The Blacklist, Part 1

 

[I’ve been holding on to this article since it came out last winter.  I knew I wanted to post it because it’s such a volatile subject, and this is extraordinary coverage of it.  It’s also an apt topic to contemplate in these times particularly because it about the very thing that made this country break away from Great Britain almost 250 years ago. 

[I’m talking about the freedom of speech and the freedom of thought—the freedoms enumerated in the First Amendment.  As readers of Rick On Theater will know by now, I consider myself pretty nearly a First Amendment absolutist.  But 75 years ago, during the Second Red Scare, this country’s government and some of its citizens took it upon themselves to punish people for what they thought. 

[If that wasn’t bad enough, often those who made it their business to root our people who had ideas different from their own did so with no real evidence—where have we heard that recently?—and when there wasn’t proof, then innuendo and lies were thrown about. 

[I’m talking, of course, about the Hollywood blacklist.  People’s lives were destroyed.  Some people, including innocent people, died.  All because one group of people decided that anyone who doesn’t think, act, or believe they way they do must be rooted out.  To hell with the First Amendment!  We don’t need that—it just gets in the way of real America.

[So, let’s take a look again at what happened back in the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s.  Let’s see how close we are now to repeating one of the darkest periods in our history.  And for full disclosure, I’ll bit that I was around during all this—but the blacklist became about six months before I was born and reached its peak when I was between 6 and 10.  (I’m old, but I’m not that old!)] 

“‘UN-AMERICAN’:
THEATRE ARTISTS vs. THE 1950s BLACKLIST”
by Mary B. Robinson

[This article was published in the SDC Journal 14.1 (Winter 2026), the membership publication of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society.  It’s posted online, or through the SDC website.]

Long before the phrase “witch-hunting” became a president’s attempt to tarnish investigations into his own acts, it was the title of a chapter of director Margaret Webster’s [1905-72; American-British theater actress, producer, and director] autobiography Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage [A. A. Knopf, 1972]. Webster [1905-72; American-British theater actress, producer, and director] was a victim of the 1950s blacklist, the systematic destruction of people’s livelihoods brought on by the federal government’s pursuit of alleged Communists in the United States. It caused irreparable harm to the professional and personal lives of many Americans, including a number of directors and choreographers, as well as other theatre artists.

Twenty years later, Webster wrote that what happened in the 1950s “now seems so utterly incredible,” but she was convinced that “we need to be reminded that, incredible or no, it could happen again.” She foresaw that cruel and dangerous government overreach could again be tolerated by much of the public “under the same pressures of insecurity, ambition, hatred, and above all––fear; always, and on both sides, fear.”

More than 50 years after she wrote those words of warning, it feels important in our own time to re-examine these past events from the perspective of our theatrical predecessors: directors, choreographers, and other theatre artists of the mid-twentieth century. What did they do when they were confronted with state sanctioned persecution? What compromises of their own values were some of them willing to make, while others refused to comply––and why? And how can this dangerous era in our nation’s history illuminate what we might do in our own time––one that has echoes of the 1950s but is unquestionably much worse?

AFRAID OF THINKING PEOPLE

The public’s fear of Communists that certain politicians exploited in the late 1940s and early 1950s was fueled by the existential terrors of the atomic bomb and the Soviet Union’s acquisition of it. The Communist Party USA, which had been the hope of many progressives during the unemployment and deprivation of the Great Depression [1929-39], had, for much of the country, acquired a much more sinister cast because of the arms race. The Soviet Union was now our Cold War enemy with the capacity to wipe us out, rather than the World War II ally it had been a decade earlier. And in much the same way that certain fears of the public are exploited today, ambitious politicians manipulated people’s fear of Communists for their own self-interest. Congressman Richard Nixon’s career took off with his dogged pursuit of supposed Soviet spies in the late 1940s, while Senator Joseph McCarthy grabbed the limelight in 1950 when he claimed there were hundreds of Communists working in the State Department.

[The nuclear arms race (1949-91) was the Cold War competition for supremacy in nuclear weaponry between the United States and the Soviet Union.

[Richard Nixon (1913-94), a staunch anti-communist, was the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 until his resignation in 1974. He was Representative from California from 1947 to 1950, then Senator from 1950 to 1953. Nixon served as Vice President of the United States under Dwight Eisenhower (1890-1969) from 1953 to 1961, and then was the Republican nominee for president in 1960, losing to Democrat John F. Kennedy (1917-63; 35th President of the United States: 1961-63).

[Joseph R. McCarthy (1908-57) was Republican U.S. Senator from Wisconsin from 1947 to 1957 (his death). He was Chairman of the Senate Committee on Government Operations (1953-55) and Chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (1953-54). The latter was the Senate’s counterpart to the House’s Committee on Un-American Activities. McCarthy exploited the “Red Scare” (1947-59), giving rise to the term “McCarthyism” to describe his tactics and rhetoric.]

But in truth, certain members of the federal government who hated Roosevelt’s New Deal (with its “socialist” programs like Social Security) had always seen Communism as a threat––or at least as a tool that could be used to stir the American public’s anxieties and further their own ambitions. The House Committee on Un-American Activities, or HUAC, was first proposed in 1934 to investigate the dissemination of Nazi propaganda in the U.S., but it wasn’t until Communism was added as another “un-American” element whose proponents should be investigated that HUAC came into being in 1938. Even at the time, it was recognized that the term was vague and subjective: as one liberal congressman put it, “un-American is simply something that somebody else does not agree to.” Other organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan were suggested as additional targets for HUAC’s investigations, but that idea was dismissed by a Southern congressman who stated that the Klan was a thoroughly American institution.

[Franklin D. Roosevelt (known as “FDR”; 1882-1945; 32nd President of the United States: 1933-1945) initiated unprecedented federal legislation during his first 100 days as president to implement the New Deal, a 1933-38 series of federal programs, public work projects, and financial regulations in response to the Depression, focusing on relief, recovery, and reform.

[Among these programs was the Works Progress Administration (WPA; 1935-43), which supervised the construction of bridges, libraries, parks, and other facilities, while also investing in the arts. The arts programs were the Federal Writers' Project (FWP; 1935-43), the Historical Records Survey (HRS; 1935-43), the Federal Theatre Project (FTP; 1935-39), the Federal Music Project (FMP; 1935-43), and the Federal Art Project (FAP; 1935-43).]

HUAC’s first chairman [1938-44], Congressman Martin Dies [pronounced to rhyme with “skies”; 1900-72] of Texas [1931-45; 1953-59], was a racist, anti-immigrant, anti-labor politician who decided that his committee’s first target would be the Federal Theatre Project, which had been created by Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration in 1935 to put theatremakers back to work during the Depression. Directed by Vassar theatre professor Hallie Flanagan [1890-1969; American theatrical producer and director, playwright, and author], the Federal Theatre Project employed between 8,000 and 12,000 people at any given time and went far beyond its mandate of combating unemployment. It created the first network of regional theatres across the country, attracted an audience of 30 million people (two-thirds of whom had never seen a play before), and charged no admission for most of its productions.

The work of the Federal Theatre Project spoke to those audiences with immediacy and urgency about matters that affected their own lives. It commissioned new plays such as It Can’t Happen Here [adapted in 1936 into a play by Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) and John C. Moffitt (1901-69)], a cautionary tale about the rise of American Fascism adapted from the [1935] Sinclair Lewis novel; staged classics in ways that highlighted their relevance to contemporary issues; and created a brand-new theatrical form in the Living Newspaper, an early kind of docudrama that explored current events. It bucked the norms of segregation in the South when it integrated both casts and audiences, and it created many Black theatre units in large and small cities around the country.

[Living Newspapers were nonfiction performances in revue format—realistic, current, relevant—and the topics were always recent. The Living Newspapers frequently dramatized social issues of the day such as unemployment and the housing shortage, and often implicitly or explicitly urged social action, so controversy over their politics contributed to the disbanding of the FTP in 1939.

[The FTP is the subject of my post “The Federal Theatre Project (1935-1939)” (30 October 2024), and there’s some discussion of Living Newspapers in “America’s War on Theater” by Daniel Blank in “America's Culture War—Now at Your Local Theater” (25 October 2024).]

There is no doubt that some of the thousands of theatremakers who worked for the Federal Theatre Project were members of the Communist Party. (So were several members of the Group Theatre, the other notable American theatre experiment in the 1930s, including playwright Clifford Odets [1906-63; playwright, screenwriter, and actor], the success of whose plays Waiting for Lefty [debut: 6 January 1935; Broadway: 26 March 1935, Group Theatre], Awake and Sing! [premiere: 19 February 1935, Group Theatre], and Golden Boy [premiere: 4 November 1937, Group Theatre] gradually propelled him and a number of Group Theatre actors toward the more lucrative film industry.) But the Communist Party was not illegal in the U.S. in the 1930s, and it was for many the only political party that was squarely on the right side of many important issues, including racial justice.

[The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) was declared illegal by the Communist Control Act of 1954 which criminalized membership in the CPUSA. The act has never been used for mass arrests, however, and portions were later dismantled or found unconstitutional by courts, but it remains a federal law on the books. Because of the First Amendment, the Department of Justice never fully enforced it, and no one has ever successfully been prosecuted under it.

[Ironically, the Nazi Party has never been made illegal in the United States. American Nazi groups have, however, faced intense government surveillance and public backlash. (The American Nazi Party [ANP] was founded in 1959. It was renamed the National Socialist White People’s Party [NSWPP] in 1967, but it still exists.)]

