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Actress Gene Tierney and Vincent Price in Laura. (Donaldson Collection / Getty Images)
The current Writers Guild of America strike reminds us of the lasting effects of major political and labor action in the entertainment industry on the kind of material that gets produced. The most dramatic instance of this is, of course, the 1950s McCarthyist red-baiting, which resulted in the Hollywood blacklist. Not only did the anti-communist witch hunts directly alter the course of hundreds of lives, but they also radically impacted film and television as a medium — and, consequently, the whole culture.
The conformity and conservatism of the 1950s were manifest across all mainstream media, but especially in sanitized television shows celebrating the American, white, middle-class nuclear family — think Leave It to Beaver, Father Knows Best, and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. These shows imprinted themselves on the conservative political imagination. When politicians urge us, as Ronald Reagan did when first running for president, to “make America great again,” the ideal in their minds is the one modeled by these fantasy shows.
But contrary to popular understanding, the conservatism of the ’50s isn’t simply “old-fashioned.” It came on the heels of a somewhat more progressive period in film and television, which drew to a close with the intensification of Hollywood red-baiting.
The life of novelist and filmmaker Vera Caspary demonstrates the shift. A woman and a socialist, Caspary always had to face down censorship, even before the second Red Scare. But as her story shows, the blacklist was something more comprehensive and insurmountable, not only derailing individual careers but killing entire genres that lent themselves to social critique.
In her 2018 book The Broadcast 41: Women and the Anti-communist Blacklist, Carol A. Stabile describes the life and career trajectories of the forty-one women, mainly writers and actors, who were blacklisted or graylisted during the witch hunt era of the late 1940s and ’50s.
The stories of blacklisted and graylisted men are more well known. They included writers like Dalton Trumbo, Dashiell Hammett, and Langston Hughes; directors like Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles; actors like John Garfield and Burgess Meredith; singers like Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger; composers like Leonard Bernstein, and roughly a hundred more.
The culture is far less familiar with blacklisted and graylisted women’s stories, though there were several dozen of them. Many of them built major careers in the 1930s and ’40s only to be professionally derailed by anti-communist fanatics. These women all fell somewhere on the political spectrum then termed “progressive,” which spanned from committed “reds,” i.e., Communists and socialists, through left-leaning “pinks,” who joined organizations and supported causes like labor unions, racial justice, refugee rights, and opposition to the international rise of fascism.
Among their ranks were writers Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, and Vera Caspary; writer-actor Ruth Gordon; actors Judy Holliday, Lee Grant, Anne Revere, Rose Hobart, Marsha Hunt, Jean Muir, Aline MacMahon, Fredi Washington, Pert Kelton, and Margo; legendary acting teachers as well as actors Uta Hagen and Stella Adler; singers Lena Horne and Hazel Scott; and entertainer Gypsy Rose Lee.
Given the racial hatred, antisemitism, and xenophobia underpinning so much of the anti-Communist witch hunt, it was no coincidence that, of the forty-one women blacklisted, more than a third were Jewish. Four — Horne, Scott, Washington, and composer Shirley Graham Du Bois (second wife of W. E. B. Du Bois) — were black women. One, Margo, was Mexican-American. Sabile writes, “Most of the women listed in Red Channels” — the main publication associated with the ensuing blacklist, created in 1950 by three anti-communist idealogues and ex-FBI agents — “were from working class or immigrant backgrounds (sometimes both).”
Almost all of the women were New York City–based, though many wound up doing stints in Hollywood. They were often friends and colleagues with each other, and many were members of the same Popular Front organizations and supporters of the same causes. They’d made great strides on the stage and in radio and films, and were very hopeful about a progressive future for the new medium of television.
Television, a mass medium with the potential to reach into the homes of who knew how many millions of viewers, became a hard-fought battleground — one that reflected the broader political dynamics of the time period. Ultimately, the bland and blinding traditionalism of so much 1950s television is a result of the era’s successful assault on political progressives. As Sabile notes, “Contrary to popular belief, the images that appeared on American television after 1950 were not simply reflections of American culture. They were products of suppression, fear, and eventually self-censorship.”
Caspary’s trajectory illustrates both the victories progressive women secured before the ’50s and the erosion of those achievements. Caspary’s writing career was dedicated to representing the life experiences of single, independent women such as herself, reflected most strikingly in Laura Hunt, protagonist of her sensationally successful novel Laura.
