Why did images of white, nuclear families dominate television in the 1950s? Why has it taken nearly 70 years for images of a diverse America—featuring people of color, immigrants, women as independent social beings—to appear on prime time television? Challenging the longstanding belief that what appeared on television screens in the 1950s and after resulted from some social consensus, The Broadcast 41 addresses these and other questions by telling two intersecting stories. The first story documents the heterogeneous perspectives of a generation of progressive women who had been…
Judy Holliday was brilliant. She was a smart and funny, a member of a Village improv group called the Revuers. She was committed to a wide range of political causes, including serving on the radical Voice of Freedom Committee along with Dorothy Parker and Paul Robeson, and supporting the Civil Rights Congress. When she was listed in Red Channels in June 1950, the film Born Yesterday, written by Garson Kanin (also listed in Red Channels), was set to be released later that year, this…
Hannah Weinstein was a blacklisted writer who left the US in 1950 with her three young daughters and founded Sapphire Films in England, a company that went on to inaugurate the costume drama craze of the fifties before returning to the US in the 1960s and, with Ossie Davis, James Earl Jones, and Rita Moreno, founding Third World Cinema Corporation. Her daughter Paula became a successful movie producer and studio executive in the US. Julia Bricklin's recent book on Hannah Weinstein, …