Ed Rampell

Ed Rampell is an LA-based film historian and critic, author of "Progressive Hollywood: A People’s Film History of the United States," and co-author of "The Hawaii Movie and Television Book." He has written for Variety, Television Quarterly, Cineaste, New Times L.A., and other publications. Rampell lived in Tahiti, Samoa, Hawaii, and Micronesia, reporting on the nuclear-free and independent Pacific and Hawaiian Sovereignty movements.

LATEST ARTICLES BY Ed Rampell

Culture

Passing the baton: The Memphis metaphysics of Martin Luther King in ‘The Mountaintop’
June 26, 2023 By Ed Rampell
Hill finds the nuance in depicting a character with the status of a prophet, but who is, as those picket signs of the sanitation strikers he’s supporting declare, “a man,” after all.
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Culture

The real and reel Ava Gardner: What price celebrityhood?
April 25, 2023 By Ed Rampell
As a film historian, when I heard a bioplay was being mounted about silver screen siren Ava Gardner at one of L.A.’s finest theaters, the Geffen Playhouse, it was “Westwood Ho!” for moi.
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Culture

It can happen here: Three L.A. museums shine spotlights on Hollywood Blacklist
April 17, 2023 By Ed Rampell
Learning about yesterday’s anti-communist Reds-under-the-beds hysteria can empower us to resist today's rising tide of book banning, school curriculum gagging, censorship, disinformation, history denial, expulsions, redbaiting and more.
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Culture

Traffic jam at the juncture of Black and ‘Blue’
April 11, 2023 By Ed Rampell
The second I entered the Matrix Theatre on the opening night of June Carryl’s Blue, Rogue Machine’s new play immediately got me into the mood indigo.
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Culture

Brecht’s ‘The Mother’: The Revolution will not be dramatized
February 16, 2023 By Ed Rampell
Brecht’s 'The Mother' is a 1932 adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s 1906 novel of the same name about the 1905 Russian Revolution, which has been called “the dress rehearsal” for 1917’s Bolshevik Revolution.
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Culture

‘Southern Girls’: A ‘woke’ play suitable for banning in today’s Florida
February 1, 2023 By Ed Rampell
“The playwrights who wrote this absolutely lived it. The play is very authentic.”
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Culture

‘Ubu the King,’ a raunchy play from 1896, revived in Culver City
November 23, 2022 By Ed Rampell
Its fanciful lunacy won me over and I ended up quite enjoying this 40th anniversary revival and tribute to one of L.A.’s greatest theaters.
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Culture

Commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Hollywood Blacklist
October 13, 2022 By Ed Rampell
Members of the motion picture industry who refused to “cooperate” by informing on themselves and others about their leftist politics were forbidden from working in the movies.
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