CZM Rewind: Part Two: The Vampires Are On Our Side: Antifascism in Film
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Cool Zone Media.

Because I like it, and I want you to hear it again. Or for the first time. But also, because I think it's really important that we understand about how culture can shape things, and also specifically, how we can use culture to resist. And also, I just think it's cool that all the original vampires are on our side. Anyway, I hope you all are well, and here's an episode.

Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and every week I talk about rebels and revolutionaries and weirdos and, I guess, people who pass the basic minimum bar of not liking Nazis and people I find interesting. And with me today is Shrek. Shrek, how are you doing? Oh, oh, I was...

I was going to try to do a terrible Scottish accent and then I thought better of it. That's what I thought you were going to do. I don't know what I was going to say. It was going to be bad. So I decided against it. I'm great. Donkey's great. Fiona is great. We're just chilling in the swamp. Yeah.

And I believe most people might know you by your previous name, which is, I'm under the impression, not a dead name, but just not your current name, which is Caitlin Durante. Is that true? That's true. I go in and out of identities, and all of those identities are fictional movie characters. So right now I'm Shrek. Excellent. And I'm the dictator of people's identities. With me today is Sophie. How are you, Sophie? Hi.

No, I'm sorry. I won't do it again. I really want to rewatch Shrek to see if it holds. Wait, have we done a Shrek on... Have we done any of the Shreks on Bechdelcast? We've done Shrek 1 and 2, although I don't know if you were present for either. I don't think I was. I would have been annoying. I would have been annoying. But did they pass the Bechdel test?

You know what? I don't remember. You know what, listeners? You'll have to go back and listen to the episodes. Exactly. Yeah. There's no way you could just watch the movies and find out if they passed the Bechdel test that way. I do really want to rewatch the movies because I want to see if they hold up at all or if they are an absolute nightmare. Well, you can also listen to our episodes about them. The Shrek 1 episode sucks because mostly my fault. It was...

It was just like one of our earlier episodes in the first, like, I don't know, few months of doing the show. And before we really did, Jamie did watch the movie. Wow. Called out. It's been dropped in completely cold. Caitlin has a podcast called Bechdel cast where they talk about movies and you should listen.

Thank you so much. I agree. You should listen, but not to the Shrek one episode. The Shrek two episode, however, is what we did to celebrate, I think the podcast's five year anniversary. It was some celebratory episode. And so Jamie and I, there's no better way than to, you know, celebrate with some puss in boots. Oh my gosh.

And isn't we supposed to be having a fiesta, as Puss in Boots says at the end of Shrek 2? Caitlin and I could do this banter for probably several hours, so Margaret, if you would like to interrupt. Okay, so...

No, no, no. Please continue. We could. This will be a three part. Okay, so Ian does our audio editing and our theme music was written for us by Unwoman. One person said, you keep saying your music is done by a woman. And while that is true, it is a performer named Unwoman, like non-woman, who ironically is a woman. And you can check out her music, much like the music that you already listened to.

Anyway, on Monday, we talked about German expressionist horror and the people who fought Nazis. And today, we're going to talk about Hollywood. It's a sleepy little town. Have you ever heard of Hollywood, Caitlin? Ever heard of it? I have. I mean, Shrek. It's okay. I'm back to Caitlin for now. Oh, okay. Mm-hmm.

I have heard of Hollywood. I live adjacent to the neighborhood, in fact. And yeah, I would say I'm very, very peripherally working in Hollywood. Oh, okay. In that I have a movie podcast that...

that analyzes film and therefore I work in Hollywood. That's how that works, right? Does that mean I temporarily work in Hollywood? Yes. Yeah, for this episode, yes. Hell yeah. Well, did you know that there was a homegrown anti-Nazi league in Hollywood? I don't know if I knew about this. What do you think that the anti-Nazi league in Hollywood was called? Was it called the Hollywood anti-Nazi league? What, did you read my script ahead of me? What?

Yeah. Is that really correct? Yeah. It's called the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. Okay. Well, I mean, you set me up for it, so. Yeah. I do still appreciate that probably more than anything else, the actual long-term sponsor of this show is naming things. All of your groups have to have a league in the name because I think there was a period between 1880 and 1930 where there was not a social movement organization, both right-wing or left-wing, that did not have league in the name.

And we don't use league anymore. I know. It's all like people are like, I don't know, organization or... Association. Association, group. Yeah. Whatever happened to league? I suspect, and I'm just going to go ahead and claim this as truth, tell you the truth, which is that in the 1930s with the fall of the cloak as a fashion item...

also fell the leagues because I think that the leagues and the cloaks were inexplicably tied together. Okay. Like a cloak pin holding the two concepts together. Makes you think. I know. I don't know sure what it makes me think, but so the Hollywood anti-Nazi league, they actually started out really cool. Uh, it was probably the first American anti-Nazi organization that wasn't specifically Jewish for other organizations had started earlier. Um,

And a lot of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League was communist, like members of the Communist Party, but notably a lot of it wasn't. It was sort of a popular front against fascist influence in filmmaking. Practically a who's who of Hollywood, including communist, liberal, and conservative members, actually. And including a bunch of refugees from the Nazis, like Fritz Lang, who we talked about last time.

Chico Marx, the oldest Marx brother, was in it. John Ford, who directed The Grapes of Wrath and basically like every movie at the time, was in it. Very popular director. Yeah. So I looked more into him and he was never a communist, but he made it clear that if being in an anti-Nazi league got him smeared as a communist, then like fucking bring it on. Specifically, his quote was,

May I express my wholehearted desire to cooperate to the utmost of my ability with Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. If this be communism, count me in. Pretty cool, John. Yeah. And basically the whole pro-Nazi press, because there's this whole pro-Nazi press, was like, this is a Jewish communist conspiracy, which is always funny because anti-Semitism either accused the Jews of being communist or capitalist, depending on which ideology they want to demonize. Mm-hmm.