Hallie Flanagan was not charged with being a member of the Communist Party herself, but with letting Communists infiltrate the Federal Theatre Project and producing radical plays. Called before HUAC in December 1938, she caught her accusers off guard with her opening statement that the Federal Theatre was in the business of “combating un-American inactivity”––i.e., unemployment among theatre professionals––and her use of the term “Marlowesque,” which elicited this memorable exchange:

Congressman [Joe] Starnes [1895-1962; U.S. Representative from Alabama: 1935-45]: You are quoting from this Marlowe. Is he a Communist?

Flanagan: I was quoting from Christopher Marlowe [1564-93; English playwright, poet, and translator].

Starnes: Tell us who Marlowe is, so we can get the proper reference, because that is all that we want to do.

When Flanagan clarified that she was speaking about an Elizabethan playwright, an embarrassed Starnes stated that all drama, going back to the Greeks, was about social conflict and therefore inherently Communist. “Mr. Euripides was guilty of teaching class consciousness,” he declared.

But though Hallie Flanagan may have had the upper hand during her congressional hearing, the mere charge of Communist infiltration was enough to turn public opinion against the Federal Theatre Project, and Congress voted to stop its funding and end its existence in June 1939.

In an op-ed for the New York Times after its demise, Flanagan wrote that her congressional adversaries “were afraid of the Federal Theatre because it was educating the people to know more about government and politics and such vital issues of the day as housing, power, agriculture and labor. . . [.] They are afraid, and rightly so, of thinking people” [“Congress Takes The Stage,” Sec. 9 (Drama, Screen, Music, Dance, Art, Radio), 20 August 1939] And a further reason HUAC wanted to get rid of the Federal Theatre, she maintained, was because “it gave Negro actors as well as white actors a chance [for employment].”

After four years of astounding productivity, the Federal Theatre Project was dead, never to be revived––and at least 8,000 theatremakers were immediately put out of work. But Flanagan believed that its brief existence had made the creation of some kind of national theatre inevitable. “Not even an act of Congress can kill an idea,” she stated.

ARTIST-HATING BRUTALITY

HUAC’s crusade against Communism was briefly suspended during the World War II alliance between the Soviet Union and the United States, but it picked up again with a vengeance when the Cold War began. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover [1895-1972; first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation: 1935-72] appeared before the Committee in early 1947 and declared that the Communist Party in the U.S. “is far better organized than were the Nazis in occupied countries prior to their capitulation. They are seeking to weaken America just as they did in the era of obstruction when they were aligned with Nazis. Their goal is the overthrow of our government.”

“With the tiniest Communist Party in the world,” playwright Arthur Miller [1915-2005; playwright and essayist] countered in his memoir Timebends [Grove Press, 1987], “the United States was behaving as though on the verge of bloody revolution.” And once again, HUAC went after the performing arts with the full force of what Miller termed its “artist-hating brutality.”

In October 1947, more than 40 people in the film industry received subpoenas to appear before HUAC. Eight writers and two directors refused to testify when they showed up at their hearings; instead, they used their committee appearances to publicly denounce HUAC, with some comparing its methods to those used in Nazi Germany. The “Hollywood Ten” were each fined $1,000 [worth $15,000 in 2026] for contempt of Congress and sentenced to a year in prison. Three years later, when they had exhausted all possible legal appeals after the Supreme Court refused to hear their case, they began to serve their time.

[The Hollywood Ten, ten left-wing screenwriters and directors cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions before HUAC, were Alvah Bessie (1904-85; novelist, screenwriter, and journalist), Herbert Biberman (1900-71; screenwriter and film director), Lester Cole (1904-85; screenwriter), Edward Dmytryk (1908-99; Canadian-born American film director and editor), Ring Lardner, Jr. (1915- 2000; screenwriter and novelist), John Howard Lawson (1894-1977; playwright, screenwriter, arts critic, and cultural historian), Albert Maltz (1908-85; playwright, fiction writer and screenwriter), Samuel Ornitz (1890-1957; screenwriter and novelist), Adrian Scott (1911-72; screenwriter and film producer), and Dalton Trumbo (190576; screenwriter).]

While in prison, director Edward Dmytryk changed his mind and agreed to cooperate with HUAC, not only admitting to having been a member of the Communist Party himself, but also identifying a number of people he knew as Communists (or former ones) and thereby becoming one of the first people to rescue himself by naming others. Dmytryk was released from prison and resumed his work in the film industry; the other nine people in the Hollywood Ten served the remainder of their terms and were blacklisted once they regained their freedom. “Naming names” became a purity test that the federal government set for people as the only way to get off the blacklist. HUAC didn’t need the names––they already had them––but to prove their loyalty to the U.S., people were made to practice a “ritual speech intoning names of fellow sinners and recanting former beliefs,” wrote Arthur Miller, who went on to dramatize this process in The Crucible [1953], his play about the 1692 Salem witch trials.

Meanwhile, another, more insidious form of blacklisting had begun. In 1947, President [Harry S.] Truman [1884-1972; 33rd President of the United States: 1945-53] instituted the Federal Employee Loyalty Program, in which membership and donor lists of organizations with supposed ties to Fascism, Communism, totalitarianism, or “subversive views” were obtained and checked for the names of people in the federal government as well as those applying for jobs in it. At first, these lists were for internal use only, but Truman later allowed them to be released to the public. The implication that the government had branded these American citizens disloyal to their country because they supported “subversive” organizations such as the Negro Cultural Committee and the American Protection of the Foreign Born was soon taken up and exploited by vigilante blacklisters.

In 1950, the weekly right-wing newsletter Counterattack published a pamphlet entitled Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television, accusing 151 people in the entertainment industry of having ties to “Communist front” organizations. This 50-cent [worth $6.95 today] pamphlet was bought by thousands of people who wrote letters saying they would boycott the products of the radio and television shows’ sponsors if the actors, directors, choreographers, writers, and composers listed in Red Channels were hired.

[Counterattack: The Newsletter of Facts on Communism was a weekly, right-wing, anti-communist newsletter published from 1947 to 1955. The publication played a central role in naming and blacklisting alleged communists and “fellow travelers” during the height of the post-WWII Red Scare.

[The newsletter was established in May 1947 by three former FBI agents who under a private, for-profit consultancy firm named American Business Consultants (ABC). Its stated goal was to combat communism and expose individuals, labor unions, and organizations suspected of subversive affiliation with the CPUSA. Counterattack went into decline after a series of lawsuits by people who were named in the publication.

[Red Channels, a pamphlet-style report published in June 1950, was the newsletter’s most famous and historically significant byproduct. This document listed 151 actors, writers, musicians, and broadcast journalists. The publication of Red Channels institutionalized the Hollywood blacklist, effectively freezing or destroying the entertainment careers of iconic entertainment and media figures.]

Included in this first edition of the pamphlet were many prominent theatre artists who also relied on income earned in radio and the new medium of television. Actors Uta Hagen [1919-2004], José Ferrer [1912-92], Ruth Gordon [1896-1985], Zero Mostel [1915-77], Jack Gilford [1908-90], Lee J. Cobb [1911-76], J. Edward Bromberg [1903-51], and John Garfield [1913-52] were listed, as were composers Leonard Bernstein [1918-90] and Aaron Copland [1900-90] and folk singer Pete Seeger [1919-2014]. Playwrights Clifford Odets, Lillian Hellman [1905-84], and Arthur Miller were named, as well as playwright/directors Garson Kanin [1912-99], Marc Connelly [1890-1980], and Arthur Laurents [1917-2011], and directors Martin Ritt [1914-90], Abe Burrows [1910-85], and Joseph Losey [1909-84].

Under each person’s name there was a list of the organizations that called their loyalty to the United States into question. Anything remotely left-wing was fair game, including participation in an annual May Day parade celebrating workers [1 May is European Labor Day and was a major holiday in communist and socialist countries], or supporting members of the Hollywood Ten. Choreographer Helen Tamiris [1902-66], the director of the Federal Dance Project in the 1930s and a 1950 Tony Award winner [1950, for her choreography in Touch and Go (1949)], was accused among other things of being a sponsor of the End Jim Crow in Baseball Committee. Director Margaret Webster was targeted for 14 progressive causes she supported, among them having signed a letter urging the abolition of HUAC. Underneath the name of poet and playwright Langston Hughes [1901-67; poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist] were 40 organizations, along with the accusation that his ironic poem “Goodbye Christ” was “a typical example of vicious and blasphemous propaganda Communists use against religion.” And many theatre artists were targeted for having sent telegrams of congratulations to the Moscow Art Theatre on its 50th anniversary.

[The Hughes poem noted above was published in The Negro Worker (November/December 1932). The publication was an international communist newspaper published from 1928 to 1937. It served as the primary media organ for the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, an organization formed by the Red International of Labor Unions and the Communist Third International (Comintern).]

At the end of the pamphlet, the organizations themselves were listed and their supposed subversiveness identified. The Congress of American Women, part of an international organization that worked to improve child welfare and women’s rights, was cited as “one of the most potentially dangerous of the many active Communist fronts.” The League of Women Shoppers, a consumer advocacy group that promoted social justice and fought racial discrimination, was described as an organization “whose chief purpose was to create feminine support in labor disputes.”

The anti-labor vehemence of these guilt by-association lists begs the question: what were unions doing to support their members during this ordeal? The answer is that the film, radio, and television unions were doing nothing––or worse. The Screen Writers Guild [formed in 1933, in 1954, became the Writers Guild of America, West and the Writers Guild of America, East] and the Directors Guild of America refused to support their members during the prosecution and imprisonment of the Hollywood Ten. The American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) adopted a new rule: members who pleaded the Fifth Amendment at HUAC’s hearings so as not to incriminate themselves––refusing to answer whether they were, or had ever been, in the Communist Party––were assumed to be Communists and suspended or expelled from the union. The board of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) published a statement saying that members of the Communist Party “should be exposed for what they are––enemies of our country and our form of government. It is not the province of the Guild Board to decide what is the best method for carrying out this aim.”