Caspary had what Sabile called an “anti-romance” tendency in her writing, a refusal to deal in clichéd love-and-marriage plots combined with a bracing frankness about the active sex lives of single working women. Caspary herself, in her life and in her autobiography The Secrets of Grown-Ups, was open about her innumerable love affairs. She didn’t wed until she was in her forties, and as her Austrian-American film producer husband Isadore Goldsmith’s career faltered, she took over the breadwinner role throughout their long and happy marriage.
Caspary came from a prosperous family of German-Jewish and Russian-Jewish immigrants, and her father and grandfather were both self-proclaimed socialists. As Caspary put it in her autobiography, “The skeleton in my closet carries a hammer and sickle.”
Ultimately, the bland and blinding traditionalism of so much 1950s television is a result of the era’s successful assault on political progressives.
When her father went bankrupt in the 1920s, Caspary undertook to support not only herself but also her mother by “pounding money out of a typewriter.” She claimed to have been politically radicalized by the Depression, as many were. But her investment in progressive causes was manifest in her writing from the beginning. Her first novel was a sympathetic account of the life of a young black woman who could pass for white, called The White Girl (1929), which was well-received in the black press.
She was a member of the Communist Party of the USA for a few years, but felt uncomfortable with doctrinaire party membership, and quit after Stalin’s nonaggression pact with Adolf Hitler in 1939. But she continued to be active in Popular Front causes, all of which were listed in the dossier of accusations presented to her when she was called into a studio executive’s office at MGM in 1951.
Though she was fortunate in never being called to testify before House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and thus was never blacklisted outright, studio fears that her left-wing past would come out led executives to phase out the career of one of their highest paid writers — a textbook case of graylisting, which was just as devastating as blacklisting only more insidious. Caspary and her husband fled to Europe for years, and fortunately she was able to keep them both going financially, mainly through her work as a popular novelist.
If we look at two films based on Caspary’s books, we can see indications of the political climate’s impact on her career. One was her greatest success, Laura (1944), which was in production in the early 1940s during World War II when film noir, with its built-in critique of American society, was on the rise, along with what seemed then to be a progressive political arc. Laura, with its vivid, unreliable voice-over narration, extensive flashback structure, and an ambiguous femme fatale figure in the central role, helped define the form. It was one of the backlog of early American noirs received with rapture by French film critics at the end of World War II, when they named the new genre they saw developing.
The other Caspary adaptation, The Blue Gardenia (1953), based on Caspary’s novella The Gardenia, was also a film noir, made late in the genre’s main cycle of films. It was made during the depths of the blacklist, when Caspary had already fled the country to escape the attentions of HUAC. Though it’s a generally excellent film made by Fritz Lang, it was badly received and hardly created a ripple. The number of noirs in production during the 1950s was dwindling under the impact of censorship focused on eradicating “subversive” material in films.
Even getting Laura made was no picnic, and that was during the “prosperous and tolerant” 1940s that Caspary claimed all Hollywood leftists of her generation felt nostalgic for. Director Otto Preminger, overseeing the adaptation, insisted that the lead character had no substance and was only a cipher invested with importance by the male fantasies swirling around her: “She’s nothing, a nonentity.” This statement enraged Caspary, whose book was meant to be a celebration of a thirty-year-old career women leading an exciting, independent, sexually active life, which stirs up a whirlwind of murderous desire and envy around her.
Gene Tierney as Laura in the eponymous 1944 film. (20th Century Fox)
Even the famous painted portrait of Laura, in Caspary’s description is nothing like the sweet, winsome, romantic portrait of pliant twentysomething Gene Tierney in the movie. Instead, it emphasizes the besotted male painter’s failure to capture her essence, except for two qualities: her tilted fawn-like eyes and, as Waldo Lydecker — the waspish, erudite columnist and radio star obsessed with Laura — put it, “the fluid sense of restlessness in the position of her body, perched on the arm of the chair, a pair of yellow gloves in one hand, a green hunter’s hat in the other.” Note the evocation of helpless prey (the fawn eyes) and predator (the hunter’s cap) as a way of indicating Laura’s complexity, which keeps the reader thinking of her as both possible murderer and possible murderer’s victim.
When detective Mark McPherson wonders why Laura wasn’t married considering she “wasn’t a bad-looking dame,” Lydecker says, “Marriage wasn’t her career. She had her career, she made plenty of money, and there were always men to squire and admire her.”
