Is Trump's "eyes on Hollywood" an attempt to bring back the Blacklist? Or is it just another sick clown show?

Hollywood screenwriter Ned Young was a good friend of my parents.

Because of McCarthyism and the Hollywood Blacklist, Ned Young had to work as a screenwriter using the pseudonym Nathan E. Douglas.

It was as Nathan E. Douglas that Ned won the Academy Award for writing The Defiant Ones with Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier.

He also wrote as Nathan E. Douglas the Oscar nominated movie Inherit the Wind with Spencer Tracy and Gene Kelly.

Ned Young is credited with writing the story for Jailhouse Rock in 1957, which starred Elvis Presley.

I have vivid memories of driving up Laurel Canyon with my Dad to visit Young’s classic Hollywood Hills house.

At the time, Young was working on a screenplay about the bombing of Hiroshima.

It would never get made. Under any name.

But Young let me hold the typed screenplay in my hands and as a young boy I was fascinated by it.

He would take time out from their discussion of politics he and my Dad were having to answer whatever questions about movie-making I would have.

Ned Young was blacklisted during the 1950s and 1960s for refusing to answer questions about his membership in the Communist Party before the House Committee on Un-American Activities

These were pretty dark times for progressives, leftists and communists in Hollywood.

And it was a dark time not just for actors and writers, but for many behind the camera folks who worked in the film industry.

But among the screenwriters who were banned from working in Hollywood were the Hollywood Ten: Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner, Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo, plus German playwright Bertolt Brecht.

Years later the Motion Picture Academy would acknowledge their own collaboration with McCarthyism during that time by posthumously recognizing Ned Young’s Oscar by using his real name.

Was a new Hollywood Blacklist what Donald Trump had in mind when he posted on his Truth Social that he was appointing Sylvester Stallone, Mel Gibson and Jon Voight as “special ambassadors,” to be his “eyes and ears” in the film industry?

Would the three be a reincarnated Red Channels?

“It is my honor to announce Jon Voight, Mel Gibson, and Sylvester Stallone, to be Special Ambassadors to a great but very troubled place, Hollywood, California,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Thursday. “They will serve as Special Envoys to me for the purpose of bringing Hollywood, which has lost much business over the last four years to Foreign Countries, BACK—BIGGER, BETTER, AND STRONGER THAN EVER BEFORE! These three very talented people will be my eyes and ears, and I will get done what they suggest. It will again be, like The United States of America itself, The Golden Age of Hollywood!”

Is this for real or just another one of Trump’s attention getting diversionary clown shows?

Is it better for Trump to put news focus on Hollywood than on the record of Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard.

Variety:

It appears that the newly appointed ambassadors had little advance notice on the news, as Gibson said he found out at the same time at Trump’s social media followers.

“I got the tweet at the same time as all of you and was just as surprised. Nevertheless, I heed the call. My duty as a citizen is to give any help and insight I can,” Gibson said in a statement to Variety. “Any chance the position comes with an Ambassador’s residence?”

“Wow,” Jimmy Kimmel replied on his late nighty show. “Braveheart, Rambo, and the Midnight Cowboy. He summoned the three horsemen of the apocalypto to save us.”

Kimmel read out the part of Trump’s post promising the three actors would help make Hollywood “BIGGER, BETTER, AND STRONGER THAN EVER BEFORE!”

Responding to the part of the post where Trump claimed the actors would serve as his “eyes and ears,” Kimmel replied, “And who better to be Trump’s eyes and ears than 86-year-old Jon Voight?