At first, Actors’ Equity Association followed SAG’s lead and even used some of the same “enemies of our country” language in its own published statement. But in 1951, after Variety announced that HUAC was “getting ready to switch its emphasis from Hollywood to Broadway,” some Equity members resolved to take a different stand. The membership at the October quarterly meeting in New York passed a strongly worded resolution saying that the “blacklisting of one actor in any area of the Entertainment Industry threatens the security of all actors and, indeed, jeopardizes the very existence of our Association.”

Equity’s Council was required by its By-laws to consider this resolution, and though it was hotly debated in a Council meeting two weeks later, it was eventually passed. The final resolution was considerably watered down from the membership meeting draft, but it did state that Actors’ Equity “condemns the practice of ‘blacklisting’ in all its forms,” and promised to aid members in getting a fair and impartial hearing if they faced charges. The following year, Equity succeeded in getting this language into its contracts with the Broadway League and other producers, and its members also formed an anti-blacklist committee––thereby becoming the only performing artists’ union to take a stand against the anti-democratic behavior of the federal government and the vigilante blacklisters. (SDC [Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (formerly Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers )] was not founded until 1959.)

Theatre was mostly exempt from the insidious Red Channels-type blacklisting that so affected film, television, and radio because its audiences didn’t care about the political affiliations of the actors, directors, and playwrights whose work they wanted to experience. At least one vigilante blacklister found this intolerable, writing an article that spewed out names while asking in frustration, “When will the theatre-going public get wise to the con game being operated in New York’s Great Red Way?”

If the theatre-going public never “got wise” to Broadway turning “Red,” a few nervous producers did. At least one director, Joseph Losey, was not hired for a job (directing Arthur Miller’s The Crucible) because of his suspected Communist membership. And even Equity took a step back from its stand against blacklisting when its membership felt it necessary to vote to expel any member who’d been proven––by due process––to be a current member of the Communist Party.

CAPITULATION

HUAC’s new focus on Broadway was preceded by several years of FBI investigations of well-known theatre artists who also worked in film. In 1950, choreographer Jerome Robbins [1918-98], whose celebrated work on Broadway and with the New York City Ballet was beginning to lead to film offers, was informed by television host Ed Sullivan [1901-74] that his suspected Communist membership in the 1940s made it necessary to rescind an invitation to appear on his show. Sullivan told Robbins that his past affiliations could harm his career and urged him to “confess” to local FBI agents; he may also have suggested that he would divulge his homosexuality if he didn’t comply.

[HUAC and McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations linked the “Lavender Scare” to the “Red Scare” by labeling LGBTQ people potential security risks due to vulnerability to blackmail.]

Robbins met twice with the FBI in New York, confirming his brief Communist membership and agreeing to appear before HUAC if called. He even said he would be willing to identify others who were in the Party with him but he expressed reservations about “smearing people whose activities I had no knowledge of for the past three to six years.” He then left on a European tour with the New York City Ballet, and when Sullivan published a story in the Philadelphia Inquirer entitled “Tip to Red Probers: Subpena [sic] Jerome Robbins,” he stayed overseas for some months afterwards on the advice of his lawyer. His letters from that time even suggest that he considered becoming an ex-patriate to avoid having to testify before HUAC.

In early 1952, stage and film director Elia Kazan [1909-2003] was called before the Committee in a private session. He too was candid about his own brief membership in the Communist Party in the 1930s when he was an actor with the Group Theatre, but he was not required to name names. But his contract with Twentieth Century Fox was up for renewal, and he was told by one of its producers that unless he identified other former Communist Party members to the Committee he would never work as a film director again. Kazan began to experience chest pains, hand tremors, and sleepless nights as he agonized over what to do, eventually turning his agitation against the Communist Party, which he had left in 1936 over his refusal to try to persuade the Group Theatre to produce plays with overt Communist propaganda. He felt he had been humiliated at a Party meeting and had remained bitter ever since.

“I was against them all,” he wrote many decades later. “I began to measure the weight and worth of what I was giving up, my career in films, which I was surrendering for a cause I didn’t believe in.” (Of course, the “cause” he’d be giving up his film career for would not have been Communism, but the ability of his friends and colleagues to make a living.) Kazan directed all the blame for his situation at the Communist Party and none at HUAC, apparently rationalizing (as many did at the time) that if a democratic government behaved in an anti-democratic way, it was within its rights to do so. But others deplored HUAC’s “contempt for basic human rights,” in the words of Arthur Miller, and laid the blame for the blacklist squarely at the feet of the federal government.

[The quotation (and those below) from the director is from Elia Kazan: A Life (Knopf, 1988), his autobiography.]

Kazan returned to HUAC in April 1952 and gave the Committee eight names. (For good measure, he went on to talk about all the plays and films he’d directed, describing how––as he said of one musical––they were “non-political but full of American tradition and spirit.”) He then tried to hold off the inevitable recriminations from the theatre community by taking out an explanatory ad in the New York Times [“A STATEMENT by Elia Kazan,” 12 April 1952: 7.]––a defense that was poorly received and seen as self-serving. His secretary at the Actors Studio quit in protest, people he knew crossed the street to avoid him, and he received many letters, some of them anonymous, condemning what he had done. One such letter concluded, “I cannot sign my name because you hold an economic whip over those of us who are only actors.”

Elia Kazan resumed his successful career in both theatre and film but was disturbed by his own actions for the rest of his life. He speculated in his 1988 memoir that as the child of Greek immigrants, he might have been consumed by the need to prove his own patriotism. “What I’d done was correct but was it right?” he wrote. “No one who did what I did, whatever his reasons, came out of it undamaged. I did not. Here I am thirty-five years later, worrying over it.”

Kazan’s testimony cost him his working and personal relationship with Arthur Miller, whose early plays All My Sons [1947] and Death of a Salesman [1949] he had directed: Miller collaborated with other directors on his 1950s plays The Crucible [1953; staged by Jed Harris (1900-79)] and A View from the Bridge [1955; directed by Martin Ritt], both of which explore the human costs of informing on others. But Miller never explicitly condemned Kazan, and he always kept his anger directed at the perpetrators––HUAC and the vigilante blacklisters––rather than at their victims. Decades later, in his memoir, Miller lamented the futility of Kazan’s capitulation to HUAC. “Who or what was now safer because this man in his human weakness had been forced to humiliate himself?” he asked. “What truth had been enhanced by all this anguish?”

[Quotations from Arthur Miller are from Timebends.]

Writing from Israel in the spring of 1952, Jerome Robbins asked in a letter, “What is the news––& what have been the repercussions of Kazan’s statement?” When he himself was finally called before HUAC in May 1953, he talked about his reasons for joining the Communist Party––because of its stance against “minority prejudice” and anti-Semitism [Robbins, born Jerome Rabinowitz, was Jewish]––and why he left it several years later over its treatment of artists as “puppets” expected to insert Communist propaganda into their work. Then, with very little prompting, he went on to name seven of his colleagues from that time as having been members of the Party as well.

His demeanor when testifying “was so compliant that his appearance had about it the aura of social blackmail” (according to Naming Names [Viking Press, 1980], Victor Navasky’s [1932-2023; journalist, editor, and author] definitive account of the blacklist era), leading to speculation in the theatre and dance community that he might have cooperated so fully with HUAC for fear of being outed. At the hearing, when Representative Clyde Doyle [1887-1963; United States Representative from California: 1945-47 and 1949-63] asked him to explain his motives, observing that “some other people, who claim to be artists or authors or musicians, would put you down as a stool pigeon,” this exchange ensued:

Robbins: I’ve examined myself. I think I made a great mistake in entering the Communist Party, and I feel I am doing the right thing as an American.

Doyle: Well, so do I . . . You are in a wonderful place, through your art, your music, your talent . . . to perhaps be very vigorous and positive in promoting Americanism in contrast to Communism. Let me suggest that you use that great talent which God has blessed you with to put into ballet in some way, to put into music in some way, that interpretation.

Robbins: Sir, all my works have been acclaimed for its [sic] American quality particularly.

Doyle: I realize that but let me urge you to even put more of that in it, where you can appropriately.

Jerome Robbins’s career continued unabated in theatre and he began to work in film as well. But like Kazan, he found that many of his colleagues and friends were outraged by his compliance with HUAC’s request for names. Even his family was appalled: his father told his sister that rather than become an informer, Robbins should have given up his prospects in film, television, and even theatre. “He could always open a dancing school,” he said.

Robbins was haunted by what he had done for the rest of his life. Years later, in his notes for an autobiographical play, he wrote that he had capitulated to HUAC not so much because he was afraid of his sexual identity becoming known, but because of his lifelong insecurity about being the son of Jewish immigrants. He had always experienced “terrible pangs of terror when I feel that my career, work, veneer of accomplishments, would be taken away.” In front of HUAC, he believed, “I panicked and crumbled and returned to that primitive state of terror––the façade of Jerry Robbins would be cracked open, and behind everyone would see Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz.”

[Robbins’s statement above is apparently from journal entries he made in the early 1990s for a play called The Poppa Piece that was to be an autobiographical play with dialogue that explored not only his anguish over the HUAC interview, but his family history as well. The Poppa Piece was never completed and its only “performances” were private experimental workshop sessions.]

