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The question that would later wreck careers, friendships and, in some cases, lives -- "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?" -- is never asked in the film. Robbins knows that historically it's about 10 years too soon. But you can feel it looming in the air, waiting to materialize and pounce.

In this and other scenes, Robbins is none-too-subtly adding his own voice to a debate that has raged for more than 50 years. Was it American or un-American, as the film implies, to support anti-communism and its most lethal manifestation, HUAC? Was it right or wrong to cooperate with HUAC? And if other people suffered because you cooperated, whose fault was it ultimately?

The controversy won't go away. Just ask Elia Kazan.

Beneath it, however, lies a more significant problem, one that has gotten much less attention. If you were in the entertainment industry and you refused to answer HUAC's questions -- as some people did on principle -- you were blacklisted. But the blacklist was a voluntary creation of Hollywood studio producers, not the government. Why did producers do it?

They always maintained that the blacklist was essentially forced on them by a powerful one-two punch of politics and public opinion. True enough. But it's also true that the Hollywood blacklist descended directly -- perhaps even more so than previously thought -- from a virulent strain of anti-union sentiment. New interviews, access to internal Hollywood memoranda and a review of the existing but largely forgotten record all suggest that unions -- one in particular -- threatened to cut into studio control and profits. And the studios would do anything, even ruin lives, to keep that from happening.

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The original Hollywood moguls -- Louis B. Mayer, Harry Cohn, Sam Goldwyn, the brothers Warner et al. -- built their industry as a patrician system in which they, the dads, would always look out for their kin, the people who worked for them. And, as Nancy Lynn Schwartz noted in her book "The Hollywood Writers' Wars," "Few industries resorted to the intimate, familial forms of economic and psychological manipulation used to retain absolute control in Hollywood."

To create the illusion, appropriately enough, of a union, the studios founded in 1927 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, essentially a professional club for directors, writers, actors and technicians -- and producers -- to resolve any disputes among members. How effective was it? "Looking to the Academy for representation was like trying to get laid in your mother's house," Dorothy Parker observed. "Somebody was always in the parlor, watching."

But four years into the Depression, and shortly after Franklin D. Roosevelt's inauguration in 1933, the studios said they couldn't meet payroll. Contracts notwithstanding, everyone in the industry making more than $50 a week would have to take a 50 percent pay cut, producers said. Mayer literally performed for the employees of MGM, dramatically invoking the need for their sacrifice in order to save the company. ("Oh, that L.B. Mayer," one insider said. "He created more communists than Karl Marx.")

As writers, directors and actors swallowed hard and went along with the cut, the one union independent of the academy -- the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees -- refused. This typically producer-friendly confederation of grips, electricians, engineers, musicians and, most important, film projectionists, threatened a strike in retaliation. The producers backed off. The rest of Hollywood, particularly the writers, took note.

A few months after the wage-cut incident the Screen Writers Guild was born -- to the producers' enormous displeasure. At stake was their total control of content, credits and wages. Worse, other talent groups, like actors and directors, might get similar ideas.

But the producers really only had themselves to blame. In the words of the late Lester Cole, a founding member of the Screen Writers Guild, the moguls considered writers "the niggers of the studio system." A number of producers even delighted in sometimes cattle-prodding their stable of scribes, who had the least control over their work in Hollywood. No surprise then that writers became the most activist, determined group of artists to organize. But because they also provided the very source material for movies, they were also the most despised and feared by the studios.

The moguls retaliated against the new union by trying to insert rules into the Motion Picture Industry Code that would have nullified the Screen Writers Guild's demands, among other things. Thanks to intervention by Roosevelt, the move ultimately failed. But the battle was just beginning. As Schwartz noted, "The movement of writers to unionize was met with opposition so violent that it contained the seeds of a struggle lasting more than fifteen years, one that became part of a larger battle ending in destroyed careers and ruined lives."

The record shows no mention yet of studio concern about Communist subversion. It was strictly, from the outset, about unionizing.

Next page | The rise, and quick fall, of the Hollywood union