And I love how it's like, doesn't even hit a cognitive dissonance in the anti-Semitic mind that like, you're like, whichever one I hate or I'm mad at right now, that's what, you know, people are doing or whatever. And it's like worth knowing because when you're like, oh, an anti-Nazi league, well, there's a whole league dedicated to being mad at like the Germans. Like,

In the 1930s, if you were a right-wing person in the United States, you were probably a fascist. You were probably at least sympathetic to fascism. And there was this huge pro-fascist movement in the U.S. by people who, once the U.S. enters the war, people immediately drop off. Some people stay Nazis, but most people are like, okay, well, we want to be American right-wing people, not our enemy right-wing people or whatever. Right. Yeah.

Anyway, John Ford, during World War II, he joins the military as a filmmaker. He gets wounded twice filming battles. He lands at D-Day. He films. And he got less cool as he got older. He goes from fighting against McCarthyism to supporting Nixon and Reagan later. Ugh.

But more important to the anti-Nazi League, and more personally, really, it's actually not more important, it's just personal to me. My great-grandfather was this Tin Pan Alley songwriter who used to write songs in the 1920s for this guy named Eddie Cantor. And Eddie Cantor was like this big vaudeville...

singer guy right and he gave a speech Eddie Cantor not my great whatever great grandfather great great grandfather he gave a speech at the inaugural party and I just got really excited whenever I see his name because I'm like ooh maybe my great granddad was really cool I don't know shit about my great granddad and I'm not even gonna tell you his name because Nazis have already worked hard enough to figure out who my family is anyway okay so they published it not that there's like a through line to the modern world or anything like that but

So they published two papers, the Hollywood Anti-Nazi News and Hollywood Now, which I feel like Hollywood Now is probably a clever way to name your paper. Because it's very just like, it just makes it seem like, and here's what's happening in the movie industry. Yeah. Yeah.

Totally. Without any sort of like other objective. Yeah. Which one would you have worked for? Like if you're like, which one of you put your weight behind the Hollywood anti-Nazi news or just Hollywood now, both with the same purpose, just which. Right. I mean, I've, uh,

I feel like based on the names alone, I would say the first one. Cause why, you know, I'm, I like transparency. Yeah. So the first one has a way more transparent name. I think, I think I would have to, you just, and also you get to be like part of Hollywood anti-Nazi news. Get all your anti-Nazi news about Hollywood. Yep. Read all about it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

They had two LA radio shows. They sponsored lectures and rallies. They organized boycotts of Nazi products. And they fucked with all the American Nazis, mostly the German American Bund, as well as the silver shirts. And they fucked with visiting European Nazis, at least one of whom stayed with Walt Disney, because Walt Disney was a piece of shit.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And now let's talk about Walt Disney. The piece of shit. Mm-hmm. A little mini reverse. A little bastard. Yeah. I was like, uh. Just a little mini bastard. Just like a little taste. Like, you know. You're not going to start like atonal shrieking, are you? No. Great. Just making sure. Yep.

No, no, I'm not. You thought about it. You definitely did think about it. Yeah, yeah, no, I know. But that's in that same way that like when someone tells you not to do something, it just you instinctively want to do it, even if it's and then you realize you don't want to do it anyway. Disney, he gives a Nazi propaganda filmmaker a tour of his studio a month after Kristallnacht while she's there to promote her Nazi propaganda film. He later claims that he didn't know like that she was a Nazi or whatever, but

My argument as to why this is obviously a lie is that the anti-Nazi League was like boycotting him over it and making it really clear ahead of time and doing all of this press being like, don't host the Nazi lady with her Nazi propaganda. And he's like, oh, I just will, as an apolitical filmmaker, I'll just show you around the space, you know. I don't know why he has that accent. He does not have that accent. So...

A Disney animator, the main evidence of Disney as a Nazi. There's a lot of weird rumors and complicated things around Disney. But the like main single thing that I can point to and be like, no, he was a fucking Nazi. A Disney animator named Art Babbitt said, quote,

So my argument with that he was a Nazi is that he went to Nazi organizing rallies. Yeah.

You know, not hard to connect those dots. Yeah, because people are like, oh, he's a Nazi because of this or that. No, no, because he went to the Nazi meetings. Actively participating in Nazi meetings, perhaps. Yeah. And there's this thing happening, and I'm kind of curious if you've caught this, where there's this whole big backlash. There's like a Disney wasn't a Nazi discourse that the internet's trying to have. I haven't been paying attention to that. Why? What are they saying? It's like...

I think what's happening is that people are conflating like personal bigotry with supporting fascism because basically what people are saying is that they're like, they're like literally listing out all of his black friends or all of his Jewish friends or whatever. Um, and being like,

And like, it seems to me that most of his like most of the bigotry that's expressed in the old Disney films actually is kind of in line with all of the other bigotry happening in Hollywood films at the time. Like, I think it wasn't particularly exemplary. I mean, or like particularly standout-ish. Right, right. But yeah, so people are like, oh, he wasn't a Nazi because he like didn't have personal bigotry against Jews necessarily his entire life.

But my argument is that I literally am not thinking about that one way or the other because I don't have enough information. I'm just saying he went to fucking Nazi meetings and he was like super right wing. So I don't know. It's not hard for me. Right. And

And some of his films were the last ones to be. He was like trying to be buds of the Nazis. And some of his films were the last American films to get banned in Germany during the war and Goebbels and all the rest. They actually put together a plan to try and figure out if they could claim that Walt Disney was German so that they could get it.

get his films to be allowed to continue to be played because they liked his films so much because they were kind of right wing you know and so they were like put together this thing about whether or not they could get away with claiming he was born Walter Distler instead of Walt Disney and that's not Disney's fault like he didn't make Goebbels do that

Once the war started, and this is the other reason that people claim that he wasn't a Nazi. He absolutely, like the rest of these fucking Nazis, as soon as the US entered the war against Germany, he was like, no, no, no, I'm an American right-wing person. And so now I'm anti-Nazi. He was just a social conservative capitalist. And he made a whole bunch of anti-Nazi films during the war because everyone did. Mm-hmm.

