S TARDUST IS A work of fiction, not history, and readers familiar with the period will see that liberties, a few chronological, have been taken with events that inspired some of its scenes. Labor unrest in Hollywood actually began before the war was over, in early 1945, but reached its most violent stage in the fall, as in the street brawl here. An information film about the Nuremberg trials, That Justice Be Done, was released in October 1945, but no feature film about the death camps themselves was ever made or, so far as I know, contemplated. (A rough documentary compilation of captured newsreels about the camps, We Accuse, was released in May 1945.) Minot’s hearings are meant to be a premature trial run, a preview, of HUAC’s assault on Hollywood in 1947, but even in 1945 Representative Rankin had announced the committee’s intention to investigate Hollywood, “one of the most dangerous plots ever instigated for the overthrow of this government,” and California state senator Tenney’s fourteen thousand files had been compiled during the war and were certainly in place then. Jack Warner did indeed become a friendly witness but for reasons of his own, not those suggested here. No studio head, in fact, ever stood up to the committee. After a meeting in November 1947 at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, some fifty studio executives issued the anti-Communist Waldorf Statement, effectively starting a blacklist that would last for a decade. Sol Lasner’s principled stand here is imagined, something that might have happened in the movies.
Kanon, Joseph
Stardust
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Kanon, Joseph
Stardust