Red Sapphire: The Woman Who Beat the Blacklist

In 1950, facing artistic and legal persecution by Senator Joe McCarthy because of her listing on Louis Budenz’s list of 400 concealed communists, single mother Hannah Weinstein fled to Europe. There, she built a television studio and established her own production company, Sapphire Films, then surreptitiously hired scores of such blacklisted writers as Waldo Salt, Ian McClellan, Adrian Scott, and Ring Lardner Jr., and Trojan-horsed more than three hundred half-hours of programming back to the United States, making a fortune in the process. Before she became one of the more powerful independent production forces in 1950s British television, Hannah Weinstein had a distinguished career as a journalist, publicist, and left-wing political activist. She worked for the New York Herald Tribune from 1927, then began a career in politics when she joined Fiorello H. La Guardia’s New York mayoral campaign in 1937. She also organized the press side of the presidential campaigns of Franklin D. Roosevelt and later (in 1948) of Henry Wallace where she established her own production company, Sapphire Films. With the exception of a French producer, no other woman on the continent was creating television content at this time, and Weinstein was the only one who was head of her own studio. Using declassified FBI and CIA files, interviews, and the personal papers of blacklisted writers and other sources, Red Sapphire will show that for the better part of a decade, Weinstein was a leader in the left’s battle with the right to shape popular culture during the Cold War … a battle that she eventually won.