The Hollywood Reporter is a major trade publication of the
film industry in the
United States. During the last century it was one of the two major publications — the other being
Variety. Today both
newspapers cover what is now more broadly called the
entertainment industry.
Wilkerson believed that the Screen Writers Guild was one of the prime Communist strongholds in all of Hollywood. He used his TradeView column to publicize the "Communist Takeover" of the guild dating as early as 1938. Throughout the thirteen year Screen Writers Guild ban of its members advertising their services in trade papers, Wilkerson would not allow screenwriter credits in the Reporters film reviews.[2]
On Monday, July 29, 1946, Wilkerson published his TradeView entitled "A VOTE FOR JOE STALIN". It contained the first industry names on what later became the infamous Hollywood Blacklist - Dalton Trumbo, Maurice Rapf, Lester Cole, Howard Koch, Harold Buchman, John Wexley, Ring Lardner Jr., Harold Salemson, Henry Meyers, Theodore Strauss and John Howard Lawson.[3]
Wilkerson soon went after Cole, who was the first Vice President of the Screen Writers Guild. Here, Wilkerson would be the first to ask the two questions that would ring throughout the nation for the next decade "Are you a member of the Writers Guild?" and "Are you a member of the Communist Party of the United States?" On Monday August 19, 1946, Wilkerson wrote
