hannah weinstein

When I wrote The Broadcast 41, I made a decision to write the book about a cohort--a group of women making their way in media in the 1930s and 1940s--rather than as a series of case studies. Part of the reason wasn't that ALL the stories were so compelling, but mainly I wanted to pass the baton to other scholars and give them enough so that they could devote attention to the individual stories.

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.