Very few of the Hollywood studios were willing to stick their necks out and critique fascism at the time. Like very, very few foreign films made up about 40% of movie revenue before world war II. This is like before America entered the war basically. Okay. And so they didn't want to rock the boat. Right. Because they were like, well, we want the foreign market and we want all the Nazi controlled areas to still show our movies and give us money with one exception, the Warner brothers, right?

Okay. The most based Hollywood studio of the 1930s. Harry and Jack Warner were the sons of a Jewish cobbler who had fled pogroms in Poland, and they didn't forget their roots. Theirs was the first studio to criticize Hitler in a 1933 Looney Tunes cartoon called Bosco's Picture Show, in which Hitler is chasing someone around with a meat cleaver. The person they're chasing around is played by someone whose last name is Durante, but I forgot to write down his first name. Jimmy? Jimmy?

There's a Jimmy Durante. Oh, Durante? Yeah, which is also how my family pronounces my last name, but I was like, I'm... It's also how Robert consistently mispronounces your last name.

Yes. So in a way I do change my identity around because I live the first 18 years of my life as Caitlin Durante. And then I was like, I hate the way that sounds. Yeah. I'm Caitlin Durante. Cause that's like the Anglicization of it is Durante. Yeah. Okay. Which like, I don't, I mean, Durante is a, an Italian name. So it's yeah. Yeah.

It's slightly more correct pronunciation wise to say Durante. But anyway, Jimmy Durante was a famous person in Hollywood at one time, but no relation. I'm not related to him. Okay. So he was your great grandfather. He's my husband. Oh, that actually makes sense. You took his name.

No, no. He took my name. Oh, good. Okay. I'm sorry. I'm sorry to have accused you of such a thing. Yeah, feminism. Hello. Yeah. Yeah. He used to be, his maiden name was like Jimmy Smith. Yeah. Well, you all made that film together, so I married a vampire.

Exactly. Starring the same actor who plays Shrek. Yeah. Whose name is Shrek. Oh, you mean the ogre Shrek. Okay. Yeah. Count Orlok. Mike Myers? Is that who that is? Mike Myers. Well, he was in that movie Something Something Married an Axe Murderer. Oh, yeah. Totally. I assume that's what you were referring to. Yeah. Absolutely. I actually have seen that movie. You're off the rails. Okay. So...

Warner Brothers. They closed their German offices entirely in 1934 when the Nazis told them to fire all the Jewish employees. They were like, nope, you get nothing from us ever again. Fuck all of you. They stopped working with the Nazi regime. It took five more years. It took till 1939 for the other major studios to follow suit. And

And the heads of many of these other major studios were Jewish too. It's almost like an ethnic heritage doesn't make you a good or bad person. Instead, it's your own actions that do that. It's almost as if capitalism really just warps your brain regardless of who you are and kind of what your background is. Yeah. And if you want your brain warped, you can purchase goods and services online.

nicely done yeah thank you I worked hard on that one such as the following advertisers who we support in every way with our entire hearts our entire golden onion hearts especially those weird ads for gold that keep popping up oh yeah that nobody should buy okay but hear me out if you bury gold don't do it don't do it gold onions only

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And we are back. And we are talking about how MGM Studios, which had a Jewish head in 1939, the Jewish head, Adolf Zucker, said, I don't think Hollywood should deal with anything but entertainment. The newsreels take care of current events. In fucking 1939. The Warner Brothers had to fight anti-Semitism at home as well.

Hollywood had a self-censorship board called the Production Code Administration, which was led by this anti-Semite named Joseph Breen. And when I say anti-Semite, I'm not once again not trying to be like subtle here because he wasn't very subtle. What he said, what's wrong with Hollywood was all the quote lousy Jews and that 95% of Jews were Eastern Jews, the scum of the earth, right?

Oh my goodness. Yeah. So that's who was in charge. And then that's funny too, right? Cause everyone's always like anti-Semitic shit's always like, ah, the Jews controlling Hollywood and whatever. And you're like the fucking censorship board was like run by this guy who, whatever. Yeah. Regardless of the PCA, the Warner brothers went ahead as best they could. In 1937, they made a Humphrey Bogart film called black Legion about domestic fascism that compared the KKK to the Nazis and,

They made a 1938 version of The Adventures of Robin Hood that was like really transparently about the need to fight Nazis. And then they made a film that I had never heard of, but made a big fucking... We'll talk about what a big deal it was. They made a film called Confessions of a Nazi Spy. Either of you ever heard of this? I've not...

heard of maybe I've heard of it but I know nothing else well that's what's so interesting to me is kind of like how these things can be like cultural moments right and then not become classics kind of have no legacy after that yeah yeah Confessions of a Nazi Spy was directed by a Jewish refugee and it brings us the Hollywood Nazi the like here's a caricature of a shitty fucking Nazi right and this is way before the US was involved in the war

And it was based on the true story of an American detective who uncovered Nazi spies in the U.S. And since it was a true story, it could kind of get around PCA censorship barely. The Reich did not like this film. The Reich declared it would ban all films ever made by any of the actors in the film. Other studios wanted it to not come out because they were afraid the Nazis would ban all American films if this movie came out, which eventually the Nazis did ban all American films. A PCA official wrote,

Are we ready to depart from the pleasant and profitable course of entertainment to engage in propaganda, to produce screen portrayals arousing controversy, conflict, racial, religious, and nationalistic antagonism and outright human hatred? Yeah. They're saying that about a film that criticizes fascism and Nazism. Yeah, yeah. That reminds me of the time when...