Caspary borrowed elements from Wilkie Collins’s novels The Woman in White and The Moonstone, such as the device of examining a murder mystery through the contradictory first-person accounts of those suspected of or investigating a murder. She included among the various men’s accounts a major section drawn from Laura’s diary, confessing how she was trying to navigate not only her own shifting desires but the frightening hostility and manipulative behaviors underlying the desires of the men surrounding her.
As Caspary put it in her autobiography, ‘The skeleton in my closet carries a hammer and sickle.’
Caspary, who clearly based the main character on herself, had heated arguments with Preminger about the first draft of the script, especially what he was doing to the character of Laura, “turning her into the Hollywood version of a cute career girl.” There was nearly a public brawl over the film when Caspary and Preminger happened to meet at the Stork Club after its triumphant opening.
Nevertheless, Caspary claimed to have liked the rewritten script and the way the film ultimately turned out, insisting that Preminger had at least partly incorporated her point of view, though he denied it vociferously. Caspary lost some battles. For example, Laura’s first-person narration was never used in the film; only the character who turns out to be the killer, Lydecker, provides voice-over narration, in the extended flashback sequence describing an extremely biased version of his relationship with Laura. Still, it’s a great film, and retains at least some of what Caspary meant to convey about Laura’s struggle to maintain a coherent sense of herself in a world defined by men.
The success of Laura kept Caspary writing noirish murder mysteries, and she sold her novella The Gardenia (1952) to Warner Brothers Studio almost immediately upon publication. The film title was changed to The Blue Gardenia to evoke the 1947 “Black Dahlia” murder of aspiring Hollywood actor Elizabeth Short, thus evoking a notorious case of misogynistic fury that riveted the public.
Like Laura, The Gardenia is also about a young working woman who becomes a suspect in a murder, but in this case, the murder is motivated by a man’s date-rape attempt, and the protagonist really did it, accidentally killing him while trying to fight him off. Called Agnes in the book and Norah in the 1953 film (played by Anne Baxter), she’s a telephone operator, one of dozens working a huge Los Angeles switchboard. She’s living in a cramped apartment with female housemates who have much more exciting sex lives than she does. In the book, Agnes is a mousy, repressed, fearful young woman who was raised in a religious household, doesn’t drink, never goes out on dates, and deplores what she sees as her friends’ obsession with men. Eventually loneliness drives her out on the date that ends so disastrously.
In the film, Norah’s homebody ways are attributed to her total dedication to her boyfriend who’s off fighting the Korean War, and it’s only a “Dear Jane” rejection letter from him that sends her out on a date with the notorious ladies’ man Harry Prebble (Raymond Burr). Drunk on too many cocktails pressed on her by Prebble, she doesn’t remember actually killing him.
She’s tormented by guilt and terror as the murder investigation is given lurid coverage in all the newspapers, and she falls for the appeals of a newspaper columnist (Richard Conte) who writes a “Letter to an Unknown Murderess,” offering to help the anonymous young woman about to be arrested by police. He has no intention of really helping her, but winds up falling in love with her anyway, because she’s so different from the type of scarlet woman he expected to meet. But then, so is Harry Prebble’s quiet, desperate, pregnant ex-girlfriend (Ruth Storey) who works a similarly underpaid job as a record store clerk and, it turns out, actually killed Prebble in a bitter encounter after Norah ran from the apartment.
Cleared of murder charges, Norah emerges from jail and seems to reject the overtures of the betraying newspaper columnist as she passes him by, accompanied by her roommates. There’s actually a thrilling moment of female solidarity implied by their striding off together — right before Norah confides to them that she’s only “playing hard to get” as they advised. She intends to make the newspaperman work for her forgiveness. This is the tacked-on romantic happy ending so sadly familiar to admirers of film noir. The film ends on the newspaper columnist’s confident smirk as he watches Norah walk off.
Anne Baxter as Norah in Fritz Lang’s The Blue Gardenia (1952). (Warner Brothers)
From the screenplay, you’d never know that Caspary’s original story is about the storm of male hostility toward independent working women with sex lives. Date-rape and murder and corrupt betrayal are not treated as serious subjects, but light shots fired in “the battle of the sexes.”
