Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story Behind America's Favorite Movies

Description

Now in paperback, Radical Hollywood is the first comprehensive book about the Hollywood Left. Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner describe the vibrant community in Hollywood that helped create the classics of American film, from the dawn of sound movies to the early 1950s. Full of rich anecdotes, biographical detail, and explorations of movies well-known, unjustly forgotten, and delightfully bizarre, this is a highly readable, affectionate history that invites a new appreciation of our most distinctly American cultural creations. Author Information. Paul Buhle co-authored Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist and A Very Dangerous Citizen. He is the founder of the Oral History of the American Left archive at New York University and a co-editor of The Encyclopedia of the American Left. He writes for The Nation, The Guardian, and the Times Higher Education Supplement. Dave Wagner, a journalist and critic who lives in Tempe, Arizona, is co-author of A Very Dangerous Citizen. He has written for the film journals Cineaste and Filmhaftet (Sweden) and contributed to Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist (1997).

Paul Buhle is a retired senior lecturer in the American studies department at Brown University. He is a co-author, with Dave Wagner, of Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story Behind America's Favorite Movies and the editor of Jews and American Comics: An Illustrated History of an American Art Form, Studs Terkel's Working: A Graphic Adaptation, and A Dangerous Woman: The Graphic Biography of Emma Goldman, all published by The New Press. Buhle is the founder of the Oral History of the American Left archive at New York University and a co-editor of The Encyclopedia of the American Left. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and has continued actively producing books of comic art, including Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular and the New Land and Bohemians: A Graphic History. Dave Wagner is a journalist and critic who lives in Tempe, Arizona. He was a contributor to Tender Comrades, co-author of A Very Dangerous Citizen, and has contributed to several film journals. He was political editor at the Arizona Republic from 1993 to 2000.

"When it comes to the films, [Buhle and Wagner] have taken their own advice: "when in doubt, see the movie". Which they do, with a wicked sense of humour that should comfort the ghost of many a blacklisted talent." - The Guardian "It is a tale of frustrated talents and lost opportunities... Buhle and Wagner have given that story a human face." - The Financial Times "Buhle and Wagner are both scholarly and democratic in their interests, moving easily from the tackiest B-movie to Casablanca. They reveal a Hollywood founded in liberalism..." - The Scotsman "Buhle and Wagner may not have set out to write a subtext for our times, just an authorative and lively primer to a rancid age, but some bonuses come resonantly free." - The Observer"