Author’s Note: Sources consulted in the writing of this article include biographies and memoirs of the theatre artists discussed, plus three indispensable books: Naming Names by Victor Navasky, a comprehensive narrative published in 1980; Broadway and the Blacklist by K. Kevyne Baar, which details the actions of Actors’ Equity and other unions; and The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War by James Shapiro, a 2024 book about HUAC’s targeting of the Federal Theatre Project.

[Because of its length, I’ve had to break this article into two parts.  Part two of “The Blacklist” will be posted on Friday, 3 July.  Please come back to ROT for the conclusion of this report.

[Mary B. Robinson is a director, teacher, and writer who has directed more than 70 productions in New York City and around the country, taught directing at NYU and Brooklyn College, and written the books To Repair the World: Zelda Fichandler and the Transformation of American Theater and Directing Plays, Directing People: A Collaborative Art.  She served for 15 years on the Executive Board of SDC.]

'Operation Mincemeat'

 

[The musical Operation Mincemeat premièred at the New Diorama Theatre (near Regent’s Park in London) on 14 May 2019 and ran until 15 June. The cast featured writers Natasha Hodgson, David Cumming, and Zoë Roberts (book, music, and lyrics) with Jak Malone and Rory Furey-King. 

[It then played on The Little stage at London’s Southwark Playhouse from 4 to 11 January 2020. A run on The Large stage began on 23 July 2021, where it was originally due to run until 7 August, however due to popular demand it was extended to 18 September. The musical ran for a final time at Southwark Playhouse from 14 January to 19 February 2022.

[Operation Mincemeat's final Off-West End run opened at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, London, from 28 April to 23 July 2022.

[The musical transferred to London’s West End, opening on 9 May 2023 at the Fortune Theatre. Originally scheduled to close after 9 July 2023, the production has been extended multiple times after receiving favorable reviews. It’s still running; after winning several awards for the Off-West End stagings, Operation Mincemeat, dubbed the best received show in the West End, won the 2024 Best New Musical Laurence Olivier Award (London’s counterpart of a Tony).

[The musical transferred to Broadway in 2025 for an originally slated 16-week limited run. Previews began on 15 February at the Golden Theatre and the show officially opened on 20 March to generally positive reviews. The original London cast reprised their roles on Broadway, and days after its first preview, the show announced an extended run due to popular demand, subsequently extended multiple times, and is still running. It was nominated for the 2025 Best Musical Tony Award, but didn’t win.

[There have been two feature-length movies based on the same material as the musical. The Man Who Never Was is a 1956 British espionage thriller film directed by Ronald Neame, based on the book of the same title (J. B. Lippincott Company, 1954) by Lt. Cmdr. Ewen Montagu, Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve. Operation Mincemeat is a 2021 war drama film directed by John Madden based on Ben Macintyre’s 2010 book (Bloomsbury) of the same name.

[Among the 80-odd characters portrayed by the five-actor cast, is, as David Gordon of TheaterMania describes him, “one of the most surprisingly real figures from this espionage mission: Ian Fleming, an eccentric intelligence officer in a black tux who’s writing a novel about a British secret agent with a penchant for martinis shaken, not stirred,” played by one of the show’s creators, Zoë Roberts.  (Says Gordon: she “kills it.”)] 

“HIS SPY SCHEMES CAME TO LIFE”
by Thomas Maier

[This article, which is more about Ian Fleming, his James Bond novels, and his real-life spy colleagues than it is about the London and Broadway musical Operation Mincemeat, ran in the New York Times of 24 August 2025 in the “Arts & Leisure” section.  It was posted as “How Ian Fleming and His Spy Scheme Inspired a Broadway Show” on the Times website on the same date.]

Even before 007, Ian Fleming concocted creative plots that aided wartime victories.

The James Bond spy novels dreamed up by Ian Fleming [British; 1908-64] were rooted in his World War II experiences as a British intelligence officer. In one instance, Fleming had an idea that was so wild it’s still hard to believe it actually worked. To misdirect the Nazis, he suggested outfitting a corpse with fake military plans and strategically placing it off the coast of Spain.

Because truth can be stranger than fiction, that scheme is now the subject of the rollicking Broadway musical “Operation Mincemeat.” The show, a hit in England before arriving in New York last spring, gets big laughs from this absurd tale of deception. In a rousing number, “God That’s Brilliant,” the conspiring spies sing rapturously as they plot to kill Hitler. (Fleming paints a picture of a martini-drinking, tuxedo-wearing assassin who “kills the guards, snogs the girl and says something cool.”)

[Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) was the Austrian-born German politician who became dictator of Germany in the Nazi era, from 1933 until his suicide in 1945. He rose to power as the leader (Führer) of the Nazi Party, elected Chancellor (Kanzler; prime minister) of Germany in 1933 and then taking the title of Führer und Reichskanzler in 1934. (Reich, as in Third Reich among other uses, in German means ‘empire,’ ‘kingdom,’ 'realm,' or ‘nation.’)

[Historians have identified at least 42 assassination plots on Hitler, starting before he held office. (There are probably more as some cases may be undocumented.) One was the famous 20 July plot, in which Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (1891-1944; regarded as one of the ablest tank commanders of the war; known as the Desert Fox) was at least a supporter if not an active participant.

[This is the 1944 plot to overthrow Hitler’s government and replace it, and the weapon was a briefcase bomb that exploded at a conference of high-ranking members of that government at the Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair) in East Prussia. The bomb went off, killing 4 and injuring 20, but only wounding the Führer slightly.

[Only one planned assassination attempt was hatched in the U.K.: Operation Foxley. This was a top-secret Allied plan by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) in mid-1944 to kill Hitler at his Berghof retreat in the Bavarian Alps. The SOE considered various scenarios, including sniper attacks, poisoning the water supply on the Führer‘s private train, or a direct commando raid. The operation was meticulously planned but ultimately never executed, as intelligence revealed Hitler had relocated to Berlin and rarely visited the Berghof again after late 1944.

[Ian Fleming did not consult on any assassination plot against Hitler. As far as anyone has revealed.]

Though the show presents him as a sort of bumbling genius, the Fleming character helps to establish the complex story as a spy caper. He “is so respected and revered and made a huge contribution to British culture,” said one of the show’s creators, Zoë Roberts [b. 1985], who also plays Fleming and other characters. “It seemed like a huge opportunity to have a little bit of fun and poke a little fun at him.”

But the musical provides only a glimpse of Fleming’s life as a spy.

In reality, Fleming was a clever and sophisticated British intelligence officer, who worked on both sides of the Atlantic and gained a wealth of insider knowledge that he later transformed into colorful, action-packed fiction with his Bond novels. “Never say ‘no’ to adventures — always say ‘yes,’” he explained. “Otherwise you’ll lead a very dull life.”

The Operation Mincemeat ruse originated in 1939 — shortly after Britain declared war on Hitler’s Nazi Germany [3 September 1939] — with a lengthy memo by Fleming’s boss, Adm. John Godfrey [1888-1970], the director of naval intelligence. “It was issued under Godfrey’s name, but it bore all the hallmarks of his personal assistant Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming,” concluded the historian Ben Macintyre [b. 1963], who has written about the wartime caper and Fleming’s fictional character, the suave MI6 agent James Bond, a.k.a. 007, who was portrayed in a string of popular films by a series of actors.

[MI6 (Military Intelligence, Section 6) is the British Secret Intelligence Service, roughly equivalent to the CIA in the United States. (The Military Intelligence designation is a hold-over from its origin during World War I when espionage and intelligence were the province of the war ministry.) It handles foreign intelligence, covert operations, and international espionage outside the United Kingdom. and answers to the Foreign Secretary.

[It shouldn’t be confused with its sister agency, MI5 (Military Intelligence, Section 5), the Security Service, which handles domestic intelligence and security, focusing on counter-terrorism and counter-espionage within the U.K. It answers to the Home Secretary and is the approximate counterpart to our FBI—except that MI5 has no law-enforcement responsibility and no power to make arrests.

[The third leg of the British intelligence structure is GCHQ, the Government Communications Headquarters. It serves as the UK's signals intelligence, cybersecurity, and cryptanalysis agency, the direct equivalent of the NSA in the U.S.]

Though the schemes appeared to be implausible, the memo advised, “the more you examine them, the less fantastic they seem.” No. 28 envisioned that “a corpse dressed as an airman, with dispatches in his pockets, could be dropped on the coast, supposedly from a parachute that had failed. I understand there is no difficulty in obtaining corpses at the Naval Hospital, but, of course, it would have to be a fresh one.”

Fleming’s idea was later put into action by the British naval intelligence officers Charles Cholmondeley [1917-82] and Ewen Montagu [1901-85]. (Both are leading characters in the musical, and properly given credit for their heroics. In 1953, Montagu published a book about it called “The Man Who Never Was.”) According to Macintyre, Fleming was “at least tangentially involved” in launching the plan, though these other spies carried it out.

Found on the corpse were documents identifying him as Capt. (Acting Major) William Martin [“b. 1907” (fictional)] — he was actually a vagrant named Glyndwr Michael [1907-43] who had died after ingesting rat poison — and paperwork that in time convinced Nazi forces that a 1943 Allied invasion of Italy through Sicily would instead take place at Sardinia. The deception helped make the Allies’ eventual victory in Italy easier and less bloody than expected.

Under Prime Minister Winston Churchill [1874-1965; Prime Minister of the United Kingdom: 1940-45 and 1951-55], an advocate of espionage, sabotage and “ungentlemanly warfare,” Fleming was sent to Manhattan to join the spies working to persuade the United States to join the war. For several months before the Americans entered the war, in December 1941, the British Security Coordination (B.S.C. [part of MI6]), based on the 36th floor of the International Building at Rockefeller Center, used propaganda, political influence and media manipulation to secretly combat isolationists and the Nazi threat inside America.