What the fuck is that loser's name? D.W. Griffith. Mm-hmm. After making Birth of a Nation, which was so racist that at the time in 1915...

people were like, this is really racist. So when something, when people, when like critics and the general public in 1915 thinks something is really racist, you know it was very, very racist. Yeah. And he didn't like, Griffith didn't like how many people were calling his movie racist and were being quote unquote intolerant toward his movie that he then made a movie a couple years later called Intolerance.

Because he didn't like that people were so intolerant of his work. Yeah. So anyway. Real Nazis were the anti-Nazis all along. I'm so glad that this is a 20th century relic that is not a pattern that we've ever seen again. Yeah. Yeah.

So the Warner Brothers, they released Confessions of a Nazi Spy anyway. When asked why they were doing it, Jack Warner said, the silver shirts and the boondists, the two American fascist organizations, and the rest of these hoods are marching in Los Angeles right now. There are high school kids with swastikas on their sleeves, a few crummy blocks from our studio. Is that what you want in exchange for some crummy film royalties from Germany? Good point.

Yeah. And shout out for just using the word crummy twice in a very intense. Yeah. But, and there was one concession that they had to make in order to get the PCA to release the film at all. They couldn't outright talk about the fact that the Jews were the people who were being fucked with the most by the Nazis. Yeah.

And we'll talk about in a moment the first film that did center Jews in an anti-Nazi film. But Confessions of a Nazi Spy. They received more than 100 threatening letters and they have to hire extra security. They didn't do any publicity for it. The cast and crew's names were kept secret until like right before release. And they were hard to recruit cast and crew in the first place. And it was like almost entirely made by German refugees and like committed anti-fascists from the U.S. And this movie was controversial.

And when I say controversial, I'm going to quote from an article by Stephen J. Ross. Not everyone was enamored with the film. Nazi sympathizers in Milwaukee burned down the local Warner Brothers Theater shortly after the movie opened. Angry citizens in other cities picketed theaters, slashed seats, and threatened exhibitors. In Poland, anti-Semitic audiences hanged several theater owners in their movie houses for exhibiting the film. Nazis burned the film everywhere they could exert pressure. So people like...

Literally died for showing this anti-fascist film, which is like the stakes that I think sometimes gets forgotten about, you know? The film was carried to its premiere in an armored car and all the chicken shit celebrities didn't show up because not many of them did, but many of the like A-list celebrities didn't show up because they were afraid of being seen as quote political celebrities.

And their like excuse that they came up with MGM Studios through a birthday party for someone that night, like a surprise birthday party, like all of a sudden to give all their stars an excuse to miss it. And there's some kind of like one of the most interesting parallels to me about this is everything in the world compares to the Spanish Civil War in my head.

Which is not true, but you know, whatever my brain fixates on things. And the Americans who fought against fascism in the Spanish Civil War were called premature anti-fascists and they were mistrusted and they had like had trouble. Like they would like later go and sign up for the army because being like, well, we fought not fascists before and we want to fight them again. And the army was like holding them at arm's length being like, we don't trust you because you're too anti-fascist because you were prematurely anti-fascist. Yeah.

And this happens to the filmmakers and shit, right? They're now under suspicion because they were anti-fascist before the U.S. government was officially anti-fascist. And it was basically seen as as big of a deal as the birth of the nation, but from the opposite point of view. A Jewish film producer, Lou Edelman, wrote to his boss,

Last night, the motion picture, like the concept of the motion picture, had a bar mitzvah. It came of age. It said, today I am a man. So, big fucking deal. I've never heard of it. I kind of want to go watch it now. Right, yeah. Yeah. I have no idea if it holds up as entertainment, but it was fucking important that they made it. Yeah, I'm curious. And like you said, the stakes...

Surrounding something like that. Yeah, we can forget how, like literally life and death stakes in some cases. Yeah. For making something like that. Oh, yeah. I'm going to go check it out.

Yeah. If it's accessible, even, I wonder. Yeah, I think it is. I like didn't specifically look it up to be like, it's kind of my plan over the next couple nights to watch some of these movies that I didn't have a chance to watch before I recorded a podcast about them, because that is the nature of podcasting. And now you all know.

It's true. I do a lot of research, but I don't... That's why I never watch any of the movies that I cover on the Bechtelcast. That's not true. I watch them twice, sometimes three times. No, I thought you just read the Wikipedia entry out. Exactly. Okay, so let's go back to the anti-Nazi League. And it's a big popular front group made up of all the various people opposed to fascism. But they had another... There's another comparison I can make with the popular front of Spain. Because...

The people fighting the Popular Front fighting fascism in Spain had a problem. And that problem was Stalin. Because Stalin, you know, went around and like started shooting everyone else who didn't agree with him in the middle of a war and caused all this terrible shit. The Hollywood Popular Front also had a problem. You want to guess what that problem was? I would guess that...

I mean, what problems don't they have? I mean, it's probably having something to do with capitalism and or the, I don't know, the studio system, something, something. You tell me. Nope. Okay. Yeah. It kind of is a kind of a terrible riddle that I'm like, Stalin, their problem was Stalin. Okay. Okay.

Yeah. I get it. Yeah, yeah, it's the parallels. Okay. Because, okay, so the group was made up of a wide variety of anti-fascists, including even conservative members. And its political aims were purely anti-Nazi. But it was controlled from behind the scenes by the Communist Party.

through the Communist Party of America and the American League for Peace and Democracy, which was controlled by the Soviet Union, which had the goal of getting the U.S. into a defensive alliance with the USSR in case of Nazi aggression. So the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League was created in that context in which the USSR wanted Americans to be anti-Nazi. But...