Fritz Lang made something nicely disturbing of it, however. He leans into the jokey, sprightly tone, so at odds with the subject matter, in a way that produces a jarring and eerie dissonance. Combined with the characteristic film noir shooting style by master of shadow-play Nicholas Musuraca (Cat People [1942], The Locket [1946], Out of the Past [1947]), Lang achieves a more deranged affect than if he hadn’t been pushed into such tonal contradictions. Lang actually does something similar in dealing with murderous male misogyny in While the City Sleeps (1956) as well, which together with The Blue Gardenia and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956), comprise his unsettling “newspaper trilogy” of the 1950s.
Caspary’s novella The Gardenia ends quite differently than the film, with the newspaperman refusing to believe a young woman he’s attracted to could possibly have killed Harry Prebble. But she admits it, and becomes a kind of public heroine in confessing to the murder she committed and facing the consequences. By then she’s transformed herself, dyed her hair and changed her appearance in earlier attempts to escape police detection, and found it unexpectedly liberating as she leaves her timid self-image behind. In finally “confronting good and evil” instead of hiding from all possibility of “sin,” she’s cast off her mother’s fear-filled religiosity and become an adult.
Caspary makes no mention at all of The Blue Gardenia in her autobiography, though Lang was a friend of hers and her husband’s. Lang himself didn’t seem to remember it with any affection, though he loved Anne Baxter’s performance in the lead role. When Peter Bogdanovich in his book Fritz Lang in America was struck by the “venomous picture of American life” created by the film, Lang responded that he was probably feeling venomous because he had only twenty days to shoot the tightly budgeted movie. And besides, it was “my first picture after the McCarthy business,” which included the flight of his friends to Europe to escape persecution. To say the least, the blacklist made Hollywood a nightmarish place to live and work, even for the nominally successful. In 1960, Lang himself went back to Germany to make his last films.
Lang himself didn’t remember it with any affection, recalling that it was ‘my first picture after the McCarthy business.’
Though the film noir genre was on the wane, it managed to keep going through the 1950s, often using devices that placated the censors. Writers and directors resorted to common tactics like the sudden, unconvincing happy endings that seemed to restore “normalcy,” take back critiques of American society, and show through strained narrative twists that the protagonist was actually innocent all along, so that the “real villain” could be punished with either death or arrest.
Framing devices were also popular in “semi-documentary” film noir variations that celebrated crime-busting authority figures, sometimes with formal tributes to the heroic “G-men” of the FBI, and to police officers of the New York Police Department, the Los Angeles Police Department, and the San Francisco Police Department. The whole middle of these movies could be even darker, harsher, and more violent, labyrinthian, and reflective of American societal malaise than 1940s noir, as long as the framing device made the case that the system worked to keep all those disturbing forces in check.
With her success tied to the startling 1940s popularity of film noir, the most subversive of all genres, it’s no wonder Caspary’s Hollywood career dwindled with it — and that the genre itself, with its bracing tendency to look into the dark heart of American culture, could be counted as yet another casualty of the blacklist.
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Amit Halevi’s plan would give Muslims control of the southern end of the Temple Mount complex, which contains the Al Aqsa Mosque, while Jews would receive the central and northern areas.
By JNS
A Likud lawmaker is proposing a plan to divide Jerusalem’s Temple Mount between Muslims and Jews and remove Jordan’s custodial status over the holy site.
Speaking to the Zman Yisrael Hebrew news site, MK Amit Halevi outlined a plan whereby Muslims would control the southern end of the 37-acre complex which contains the Al Aqsa Mosque, while Jews would receive the central and northern area, where the Dome of the Rock sits.
According to Halevi, the reorganization makes sense from a religious point of view because that part of the Temple Mount is the holiest site in Judaism, where it is believed the first and second Temples stood. The Foundation Stone at the center of the Dome of the Rock is where Jewish sources place the Holy of Holies.
“This is the place of the First Temple and the place of the Second Temple built by Babylonian immigrants. No one needs to examine the stones to know that it is ours,” he said.
Halevi also wants to end Israel’s agreement with the Jordanian Waqf whereby the Islamic trust controls and manages Islamic edifices on the Temple Mount.
“Why not give them status in the Dizengoff Center [a large shopping mall in Tel Aviv] as well? This is a terrible mistake. This status should be abolished. I know it’s an agreement between countries, but we have to deal with it. It requires change, even if the process will take time,” he said.
In addition, Halevi wants to give Jews the same access to the Temple Mount enjoyed by Muslims. Currently, the Waqf only allows Jews and non-Muslim tourists access to the Temple Mount via the Maghrebi Gate and only at certain hours when the gate is open.