Soon, the United States created its first spy agency — the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S. [1942-45]), a precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency [formed 1947] — with the help of Fleming, who impressed officials with his advice about espionage and his willingness to take chances. “The British are many things, but cowards they are not,” Ernest Cuneo [1905-88], a top O.S.S. official [1942-45], said after working with Fleming.

Ghastly but ingenious, Fleming’s Mincemeat plan — itself inspired by a detective book on his shelf involving a corpse with forged papers [Basil Thomson (1861-1939; British colonial administrator, prison governor, and novelist), The Milliner’s Hat Mystery (Eldon Press [London], 1937)] — wasn’t his only creative idea. “Fleming could always laugh when some stratagem misfired — he had plenty more to choose from,” observed John Pearson [1930-2021; English novelist and biographer], whose Fleming biography [The Life of Ian Fleming (Jonathan Cape [London], 1966)] appeared two years after Fleming’s death, in 1964 at the age of 56.

One of Pearson’s favorite stories was how Fleming and William Stephenson [1897-1989; Canadian soldier, fighter pilot, businessman, and spymaster; codename: Intrepid], overseer of Churchill’s spies in Manhattan, broke into the Japanese consul general’s office, located below the B.S.C. headquarters in Rockefeller Center. Stephenson, Fleming and two other spies entered the closed offices at 3 a.m. Fleming acted as a lookout. They picked a safe’s locks and “borrowed” the Japanese code book and other confidential documents. They ran upstairs to their own offices to microfilm the important material.

Then they returned the papers, leaving them in the same order they were found. “To Stephenson, it was a straightforward operation,” Pearson recounted in Life magazine, “to Fleming a great and gleeful adventure.”

[Japan’s Consul General in New York City from 1939 to 1942 was Morito Morishima (1896-1975; traditional Japanese name order: Morishima Morito). The office that Stephenson, Fleming, and the British agents broke into was Morishima’s. The exact date of the raid is hard to verify because, for one reason, it’s possible it never actually happened.

[The story of the safe-cracking raid was popularized after the war by William Stephenson’s biographers. According to Stephenson, the raid was real, Fleming was the lookout, and the stolen codes successfully helped the Allies track Japanese and German maritime movements.

[Many of Ian Fleming’s official biographers and modern intelligence historians argue that the Rockefeller Center break-in may have been a “tall tale” or a piece of post-war bravado. They note that while Fleming certainly met with Stephenson in June 1941, there’s no mention of a physical break-in in British Naval Intelligence logs.

[Fun Fact: Whether the New York incursion was actual or not, the idea of cracking open Morishima’s safe ultimately inspired Fleming to pen Casino Royale (1953), the first Bond novel. In the book, Bond remembers his first kill and recounts that it happened in the Japanese Consulate in Rockefeller Center, New York. (See below.) Lest we forget, the “double-oh” in Bond’s code number is a “license to kill,” given to the agents of the “British Secret Service” who are authorized to use lethal force.]

Fleming told Godfrey, his former boss, about the successful break-in, hoping the story would reach the appreciative ears of Churchill, whose approval mattered to Fleming on a personal level. Churchill had been friendly with Fleming’s father, Valentine [1882-1917], a fellow Conservative in Parliament, who was killed by German shellfire in World War I when Fleming was only 9.

Years later, Fleming turned this spy scheme in Manhattan into fiction. In his first novel, “Casino Royale,” he introduced the assassin James Bond, who tracks down a Japanese cipher expert who was cracking British coded messages inside Rockefeller Center. Stationed in another building and equipped with a Remington rifle that had telescopic sights and silencer, Bond takes aim and shoots the Japanese agent. “It was a pretty sound job,” Bond summarized. “Nice and clean too.”

After the war, Fleming had felt at a loss, craving the intrigue and intensity of his spy work. “We almost suffered emotional ‘bends’ the day the war ended — tension went out like a power line turned off,” recalled Cuneo, who later ran a small newspaper syndicate with Fleming. “Aside from its horrors, you missed the frightful challenge of war. I think Fleming missed it as much as most; he seemed both grumpy and disconsolate.”

[In March 1951, Cuneo and a small group of investors purchased the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA). In addition, Cuneo and the Bell Syndicate-North American Newspaper Alliance group acquired the McClure Newspaper Syndicate in September 1952. Cuneo acquired full control over NANA in the mid-1950s and served as president until 1963 when he sold it, though he remained with NANA as a columnist and military analyst from 1963 to 1980.

[Because of Cuneo’s association with former members of American and British intelligence, including Fleming and Ivar Bryce (1906-85), and because some writers in the Cuneo era had alleged links to the CIA, critics have suggested that NANA under his tenure was a front for espionage. Cuneo, a staunch anti-communist, was involved with the Citizens Committee for a Free Cuba, an anti-Castro organization formed in 1963.]

By January 1952, Fleming had turned most of his attention to writing spy novels. He modeled Bond on various real-life figures — notably Stephenson for his bold moves, inventive killing gadgets and coolheaded fearlessness. This fictional secret agent would have a boss called “M” — modeled after his own Royal Navy superior Admiral Godfrey. And Fleming dedicated his “Thunderball” novel [1961] to his American spy pal Cuneo.

The author amused himself by slightly changing the names and identities of his spy friends: Cuneo, for example, became Ernie Cureo, a taxi driver and secret C.I.A. informant, in “Diamonds Are Forever” [1956]. And the American spy Felix Leiter [C.I.A. agent], a recurring character who appears in “Live and Let Die” [1954] and “Goldfinger” [1958], gets his first name “Felix” from the actual middle name of Fleming’s childhood friend, the British spy Ivar Bryce.

[Personal Comment: I didn’t read the Bond novels until the 1960s, when I was a teenager. At the same time, my family moved to Europe when my father joined USIA and was assigned to Germany (see “An American Teen in Germany, Part 1” [9 March 2013] and “Part 2” [12 March 2013]) and I went to school in Geneva, Switzerland.

[As I was attending school in a French-speaking town, I read a couple of things in French just to see if I could. One was the translation of Thunderball—Opération Tonnerre (‘Operation thunder’) in French, published in 1962. (At this same time, I also remember watching the French-dubbed version of From Russia with Love, the 1963 Bond film. In French, it’s called Bons Baisers de Russie, which is a common idiom frequently written or printed on vacation post cards that means “Greetings from Russia,” “Best wishes from Russia,” or, as the movie has it, “With love from Russia.”  The phrase literally means “Good kisses from Russia.”)]

One of Fleming’s most enthusiastic readers was President John F. Kennedy [1917-63; 35th President of the United States: 1961-63]. They met at a Washington dinner party the Kennedys were hosting in the spring of 1960, months before the election [8 November]. Kennedy was already a fan of the 007 novels. After dinner, he asked Fleming how he might handle Fidel Castro’s Communist takeover of Cuba.

[Castro (1926-2016), the Cuban revolutionary, was the leader of Cuba from 1959 to 2008.  He overthrew right-wing dictator Fulgencio Batista (1901-73; President of Cuba: 1940-44 and 1952-59) on 1 January 1959 and assumed military and political power as Cuba's prime minister.

[Castro served as prime minister from 1959 to 1976 and president from 1976 to 2008. A Marxist–Leninist and Cuban nationalist, Castro also served as the first secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba from 1965 until 2011.]

“Ridicule, chiefly,” Fleming replied wryly. He then outlined several Bond-like spy techniques that could “deflate” Castro’s reputation. Kennedy seemed amused by Fleming’s far-fetched suggestions. One called for American scientists shooting off a rocket intended to form a fiery cross in the sky, which might be interpreted as a heavenly sign that Castro should be replaced.

Apprised of Kennedy’s dinner conversation, the C.I.A. director Allen Dulles [1893-1969; lawyer who was the first civilian Director of Central Intelligence (DCI – 1953-61)] later directed scientists in the agency to see if Bond’s fictional gadgets and high-tech killing devices could be adopted.

Fleming’s novels — already moderately successful — soared in popularity with a public endorsement by the new president. In March 1961, Life magazine listed Fleming’s “From Russia With Love” [1957] as one of Kennedy’s favorite books. The Kennedys later hosted a private screening of the Bond movie “Dr. No” [novel: 1958; film: 1962; first Bond film] at the White House.

[Kennedy watched Dr. No at the White House on 28 November 1962; the movie wasn’t released in the U.S. until 29 May 1963, though it had premièred in the U.K. on 5 October 1962. (Almost a year later, on 23 October 1963, the Kennedys returned to the White House Family Theater to watch From Russia With Love, making it one of the very last movies the president ever saw. The Kennedys flew to Dallas on 21 November, arriving just after 11 p.m. He was shot at 12:30 p.m. on the 23rd and declared dead a half hour later.)]

Around that time, Dulles received a copy of Fleming’s “From Russia With Love” from the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, with the inscription, “Here is a book you should have, Mr. Director.”

[Operation Mincemeat had at least one unexpected consequence.  In 1951, journalist, writer, and editor of books about theater Otis L. Guernsey, Jr. (1918-2001), who was fascinated by the Mincemeat deception, pitched an idea at a cocktail party to master suspense filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) about a civilian traveling and accidentally being mistaken for a fake intelligence agent, getting saddled with a dangerous identity.