Have you ever heard of the... I keep asking. I need to stop asking you questions. Have you ever heard of... I don't like putting you on the spot like that. I'm just going to tell you about this thing. No, I like... Oh, okay. Because if I have heard of it, I get to feel so freaking cool. Okay. And be like, yeah, I've heard of it and I've seen it. Yeah. So try me. And then if I haven't, then I expose myself as, once again, a fraud. But I'm willing to take that risk. Okay. Have you ever heard of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact? No.

It's okay. And then I burst into tears. Yeah, yeah. Actually, he's literally crying. Shrek, right now on camera, is crying. So, on August 23rd, 1939, it's the eve of World War II, and the USSR decides to be buds with Hitler. So they sign a treaty called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Hitler. And it's two things. First, and this part's public at the time,

It's a non-aggression pact. Second, and this part's the secret part of it, the secret protocol that we find out decades later, it carved up chunks of Eastern Europe and the Baltic states and Finland and said, okay, we can invade this, you can invade that. They just split up the spoils of war with Nazi Germany. And the most dramatic effects of this...

of course, is that Germany and the USSR both invaded Poland and then they held like common parades where the Red Army and the Weimar or whatever would like march around together and be like, we are friends, you know. Yikes. People don't like talking about this as much. And then the USSR conquered, tried to conquer Finland, which gets called the Winter War. And the Finns put up a surprising resistance and the USSR steals about 9% of the country instead of all of the country. Hmm.

And you know how the USSR, the way that they got, the USSR got that pact with Hitler is Stalin gave an order to, quote, purge the foreign ministry of Jews in order to be friends with the Nazis.

USSR-Nazi relations only fell apart when the two countries couldn't agree about how to split the spoils of war, basically. They were in talks with... I didn't know this shit until fucking way recently, like five years ago or something, and I've been politically engaged for a long time. They were in talks with the USSR to formally join the Axis powers until eventually at some point Hitler was like, nah, we're just going to invade the USSR and take it all. But the USSR tried to

join Hitler, basically. Oops. Yeah, exactly. Doesn't look great in retrospect. The biggest deal, of course, was how the USSR invaded a bunch of places and then sent millions of tons of food to Hitler because the Western powers had a blockade on Germany, you know? And so they would send shit all the way from the eastern part of Russia. But there's another thing that mattered at all of this, too. All the communist parties in the West were forced to become anti-anti-fascist.

Because now anti-fascism... So communists in parliament in France, a few weeks earlier, had voted unanimously for war against Germany. But then they were suddenly against the war and called it imperialist. It would be imperialist for France to attack Nazi Germany. Because the Soviet Union was suddenly friends. Yeah. I guess there's always a bit of bastards in every episode about good people.

And all the anti-fascist organizations that were just communist front groups got dissolved. Or sometimes they did worse than dissolve. The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League didn't just dissolve, it joined the American Peace Mobilization, an organization dedicated to keeping the U.S. from helping Britain and France in their fight against the fucking Nazis. Okay. How does one thing become the other? So I think what happened was...

All of the like regular anti-fascists get out of the group, right? Because the group dissolves officially and becomes this other group. And then all of the people who are there because they were like communists loyal to the USSR stay and become anti-anti-fascists. Got it. And they start fighting against military recruitment. Yeah.

Until, of course, the Nazis invade the USSR and then they became the American people's mobilization and then they tried to get the US into the war. And then after the war, during the Cold War, they decide now they're pacifists and they become the National Committee to Win the Peace. Which is, I guess, like my takeaway from this is it's cool to be in coalition with other anti-fascists, but maybe don't trust the people who are only into it for some weird other shady reason. Yeah.

Yeah, right. And that's why, again, transparency is nice. You got to have these conversations. Similar to the conversation that, what was his name? Fritz Lang should have had with his wife about how she was a Nazi. You know, maybe be like, hey, why are you in this group? Totally. And then you pick out your friends based on that. Are you trying to say that Fritz Lang could have become a stand-up comedian with my wife jokes?

Yes. He would be like, get a load of my wife. He's a Nazi. And that's a perfect joke that I just wrote, believe it or not.

Yeah. Okay. It's part of Shrek 4, whatever your next movie is after Shrek. I don't know how many Shreks there are. I've starred in four Shreks. Oh, okay. So this is material for Shrek 5. This is Shrek 5, exactly. Okay. Henceforthcoming. What? My brain? It's not the best today. Okay, well...

I will say that the liberal-ish, the actual anti-Nazis in Hollywood, they did come together in a not-controlled-by-Stalin way. And they pushed for progressive themes in film during the war and after the war. And most famous among these is the progressive Orson Welles. But we've got to talk more about the lead-up to the war. Megan Feeney, in an article for the site MUBI, described Hollywood once the U.S. was involved in the war and said...

The war represented a pivotal moment in Hollywood history, one in which the U.S. film industry came to take itself seriously as a significant socio-political force. Hollywood's left liberal filmmakers ascended during the war and, in close collaboration with the Roosevelt administration, used fascism as a foil to redefine the so-called American War on their own terms, emphasizing popular democracy, civil liberties, religious tolerance, ethnic pluralism, and liberal internationalism.

And so the anti-war movies that were happening during the war weren't just we hate the Nazis from like kind of a right wing point of view. They were being made by the people who are like mostly being made by the people who are the most versed in being racist.

actually anti-Nazi, being leftists, you know? And this is in contrast to how later during the Cold War, starting in the late 40s, conservatives take control of Hollywood and bring Hollywood back to its like so-called apolitical past of being conservative. And you get the Red Scare, you get the Hollywood Blacklist. And at this point, at that point, the like leftists in Hollywood, or even just the like

anti-censorship people in Hollywood kind of pivot to just being First Amendment groups instead of being like fighting for liberal ideas in Hollywood. They're literally fighting for like, please just let us have fucking free speech. What the fuck? Right. And unfortunately, one of our previous heroes, the Warner brother, Jack Warner, testified to the House of Un-American Activities and fired the co-writer of Confessions of a Nazi Spy because that guy might have been like secretly communist or whatever the fuck.

