Hollywood Exiles | Full Podcast
11 videos • 3,523 views • by CBC Podcasts Host Oona Chaplin tells the story of the decades-long campaign to root out communism in Hollywood. It’s a campaign that eventually drove her grandfather, Charlie Chaplin, and many others out of tinseltown. Hollywood Exiles is a tale of glamour, duplicity and political intrigue that reverberates to this day. It’s the story of how Tinseltown became an ideological battleground. The toll of the fight was enormous – reputations, careers and families were torn apart by the campaign to drive communists from the movie business. It all began with Charlie Chaplin. He was one of the earliest targets of FBI efforts against leftist influence in Hollywood. This led to him being left out of the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and eventually pushed out of the US. Oona Chaplin guides listeners through the real-life events of J.Edgar Hoover’s personal obsession with her grandfather from the 1920s onwards, through to the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings and the “Hollywood blacklist”. Among others who were affected by the Red Scare, we hear from the daughter of Hollywood writer Dalton Trumbo – forced to write under a pseudonym and so could not collect his own Oscar – and descendents of exiled writers and actors whose careers and families were broken apart.