[Hitchcock bought Guernsey’s treatment and, along with screenwriter and film producer Ernest Lehman (1915-2005), used that premise of a non-existent agent to create the 1959 spy thriller North by Northwest—one of my all-time favorite flicks.  

[In the film, Cary Grant’s (1904-86) character, ordinary advertising executive Roger O. Thornhill (his initials, seen on his cufflinks on the train with Eva Marie Saint [b. 1924], are “ROT,” my nickname for this blog) is mistaken for George Kaplan—a government agent who doesn’t actually exist. (Thornhill appears to have answered a page for Kaplan in the Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel in New York City.)

[Just as in Mincemeat, British intelligence used a fabricated marine officer to misguide the Germans, the American agents in North by Northwest intentionally perpetuate the illusion of Kaplan to protect a real double agent (Saint’s character) and trap enemy operatives.

[Thomas Maier is the author of The Invisible Spy: Churchill’s Rockefeller Center Spy Ring and America’s First Secret Agent of World War II (Hanover Square Press [Toronto], 2025).]

Steven Spielberg, "Hollywood Director"

 

[According to writer Wesley Morris, prolific filmmaker Steven Spielberg (58 movies as director, 184 as producer over 67 years) is “most people’s dictionary definition of ‘Hollywood director.’”  In the article below, the writer and culture critic makes his case for the accolade.  There’s no doubt that Spielberg has made some of most popular movies of our time, many of them truly iconic.  Read what Morris has to say are Spielberg’s superpowers, the magic he wields to make his movies touch us so indelibly.’ 

“THE BELIEVER”
by Wesley Morris 

[This profile of master film director Steven Spielberg ran in the New York Times Magazine of 7 June 2026.  On the same date, it was posted as “What Steven Spielberg Taught Me About Fear, Catharsis, and Being Human” on the paper’s website.]

Hollywood is struggling, but Steven Spielberg insists that the big screen is still the best place to work out our collective dreams, fears, joys and sorrows.

On Jan. 1, something amazing happened. Steven Spielberg [b. 1946], a longtime Angeleno and most people’s dictionary definition of “Hollywood director,” became a New York City resident. On the one hand, this is a significant event. What classic Spielberg location requires a 212 or 718 or 646 to phone home? On the other hand, he has made five of his last six movies in New York State [see IMDb], including his exuberant, ominous reconsideration of “West Side Story” [2021]. Plus, for decades, Spielberg has kept a place on the Upper West Side. Five of his seven children live here, and all six of his grandchildren. So yeah: no big whoop. It was simply time. But to a New Yorker, this is a meaningful move: as if Magic Johnson had spent the rest of his career playing at the Garden.

[Earvin “Magic” Johnson, Jr. (b. 1959), is a businessman and former professional basketball player, widely regarded as one of the greatest in history. He spent his entire career with the Los Angeles Lakers.]

And Spielberg is still playing. He turns 80 in December. The signs of wear and tear of a half-century of moviemaking are discreet. He uses a barely-there hearing aid, and his gait is a tad slower than maybe he’d like. He has become an insole guy. (“I’m on my feet as a director my whole life. My feet have gotten as flat as a pancake.”) The mellower pace of Los Angeles suits his temperament. He’s voluble, yet reserved. In a five-way conversation, he’ll do as much listening as speaking. He wants to hear what’s going on with everybody around him.

But here, in Spielberg’s New York era, his zest for everything has kicked up a notch. Invite him out, he’ll show up — for dinners and openings, for one of the farewell episodes [19 May 2026] of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” Until Colbert [he also appeared on 2 and 9 March 2023], he hadn’t done late-night television since the end of the 1970s. At one point, he brought the house down. “I made a couple of jokes,” he marveled the next day, smiling with the sort of bashfulness that obscures most of his teeth. He has more true friends now than he used to. He would even schlep his Lakers-loving self to a Knicks game, but only “if Spike Lee [b. 1957; filmmaker and actor] takes me.”

“Suggestible” might be too mild for where Spielberg is right now. “Open,” “ready” — those seem closer. “Adaptable.” Willing to adjust a plan in order to experience someone else’s preference. One evening at dinner, he was all set to order the salmon when I told him I was having a calf’s liver. His eyes widened behind his glasses. “Fuck the salmon!” He enjoys some funk when he eats. “I kind of like food that reminds me of what I just ate,” he said, with not a little bit of delight. “I want food that reminds me, five minutes later, before I contaminate the taste with something else.” He then ventriloquized the food: “I hope you enjoyed me, because I’m going to linger!”

Later that night, he and I were sitting at the Lyceum Theater, waiting for Maya Rudolph [b. 1972; actress and comedian] to make her Broadway debut in “Oh, Mary!” [Lyceum Theatre, 11 July 2024-present; Rudolph: 28 April-5 July 2026] when he turned to me and said: “I really want to do theater. I really do.” He said this the way a kid might announce how bad he needs to pee. “I want to direct something. I don’t know what it is yet, but I’ve had this yearning.” Afterward, at a cozy, wholehearted welcome party for Rudolph, Spielberg grew wistful over the outpouring of support, the hooting and the adulation. “This never happens in film — only in theater,” he said above all the cheering. He didn’t mean for him (rooms ovate Spielberg all the time). He was moved by the utter earnestness of theater-community camaraderie, of people eagerly gathered to celebrate what they’d just made. His eyes were wide again. “This is infectious,” he kept saying.

Lest anybody worry, Spielberg’s appetite for filmmaking remains hardy. His 35th movie, an aliens-are-among-us action-thriller called “Disclosure Day,” opens June 12. And that thirst for connection runs beneath the movie. He has made a propulsive, lean-mean conspiracy machine that’s funny, intriguing and suspenseful — but it also concerns our alienation from something Spielberg is certain we desperately need more than ever: collective catharsis, the sort you come by at the movies.

Lately, the idea of a Steven Spielberg has felt endangered. For more than 50 years, his imagery has epitomized American movies, maybe even epitomized America [his debut film was The Last Gun, 1959]. He has been at the center of an industry that, if it’s not dying, is certainly diminished. The sort of original movies that made Spielberg Spielberg are virtually nonexistent, even though the two major flavors that now define the industry — global box-office smash and best picture nominee — are, with Spielberg, indistinguishable (start with “Jaws” [1975], “Raiders of the Lost Ark” [1981], “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” [1982]). More than once, he inhabited both modes within one calendar year: “Jurassic Park” in the summer of 1993 [grossed $47 million domestically in its opening weekend, then the biggest opening weekend gross in history], for instance, then “Schindler’s List” at the end of Hanukkah [without adjusting for inflation, this is the highest-grossing black-and-white film of all time (taking in $96 million domestically and $321 million worldwide)], perhaps the most triumphant single-year change-up any Hollywood director has had. (He’s still the most commercially successful director ever, and he’s tied, at 13, with William Wyler [1902-81; German-born American film director and producer] for directing the most best picture Oscar nominees.)

[Spielberg has received 14 Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, setting the all-time record for the most nominations in that category. He won the Best Picture award once, for 1993’s Schindler’s List. Of his 14 Best Picture nominations, he directed 11 of the films and just produced 3 of them. (That would still be the record for Best Picture nominations; in any case, according to Academy rules, the Best Picture Oscar is awarded to the producers of the film, not the director.)

[Spielberg also directed Jaws (1975) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), which were nominated for Best Picture, but because of the Academy rules at the time regarding who received the credit, he wasn’t personally named a nominee for those two films. (In the 1970s and ’80s, the Academy nominated the film itself for Best Picture rather than naming specific individuals on the ballot. If the movie won, the studio designated which producers accepted the statuette. Because Spielberg didn’t hold a producer credit on either movie, he was never an official Best Picture nominee.)]

Popular art has always bonded us to one another, no matter what might have been cleaving us apart, no matter how different our lives or how our responses to that art diverged. And Spielberg’s films have been a premium adhesive. Not only the ones he directed but the dozens of swooshing, indelibly kooky hits unleashed by Amblin Entertainment, his production company [eight of Amblin’s films were nominated for Best Picture Oscars, including the winning Schindler’s List.]: “Poltergeist” [1982], “Gremlins” [1984], “The Goonies” [1985], the “Back to the Future” trilogy [1985, 1989, 1990], “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” [1988], “Arachnophobia” [1990].

Spielberg’s stardom arose from the collision of capitalism, audacity and creative vision. His movies emerged alongside the arrival of cable television and proliferating advances in personal computing and home entertainment. I watched “E.T.” at the movies, devoured it on cable, played it on my Atari and let Michael Jackson [1958-2009; pop singer, songwriter, dancer, and philanthropist] sing me a lullaby the movie inspired him to write [“Someone in the Dark” (1982)]. (Spielberg: so titanic that the other king of pop worshiped his thrillers. [Thriller is a 1982 Michael Jackson album and “Thriller” is a 1983 single from the album.])

But a kind of cultural malnourishment has set in. While you once needed a pair of hands to count the major studios, we’re on the verge of barely needing one. And the best, most lucrative ideas entail microwaved nostalgia that we all know by its legal nickname: I.P. [Intellectual Property]. The takeovers and reheating, the obscure metrics that ensure we never quite know exactly how popular anything is, it’s dispiriting: Pac-Man eating ghosts, algorithms keeping secrets.

When movies play in only a handful of theaters to qualify for awards, and increasingly millions of us watch them on our phones, “that is not my definition of a motion-picture experience,” Spielberg told me. For that, he said, you need “an audience to be the accelerant of that experience, to be the contagion of making the experience even more profound for the individual in that crowded theater — or what we hope is a crowded theater.” Obviously, streaming changes that experience, denying us the companionship of hundreds of strangers either confirming or causing us to question our humor, our tastes, our responses.

