This book uses a wide range of primary and secondary sources, including government records, interviews, oral histories, feature and documentary films, memoirs, scholarly works, and newspaper and magazine articles. The major archival collections that I used are listed in the Bibliography. The people whom I interviewed or consulted with are listed in the Acknowledgements.
The literature of the Hollywood blacklist is voluminous and constantly expanding, but the two most enduring books were originally published in 1980: The Inquisition in Hollywood by Larry Ceplair and Stephen Englund, a comprehensive account of the blacklist period; and Naming Names by Victor Navasky, his “moral detective story” about the meaning and consequences of testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Since then several thousand documents have become public that have expanded and enriched our knowledge about HUAC, the FBI, and the blacklist. Since 2001 the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington has released ninety-four boxes of executive session transcripts, eighty-nine boxes of investigative materials, and 682 linear feet of File and Reference materials from HUAC’s files. The National Archives is still in the process of processing and releasing thousands of FBI documents from that era. Meanwhile, many essential documents from the FBI’s sixteen-year investigation into Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry are available on fourteen reels of microfilm compiled and indexed by Professor Daniel J. Leab of Seton Hall University. The materials helped me find more definitive answers to questions about the behind-closed-doors testimony of Carl Foreman, Martin Berkeley, and other HUAC witnesses and about the partnership between the FBI and HUAC in their separate but collaborative pursuit of those they targeted as subversive.
Larry Ceplair has gone on to write at least four more books and numerous articles on the blacklist, work that has established him as the era’s most authoritative historian. Nancy Lynn Schwartz’s The Hollywood Writers’ Wars, published in 1982, remains the most thorough account of the birth and life of the Screen Writers Guild and how its history and that of the blacklist are entwined. Rebecca Prime’s Hollywood Exiles in Europe is a welcome recent addition to the literature. There are many memoirs by blacklisted writers and others whose lives were touched by events. My personal favorites are Inside Out by Walter Bernstein, and Odd Man Out by Edward Dmytryk, the former a backlistee and master storyteller, the latter one of those who named names; and I Am Spartacus!, a spirited reminiscence by Kirk Douglas. Betty Garrett’s memoir, Betty Garrett and Other Songs, is an exuberant yet poignant remembrance of her life in show business and of her late husband, Larry Parks, and the personal and professional ordeal he went through. A Very Dangerous Citizen by Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner chronicles the life and times of Abe Polonsky, one of the most gifted writers and directors to be blacklisted.
Steven J. Ross’s Hollywood Left and Right places the blacklist in the context of Hollywood’s political history, while J. Hoberman’s An Army of Phantoms captures the paranoia and anxieties of the era as reflected in its motion pictures. The documentary film Red Hollywood by Thom Andersen and Noël Burch explores the feature films of those who were blacklisted and punctures the myth that their work was inconsequential. Michael Kazin’s American Dreamers and Ellen Schrecker’s Many Are the Crimes strike a careful balance between criticism and sympathy for those who joined the American Communist Party in the 1930s and 40s, while the books of John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, informed by the release of the Venona papers, offer an important counter-perspective. Athan Theoharis’s Chasing Spies is a well-researched account of the FBI’s egregious mistakes and misconduct in the pursuit of alleged Soviet spies and subversives. The memoirs of Dore Schary and Philip Dunne recount the dilemmas faced by two sincere liberals who tried and failed to thwart the blacklist.
Although they are largely available online, the most useful and evocative collection of Hedda Hopper’s columns are in her scrapbooks donated to the Margaret Herrick Library; original, bound volumes of the Hollywood Reporter are available at the Main Reading Room and the Moving Image Research Center at the Library of Congress. Finally, no study of the era is complete without Tender Comrades, an extraordinarily resonant collection of oral histories edited by Buhle and Patrick McGilligan.
As my book makes clear, the controversy over who was responsible for the brilliance of High Noon remains as bitter as the ideological conflicts of the era. Stanley Kramer and Fred Zinnemann both wrote compelling memoirs of their life and work. Gary Cooper did not, but Jeffrey Meyers’s Gary Cooper: American Hero is a well-researched biography. Gary Cooper Off Camera by his daughter, Maria Cooper Janis, is required reading for anyone wanting to understand the man and his work. The Gary Cooper online scrapbook at www.garycoopersscrapbook.proboards.com is an exhaustive compendium of articles and photographs from four decades of Cooper’s professional life, and includes all six parts of the 1956 Saturday Evening Post series that Maria Cooper Janis says offers the most authentic version of her father’s voice. Patricia Neal’s brutally frank memoir, As I Am, is also essential reading. But nothing is more essential than watching Cooper’s greatest and not-so-greatest films to see a cinematic artist and craftsman at work. Besides High Noon, my personal favorites are Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Meet John Doe, in which Cooper embodies with passion and humor Frank Capra’s vision of heroic populism.
Carl Foreman was never able to complete his autobiography, but he recorded several dozen hours of taped interviews conducted by his good friend John Weaver. Some of the transcripts are in the Foreman Collection at the British Film Institute library in London, as are transcripts of Foreman’s four-part 1976 lecture at the American Film Institute on the making of High Noon. More complete copies of the interview transcripts are in the possession of the Foreman family and of Lionel Chetwynd, who used these materials in the making of his 2002 documentary, Darkness at High Noon. The transcripts I had access to were copies of copies, and many lack dates and page numbers. Chetwynd and his staff also conducted more than a dozen interviews with Foreman’s friends and colleagues that are an invaluable resource for understanding the man and his times. Other revealing documentaries about the film and the blacklist are Word Into Image: Writers on Screenwriting, a thirty-minute session with Foreman, published in 1984; and Leonard Maltin’s The Making of High Noon. The Maltin documentary, first issued in 1992, is included in the two-disc sixtieth anniversary DVD edition of High Noon, a trove of documentary features and nuggets.
As for the making of the movie itself, Phillip Drummond’s High Noon, part of the British Film Institute’s excellent series of film books, is a thorough account, as is John Byman’s Showdown at High Noon, which covers the facts about the movie and the blacklist. Michael F. Blake’s Code of Honor also thoroughly recounts the details of the making of the film. Rudy Behlmer’s America’s Favorite Movies is a brisk but thoroughly researched account. Thomas Schatz’s The Genius of the System and Jeanine Basinger’s The Star Machine are deeply informed studies of the political economy of the studio system and its stars, and Neal Gabler’s An Empire of Their Own is a highly original look at the Jewish moguls who invented Hollywood.
There are many interviews with Foreman, Kramer, and Zinnemann that briefly discuss their work together and their individual contributions to High Noon. Two of the best are George Stevens Jr.’s discussions with Kramer and Zinnemann published in his Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age. But the most valuable concerning the making of High Noon are several audiotaped interviews from the 1970s that remain untranscribed in whole or part. These include film historian Rudy Behlmer’s interviews with Carl Foreman and Elmo Williams, which can be accessed via an iPod at the Margaret Herrick Library in Beverly Hills; and screenwriter Michael A. Hoey’s audio interviews with Stanley Kramer, Lloyd Bridges, and Floyd Crosby, which are stored on compact disk at the University of Southern California’s Cinematic Arts Library.