Writes Shawn Ritenour: “For those who are interested in McCarthy and Hollywood, I highly recommend Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley’s Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s. Billingsley reveals the great extent to which the Communist Party really did infiltrate Hollywood. Among other things, it tells how scripts were rewritten in mid stream as relationships changed between the USSR and other countries fighting in WWII. It tells the pathetic story of communist short story author and screenwriter Albert Maltz who wrote a manifesto of sorts, ‘What Shall We Ask of Writers?’ in New Masses, a communist publication, only to undergo a sort of communist inquisition resulting in a public recantation. My favorite line is a quotation of Billy Wilder regarding the “Hollywood Ten,” originally known as the ‘Unfriendly Ten’ because of their unwillingness to work with McCarthy’s committee: ‘Only a few in this group were talented; the rest were only unfriendly.'”

The Best of Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.