Buzz looked around his office for something to kill time with, saw the morning _Mirror_ on the doormat and picked it up. He flipped through to the editorial page and got bingo! under Victor Reisel’s by-line, less than twenty-four hours after cuckold Mal told Loew his plan.
The title was “Reds 1–City of Los Angeles 0. 3 Outs, No Witnesses on Base.” Buzz read:
Side 77
Ellroy, James – Big Nowhere, The It all came down to money–the great equalizer and common denominator. A grand jury was in the works, an important grand jury that would have been as farreaching as the 1947 House Un-American Activities Committee hearings. Once again, Communist encroachment in the motion picture industry was to be delved into–this time within the context of labor trouble in the City of the Angels.
The United Alliance of Extras and Stagehands is currently under contract with a number of Hollywood studios. The union is rife with Communists and fellow travelers. The UAES is making exorbitant contract renegotiation demands, and a Teamster local which would like the opportunity to reach an amicable accord with the studios and step in to work UAES’s job for reasonable wages and benefits is picketing against them. Money. The UAES implicitly advocates the end of the capitalist system and wants more of it. The nonideologically involved Teamsters want to prove their on-the-job mettle by working for wages that anticapitalists spurn. Hollywood, show biz: it’s a crazy world.
Crazy Item #1: The glut of pro-Russian movies made during the early 1940’s were largely scripted by members of the so-called UAES Brain trust.
Crazy Item #2: UAES Brain trust members belong to a total of 41
organizations that have been classified as Commie fronts by the State Attorney General’s Office.
Crazy Item #3: The UAES wants more of that filthy capitalist lucre; the Teamsters want jobs for their people; a number of patriotic men in the LA District Attorney’s Office had been slated to gather evidence for a prospective grand jury to delve into just _how_ deep those green-loving UAESers’ influence in the movie biz went. Let’s face it: Hollywood is an unsurpassed tool for disseminating propaganda, and the Commies are the subtlest, most cruelly intelligent foe America has ever faced. Given access to the motion picture medium and its pervasiveness in our daily life, there is no end to the cancerous seeds of treason that well-placed movie Reds could plant–subtle satires and attacks on America, subliminally planted so that the public and right-thinking movie people would have no idea they were being brainwashed. The DA’s men had made approaches to several subversives, and were attempting to get them to admit to the error of their ways and appear as witnesses when money–the great equalizer and common denominator–reared its head to give aid and comfort to the enemy.
Lieutenant Malcolm Considine, of the DA’s Bureau of Investigations, said: “The City had promised us budget money, then withdrew. We’re understaffed and now unfunded, with a backlog of criminal matters clogging up potential grand jury docket time. We might be able to begin gathering evidence again in fiscal
’51 or ’52, but how many inroads will the Communists have made into our culture by then?”
How many indeed. Lieutenant Dudley Smith of the Los Angeles Police Department, Lieutenant Considine’s sadly short-lived partner in the DA Bureau’s sadly shortlived investigation, said, “Yes, it all came down to money. The City has precious little, and it would be immoral and illegal to seek outside funding. The Reds do not balk at exploiting the capitalist system, while we live by its rules, accepting the few inherent frailties in an otherwise just and humane philosophy. That’s the difference between them and us. They live by the law of the jungle, we are too peace-loving to stoop to it.”
Reds–1, the City of Los Angeles and the movie-going public–0.
It’s a crazy world.
Buzz put the paper down, thinking of crazy Dud circa ’38–
brass-knuckling a nigger hophead half to death for drooling on a cashmere overcoat Ben Siegel greased him with. He hit the intercom. “Sweetheart, any results on those calls yet?”
“Still waiting, Mr. Meeks.”
“I’m going out to East, LA. Leave my messages on my desk, would you, please?”