Billy Crudup

Oh.

Okay, okay.

This is like Wyatt Earp and Tombstone.

Exactly the same.

Speaking of which, I'm about to go to London to do a stage adaptation of High Noon.

So I've been watching Westerns.

Patrick Wilson turned me on to a whole bunch.

I didn't really know the Western genre so well.

My Darling Clementine, if you like the Wyatt Earp story, Henry Fonda plays it.

It's awesome.

My Darling Clementine.

Okay.

I like those movies.

I like a Western.

They're very applicable to right now.

And what you discover is...

A lot of the writers, the guy who wrote High Noon, the movie, was blacklisted.

If you re-watch High Noon under these circumstances, you see it's really not about that kind of heroism.

It's about cowardice in the face of a violent threat and how people kind of turtle up, even for somebody who they have lionized before, if they feel like it's not in their best interest to get in the fight.

The big red scare was people giving up names, people being blacklisted, companies not wanting to put out anything that might be perceived as left-leaning.