Fighting McCarthyism through Film: A Library Censorship Case Becomes a "Storm Center"
1998; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 39; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/40324305
ISSN2328-2967
Autores Tópico(s)Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
ResumoWhen Daniel Taradash and Elick Moll decided to use the story of a library censorship case in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, described in a September 1950 letter to the editor of the Saturday Review as the seed for a script, they conceived to fight McCarthyism through film and masked their topic and theme behind as dull a title as we could think of-The Library. Despite their efforts at subterfuge, the story of a middle-aged librarian who refused to remove a book from her library's shelves and suffered the loss of her job and her friends as a result became a Storm Center in reality as well as in title. In so doing, it mirrored both the conditions that inspired it and the case on which it was based. This study employs a number of primary sources, including the papers of writer-director Daniel Taradash, the records of the American Library Association, and the papers of Ruth W. Brown, the librarian on whose case the film was loosely based, to examine the controversies that swirled around Storm Center from its inception during the investigations into Communist influence in Hollywood to its reception more than five year later at the American Library Association's summer conference and subsequent release. Through its highly fictionalized version of the Bartlesville Library censorship case, Storm Center directly challenged McCarthyism.
Referência(s)