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90 CINEMONTAGE / Q4 2017 Hollywood Divided: The 1950 Screen Directors Guild Meeting and the Impact of the Blacklist by Kevin Brianton University Press of Kentucky, 2016 Hardcover, 174 pages, $45.00 ISBN # 978-0-8131-6892-0 by Betsy A. McLane T he blacklisting of Communists, former Communists, union supporters, socialists and people whose only agenda was to create films was a fact of life in the entertainment industry during the 1950s and 1960s. Few of the thousands directly affected by the tumult remain alive today, so it has been left to old memoirs and interviews, and to historians of every stripe, to repeat and interpret what has become ingrained Hollywood legend. And as longtime character actor Carlton Young, playing the town's headline- grabbing newspaperman in John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962), says in a classic line to Jimmy Stewart, "When the legend becomes the fact, print the legend." The October 22, 1950 meeting of the Screen Directors Guild (the West Coast predecessor of the DGA) can still provoke emotion. Its legend features Ford's much-(mis)quoted statement, "My name is John Ford. I make Westerns," and a belief that he then brought common sense to the heated gathering. Kevin Brianton untangles this and other myths in Hollywood Divided: The 1950 Screen Directors Guild Meeting and the Impact of the Blacklist. It is far beyond the scope of this review to detail the many ins and outs of the Blacklist, or even all the events surrounding that contentious meeting; best to leave the latter to Brianton's scrupulously thorough research. He is an Australian academic who brings a dispassionate outsider's view to Hollywood's company-town lore. He religiously cites original sources, often pointing out discrepancies, such as those between an account "as told to" a biographer and an FBI memo. Evident in every page are the hours Brianton must have spent pouring through the Joseph Mankiewicz papers at the Margaret Herrick Library in Beverly Hills and at Harold B. Young Library at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, where the Cecil B. DeMille papers are archived. Brianton also references — and challenges — virtually every published source that mentions that infamous meeting, including such seminal works as Peter Bogdanovich's 1978 book, John Ford, and Kevin Brownlow's 2004 documentary, Cecil B. DeMille, An American Epic. The SDG meeting took place amid growing anti-Communist hysteria. As early as 1947, 30 national and international unions representing various industries instituted loyalty oaths — a direct result of the Taft-Hartley Act, passed after much resistance from labor leaders and a veto from President Harry S. Truman. Taft-Hartley did away with closed shops and required all union officers, but not rank and file, to sign loyalty oaths. Brianton points out that in 1948, the Screen Writers Guild elected 20 anti-Communist CUT / PRINT Run of DeMille Red Scare, Blacklist and a Directorial Feud