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Creed: Rocky's Creed

The success of Rocky, written by and starring a then-unknown Sylvester Stallone, and George Lucas’s Star Wars, launched within a year of each other in the mid-late seventies, steered American cinema away from nihilistic character pieces to the escapist entertainment that continues to dominate the global box office today. Both films launched five sequels spanning four decades, and now have seventh chapters arriving within a month of each other, Creed on Thanksgiving and The Force Awakens on December 16.

Trumbo: Lynch Mobs In La-La Land

Playwright and screenwriter Lillian Hellman called it “Scoundrel Time,” the name of her mid-1950s memoir of her experience with America’s 1940-1950s pandemic of anti-communist hysteria and witch hunting, especially her confrontation with the congressional House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Hellman, briefly a party member in the 1930s, was an “unfriendly witness” before the committee who declined to “name names” of former party comrades. She largely got away with it, perhaps because of her prominence and influential friends, but a great many others, in and out of Hollywood, didn’

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