“We will take the northern end and pray there. The entire mountain is sacred to us, and the Dome of the Rock is the place on which the Temple stood. This should be our guideline,” Halevi said. “Israel is leading. It will be a historical, religious and national statement. If this does not happen then you are not actually the owner of the house. You are a klutz. Why are you even going in there?”
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A cooling tower at the Constellation Nine Mile Point Nuclear Station in Scriba, New York, on May 9, 2023. (Lauren Petracca / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Oliver Stone’s brand is antiestablishment controversy. In his features and documentaries, Stone has blazed a trail as a cinematic scourge of the status quo. Platoon (1986), the Vietnam War veteran’s unflinching, grunt’s-eye view of that imperial debacle, won the Best Picture Academy Award, while Stone scored the golden statuette for Best Director. That year, Stone was also nominated in a screenwriting category for Platoon, as well as for his excoriating look at the Ronald Reagan regime’s Central America foreign policy and mass murder in Salvador.
Stone tackled the “greed is good” capitalist class in 1987’s Wall Street and the extremist right wing in 1988’s Talk Radio. The combat vet returned to Vietnam’s battlefields to win another Best Director Oscar and Best Picture nomination for 1989’s Born on the Fourth of July, a stirring ode to antiwar activism. The iconoclastic JFK (1991) received eight Oscar noms, including for Best Picture and Director, and forever shattered the myth of the Warren Commission’s “lone gunman theory,” pointing a finger at CIA and right-wing renegades for conspiring to assassinate President John F. Kennedy.
Although lesser known than his fiction movies, Stone’s documentaries — about Castro, Hugo Chávez, and Yasser Arafat; 2012’s The Untold History of the United States; and so on — helped solidify his reputation as, arguably, Hollywood’s most left-wing director. But now Stone is going against the grain with his latest nonfiction film. In Nuclear Now, Stone makes a frontal assault on the underlying beliefs of antinuclear activists, arguing that nuclear energy is a solution to the climate crisis.
Stone recently spoke with Jacobin about why he made Nuclear Now, the film’s funding, Three Mile Island, alternative energy, and more, including his next film, chronicling the life of another progressive leader, Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Ed Rampell
How did the recipient of a Purple Heart and creator of some of the best antiwar films ever made observe Memorial Day?
Oliver Stone
I went to Austin to be on The Joe Rogan Show. It’s very important – [the podcast] has a huge audience.
Ed Rampell
So how did Nuclear Now come about?
Oliver Stone
I was scared. In the 2006 movie [An Inconvenient Truth by] Al Gore, I was obviously conscious that he was giving solutions to the problems of clime change. But I was confused by the many different sides I was hearing. It was confusing — and I wanted to straighten it out for myself. I saw a book in 2019 that was well reviewed in the New York Times by Richard Rhodes: it was called A Bright Future. It was written by Josh Goldstein, an emeritus professor of international relations, and by a nuclear scientist named Staffan A. Qvist, from Sweden. It was a small little book, but it was simple and commonsensical. Common sense is important. It was very different in the sense that it was saying: “What’s wrong with nuclear power?”
Because that’s all you had heard for many years. I didn’t know; I just went along with the consensus that nuclear power was a bad thing. But when you read the book, you begin to understand that it is not a bad thing — it has been confounded with nuclear war; war and power are not the same thing — and that we have lost, bypassed a great opportunity, in America anyway, [compared to] if we had followed through on “Atoms for Peace,” what presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy had started in the 1950s and ’60s.
Nuclear power was working. It worked for many years with the Navy, with Hyman Rickover, and then he transferred his acumen to building civilian power stations. Shippingport, Pennsylvania, was the first one in the United States; in 1958 and 1959 it came online. Many of those same reactors are still going; they’re called “legacy reactors,” but they’re almost finished now. But they worked seventy years [laughs], and nobody complained.
Except there was a scare at Three Mile Island, where no one died, and in fact, the containment structure worked. But a lot of hysteria and brouhaha — as you know, I’m not a guy who believes in passion, necessarily, when it’s wrong. You’ve got to call it out; I wanted the truth, and this is the truth.
I’ve been talking to many scientists. I went to Idaho National Laboratory; I went to France, and I went to Russia and talked to a lot of people. It’s all a lot of hooey from a lot of scared types who love to tell you what’s wrong with everything. You’ve got to scale it down and say, “Relative to what?” Relative to climate change — coal, oil, and gas?
