Buhle and Wagner vs. 'Martin Brady'.

The anonymous screenwriter who says his "nom de guerre" is "Martin Brady" ("A Litany of Errors" in Letters, Cineaste, Vol. XXIX, No. 3) has proved that the very best copy editor is one who reads with a malicious eye. Thanks to this principle we have been able to improve on the paperback edition of Hide in Plain Sight, due for release in November, by changing an 'o' to an 'a'; deleting an 'l' (once) and an 'h' (twice). An apostrophe will be added deep in the text, along with an 'a' and an 'e' and a capita] 'W." We are also changing 'girlfriend' to 'wife,' 'Robert' to 'Frank,' 'detective' to 'crime,' and 'Anglos' to 'gringos.'

We are also making a few more significant corrections. Although friendlier sources alerted us to some of them first, Anonymous has caught us out in a couple of errors that have caused us sincere regret: a reversal of the two leading characters in The Molly Maguires and, because of a copying error, the misattribution to Raymond Durgnat of a line that is in fact David Caute's paraphrase of Durgnat. The line, "Losey made the soul 'the battleground' where victory is lucidity," which Anonymous accuses us of "making up," can be found in its entirety in Caute's biography of Losey (page 465), with Caute's footnote to Durgnat. Earlier, Ron Simon had caught errors in the dates of two historically important TV productions. On these points and a very few others, we can only share Samuel Johnson's lament that in writing books, "sudden fits of inadvertency will surprize vigilance ... and casual eclipses of the mind will darken learning."

Few if any of the remaining errors that Anonymous has piled up will find their way into the new edition as corrections, however. That's because they are not errors at all. We will be happy to provide anyone who bought or read a hardcover copy of Hide in Plain Sight with the complete list of corrections that will appear in the book's next edition (e mail the request to [e-mail]). Meanwhile, we ask the readers' patience while we use this space to climb through the thicket of Anonymous' accusations before moving on to the interesting question of the motives of the man lurking behind the silly and self-romanticizing notion behind the "nom de guerre."

Item. Anonymous said we wrote: "Broadway Danny Rose takes place in 'the 1930s 1940s.'" What we actually wrote: "[Allen] brilliantly recalled the undercurrents of Jewish popular life of the 1930s 1940s in films like Broadway Danny Rose (1984) and Radio Days (1987)."

Item. Anonymous said we wrote: "Accident is 'often overlooked' in considerations of its director Joseph Losey and screenwriter Harold Pinter." What we actually wrote: "Losey biographer David Caute states flatly, with no need for insistence, that the pair's next collaboration, Accident, is the director's best film. Not many students of Losey's films would dispute this judgment." (The public did not share their enthusiasm.)

Item. "Accident and The Go-Between were made 'during the blacklist.'" What we wrote: "Taken as a whole, the three films [Losey-Pinter collaborations] mark the highpoint of Marxian filmmaking during the blacklist." Anonymous apparently is not aware that Losey remained on the Hollywood blacklist and was never allowed to work in the United States after his exile.

Item. Anonymous says we called Dalton Trumbo's Hawaii "bomb." We never wrote that, but on this and a number of other films we did dare to make critical judgments that Anonymous disapproved of and shuffled into his list of "errors." Another exam pie is The Bridge Over the River Kwai, in which we summarized in a single sentence three alternative popular interpretations of the film to illustrate the point that its politics are elusive (p. 163). Our own views of Kwai were reserved for a different volume.

Item. "When Time Ran Out features 'veteran progressive Eddie Albert.'" What we wrote: "When Time Ran Out (1980), with Paul Newman and a host of others, including veteran progressives Eddie Albert and Burgess Meredith, was a catastrophe...." Apparently Anonymous is unfamiliar with Eddie Albert's biography.

Item. "Lawrence of Arabia was practically the end of Sam Spiegel's career." He made more films but none compared to Lawrence. On this same film and the reference to Robert Bolt as the "first" writer: Maltin and IMDB give Bolt the first writing credit, and he is also listed that way on the video.

Item. "Producer Harold Hecht is credited with writing The Crimson Pirate." What we wrote: "The follow up film for ]blacklisted writer Waldo] Salt was supposed to be The Crimson Pirate [1952], with largely the same plot [as The Flame and the Arrow]. After Salt was fired, it was written by Hecht himself along with friendly witness Roland Kibbee." We have changed the verb to "rewritten." Hecht pitched into the task himself because he was in a hurry for a revision of Salt's work that would be extensive enough to deny him a credit on his way to the blacklist. (Source: An April 11, 1955 interview with Salt in his papers at UCLA.)

Item. "While Spike Lee was preparing Malcolm X, Marvin Worth in the meantime produced The Rose, a biopic about Janis Joplin." What we wrote: "In the meantime, Marvin Worth, who accepted a demotion to co producer with Lee, had been able to claim a series of hits with two other biopics, The Rose (about Janis Joplin) and Lenny (Lenny Bruce)." Earlier we had referred to Worth's 1972 documentary, also titled Maholm X, and the phrase "in the meantime" unambiguously referred to the period between the making of that film and Lee's 1992 feature version of Malcolm.

