Screening Our Politics

Like Pop-Up Video--one of the many things the movie-industry left never anticipated--ancillary factoids keep imposing themselves on Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner's Radical Hollywood:

1. When the oft-dubbed "revolutionary" Lew Wasserman (longtime MCA mogul) died this past June 3, obit writers made the old archcapitalist sound like he'd been the happy end of a Bolshevik dream--the man who finally took the power away from the studios and gave it to the people (OK, very rich, well-placed people).

2. Wasn't it Ronald Reagan--"FBI collaborator," the man deemed "too dumb" for membership in Hollywood's CP of the 1930s and the star of the blacklisted screenwriter Val Burton's last movie (Bedtime for Bonzo)--who helped decontrol the studios' ownership of movie theaters, i.e., the means of distribution?

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