The Politics of Hollywood's Writers

Looking back it seems that Hollywood's writers have, by the standards of its higher-profile personnel, been particularly conspicuous in the history of radicalism in the film industry. The Hollywood Ten were, in the main, writers--and so it seems were the victims of the blacklist.

One may wonder at that. I suppose one reason is that writers are a less privileged group in Hollywood than, for instance, actors and directors, with all that means for questioning the status quo.

It may also matter that a writer, more than an actor or a director (assuming he just directs), is less able to avoid engagement with ideas, which includes socially critical ideas, with all that means for their politics not staying inside the mainstream; and whatever ideas they have are more likely to manifest in their work in an obvious way.

Of course, to go by what we see on the screen the writing that comes out of Hollywood appears deeply conformist, conventional, respectful of mainstream pieties. (In his great book on American film of the 1950s Peter Biskind quipped that in right-wing films self-made millionaires are as common as the masses in the films of the left. Guess which you saw more of when he was writing--and how things have tended since?) Still, what gets put on the screen is only what other, more powerful, individuals are willing to back--individuals who very clearly hold, and help make, those conformist, conventional, mainstream views. Any other impulses would only seem to rarely come out--with, if Succession is all some of its admirers make it out to be, suggestive of hidden depths.

Albeit, very, very well-hidden depths.