Kubrick and Douglas made Paths Of Glory together then Douglas decided to champion an even bigger outsider, a blacklisted screenwriter named Dalton Trumbo who adapted the novel Spartacus, written by another convicted Communist, Howard Fast. He rose to fame and founded his own production company, Bryna, named after his mother-and then discovered Stanley Kubrick, a young director Douglas decided to champion after seeing his first film. Douglas entered this Hollywood world as a young stage actor raised in upstate New York by two Russian immigrant parents. The careers of many both up-and-coming as well as established actors, screenwriters and directors were ruined-as, often, were their lives. The studio heads met at the Waldorf-Astoria and agreed to blacklist anyone named as a sympathizer, and anyone who had testified they had once been affiliated with a named “Communist front” group. With the whole country terrified of communism, the HUAC hearings focused on the film industry as a supposed hotbed of Communist activity. Kirk Douglas, leading man and Hollywood legend, is the perfect person to recall the different evolutions and eras of Hollywood and in his latest memoir I Am Spartacus!: Making A Film, Breaking The Blacklist(Open Road Media), Douglas chronicles a particularly disturbing time in Hollywood history. Hollywood has a unique and shocking history: sometimes the shimmering success of the film business shaped the world for good, but its dark chapters influenced American history just as strongly.
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