So we wanted to paint a picture of who they were before the hearings.” “Many of them were involved in work that was very patriotic that was part of the war effort,” Thurston says, “and just two years later these actions would be held against them. One of them, “Hollywood and Anti-Fascism,” explores the lives of the Hollywood Ten before World War II. The Skirball presentation includes two new sections. Much of the exhibition text is original to the show, but about 100 of the 125 artifacts on view are unique to L.A. Thurston and the exhibition’s original curator, Ellie Gettinger, hunted down new objects from institutions and individuals around the U.S. “Hollywood Red Scare” already included items such as letters Hollywood Ten members Dalton Trumbo and Alvah Bessie had sent to their families while incarcerated, as well as newspaper and magazine articles about the blacklist from the time. “We wanted it to really speak to ‘this is a Los Angeles story,’” Thurston says. But the Skirball wanted a hyper-local exhibition with a larger gallery footprint that was, specifically, more robust in terms of the number of artifacts on view.
It was planned - and significantly expanded - in about 10 months.Īsking questions is central to Jewish tradition, Thurston says, and the Skirball appreciated the way the exhibition had been framed, using the blacklist as a sort of case study to inquire about civil rights and liberty today. Skirball director Sheri Bernstein and deputy director Michele Urton saw the exhibition at Baltimore’s Jewish Museum of Maryland in mid-2022 and instantly decided it must travel to Los Angeles, the center of the film industry.
Museum exhibitions are generally planned several years ahead of time. I think the blacklist is an interesting template to explore this through.” “From the rights of the LGBTQIA+ community to questions about cancel culture to questions of security - like what is a reasonable interference into one’s personal life from the government - none of this is new. This is a theme throughout our history, of having a hard time finding a way to forge across difference ideologically,” Thurston says. “This is not the first time we, as a country, have dealt with intense factionalization, intense division. Thurston’s grandparents were then “graylisted - guilty by association,” she says. Her great uncle Irwin Shaw, a screenwriter and author whose 1948 novel “The Young Lions” was later made into a film starring Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift and Dean Martin, was blacklisted. Her grandparents were story analysts and screenwriters for RKO Pictures, Paramount Pictures and MGM, among other studios. Thurston, a third-generation Angeleno who grew up in the San Fernando Valley, has a family connection to the exhibition.
It includes more than 100 rarely seen artifacts - scripts, telegrams, Oscar statuettes, film costumes, court documents - that tell the infamous story of the Hollywood blacklist. It was organized by the Jewish Museum Milwaukee in Wisconsin and centers, in part, on the Hollywood Ten, a group of eight screenwriters, one director and one producer who, when testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 about allegations of communist propaganda, refused to answer certain questions and were charged with contempt of Congress and sentenced to one year in jail. “Blacklist: The Hollywood Red Scare” is about a complex and not-so-proud moment in American history. For the Skirball Cultural Center’s Cate Thurston, serving as coordinating curator for the museum’s next big exhibition was deeply personal.
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