Hollywood Blacklist Research Paper

463 Words2 Pages

The paramount decision was a big due to the lawsuit filed against them. Unfortunately, around the same time the Hollywood blacklist was released. Both were very important to the filmmaking business in America. The Paramount decision was due to a lawsuit the United States filed on paramount pictures around 1948. Paramount was using block booking and pre-selling to get ahead in the industry. Block booking would help make more movies for a cheaper price but pre-selling was worse. Pre-selling made it to where paramount could collect up-front funds for a movie that was not even in production yet. On top of all of it, Paramount also owned movie theatre chains. This allowed them to control what movies were shown in that theatre. This would help their competitors lose business …show more content…

Due to this lawsuit, not only did they lose the ability to block book films for the whole year and pre-sell films, but they were forced to sell the movie theatre chains that they owned. This caused them to cut down the number of movies they made in a year drastically. Because of this they had to be more selective with the movies they made. Since they made fewer movies the ones they did make needed to be better so production cost was raised. They raised the rates that they charged the theatres since the volume of movies that were sold fell. At the same time the Hollywood blacklist came out. The Hollywood Blacklist is a list of ten Hollywood professionals at first that consist of writers, producers, and directors. They were accused that their work was communist inspired. They refused to admit whether or not they were a part of the communist part. Due to their silence, the House of Representatives voted and sentenced the ten to one year in prison and a fine of 1,000 dollars. They were then blacklisted which gave them a lot of trouble finding a job in media production. In the course of ten years the list grew to 150