...in the spring of 1945, when hard-line Stlainist William Z. Foster expelled the "liberal" Browder from the Party and took over as General Secretary at Stalin's behest, one of the first places he visited was the Hollywood Party.
The reason for the special importance of the Hollywood section is not hard to discern. The Soviet government had an early understanding of the crucial power of film as propaganda in a mass society. Communist influence in Hollywood filmmaking was therefore seen as both culturally and politcally important in spreading ideas among the masses to prepare for the Revolution, or at least to curb popular opposition to the USSR.
Party members boasted of "sneaking" Marxist dogma into otherwise bland Hollywood films, though they later denounced this suspicion as fascist propaganda. The intent was quite clear.
Ring Lardner, Jr., for example gleefully told the story of his blacklist period in the 1950s when he worked as a secret screenwriter for the Britis TV series "The Adventures of Robin Hood, and slipped frequent anti-capitalist messages into a show set in medieval England. His purpose, he said was to subvert the younger generations's beliefs in free enterprise.
In the Hollywood of the 1930s and 1940s, however, the anti-ideological domination of the studio moguls meant that Communist writers could only slip in a few bits here and there, and such bits could not have much effect. Rather, as Party leader Foster told the Hollywood section of the Party during his visit in 1945, the Party intended its influence on film production in Hollywood at this point to be primarily negative. Communists were to block and prevent theproduction of any films with an anti-Communist bent, or with a theme detrimental to the interests of the Soviet Union.
In keeping with this subterfuge, most Party members in Hollywood were secret Party memgbers, operating under noms de guerre. The strict cell structure of thehollywood Party, and the secret meetings of the cells, kept many people from knowing more than a dozen fellow Party members.
The Party was not organized this way by accident, or merely otu of traditional conspiratorial or paranoid mindset, though that mindset obviously existed and was fundamental. There were two specific reasons for secrecy: (1) so that opinions presented during their daily work in the studiois by secret Communists could masquerade as independent artistic opinions, since filmmakers dealing with the secret Communists would not know they were dealing with Communists, and (2) so that secret Communist operatives could control the bien pensant front organizations mostly populated by liberals and ordinary leftists.
An example of the latter is the hollywood Citizens Committee on the ARts, Sciences, and Profession. Most of the HICCASP's members were liberals and independent leftists, but the crucially influential post of executive secretary of the organization was held by a secret Communist. The Communists operated like cuckoos, as Edward Dmytryk said, laying their eggs in other birds' nests. Moreover, there is evidence to suggest that some prominent Hollywood people who wanted to join the Party were forbidden to become members, but were nonetheless trusted towield influence over Hollywood individuals and organizations on behalf of Party policies all the sam - influence all the more effective for coming from people known merely as "leftists."
