Radical Hollywood

The Untold Story Behind America’s Favorite Movies

Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner

paperback

$19.95 / £12.95

Radical Hollywood is the first comprehensive history of the Hollywood Left. From the dawn of sound movies to the early 1950s, Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner trace the political and personal lives of the screenwriters, actors, directors, and producers on the Left and the often decisive impact of their work upon American film’s Golden Age.

Full of rich anecdotes, biographical detail, and explorations of movies well-known, unjustly forgotten, and delightfully bizarre, the book is “an intelligent, well argued and absorbing examination of how politics and art can make startling and often strange bedfellows” (Publishers Weekly). Featuring an insert of rare film stills, Radical Hollywood relates the story-behind-the-story of films in such genres as crime, women’s films, family cinema, war, animation, and, particularly, film noir.

Paul Buhle is a lecturer in the American civilization department at Brown University. He co-authored Tender Comrades and A Very Dangerous Citizen: Abraham Lincoln Polonsky and the Hollywood Left. He is the founder of the Oral History of the American Left archive at New York University and a co-editor of The Encyclopedia of the American Left. Dave Wagner is a journalist and critic who lives in Tempe, Arizona. He was a contributor to Tender Comrades, co-author of A Very Dangerous Citizen, and has contributed to several film journals. He was political editor at the Arizona Republic from 1993 to 2000.