This is to say that what Steven Spielberg symbolizes, what he built in Hollywood and in our hearts, could be reaching its twilight. He is touched by our appreciation for all that he has come to mean to us. At that “Oh, Mary!” cast party, a stocky, ebullient woman approached and asked if she could show Spielberg the “Jaws” tattoo beautifying her calf. Of course she could. And even though Spielberg estimates that he has seen 30 of these since “Jaws” came out in 1975 (plus dozens of other tattoos inspired by his movies), he listened and marveled as though hers was his very first. Earlier, on the corner of 45th Street and Eighth Avenue, a young, fit guy with a blond ponytail sitting on a construction barrier looked up and said, with biblical concision, “Thank you.”

It was a “thank you” that contained so much. As I interpreted it, thank you for your vision, your imagination, your ingenuity, acuity, spirit and nerve. Thank you for “All my life I had to fight” [Sofia in The Color Purple (1985; Oprah Winfrey [b. 1954])] and “You’re gonna need a bigger boat” [Jaws; Police Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider [1932-2008])], for every single caftan you let wear Meryl Streep [b. 1949] in “The Post” [2017]. Thank you for more than 50 years of unflagging energy and unshakable belief that we human beings are worth the trouble. But the gratitude was tinged with sorrow. “Thank you” for daring and caring and trying to show us the light, to keep the lights on, as the artistic system you worshiped and symbolized and helped redefine renounces itself.

But he’s not thinking of his career or his meaning that way. He’s going to keep on keeping on. As you read this, he’s getting ready to make his first western.

Spielberg has always known how to reach us, how to reach into us. The first time he reached inside me, I was 6.

My mother took my sister and me to see “E.T.,” and I was besotted. This space alien that had been taken in and cared for by Elliott, Gertie and Mike, whose capacity for love glowed like lava in his chest, who just wants to return home. I got it all. When E.T. goes missing and Mike goes looking for him on his bike and discovers the poor thing passed out in a ravine, I understood, for the first time, the porous border between the screen and the rest of the world. I wasn’t in a movie theater anymore. I was at a funeral. I went, in escalating stages, from sobbing to weeping to bawling. The theater was packed. The bawling was probably a real disturbance. My mother leaned over and asked if I wanted to go home, and I have a clear memory of saying, with a sharpness that she later described as “appalled”: No.

I was having my first art attack. And Steven Spielberg induced it.

I’ve done my share of blubbering at other people’s movies. But crying at my first Spielberg was primal. By the end, as Elliott and E.T. are aloft on a bike, framed by the moon, soaring as much on John Williams’s [b. 1932] score as on air, the waterworks had revved up anew. But now I was crying tears of joy. I was experiencing what I can only describe as the Spielberg rinse: a full-cycle emotional power wash.

A rinse can occur when you least expect it. Take “West Side Story.” The minute Ariana DeBose [b. 1991] begins her assault on the asphalt of 68th and Broadway in the “America” number, I lost it. I was sure this was the most exhilarating musical sequence I’d ever seen. For the whole number, DeBose is a firework that whirs and whirs and never seems to extinguish: limbs and shoulders and hips, but also the yolk-yellow of her skirt and its scarlet underskirt. So how did Spielberg rinse me here? Let’s start with the controlled rush of imagery. The camera and editing are savoring every shot, but they’re also doing their own dance. The movie came out when we were still pandemic-skittish. I hadn’t been out dancing with strangers in a long time. And all that vigorously precise motion, presented from head to toe, summoned the desperation I’d been feeling for dancing I could not do.

I cried because here was incontrovertible proof that Spielberg, who was in his mid-70s when the movie came out, still had gusto to go for, gusto to burn. And then there was this: I was horny. One turns to Spielberg for many things, but the erogenous hadn’t been one of them. And yet he’d managed to serve us a number that, visually, is nothing but sex.

A Spielberg works in other modes, too. Take wonder. He has a shot for that. Often our heroine or hero gets a load of something — no, no, they witness it, they behold it. And what they’re seeing they can’t believe. The camera will often swing around to capture this moment of awe. Richard Dreyfuss [b. 1947] awaiting rapture at the end of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” [1977]. Whoopi Goldberg’s [b. 1955] Celie agog as her long-lost family returns to her in “The Color Purple.” Laura Dern [b. 1967], dumbfounded at the sight of a dinosaur in “Jurassic Park,” rising from her Jeep so automatically that she’s all but levitating. These are just a few of the protagonists; agape bit players could stock their own hourlong montage.

Crucially, this is a career spent harnessing that wonder to peer into childhood’s recesses. Light happens to be a major Spielberg motif — flashlights and spotlights and searchlights and floodlights and headlights; the sun, the moon. Projector stand-ins, perhaps. But also evidence that something is being detected, ferreted out, sometimes found. His movies understand that anything could happen to a kid, so almost everything does — divorce, dinosaurs, dinosaurs during a divorce, assault, abandonment, adulthood. I’ve always thought about that moment in “Close Encounters” when a son sits at the dinner table and weeps as he watches his father tearfully play with his food; the upside-downness of what he’s witnessing embarrasses him, but it’s also breaking his heart. Spielberg has always known that his movies are attempts to understand his boyhood and his parents, to try to heal them through fiction and illuminate parts of himself.

“For years, I was working out my mom and dad’s divorce through my stories,” he told me. The split happened when Spielberg was about 15, but the marriage had begun to fade years before. The family dissolved, too. He went off to live with his father, Arnold, a computer engineer, in Los Angeles, while his three sisters remained in Phoenix with their mother, Leah, a classical pianist who used to operate a kosher deli. But it seems that living under the same roof didn’t significantly change how remote Arnold could feel to his son.

Over dinner one night, Spielberg told me about working on “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” [1989] with George Lucas [b. 1944; filmmaker and philanthropist]. The movie reunites Harrison Ford’s [b. 1942] Indiana with his father, a Holy Grail expert played by Sean Connery [1930-2020]. “My contribution was: ‘OK, but I want to meet Indy’s dad, and I want them to have had years of estrangement and father neglecting son because the father was a workaholic. And this story will bring them back together again.’” When Spielberg said this, he still sounded wishful and a touch sad. Watched through the lens of his childhood, his movies can seem newly forlorn, someone blowing on a birthday cake gated with stubborn candles.

For centuries, we’ve lived with a myth that genius — male genius — expresses itself as wild eccentricity or madness, that the personality warrants a cult or a harem. Spielberg disorients in that regard. I, at least, needed a moment to absorb how familiar he felt, how familial. The man who made “E.T.” was eerily reminiscent of the woman who took me to see “E.T.” Both of them have in common a special intuition to anticipate needs we don’t know we have. My mother did it for a household. For more than half a century, Spielberg has been doing the same for a planet.

Yet as a man, he maintains a small scale. He’s as modestly sized [he’s 5′ 7¾″] as his movies tend to be gargantuan. Maybe the movies wouldn’t work without this modesty. If he were any other way, you’d lose sight of the people. Their lives often start simply enough, in houses with, say, shag carpets and cluttered bedrooms. But then they are ripped from home and spend the movies on a quest to find it again, or to fight to keep it, recreate it, ensure it stays intact.

Spielberg hasn’t been to see a therapist since he was in college. Instead, the movies are the arena in which he has worked on some of the mysteries he couldn’t solve on his own. What we experience as sorcery is, for him, a process of exorcism. “I can’t express enough how therapeutic and healthy it is for me to keep doing this job over and over and over again,” he said deliberatively, almost as if he was feeling this out. “I work so much out through this process. So much out. I get to bleed off some of the darkness instead of letting it fester inside me. You get to let it fester inside you.”

It seems that his marriage has been therapeutic too — a chance, perhaps, to better grasp his father by being a husband. He has been with Kate Capshaw [b. 1953; m. Spielberg 1991] since they met making “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” [1984] more than 40 years ago; she played Indy’s chanteuse sidekick, Willie Scott. Capshaw told me that when she went in to read for the part, Spielberg sat across from her with a pair of aviators on, and she summoned the gumption to ask him to take them off.

“Oh, that’s so much better,” she remembered saying. “Now I can see you.” He was in his mid-30s. He’d already made “Jaws” and “Close Encounters,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “E.T.,” and maybe he had been enjoying the performance of “Hollywood movie director,” the costume of it. Capshaw, who was in her late 20s, wanted to peel away the defenses. “All the jobs that are required in order to make a movie, he could do all of them, and he could do all of them almost better than anyone else,” she said. But when she came into his life, “It was like: Yes, you’re a director, but that’s what you do. I’m interested in who you are. Like, who’s the man?”

Spielberg tried to resist how he felt. “I like to be very professional on a movie,” he says. He was still involved with the actress Amy Irving [b. 1953], whom he eventually married [​m. 1985; div. 1989]. But Capshaw disarmed him. She asked to get a look at him, a professional look, and gradually, he made himself vulnerable to his feelings — for her. “Changed my whole life,” he said.

Capshaw, who is now in her 70s and seems part solar and part floral, talked about her husband with ardor. They raised seven kids together, often on location, with him on film sets and her directing at home. Yet somehow her love sounds as if she pulled it out of the dirt yesterday. Her appeals to her husband to remove the sunglasses, so to speak, continue. “Kate always sees where I don’t want to go,” Spielberg told me when we walked through Times Square. “And she doesn’t let. It. Go.” He wasn’t registering a complaint. It seemed like a source of healing, a conjugal deep-tissue massage. “The second I get quiet, she knows she hit a nerve. And I’m like: How do I get out of this? Somebody pull the fire alarm!”

