Hollywood loves remembering Hollywood.
Preferably after everyone involved is dead, the rights are cleared, and somebody has found a tasteful way to monetize the trauma.
Which makes the rescue of deteriorating footage from a 1981 gathering of Hollywood blacklist survivors particularly wonderful.
The reunion brought together writers, actors and filmmakers connected to the era when refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee could transform a working Hollywood professional into yesterday's lunch reservation. Careers vanished. Credits disappeared. Some writers worked behind fronts. Others left the country. Hollywood, displaying the legendary courage for which major corporations are universally celebrated, mostly went along.
But decades later, blacklist veterans got together—and somebody rolled 16mm film.
Then Hollywood nearly lost that, too.
The surviving reels warped and deteriorated. Roughly 104 quarter-inch Nagra audio rolls also had to be recovered, digitized and synchronized. Restorers reportedly faced synchronization problems difficult enough that lip-reading technology helped reconnect certain words with the photographed speakers.
Think about that.
People once professionally silenced by Hollywood survived long enough to tell their stories, only for their recorded voices to become separated from their own moving mouths.
You couldn't write symbolism that shamelessly obvious without a studio executive asking you to tone it down.
And yet this is why I still love the Hollywood game.
Film is ridiculous. Film is miraculous. Film forgets people, rediscoveries them, ruins negatives, finds prints in closets and occasionally allows somebody fifty years later to thread history back through the projector.
The blacklist wasn't mythology. Careers really were destroyed.
But the people remained.
So did the film.
Barely.
And somewhere inside those battered reels is Hollywood doing what Hollywood does best:
Making sure the show survives despite Hollywood.
