Other than the late-1920s transition from silent to sound cinema, there’s perhaps no other period in film history as well-documented and commented on than the Red Scare of the late-1940s and 1950s. Most people with a reasonable interest in movies have heard of the House of Un-American Activities Committee, just as they’ve likely seen High Noon, On the Waterfront, and Rio Bravo and recognized them as blacklist allegories. Go a little deeper, and you’ll find Crossfire, the 1947 anti-anti-Semitism movie set up as an awards contender, and brushed under the rug within weeks of its release because of its remarkably Red cast and crew; around here, you’ll start hearing about the 1950 meeting of the Director’s Guild, where Cecil B. DeMille railed on about “foreigners” in the voices of various mock ethnicities, and John Ford waited two hours to stop him in his tracks with the best underhanded compliment of all time: “Cecil B. DeMille is a great director; no one would deny this, and I’ll be the first to say it. But I don’t like you, C. B., and I think we should dissolve the board.”
That night nearly became a movie in the late-1990s, just as Elia Kazan was given a controversial Lifetime Achievement Oscar. Some sat on their hands that year (Ed Harris), some applauded (Tom Hanks), others split the difference by clapping in their seats (Steven Spielberg). If the wounds weren’t fresh in 1999, people nevertheless still cared that Kazan was a rat. Now, I doubt that many people in Hollywood, let alone the public at large, would recognize the name “Elia Kazan.” There isn’t even any You don’t mean Zoë Kazan, do you?
But for those still interested in history, J. Hoberman remains the greatest living writer on film, politics, and pop culture in the English language. His 2012 volume An Army of Phantoms, the second released but first chronological entry in his “Found Illusions” trilogy, is the book to read for anyone who thinks they know everything about 1950s Hollywood. Far from run-of-the-mill history or memoir, Hoberman leads with an expansive chapter on William A. Wellman’s The Next Voice You Hear… (1950), which he calls “the heaviest movie Hollywood ever made.” Made under the storm and stress of both the Red Scare and the explosive popularity of television, the Voice of God addresses an Everytown, USA, and although he isn’t heard by the audience, it’s not hard to get swept up along with the townspeople and the aggressively “average” family we follow, headed by James Whitmore and Nancy Davis.
Hoberman’s latest is a book of New York history: stretching from 1958 to the end of the 1960s, Everything is Now charts the American underground and avant-garde as they converged in Manhattan and began from Zero Point. Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan play supporting roles, while artists like Jack Smith, Barbara Rubin, Carolee Schneemann, and Yayoi Kusama take center stage. This is the era of unbelievably cheap rents below Houston St., the moldering lofts full of garbage rehabbed into gallery spaces and theaters, and a handful of events that would quickly become legend: Lenny Bruce arrested, Warhol shot, and Jack Kerouac’s entire existence (Kerouac has never once felt “real” to me; I seriously doubt that On the Road still sells as well as it might’ve 20 years ago).
But Hoberman once again gives life to a period that feels papered over and over. His sentences are screwed in tight, and he almost never uses the word “I.” Because he was a teenager in Queens at the time, eventually Hoberman does become a character in his own history, walking alongside Jonas Mekas to this or that screening, or recalling a Greenwich Village “happening;” he was also notably present for Dylan’s August 28, 1965 concert in Forest Hills, where he debuted “Gates of Eden” and “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” and his brand new electric backing band. There is no gushing, no hyperbole—Hoberman was there, and while these personal asides are few and come toward the end of the book (Hoberman’s parents saw Jack Gelber’s The Connection in 1959), they make the history all the more moving. Experimental filmmakers like Michael Snow, Shirley Clarke, Joseph Cornell, Jack Smith, and their most “famous” works—Wavelength, Portrait of Jason, Rose Hobart, Flaming Creatures—were never widely released and remain hard to find, even on the internet.
So many of these plays, performances, “happenings,” and screenings were one and done, just as the hundreds of bands I saw in my teens and early-20s have no past, no history; Hoberman couldn’t find physical copies of The Village Voice, but he was able to work with pieces. If there’s ever a book written on the underground and independent music scene of America in the second half of the 2000s, what will the sources be? Blogspot? Last.fm? Flickr? It’ll be YouTube, probably, and interviews with primary players. I hope someone gets on it before I have to do it. Just as Dan Deacon and Whartscape loomed large in my adolescence, so too did Jonas Mekas and this constellation of artists imprint themselves on Hoberman for a lifetime. So many of the subjects died young, long ago, or both; Everything is Now is plaintive while retaining a sense of urgency, its author knowing that so many of these people and the things they made are disappearing to time. As we all do; he ends the book with the immensely moving sentence, “I consider this book a memoir, though not my own.”
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @MonicaQuibbits