But back to the golden age of anti-fascist filmmaking, also known as World War II. I love accidentally saying positive things about one of the worst things. Okay, anyway. It's this anti-fascist era that gives us the Nazi as the ultimate villain. And it also gives us the unfortunate good war narrative and the idea that America is the savior of humanity. And...

Then I found even more disturbing shit that even the lefties and liberals were doing at this time, or at least some of them were. So, you know how like Nazis are like the ultimate villain, right, in Hollywood? They didn't start out that way because of racism.

More films with Nazis, like films with Nazis started off before the war like really got in where like usually the Nazis could be like redeemed. Right. And like a lot of like Nazi collaborators like come around to see the light. The Japanese, however, were presented as monsters and the Japanese were to be fought in a similar way to other like classic monsters of the screen. The indigenous people of North America who the U.S. is, you know, continuing its war of genocide and expansion against.

So basically everyone can twist anti-fascism into obnoxious propagandistic ends to do really bad things. That's my, this actually turned into more of a bastards episode than I thought. Okay. Actually, we're about to get into the most complicated of them all. I'm ready. Okay. In the lead up to this anti-fascist film era, you get the Warner Brothers being pretty consistently cool and a few more people start coming on board. You've got a producer, Walter Wanger, who puts Henry Fonda in a Spanish Civil War movie in 1938 called Blockade. Okay.

and gets Alfred Hitchcock to make an anti-fascist film in 1940 called Foreign Correspondent. Hitchcock made more movies during the war. And then you get Charlie fucking Chaplin. Oh, the great dictator. Yeah. And Charlie Chaplin...

He gets both Charlie fucking Chaplin, as in like, hell yeah, because of some of the interesting shit he did. And he gets Charlie fucking Chaplin, because what the fuck is wrong with this guy? What the fuck is wrong with this guy? He did some bad things. He did do some bad things. We're going to talk about some of them. And if you know more of them, please...

Charlie Chaplin is maybe the most dramatic rags to riches entertainment story in history. Not just filmmaking, just fucking all over. He was born four days before Hitler. A lot of people like make weird comparisons about the fact that he's like just like Hitler because he was the same age and also had a toothbrush mustache. Right. He was born on April 16th, 1889.

He grew up dirt fucking poor in South London to a probably Roma family in a community of like sex workers and buskers and like just like down and out folks coming up with creative means by which to survive. He might have been born in a Vardo, the wagons that Roma folks would have. And...

he grew up more or less orphaned and he's not even fucking seven years old when he's like clog dancing on the streets outside bars for money. And you know what he could have done with that money? Caitlin Durante. Um, yeah, I can imagine a few things, but why don't you just let you know? Yeah. Yeah. He could have purchased products and services. Oh, I see what you were doing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, sorry. Yeah. Um,

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And we are back and we are talking about Charlie fucking Chaplin. Yeah. He's clogged dancing on the streets for money. He gets discovered.

And on the streets, he gets given a job with a theater troupe at age seven. He learns physical comedy. He moves to America to make films in the 1910s. And by age 26, he's maybe the most famous man in the world. People refer to it as like the world was suffering from chaplainitis. He's like the symbol of popular culture.

And there's two stories to tell about Chaplin because, and they're fucking messy to resolve with each other. And I think that learning how to not necessarily resolve these with each other, but understand them both, I think is like crucial. Sure. I'm gonna start with the bad story. Because before I say cool shit about a guy, I want to say he sucks. He is a fucking monster. He is an early example of why Hollywood is a misogynist cesspool run by fucking predators. Yeah.

Yeah. He bragged to have slept with 2,000 women in his lifetime. He never trusted women. He constantly married children. He always waited until they were 16 to marry them. His first wife, Mildred Harris, was 16 when they got married. The story is that she feigned pregnancy to get married, but I don't know. That's his story, and I don't fucking trust anything he has to say. No. And once they got married, she wound up institutionalized for weeks. Yeah.

And when she divorced him, she cited cruelty as the reason for the divorce. He was a literal groomer. His second wife, Lita Gray, was 12 when they met. At 16, he started assaulting her, then married her while she was pregnant to avoid statutory rape charges. He tried to pressure her into an abortion, but...

And he also, and she said no to that. And then, so he tried to pick a random man, her age to marry her to take the, and then take care of the kid and offered like the man, like $200,000 to do this. Oh my gosh. But she turned that down as well. So he married her and called her a little whore and told her to kill herself because Charlie Chaplin is the fucking worst. She was around 19 when he divorced her. His next wife was a 17 year old who he claims told him that she was 22. Wow.

His final wife was 36 years younger than him. He was 54. She was 18. She was terrified of him and regularly locked herself in her room to get away from him. He had tons of children. He was constantly cruel to all of them. He got sued over parentage, lost that suit. In 1926, he described his ideal woman as, I am not exactly in love with her, but she is entirely in love with me. Oh, okay. So he's in love.

narcissist. Yeah. On top of all that. Yeah. I mean, well, yeah, fuck that guy. Yeah. That was what I knew. I didn't even know most of those details. I just knew that he was sexual predator slash child rapist. Yeah. Yep. He is absolutely those things. Well, fortunately now he's just dead. I had a high school teacher who was obsessed with him and like we had to watch so many of the films and I was just like,

Just like without knowing any of this, it's just like the unbelievable amount of red flags you see even in his work. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Like the way that it's been a long time since I watched Chaplin films. I used to watch them a lot when I was younger. Yeah. No, it's now I'm going to tell you about anti-fascism in film. Please. Please tell us, Magpie. We're here. Okay. So the other story about Charlie Chaplin.

is a story about an anti-fascist filmmaker who risks his entire career, who tanks his entire career to try and stop the Nazis. In this story...

