tailieunhanh - ‘GOOD RIDDANCE TO BAD COMPANY’: HEDDA HOPPER, HOLLYWOOD GOSSIP, AND THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST CHARLIE CHAPLIN, 1940-1952

Third, we computed VAIs for each shot in each film. The purpose of these calculations was to determine the relative amount ofmotion andmovement in shots of different duration and whether that relation had changed over the course of 75 years of popular film. Since both dimensions, shot length and VAI per shot, are strongly skewed, we transformed each. We took the logarithmof each shot duration, and because VAI is based on correlations, we used the r-to-z transformfor VAIs. These transformations created roughly normal distributions along both dimensions for all films | AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES 73 GOOD RIDDANCE TO BAD COMPANY HEDDA HOPPER HOLLYWOOD GOSSIP AND THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST CHARLIE CHAPLIN 1940-1952 JENNIFER FROST ABSTRACT Prominent in the motion picture industry and among political conservatives in the mid-twentieth-century United States Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper together with her readers had an impact on American popular and political culture during the Cold War an impact most evident in Hopper s campaign against film actor and filmmaker Charlie Chaplin in the 1940s and early 1950s. In collaboration with anticommunist forces inside and outside Hollywood Hopper and her readers contributed to the revocation of Chaplin s . re-entry visa in 1952 which in turn led to Chaplin s decision to leave the United States permanently. Far from being trivial or idle talk Hopper s gossip column and her readers responses condemned Chaplin s personal political and professional life and blurred the invisible but influential boundary between what was considered public and private in Cold War America. In 1938 a struggling underemployed supporting actress and fledgling writer had her syndicated movie gossip column picked up by the Los Angeles Times. With that Hedda Hopper s Hollywood had the audience it needed. Following in the footsteps of her soon-to-be archrival Louella Parsons Hedda Hopper emerged as a powerful figure in the Hollywood movie industry during its golden age and remained influential into the 1960s. Syndicated in 85 metropolitan newspapers 3000 small town dailies and 2000 weeklies during the 1940s Hopper s column had an estimated daily readership of 35 million by the mid-1950s out of a national population of 160 million .1 Among these readers were filmgoers and fans who wrote enough letters in response to the content of Hopper s column to employ two clerks working full time by the early By the middle of the last century Hopper in her famous hats had become a Hollywood icon even gracing the