Junto Boys

AND HOW WOULD THIS BE DIFFERENT FROM McCARTHYISM?

Since Mr. Gibson’s drunken tirade against Jews last summer, many people in Hollywood swore — both publicly and privately — that they would not work with him again or see his movies.

Powerful players like Amy Pascal, co-chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, and Ari Emanuel, of the Endeavor talent agency have publicly disavowed Mr. Gibson, with Mr. Emanuel writing online last summer that “people in the entertainment community, whether Jew or gentile, need to demonstrate that they understand how much is at stake in this by professionally shunning Mel Gibson and refusing to work with him.”

Mr. Gibson has disavowed his own statements instead of hiding behind the 5th Amendment like so many of the Hollywood Ten. Ah, but look how it's framed:

The problem posed by Mr. Gibson touches on an age-old question of whether an artist’s personal behavior ought to be a factor in judging his or her work.

The question is not a new one even in the brief history of cinema, which includes people like D. W. Griffith, the visionary feature director whose work fed racist stereotypes; Leni Riefenstahl, whose ground-breaking talent served Nazi Germany; or Roman Polanski, who in 1977 pleaded guilty to having sex with a minor and then fled the country, which did not prevent him from winning the Oscar for best director in 2003 for “The Pianist.”

Sure Polanski's problem was behavior. What he did was illegal.

What does Gibson's behavior have to do with the blacklist? Drunken rants are a Hollywood favorite pastime. Maybe he hates Jews and maybe he doesn't, but even asking him the question is against the 1st Amendment, remember? He's allowed to believe anything without question. Dalton Trumbo wrote for the Daily Worker did that make the poor man a Communist? We were cowards for even letting Congress ask.

Hollywood's real problem with the 1950s blacklist was that they sympathized with communist positions. Not one of the Hollywood Ten was ever acquitted or absolved dead or alive of being a communist, although the issue is always presented as a frame up. No one even says they were innocent only that making them name the names of other communists was worse than the gulag.

I wish Elia Kazan would have lived long enough to get his Oscar post-Gibson so that they could sit on their hands like a bunch of heroes and then explain why Mel is intolerable.