It is his unshakable self-confidence that one might call narcissism that allowed him to survive on the streets of Victorian London as a fucking like seven year old orphan. You know, it offered him the self-confidence and he offered that self-confidence to his viewers and to the world. He described how he survived in his youth by the exuberance that comes from utter confidence in yourself. Without it, you go down in defeat.

And his main character, the little tramp, no matter what happens, he picks himself up and he trots off jauntily into the sunset. It's also the story of a person with an unshakable political moral compass with the largest blind spot the world has ever seen. An unshakable moral compass when it's applied on a geopolitical level instead of an interpersonal level. In the 1930s, he did radio broadcasts supporting the New Deal.

And his first talkie, his first non-silent movie, he was like one of the last people to want to switch over to talkies, was The Great Dictator in 1940. And it came out before the US entered the war. His little tramp character is modified slightly into a Jewish barber. And he also plays a like really obvious Hitler clone. And it's the first, and this is the first time that a Hollywood film acknowledges that the Nazis were specifically after the Jews. And I think it's interesting to me that also the fact that he was Roma, like this is something that

you know, affects him, right? Right. And it brings us one of the greatest moments in political Hollywood history. At the end of the film, the Jewish barber is mistaken for the dictator and he goes up and he gives a speech and the film gets rid of the fourth wall, much as Brecht and all the other people would have liked, right? And specifically as a way to counter propaganda, look directly at the camera and talk, which is interesting because I feel like now if you did that, it would kind of read as propagandistic. And this

This speech that he gives is kind of propagandistic, but by breaking the fourth wall, it ties into this art movement at the time of using that to get people to question shit. So the Jewish barber goes up pretending to be the dictator and he gives a speech about how we should destroy national borders, how we should never listen to despots, how soldiers should fight for democracy and against dictatorship. And I'm going to read part of it.

I don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone, if possible, Jew, Gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other's happiness, not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another. In this world, there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men's souls.

has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical, our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost. He just goes on in this complete...

not what people are fucking doing in movies at the time. And he spent two years making The Great Dictator. And all the while, the English and American censors, because England isn't at war at the start. England isn't at war with Nazi Germany either. And they're like, don't fucking make this movie. We're at peace with Hitler. You can't make fun of Hitler. And he basically is like, all right, well, I'm going to hire all the movie halls myself. I'm the most famous man in the world, and I'm going to fucking make this anti-Nazi film.

because I fucking hate Hitler. And before he finishes it, war was on and France was conquered and England was at war with Germany and the US hadn't entered the war yet.

It winds up his highest grossing film up to that date, but it's controversial. A lot of the critics said the last speech was just him declaring communism, which is funny because it's a speech about democracy. It literally uses the word democracy over and over again. And the press starts to hate him at this point. And he literally tanks his career with this. All of his films afterwards play to his existing fan base, but fail to attract new audiences because the press spends the rest of his life attacking him. Sometimes...

And the press gets it right, and they attack him for being a fucking child raping piece of shit, fucking absolute monster. Yeah, uh-huh. You'll be surprised to know that mostly they spend all their time calling him a communist, which he wasn't. But even if he was, you know? Right. And his films start being picketed after The Great Dictator.

And some other filmmakers love the speech. At least one director puts the whole text into like his Christmas card that year, which is like the most like lefty Hollywood thing I can imagine someone doing. He reads it to about 60 million people on the radio. But while he's reading it, he's in a hall and Nazis, American Nazis in the audience are like jeering him and coughing really loudly and trying to disrupt the whole thing. And he also, in his autobiography, he wrote about the film

quote had i known the actual horrors of the german concentration camps i could not have made the great dictator i could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the nazis however i was determined to ridicule their mystic bilge about a pure-blooded race and uh it seems like you you can you can react as this like tension or weirdness i mean like i'm just over here uh processing i'm like still no keep going and i'm still collecting my thoughts okay

He doesn't stop his anti-Nazi stuff with just making a film. He fucks up his whole career by going out on a limb over politics time and time again. He gives speeches about how America needs to help England open up a second front against the war while the Nazis were busy fighting the USSR. He talked with Roosevelt and with previous presidents, anyone who would listen, about why the US needed to join the war and ally themselves with England and Russia. And he makes no bones about being like, yes, and Russia, I don't care that they're communists, right? I hate Nazis.

In the middle of his autobiography, while talking about the speeches he was giving, and all the flak he got, he stops and then spends a paragraph talking about the tits of some lady that he saw. Because he's a piece of shit. There's no other. He gets labeled a communist, which he denies his entire life because he wasn't a communist. He called himself two things instead. This part makes me sad. He called himself a peacemonger and he called himself an anarchist. And I don't want him.

In 1957, he put out A King in New York. And he's playing a king and his own 10-year-old son plays a kid who chews him out about how evil giant corporations are and how national borders is like shitty. And the whole thing is this anti-McCarthy film. And the same year, he says he's an anarchist. He says, as for politics, I'm an anarchist. I hate governments and rules and fetters. Can't stand caged animals. People must be free.

Except, obviously, not teenage. The woman he was married to. Yeah. The girl, the little girl he was married to. Who were hiding in their rooms from... Yeah. So he wasn't American born. And one time in 1952, while he was out of the country, the U.S. sort of doesn't invite him back because he's a filthy communist. They revoke his reentry permit and he moves to Switzerland. Not, you came here and sexually assaulted uncountable numbers of people, but you are a communist even though you're not.

And this should be a story about a Roma born anarchist filmmaker who makes himself into the greatest star in the world, gambles it all to pressure the US government and public into going to war against the Nazi empire. And instead it's a story about a gross fucking man who raped teenagers, who went to parties and his way of entertaining people at parties was to mimic a woman having an orgasm. So fuck you, Charlie Chaplin for fucking all that up. When Chaplin died, some grave robbers stole his body.

