VLVL (6) Sasha: Hollywood blacklists

[jbor]

on 29/9/03 10:11 AM, Mike Weaver at mikeweaver at gn.apc.org wrote:

> P 74 tells us that Sasha and Hub were still politically active in the
> 1950s, so by your argument they turned again.

I'm not sure how "politically active" the text indicates they were. In fact
we're told that Frenesi had grown up not as a "red-diaper baby", but "more
on the fringes of the political struggle in Hollywood back in the fifties":

    Her mother then had worked as a script reader and her
    father, Hub Gates, as a gaffer, always under dreamlike
    turns of blacklist, graylist, secrets kept and betrayed,
    grown-ups acting like the worst kind of kids" (74.28-30).

If they're still able to work in Hollywood in the '50s then they can't have
been all that politically active. Reads to me more like they were trying to
lie low and hold on to their jobs.

    Friends of Hub's had sold out friends of Sasha's, and vice
    versa .... To Sasha the blacklist period, with its complex
    court dances of fuckers and fuckees, thick with betrayal,
    destructiveness, cowardice, and lying, seemed only a
    continuation of the picture business as it had always been
    carried on, only now in political form. Everyone they knew
    had made up a different story, to make each of them come
    out looking better and others worse. (81.7-15)

Sasha's judgements here seem to cut across both sides of the ledger.

best