Ed Rampell
In Nuclear Now, you criticize the fossil fuel energy industry for spreading disinformation regarding climate change. Did the nuclear industry have anything to do with the funding of Nuclear Now?
Oliver Stone
No, no, no. This was done with private investors. And the nuclear industry [laughs] has not done a very good job defending itself, if you look at the history. It has had no sense of fighting back. When Jane Fonda and Ralph Nader started their attacks, there was no really interesting response from the industry. It kind of folded up. Which was a shame, because I think when history is written, if we presume the planet will survive, and there’ll be a civilization, and I’d very much like. . . . I am an optimist. When this is written, they’ll say: “This was a huge mistake in the 1970s to stop building nuclear reactors in the United States.” Thank God they did not stop in Russia or China or France, which has kept it going.
But as we said in the film, “It’s too good to die. You cannot kill it off.” The United States is now slowly getting back into, of course, smaller reactors and more modern, new-generation reactors. There’s a lot promise. But the big building is still going on in China, Indonesia, Eurasia, India and so on.
Ed Rampell
You mentioned Three Mile Island. There are disputed accounts of what happened there. For example, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists says there was a 64 percent increase in cancer after the meltdown, and activists like Harvey Wasserman make similar claims. What’s your response?
Oliver Stone
There’s always some — excuse me — protesters who will say, “I saw this and I saw that,” but I’m going off of the facts from the World Health Organization and the United Nations. They do very thorough surveys, and they go back and go back. No one died as a result of Three Mile Island. If someone got cancer, we don’t know that it was a result of Three Mile Island. You can scare anybody about anything.
Why doesn’t Harvey Wasserman go to all the fucking oil wells and all the gas and coal plants and do his horror number? I saw his clip, and I think he’s a scaremonger. He’s like a Ralph Nader, who to this day will still tell you that nuclear is very dangerous and that it can blow up Cleveland and all that. It’s just not possible. You cannot confound nuclear power with nuclear war. It’s not the same thing. They have not enriched the plutonium; it’s not dangerous in the same way. It’s a different process.
Ed Rampell
In Nuclear Now, you have lots of archival footage with clips of antinuclear activists. But correct me if I’m wrong: you, Oliver Stone, did not per se do any original interviews for your film, which made it onto the screen, with antinuclear protesters.
Oliver Stone
No, in the same way that I didn’t in my JFK documentaries interview the people who defend the Warren Commission. There’s so much defense out there — you can go to their interviews. I’m not trying to run a debate society; I’m trying to run a fact-oriented science, where it says this is what scientists say. It’s not what protesters say. I hope you understand there’s also an issue of time and clarity. I had a lot of ground to cover— I couldn’t cover everything.
But I had to go, from the past, what is nuclear energy? Through the history of it, from the origin, through the protest movements of the ’70s, which is a part of it, then what happened in the 1980s and ’90s, then I got into the Al Gore debate about renewables — it’s a long way to go — and the future of nuclear energy. That took an hour and forty-four [minutes], and that’s pretty much at the edge of the attention span of most people. I wanted this film to play for ninth graders, eighth graders. I wanted it to not be too wonky.
Ed Rampell
You used the word “debate.” Wasserman has challenged you to a debate.
Oliver Stone
I didn’t know.
Ed Rampell
I’m going to quote what he told me about Nuclear Now, and I’d like your response.
Oliver Stone
What did he say?
Ed Rampell
“It’s the most dishonest, dangerous, dishonorable film I’ve ever seen. [Stone chuckles.] It’s the Triumph of the Will of the nuclear industry. It’s an abomination.” What’s your response.
Oliver Stone
He’s insane, I think. [Laughs.] I don’t know where he’s coming from. I don’t know the man. He should have a debate with the coauthor of the book, Josh Goldstein, I think, rather than me, because I’m sure he’s got all his arguments, as do some of the other people from that world. It’s not my duty to debate them. I’ve been interpreting a book that I bought. I believe the book; I’ve talked to people at Idaho — that’s who you should be talking to. People who have worked with nuclear and deal with it all the time and who have built these plants.
Where does he come from? He’s an amateur in this world. People who work with nuclear know it. They know these things. And you can’t argue with a guy who’s a zealot.
Ed Rampell
Most of Nuclear Now deals with fission; I know at the end you start to talk about fusion.