And they held it for ransom. They called up one of his ex-wives and was like, we've got Chaplin. She says, so what? And hangs up the phone. Hell yeah. There should be a whole episode of your podcast on just that. And even if it's only 30 seconds long. Yeah. So what?

click click oh I love that I see and Marlon Brando described Charlie Chaplin as the most sadistic man I have ever met alright Brando alright Brando and this is this is not how I usually end an episode but that's what I've got about anti-fascism and leftism that flows through filmmaking

So what we've learned here today is that Shrek, not the ogre with the donkey friend, but Max Shrek, as far as we know, wasn't a real life monster slash predatory vampire, literally. But yeah, there's... I mean, I'm glad there were people... I never quite understand...

I don't know. I have complicated feelings about this because on one hand, Hollywood and many, many, if not most film industries around the world are, I mean, they're all for sure capitalist and they are, you know, priority number one is to make entertainment is, you know, to entertain and some of that, but, but I think a lot of people conflate the, the entertainment has to be completely escapist and, and,

cannot also be informative or, you know,

getting behind a particular movement or like political ideology or like, I don't know. The people who are like, no entertainment should just be strictly entertainment all the time. A hundred percent and not anything that has any sort of like political message. I don't trust those people. Yeah. Because while a lot of the entertainment I like is very strictly, you know, like silly mindless escapist media, but,

a lot of it is also very political or like, you know, has some kind of message that could be perceived as political. So,

Anyone who's like entertainment should never be political. I don't, again, I don't, I just don't agree. So for the people who are willing to with their platform and with their art form and entertainment also push a political agenda, especially if that political agenda is anti-fascist, that's rock and roll.

So good for them. And fuck Charlie Chaplin. Yeah. The end. My tirade. Yeah. Yeah. Caitlin, do you have anything you would like to plug?

Um, give, uh, Hey, speaking of anti-fascist media, the Bechtel cast is anti-fascist coming out with a bold stance. Yeah. Right. Um, and, uh, not only that, Jamie and I are, um, uh, good people who in our private lives are, are still good and not, um, scary. Yeah.

I co-signed for Jamie and Caitlin. Okay. Thank you so much. Reference accepted. They're really, really good friends to me. Yeah. I've got receipts on how good of a person I am. No, I'm kidding. Caitlin has hugged me while I cried before. Okay? Caitlin forever.

Yeah, I believe, to quote Paddington too, okay, if we are kind and polite, the world will be right. And I behave that way in my public life and in my private life. Excuse me, someone who has something to prove had a very loud engine that just drove by. Anyway, can be followed. Yeah.

I was like, what was I saying? You can follow me on social media at Caitlin Durante on Twitter and Instagram. Hey, if you want to follow me on TikTok, I have exactly two posts on there and they're both Titanic related. So really just filling out the trifecta of my personality. We've got Titanic, Paddington, and now RRR. I'm so glad that we filled that out to a trifecta. Yeah.

As, as was stated earlier, the triangle is the strongest shape that might've been in the first episode. But it was stated on the record. Yeah. It is on the record and you can, you cannot remove it. So what am I saying? Um, and listen to the Bechdel cast, please. Oh,

Oh, that's where this all started. We are publicly and privately anti-fascist on the Bechdel cast. And it's a podcast about movies and examining those movies from an intersectional feminist lens. And that's, yeah, that's it. That's all I got to put. Listen to the episode that I did on the Bechdel cast. Wait, which one did you do? We did nine to five. Oh, shit.

That's cool. Nine to five. And once again, the Shrek 2 episode is a banger. Yeah. When are you going to do Nosferatu? Do you want to come on for it? Oh, shit. Yeah, I'll rewatch Nosferatu. That could be a trip. What if it doesn't hold up? I'll be so disappointed. I'll be like, I went through all this work to be like, yeah, this guy rules. And then I'm going to be like,

this portrayal is different I mean actually I don't it doesn't make someone a bad person if they played a I'm pretty sure he preys on women I think that's his thing in the movie that is kind of the whole thing about vampire lore yeah he's actually just playing Charlie Chaplin in it I think dude Charlie Chaplin real life vampire yeah

And, you know, listeners, stay tuned after we force her to watch the Twilight series to find out if she's Team Edward or Team Jacob. I'm Team Charlie Swan. Charlie Swan. Charlie Swan. You're Team Charlie Swan. Oh, oh, okay. Good to know. Bella's dad, Bella Swan. Oh, okay. He's a cop.

He is a cop. Never mind. Never mind. I forgot. I was like, I was like, Charlie, sorry, Charlie, a cab includes you. Yeah. There's truly no one on team Anna Kendrick. Yeah. Wonderful. Um,

Margaret, you have a book that people can purchase and they can see you on book tour, which they can find from your Instagram at Margaret Killjoy. Is that true? That is correct. I am also a good person. Probably. I hope to be. You are. Aspiring good person.

And you can also check me out on the Bechdel cast. I'm kidding. You can find me on the Bechdel cast. I will be talking about Nosferatu. This is just literally the whole thing was a long con to get myself back on Bechdel cast. And also... We'd love to have you back anytime. We Are the Best, which is a movie about me and Jamie and Caitlin when we started a punk band as teenagers in Sweden.

In 1980. Yeah, it's a biopic about us that we actually directed ourselves. And this is a funny joke that I am making. And it's really good to point that out. And you can follow Sophie on the internet.

Rub salt in wounds. You can find me on Twitter. Sometimes you can't find me on Instagram because they ban my account all the time. But you can find me. It happens often. But you can find me on Twitter at Y underscore Sophie underscore Y. And you can follow at CoolZoneMedia at CoolZoneMedia. Is that correct, Margaret? Did I do it?

I think so. I wasn't paying enough attention to the specifics. Oh, cool. I mean, if you're not paying attention, I guess the episode has to be over. What? It's over. Oh. Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.