A new film about ’30s Hollywood reminds us of the first truly modern campaign—whose target was California gubernatorial candidate Upton Sinclair.
Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, the latest being The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood — and America — Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (The New Press). He is also a documentary film producer and director and was the longtime editor of Editor & Publisher.
A bad luck target, Nagasaki was the first and so far the only victim of automated atomic warfare.
After the bomb dropped 75 years ago, U.S. officials took pains to spin and censor the press, and control the atomic narrative, to this day.
The story in The New Yorker exposed many Americans to what the atomic bomb had done — but the commander in chief didn’t appear interested.
After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at least two Hollywood studios planned movies about the atomic bomb. One was about its horrors. Ayn Rand’s? Not so much.
‘The president has been listening to a few advisers who have the scornful idea that it’s proper the press speak only when spoken to, or reports the news with “one-sided fairness.”’
When East Germans began tunneling under the newly built Berlin Wall in 1961, Hollywood muscled in with on-location filming even as tunnelers worked beneath them.