Item. "When [Martin Ritt biographer Gabriel] Miller writes of The Brotherhood that Kirk 'Douglas did not consider the role suitable to his talents,' Buhle/Wagner reinterpret it to mean 'he originally intended to play the leading role'--as, in fact, Kirk Douglas, star of The Brotherhood, does." Anonymous prefers to miss the point, made by Miller himself: "When [John Lewis] Carlino rewrote the script, he focused on the relationships of the two brothers rather than on the father-son conflict." In other words, Douglas' role in the rewritten script was greatly reduced and he was unhappy about it

Item. Anonymous: "They write that Martin Ritt discovered Sally Field in 'lesser dramatic roles.'" What we wrote: "The genius stroke in Norma Rae was casting Sally Field, scarcely known beyond her kitschy television work." What Sally Field wrote: "I first met Martin Ritt in 1979 ... I was working on a film in Tuscaloosa, Alabama (acting in a small role). I had been in very few films, mostly playing 'the girl' (faceless, characterless roles....) I had never carried a film." (Field's preface to Miller, Films of Martin Ritt, ix.)

Item. "Terror in a Texas Town is utterly forgot ten." There is virtually no critical literature on this film.

Item. The penultimate scene in Shampoo does indeed have Jack Warden arguing with Warren Beatty over sex and power while Richard Nixon natters on the TV about "bringing together the generations" so bitterly divided over the violence in Vietnam.

Item. "The ultimate enemies of the blacklistees are 'New York intellectuals.'" We never used the phrase. We do demonstrate in detail, however, that when the tactics of Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy were discredited or forgotten, attacks on specific films and filmmakers were continued by Pauline Kael, Stanley Kauffmann, Vincent Canby and others during the Cold War to justify the Hollywood blacklist. Anyone want to talk about this?

Item. It was not The Wild Bunch but another film that Sam Peckinpah "dedicated to the memory of Pancho Villa," but it is not incorrect to call this film a monument to Villa. When Peckinpah lost the writing job on Villa Rides! to Robert Towne, he took with him his old screenplay and his considerable research on Villa and used it all as the foundation for The Wild Bunch.

Item. "All four of The Professionals are 'veterans of the campaign in the Philippines.'" What we wrote: "Four gringos, disillusioned veterans of the campaign in the Philippines who later fought for Pancho Villa for half a decade, have now turned freelance mercenaries."

Item. Anonymous claims we erred in asserting that Ida Kaminska was nominated for an Oscar for The Shop on Main Street (1965). But nominated she was. (Check IMDB.)

Item. Anonymous claims we screwed up in saying that Dalton Trumbo played the Commandant in Papillon. But he did, in an uncredited cameo. (Ditto.)

Item. Anonymous writes, "Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970) is one of 'the last great westerns made in the late 1960s.'" What we wrote: "The lasting impact of the Italian experiment [i.e. the "spaghetti" western] on Hollywood may be understood best by looking briefly at a group of the last great westerns made in the late sixties: Richard Brooks' The Professionals (1966), Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969) and Don Siegel's Two Mules for Sister Sara (1969)." Here Anonymous overplays his hand. After wrenching the statement about "the sixties" from the context of the two other films on the list, Anonymous actually changes our date on Sister Sara from 1969 to 1970 with the purpose of introducing an error that we did not make. Although the release date of Sara was early 1970, we quite consciously chose to attribute it to 1969 because the film was shot entirely in that year, qualifying it as a film of "the late sixties."

Enough.

Anonymous' technique is to deploy an exaggerated form of what rhetoricians call "socratic irony"--an elaborate display of incomprehension that allows one to pile sin upon sin until the tower of venery blocks out any other thought. At the end, the ironist throws up his hands at the mess he's discovered, pretends to be horrified at the state of the culture, and adds the capper--a little deposit of character assassination in phrases like "deliberate falsification," "fraudulent scholarship," "alleged professional misconduct" and "con men." By the time the ironist has exhausted his readers' credulity with nonsensical fragments which he implies--but carefully does not demonstrate--are errors, perhaps anything, even character assassination, will seem reasonable.

Let's be clear about this. Most (not all) of what Anonymous represents as errors are something quite different. They are misrepresentations of our work designed to distract attention from and help suppress our historical argument, which Anonymous meticulously avoids. Indulge us in a last example.

Item. Anonymous complains about this: "Joan Crawford, in Johnny Guitar, because she's called 'Vienna,' plays 'an unidentifiable middle European exile.'" What we wrote: "Johnny Guitar (1954) has Joan Crawford playing an unidentifiable middle European exile named 'Vienna' with a bust of Beethoven on her piano ... [and] a few classical accents, mainly Johnny Guitar as a possible Orpheus." These connections, particularly the stress on Vienna as a cultural outsider who lacks a surname (hence "unidentifiable"), are part of the established critical literature on this film. The context for our use of the imagery is provided at the beginning of the paragraph, where we state that "1950s [Hollywood] even had its own domestic versions of the Eurowestern" and compared Crawford's role to Marlene Dietrich's in Rancho Notorious. The purpose of the chapter was to show the influence on the western of neo-realism and film noir and examine the role played by blacklistees in working out thematic continuities between the genres. There is no hint of any of this in Anonymous, of course; merely a sentence fragment ripped from its context and presented as an "error."

