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Smash-Up, the Story of a Woman was a “premature pro-feminist” film written under John Howard Lawson's own name before the clampdown of the “blacklist.” It is a remarkable story that focuses on a subject Lawson knew well—the intersection of substance abuse and show business—which was a recurrent real-life theme of Red Hollywood. The film was far from being a runaway hit, though it received respectful consideration. Counter-Attack was produced as the war was expiring and was in tune with the then prevailing ethos. The “threat” from the Hollywood Independent Citizens Council of Arts, Sciences and Professions (HICCASP) had become so powerful that U.S. Army intelligence, headquartered in downtown L.A., began to monitor the group's activities. Robeson thought that it was Lawson's activism with the Screen Writers Guild (SWG), the League of American Writers (LAW), and the Hollywood Democratic Committee (HDC)—not simply his screenplays—that had led to the anticommunist persecutions.

This chapter focuses on the rise and digital marketing of a spate of musical series between 2009 and 2019. It explores the specific methods used to address audiences of Fox’s Glee, NBC’s Smash, ABC’s Galavant, and The CW’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and how the shows’ industry-driven online footprints project both the television industry’s embrace of Web 2.0 techniques and varying methods of hailing fans of the Broadway musical. In various ways, these series blend techniques of Broadway and television fandoms and parlay theatrical language and stars into marketing tools, while acknowledging the contemporary power of online stardom in the cultivation of contemporary media texts. Whether through network websites, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, or via interactive gif-creators and contests, these four musical series hung their hopes on the promise of fan interactivity.

This chapter considers the ongoing, complicated relationship between musical film and television. By appropriating and borrowing from musicals in the 1950, TV contributed mightily to their downfall: seeing stars free on The Ed Sullivan Show, or in televised productions like Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, could trump paying to seem such shows in movie theaters. Yet television also propagated musicals when they began to run (in black and white, with commercials) on the home screen. The Carol Burnett Show was especially astute in its musical parodies, while MTV and VH1 rechanneled old styles into flashily edited new forms. Later, Glee and Smash would both celebrate and distort movie musicals through a web of homage, skill, imitation, and frequent misunderstanding.