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…
Reading a new Wiki entry on Otto Preminger, described as "the classic author and director par excellence, master of precision and finesse, sometimes tyrannical sometimes engaging on his sets, fervent defender of democracy and always in conflict with established conventions," I couldn't help think about Vera Caspary's experiences with him. Caspary was droppped from consulting on the adaptation of her novel Laura because she and Preminger disagreed about having the title character be the focus of the story…
The New Yorker just reviewed Paramount+'s new streaming series, Fellow Travelers. I'm so glad to see more media about the blacklist era, especially stories that explore the sordidness of anti-communists like Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn (who were front men for a dense network of gossips and homophobes).
And, I hope shows like this might inspire more folks to remember all the queer women who worked in the spotlights and, more often, the margins of 1940s and 1950s…