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More Moe
Note the preceding photo. That envelope was sent to Moe Asch’s recording studio in Manhattan by Woody Guthrie. Moses “Moe” Asch (the original Mel Novikoff from Inside Llewyn Davis, see December posts) began putting Guthrie’s singing and playing on acetate master discs in 1944. The producer was “impressed with the man’s ability to make the…
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Feature on the Blacklist Era
All the CP’s Men. The great screenwriter Robert Rossen (Body and Soul, All the King’s Men) is the subject of historian Ron Capshaw’s new essay, which he has graciously provided to Painting the Culture Red. Read Capshaw on Rossen by returning to the top, left side, the Pages list.
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Moe Asch
Try Saying Something. One of the funny side characters in the movie Inside Llewyn Davis is Mel Novikoff, a record producer running a mom-and-pop label in New York. Half musicologist and half fly-by-night businessman, he is shown fussing behind his cluttered desk and evading poor Llewyn Davis’ attempts to be paid for his work. There was…
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Don, Bobby, and the Pact
A Friendship Fractured. For the screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart (see previous post), it was not always easy to toe the Communist Party line. Doing so estranged him from admired friends like Robert Benchley (pictured above, with magazine to which he contributed). The 1939-1941 alliance between the supposedly anti-fascist leader Josef Stalin and the biggest…
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“I’m Not Going to Fight.”
Screwball Comedy’s Ephemeral Joke. The movie That Uncertain Feeling, with screenplay by Donald Ogden Stewart, was released by United Artists on April 20, 1941. An insurance man played by Melvyn Douglas (left) finds out that a concert pianist (Burgess Meredith, right) is dallying with his wife. Douglas confronts his rival. The bourgeois-hating, modernist musician declares: “I’m…
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Introduction
Although it crushed the individual person wherever practiced, communism was admired by artists and intellectuals in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. In 1991, the Soviet Union went out of existence. Yet the music, theater, movies, and fiction of today tell us that political failure is one thing, the annals of…
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Painting the Culture Red 