us," Reisman noted at the "Murrow Forum" dinner held last week at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. The fora celebrated First Amendment rights and free expression as well as the legacy of courageous CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow.
Reisman had arrived to tell about his experiences along with other journalists and artists familiar with the Second Red Scare and McCarthy era.
Also present at dinner and the subsequent discussion, led by Murrow Center director and journalist Crocker Snow, were Casey Murrow, son of reporter Edward R. Murrow, David Viola, producer of another documentary on blacklisting, Trumbo, as well as Lynne Olson, Murrow's biographer. Olson served as a journalist for the Associated Press for nearly a decade before penning two books on Murrow's life and a number of others on the World War II era.
The Murrow Forum is an annual event held at Tufts University that seeks to highlight topics the late reporter might himself have spoken on had he gained the chance now. The documentary, Trumbo, about screenwriter Dalton Trumbo's life, screened two days earlier on April 12. Though he spent much of his life on the blacklist, Trumbo was posthumously awarded an Oscar for his most famous screenplay Roman Holiday, and the Trumbo documentary featured rare archival footage, letters and interviews with the writer. The film recounts the experiences of Trumbo and his family waiting in isolation, hoping to be publicly reintegrated. Trumbo died without ever openly acknowledging another Oscar he had received while he lived, for a film The Brave One, which he wrote under a pseudonym.
Edward R. Murrow, the inspiration for the week's events, is most closely identified with his confrontation with Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy. Murrow, like the Hollywood Ten profiled in Reisman's film, spoke out against the government's efforts to scapegoat Communist sympathizers on his weekly news broadcast, See It Now. He sought to discredit the idea that Communists and Communist sympathizers should be outcasted for expressing dissenting views. At the time his four-part series on patriotism aired, Murrow was under significant pressure by his employer, CBS, to abandon his political positions, though he refused. Instead he called out McCarthy for his venom, questioned the Senator's patriotism and openly distanced himself from the statesman's goals to expose sympathizers. For those broadcasts, Murrow drew criticism from his viewers and jeopardized his job at the nation's most powerful television station.
Murrow's family was also deliberately targeted. His son, Casey Murrow, present at last week's discussion, noted how fearful his family was at the time his father's shows aired. The younger Murrow was surprised at his father's calm under the circumstances, but learned little of the kidnapping and threats against them until he was much older. "I had no idea [the threats] were going on. I was just seven or eight at the time." Casey Murrow was routed to school and back home with greater care but had little knowledge for the reasons behind the increased precautions.
The event elicited follow-up questions on a range of current concerns. The audience engaged on present day questions of speech and free expression and the present-day blacklisting of the popular all-female band from Texas, the Dixie-Chicks -- who were declared unpatriotic and dropped by sponsors for criticizing the Iraq war. A debate over net neutrality as well as the benefits and costs to the corporate financing of media programs during political campaigns also followed.
Murrow's biographer, Lynne Olson, who has written definitive accounts of Murrow's broadcasts during World War II and his work with CBS, shared highlights from Murrow's past and focused on the implications his legacy has on the news business today. She noted the venerated reporter would likely have taken issue with the tepid nature of much of the cable-based mainstream media coverage on the air. In particular, she spoke to Murrow's experiences reporting during wars. "Murrow would have been more than a bit surprised about how little journalists pressed the government in the lead-up to the 2003 war. Murrow was tenacious. He likely would not have accepted that the media gave in as easily as they did [before letting the country go to war in Iraq]."
The Murrow Center at Tufts University houses many of Edward R Murrow's personal letters and documents. More about the Center, based at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, on the program's website... For a tape of the talk, contact Julie Dobrow, director of the communications and media studies program at Tufts at Julie.Dobrow@tufts.edu.