'The Majestic' revisits Hollywood blacklist

LOS ANGELES -- Jim Carrey is not now, nor has he ever been, a member of the Communist Party.

Such a denial is unnecessary these days, but during the Red Scare of the late 1940s and '50s the House Un-American Activities Committee would call actors, screenwriters and directors to testify about their political backgrounds. The implications of the questions could be enough to ruin a career.

"I think if we don't have a common enemy in this country we start eating ourselves alive. We start attacking ourselves," says Carrey, who stars as an accused screenwriter in the drama "The Majestic."

The film revisits the post-World War II era of the Hollywood blacklist, the HUAC interrogations and the fear spread across the nation by Red-hunting politicians, most notably Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wisc.

The Motion Picture Academy has an extensive new blacklist exhibit opening in February, detailing the careers devastated by the political probe and the lingering effects on the film industry's creativity.

Meanwhile, the Hollywood writers guild plans to devote its magazine to the theme that month, including profiles of late blacklisted writers and brief memoirs from the era. Some DVDs also now include extra features about the role older films played in that era's show-business history.

The HUAC hearings prompted studios to fire hundreds who refused to renounce unpopular political views or "name names" or answer the oft-asked question: "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?"

A half-century later, many of those directly involved are dead but the wounds haven't healed.

"How could they heal?" asks film historian Larry Ceplair, curator of the Motion Picture Academy exhibit. "There was a lost decade when all these people who might have made some wonderful films weren't allowed to work."

"The Majestic," a Capraesque drama in which Carrey plays a blacklisted screenwriter who takes on a new identity after suffering a memory-erasing car crash, views the committee's interrogations as an affront to free speech.

Mistaken for a missing war hero, Carrey's amnesiac character gets a lesson in freedom and courage while federal investigators try to hunt him down.

Frank Darabont, the film's director who made "The Shawshank Redemption" and "The Green Mile," characterized the cynicism that arose from the anti-communist hearings as a "poison that started seeping into the culture."