Oliver Stone
We went from fission . . . at the end we talk about fusion. We talk about the time period from 2020 to 2050. That’s our concern, that thirty-year IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] prediction. Fusion has not worked out yet. I went to Livermore back in 2003 or so, and I saw the fusion experiments. I know there’s been lots of new work, and I just saw Dennis Whyte over at MIT Lab, who’s working very promisingly in plasma fusion, and it’s really interesting work. But it still doesn’t seem to be something practical for this point in time. It might well come into being by 2050 and be the answer to all of our problems for the rest of this century. That would be ideal. We’re all for it.
Ed Rampell
I just returned from Germany. From the air and from the Rhine, you can see solar and windmills everywhere, very widespread.
Oliver Stone
Wonderful. We’re not against it. It’s ok. The problem is renewables don’t work all the time. The maximum capacity so far in Germany of wind is something like 25 percent, and wind has helped Germany. Solar is much less successful: about 11, 10 percent capacity. That means it’s not working most of the time. So what do they do? They bring in gas to back up wind and solar.
Gas, as we explain in the film, is methane. Methane is horrible for the climate. Nobody really talks about methane, and it’s invisible pollution. We show it in the film with an infrared camera. It’s deadly. Although it wears off ultimately, it has very bad short-term effects. So it contributes to pollution, to the warming of the planet. As such, it’s not the perfect solution — it’s the worst solution, next to coal. More coal is worse. But that works for advertising purposes, to say we’re a perfect partner for renewables. People don’t realize it’s methane. It’s certainly better than coal, but there’s no question we need to go back to nuclear in a big way.
Ed Rampell
Before we wrap up, I want to touch on the question of radioactive waste.
Oliver Stone
Waste is the most monitored, supervised industry of all. There’s nothing like it. Compare it to gas, to coal. The waste from those is all over the country. There’s leakage from methane. There’s the oil. In terms of, compared to what? Nobody has died from it. It’s intense and a relatively small amount. After seventy years, they could put all of it into a Walmart, according to some scientists I’ve talked to. It’s not a huge amount. Radioactive decay kicks in; 99 percent of it is over by forty years in. Right now, they cool [the waste] in water and they put it in concrete and steel casks; it’s good for a hundred years. And then you could even move it over to another hundred years on another one.
People like we’re talking about, people who are against it, are talking about a million years, ten thousand years. There’s no end to their concern, but the point is radioactive waste decays, and most of it is not harmful at a certain point. And it’s watched very carefully; it’s actually an advantage of this industry. Also, there’s a new development with a lot of the reactors burning the waste, using the waste. The one in Russia, the breeder reactor, and other reactors in France are burning the waste.
Ed Rampell
What’s next for Oliver Stone?
Oliver Stone
[Laughs.] What’s next for the world, you should be asking. This is important for my children, for your children, for grandchildren; it’s really the future. We have to really think how we get energy, and we’re not doing that in a sober, analytical way. We’re listening to too many nutcases who told us it’s no good. We have to be positive, because this is important. Nuclear energy was a gift from the gods — think of it that way. From the very beginning, we’ve had nuclear energy in the world. What Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, and Enrico Fermi did was bring it to our attention.
Unfortunately, the climax of it came in World War II, and it was used to build a bomb, in a separate process. But Fermi proved we could control, through his rods, the power in the radium. That is an amazing scientific breakthrough,. That’s what Eisenhower understood. Those people who doubt Eisenhower would say, “Well, he was using that to cover for building more and more bombs” — and he did build bombs, ok. I fault him for that.
But at the same time, he did have an idealistic vision of the future, a world powered by nuclear energy. America would not be in this hole it is in now. We’d have a thousand nuclear plants, at least five hundred. We have to build; that’s the important thing. And we have to build fast and on the assembly line, like planes. That’s the message we’re trying to give.
Ed Rampell
You’re nearing completion of a documentary about [Luiz Inácio] Lula [da Silva]. When can we look forward to seeing that?
Oliver Stone
That’s right, hopefully before the end of the year. As you know, I had him in the other films with Hugo Chávez. And of course, he’s gotten a very dramatic story, with his going to jail after his second term. Now he’s back — he’s won a third term. It’s quite a story. He’s a wonderful man.
Fox News host Laura Ingraham explains why Democrats resort to name-calling on ‘The Ingraham Angle.’
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