The Fall of the Studios: HUAC, the Blacklist, and the Paramount Decree

In late October 1947, a chartered plane carrying some of the most famous faces in America flew east from Los Angeles toward Washington, D.C. Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall were aboard. So were the director John Huston, the songwriter Ira Gershwin, and the dancer Gene Kelly. They called themselves the Committee for the First Amendment, and they flew into the teeth of a congressional hearing that had summoned Hollywood to answer one poisonous question: was the movie business full of Communists? The stars believed their glamour and their principles would shame the inquisitors into silence. They were wrong, and within months some of them would be quietly apologizing for having gone at all.

"Are you now, or have you ever been?"

The hearings had opened on October 20 in a packed Washington caucus room, chaired by Representative J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey. The House Un-American Activities Committee began with "friendly" witnesses, studio chiefs and stars who agreed the industry harbored subversives. Jack Warner named writers he suspected of slipping propaganda into scripts. Walt Disney blamed Communists for a 1941 strike at his studio. Screen Actors Guild president Ronald Reagan testified more cautiously, warning against trading one fear for another. The novelist Ayn Rand complained that MGM's wartime Song of Russia had made life under Stalin look pleasant.

Then came the unfriendly witnesses. Ten screenwriters and directors, among them John Howard Lawson, Ring Lardner Jr., Albert Maltz, Edward Dmytryk, and Dalton Trumbo, one of the best-paid writers in the business, refused to say whether they had ever belonged to the Communist Party. Invoking the First Amendment rather than the Fifth, they traded shouts with the chairman and were gaveled down or hauled from the stand. Congress cited all ten for contempt. The Committee for the First Amendment, watching its heroes look less like martyrs than hecklers, lost its nerve. Bogart soon published a magazine piece titled "I'm No Communist."

The men who ran Hollywood surrender

In late November 1947, forty-eight studio executives gathered behind closed doors at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York. Eric Johnston, president of the Motion Picture Association, emerged with a two-page statement. The studios would fire the Hollywood Ten and would hire no known Communist:

We will not knowingly employ a Communist or a member of any party or group which advocates the overthrow of the government of the United States by force or by any illegal or unconstitutional methods.

It was the birth of the blacklist. The men who ran the studios had insisted for weeks that they would never bend to political pressure; faced with bad press and the threat of boycotts, they bent in a single afternoon. The Ten exhausted their appeals and went to prison in 1950, most for up to a year. In a turn worthy of a studio script, Thomas was himself convicted of padding his congressional payroll and sent to the federal prison at Danbury, Connecticut, where two of the men he had helped jail, Lester Cole and Ring Lardner Jr., were serving their own sentences.

The slower catastrophe

While the hearings seized the headlines, a quieter disaster was grinding through the courts. The government had first sued the studios in 1938, and the case outlasted the war. On May 3, 1948, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Paramount Pictures that the studio system's grip on its own product was illegal. For decades the majors had been vertically integrated: they made films, distributed them, and owned the theaters that showed them. Through block booking, they forced independent exhibitors to take a whole season's output sight unseen in order to get the handful of pictures audiences actually wanted.

The Court ordered an end to block booking and, more devastating, to "divorcement." The studios had to sell off their theater chains. The theaters were where the money was: the majors owned only a minority of the nation's screens but controlled the first-run downtown palaces that set terms for everyone else. RKO, already faltering under Howard Hughes, was the first to capitulate, and the others followed over the next several years, Paramount splitting its production arm from its theaters in 1949. The guaranteed outlet that had let a studio green-light fifty pictures a year and know each would play somewhere was gone.

The empty seats

Then the audience left. The threat came not from a rival studio but from a box in the living room. In 1948 almost no American home had a television; by 1955 roughly two-thirds did. Weekly movie attendance, which had reached its all-time peak just after the war, fell by nearly half over the following decade. Stripped of guaranteed theaters and a captive audience at the same moment, the studios trimmed their rosters, sold off backlots, and let their long-term contracts with stars lapse. The factory model, hundreds of pictures a year turned out by salaried talent on seven-year deals, no longer paid for itself.

The long shadow

The blacklist proved harder to kill than the studio system that spawned it. Barred from taking screen credit, Dalton Trumbo kept writing under fronts and pseudonyms, and twice won Academy Awards he could not claim. Roman Holiday took the best-story Oscar in 1954 under the name of his front, Ian McLellan Hunter. The Brave One won the same prize three years later, credited to "Robert Rich," a name that belonged to no one who could walk to the podium. Only in the 1970s did the Academy quietly reissue those statuettes in Trumbo's name.

The wall finally cracked in 1960, when Kirk Douglas let Trumbo take screen credit for Spartacus and Otto Preminger announced him as the writer of Exodus. Naming a blacklisted man in the titles, once unthinkable, suddenly drew more admiration than outrage. By then the world that had produced the crisis was already gone. The theaters were sold, the contract rosters thinned, the audience scattered toward television. What remained still called itself Hollywood, but it had become a marketplace of independent producers, agents, and one-off deals, the shape of the industry the next era would inherit.