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Judy Holliday won an Oscar for her first starring film role (in Born Yesterday) and of her eight major film roles between 1950 and 1960, four were in films now considered classics. She was one star who was subpoenaed to testify about her ties to Communism who was fully supported by her studio and subsequently wasn’t blacklisted from movies. Holliday’s career was short-lived nonetheless, in part because she represented a highly idiosyncratic, working-class, urban, Jewish authenticity in a time when conformity was being peddled as an equivalent to safety.
Show notes:
Here is a list of published sources that the entire season draws from:
The Red and the Blacklist: An Intimate Memoir of a Hollywood Expatriate by Norma Barzman
Dalton Trumbo: Blacklisted Hollywood Radical by Larry Ceplair and Christopher Trumbo
Trumbo: A biography of the Oscar-winning screenwriter who broke the Hollywood blacklist by Bruce Cook
When Hollywood Was Right: How Movie Stars, Studio Moguls, and Big Business Remade American Politics by Donald T. Critchlow
Odd Man Out: A Memoir of the Hollywood Ten by Edward Dmytryk
City of Nets by Otto Friedrich
Hollywood Radical, Or How I Learned to Love the Blacklist by Bernard Gordon
I Said Yes to Everything by Lee Grant
Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War by J. Hoberman
Naming Names by Victor S. Navasky
West of Eden: An American Place by Jean Stein
The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930-60 by Larry Ceplair
Sources specific to this episode:
The Un-Americans: Jews, the Blacklist, and Stoolpigeon Culture by Joseph Litvak
Judy Holliday: An Intimate Life Story by Gary Carey
“‘Washington Gone Crazy’: Nativist Son” by David Greenberg
“Judy Holliday’s Urban Working Girl Characters From 1950s Film” by Judith E. Scott
This episode was edited by Henry Molofsky, and produced by Karina Longworth with the assistance of Lindsey D. Schoenholtz. Our logo was designed by Teddy Blanks.