Readers of this journal deserve at least a brief description of what our work is about. One phrase from the introduction to Hide in Plain Sight will have to summarize four volumes. Our aim has been "to recover the lost record of those who had been excluded from the actual history of filmmaking and to evaluate their political and aesthetic contributions." To accomplish this we spent fourteen years watching well over a thousand films and reading the novels, stories, journals, correspondence and unpublished screenplays of blacklisted artists. We researched and reported on the political content of the films made by those who were ejected from Hollywood. This is a narrow field. The trailblazers have been Thom Andersen and Noel Burch, and we are aware of few others. This and nothing else is the meaning of the phrase, "a field with few previous scholars." Anonymous' assertion that we were making some larger claim is an invocation of the same feigned bewilderment that produced the phony "errors" itemized above.

We disagree with Ron Simon on one point. Anonymous' appalling cowardice lies not in his habit of bushwhacking at midnight in a mask--it requires some courage for a Westwood toff to risk his reputation on cheap libel and the revelation of his furtive habits--but in his refusal to engage our historical argument. If his "guerre" is the war of ideas, he is armed only with a sneer.

The reader will understand if we have been curious about the motivation and the identity of someone so obsessed with our work that he would write long, vituperative and anonymous comments as customer reviews on the Amazon pages pointing to our books. Or that we have felt as though we were being stalked when these same attacks, after Amazon disapproved them and scraped them off their database, started showing up in the pages of this journal, now in even longer and more vituperative form but still (of course) anonymous.

The ultimate weakness of ad hominem attacks is that they cannot replace historical argument, and if Anonymous and others of his camp want to eliminate ours they are going to have to engage the ideas rather than inflating themselves like horned toads and calling us "con men." Unless and until they deal with the argument itself, this whole nasty business will slide into the microfilm drawers and be forgotten.

Allow us to close with a nostalgic backward glance to the hopeful summer of 1967, when a new U.S. film journal was launched on the brave mimeograph technology of the day. The first issue opened with this admirable sentiment: "[W]e hope to avoid the petty politics that is so much a part of current film criticism.... We also want to avoid the flippant, irresponsible type of criticism which can be more damaging than the excesses of any theory."

What happened to that journal?

Dave Wagner and Paul Buhle

The Cineaste Editors reply:

We have no political disagreement with Buhle and Wagner regarding their basic thesis that the impact of the Hollywood reds has been undervalued. In fact, as the authors are aware, their previous efforts, including A Very Dangerous Citizen: Abraham Lincoln Polonsky and the Hollywood Left and Hide in Plain Sight: The Hollywood Blacklistees in Film and Television, 1950-2002, have received generally favorable reviews in our pages. Likewise, we do not believe that the letter from "Martin Brady," despite its highly critical and occasionally ad hominem tone, has any sort of political agenda, hidden or otherwise.

Cineaste does not consider it petty or flippant to insist on the accuracy of plot summaries, career summaries, production credits, and attribution of quotes. Nor is poor phrasing or the wholesale misspelling of names and works of art acceptable. The standard is the same as for any other academic discipline. When we received a letter to the editor that offered sixty-plus examples of such errors in Hide in Plain Sight, we thought it proper to publish. We are likewise pleased to be able to continue this important debate--although at this point we fear some of our readers may be tiring of it--by publishing Buhle and Wagner's equally contentious reply.

Regarding the rhetorical queries about our publication history, we feel obliged to point out that, over the past thirty-seven years, Cineaste has published more material on the Hollywood reds than any other film journal in America. We have been informed that some of our in-depth reportage has been used to help restore credits for various blacklisted screenwriters.

Interest in the artistic achievements of the Holly wood reds is, indeed, a relatively small area of inter est, as noted by Buhle and Wagner, but perhaps not quite as small as suggested. Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund's The Inquisition in Hollywood remains a benchmark work and Patrick McGilligan dutifully included blacklistees in his work long before he coedited Tender Comrades with Paul Buhle. Readers might also be interested in M. Keith Booker's Film and the American Left; Peter Hanson's Dalton Trumbo: Hollywood Rebel, James J. Lorence's The Suppression of "Salt of the Earth," Anthony Slide's Actors on Red Alert, Gerald Home's Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930-50, and the extensive analysis and documents offered by David Culbert in the published screenplay of Mission To Moscow. Primary resources include more than a score of book length autobiographies by blacklistees and a considerably larger number of substantial interviews with same. To these may be added well over a hundred essays, which look at the art and politics of films written, produced, starring, or directed by Hollywood reds, or at the artistic achievements of individual filmmakers.