But he’s open to being pushed. He’s the rare director who prefers his screenwriter present during shoots — a custom that David Koepp [b. 1963; screenwriter and director], who wrote the screenplay for “Disclosure Day” and whom Spielberg has been working with, off and on, since “Jurassic Park,” typically deems “painful.” The actors “sometimes think you’re there to be a word cop,” Koepp told me. It’s different with Spielberg. “Steven is eager to actively involve the writer in problem-solving, which makes the day much more interesting and makes one feel useful, rather than just an observer,” Koepp said.

Tony Kushner [b. 1956; author, playwright, and screenwriter] is another trusted collaborator and one of Spielberg’s beloved sounding boards, even though, as Kushner himself explained, he’s pushy and possibly more than that. “I’m a kvetch [Yiddish: whiner or complainer] and a worrier and unbelievably unpleasant,” he told me, and Spielberg “puts up with it.”

The Kushner collaboration is another of Spielberg’s committed marriages and maybe his toughest to fathom. Kushner is a vertiginously erudite, nervous, opinionated, gay, dyed-in-the-wool socialist. Spielberg frequently carries an unlit cigar with him and sits in a director’s chair printed with the word “Dad.” But the fruit of their partnership is cherries all the way across: “Munich” [2005] and “Lincoln” [2012], plus “West Side Story” and “The Fablemans” [2022]. Their partnership works because maybe it shouldn’t: the author of “Angels in America” and the man who brought us “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” a masterful avant-garde polemicist and perhaps our greatest Hollywood director. Somehow, their respective geniuses dovetail. But they have their moments.

[Kushner’s Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes is a 1991 two-part play. The two parts of the play, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, are occasionally presented separately. The work won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Drama (1993), the Tony Award for Best Play (1993/94), and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play (1993/94). Part one of the play premiered in 1991, followed by part two in 1992. The full play premiered in 1992 at Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles. Later that same year it had its U.K. premiere at the National Theatre in London, while its Broadway opening was in 1993. In 2003, HBO adapted the play into a six-episode miniseries.]

“West Side Story” was a particularly grueling shoot, Kushner says. At some point, he was so upset about how much Spielberg’s idea for an ending was diverging from what was in the script that Kushner says he left the set. When he returned the next day, Spielberg was eager to share what he filmed in his absence: a mournful long shot in which the Jets carry Tony’s body away as a bereft Maria trails behind them and the police arrive to arrest Tony’s killer, Chino. The camera tracks upward, observing the entire event through the bars of the fire escape. “I was blown away by it,” Kushner said.

“The thing that really just floored me is that he scans up through the fire escape, which is the icon of ‘West Side Story’ romanticism. It’s the balcony scene. And he turns it into the bars of a prison.” Kushner was chagrined that he hadn’t thought of that. “I don’t think he even knew necessarily consciously what he was doing, but that’s the thrill of him. He’s guided by something really deep.”

I had caught Kushner in the grip of a Charles Dickens [1812-70; English writer and journalist; regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era] phase. In Dickens’s day, Kushner offered, there were reading clubs devoted to his writing in which literate people read to illiterate ones. Dickens was a hit with the working class; his novels are complex aesthetic achievements that nonetheless were accessible. “There’s no condescension,” Kushner says. “There’s no dumbing down.” Such is the case with Spielberg, too. “There’s a profound sense of human community in his work, and of profound belief that the world, although it’s not perfectible, is infinitely improvable if human beings recognize their interconnection with one another, and their shared apprehensions, and misapprehensions, and work on them collectively.”

As we were getting ready to head over to “Oh, Mary!” Spielberg told me a story about the time his mother’s brother, Bernard, took him and his cousin, Paul, to visit the Lincoln Memorial. It was 1952 or ’53. He would’ve been 6. The three of them climbed the steps. “Suddenly I was standing at the foot of a scary giant,” he recalled. “I remember glancing up and being so terrified I could only look at the hands.” He fixated on how they “were overhanging the armrests” and felt the urge to flee. But something held him back. “When I turned around, I looked up at his face. At this statue. Of Lincoln. A calm washed over me. An instant connection washed over me.” His fear ceased. What arrived in its place was unabated curiosity. He began to read all about Lincoln and started making silhouette cutouts of him, an obsession you can see re-enacted in the opening scene of “Minority Report” [2002], when a child makes a paper mask of Lincoln.

By all means, allow this memory to serve as an origin story for Spielberg’s movie, “Lincoln,” about the 16th president’s stewardship of the passage of the 13th Amendment officially abolishing slavery. But what if it’s the origin of everything else, too? Spielberg experiences fear — over a sort of monster at first, then a giant, then someone majestic — and wills it to become awe.

[The 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution was passed by the Senate on 8 April 1864, by the House of Representatives on 31 January 1865, and ratified by the required 27 of the then 36 states on 6 December 1865, and proclaimed on 18 December 1865. (Lincoln was shot at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., on 14 April 1865. He died just after 7 a.m. on the 15th. He’d seen the passage of the amendment by Congress, but not its final ratification or its proclamation.)]

Kushner’s husband, the critic and author Mark Harris [b. 1963], who has had a front-row seat to Kushner and Spielberg’s partnership since it began, said to me about Spielberg: “I believe he is a searcher. He won’t make a movie unless he knows why he wants to make it. And I think he also won’t make a movie unless he knows what scares him about that particular movie. I do think he likes being scared a little bit.”

Capshaw agrees. “Almost every movie, we wake up in the morning — we get up at the same time, whether it’s 5 a.m. or whatever,” she said, “and it’s like, OK, we’re off to work. And I’ll say, ‘How you feeling?’ And he’ll go, ‘Terrified.’ I go: ‘Excellent. A great day.’ Or he’ll say, ‘I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.’ I say, ’You couldn’t be in a better spot.’”

The search — all those flashed lights — is a wish to sublimate that creative fear into astonishment.

Would Spielberg’s awe explain the correspondent wonder that has been such a major visual signpost in his work for more than 50 years? When Jaws finally rises up from the ocean, is that mouth a rictus of astonishment? Look what I can do! Is that why we’ve given ourselves so many tattoos of that one shot, of the movie’s iconic poster — fear not being conquered, per se, but awe being eternalized? Anytime one of Spielberg’s many awe-struck characters takes their wonder to the skies, what should we have called that glance? I once called it heavenward, but what if, maybe, it’s truly just Lincolnville up there, an infinite expanse of liberation, rationality and eloquence? I considered the possibility that I’d gone overboard here, until I remembered who I’d been talking to.

When I said to Spielberg that Lincoln had become bigger than life to little Steven, his response almost leaped out of his chest. “Childhood is bigger than life!”

That feels as true as ever in “Disclosure Day.” Its two protagonists, a TV weathergirl (Emily Blunt [b. 1983]) and a cybersecurity expert who works for a government subcontractor (Josh O’Connor [b. 1990]), strangers to each other, experienced something profound as children that neither wants to face. Whatever it was that happened has put them on the same path, barreling toward the event of the movie’s title. Blunt discovers, suddenly, that she can quite literally speak other people’s languages — Chinese, Russian — and experience what they’re feeling, like, what’s in their hearts. He, meanwhile, has his own special power, an uncanny knack for numbers.

The two strangers might be Leah and Arnold Spielberg, the artistic feeler and the digital pioneer. But they’re also two parts of their son, the empathizer and the gadget nut. They’re both running from a Defense Department outfit called Wardex and toward a mysterious figure named Hugo (Colman Domingo [b. 1969]). Hugo knows about their childhoods, their gifts, and that they’re destined to play a major role in the fate of the universe. We see him call the shots from a kind of soundstage where a crew is, mysteriously, constructing some kind of elaborate set, where all will be revealed. He’s the visionary, the director.

Hugo’s vision entails the planet coming to a halt for the movie’s climax, an event that blows coverage of an impending nuclear war off the nation’s screens to show us heartbreaking footage of the aliens — essentially, a Spielberg movie. The whole world watches it at the same time. The film is a cry for a monoculture that’s pure Spielberg.

We still have reasons to look up in Hollywood. For more than a year, studios have been serving us original movies that we’ve turned into hits. As I write this, a handful of the top 10 movies at the box office are based on original screenplays — “Obsession” [2025], “Passenger” [2026], “I Love Boosters” [2026], Throw in a pop biography like “Michael” [2026] and a purposeful sequel like “The Devil Wears Prada 2” [2026], and it all feels like a healthy complement to the umpteenth “Star Wars” product squatting at No. 1 [Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026)]. The moment seems ripe for Spielberg to entreat us to show up for “Disclosure Day” and lead us back to ourselves.

For most of the film, Blunt’s character has no idea why or how she can reach into people and so profoundly relate to them. She’s a regular person but itinerant, avoidant. Now she has been called by a power she doesn’t even want to understand, a power to communicate with strangers to manipulate them for goodness’ sake, because they need to hear her short-order therapy. This gift is beyond her control, and she accepts this, that she’s an instrument for a higher purpose, to bring us together with a message of hope. She has a job to do. And despite the repressive forces trying to stop her, she does it.

[Wesley Morris is critic-at-large at the New York Times who writes about art and popular culture.  In addition to movies and television and maybe certain corners of the internet, that culture also includes sports and style and all kinds of performance (on stage, on screens, on court, in court). He’s also the host of the New York Times podcast Cannonball.

[Previously, Morris wrote for the Boston Globe, then Grantland.  He won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for his work with the Globe and the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for his New York Times coverage of race relations in the United States.   In 1997, he graduated from Yale University, where he’d been a film critic at the Yale Daily News for four years.]