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trust action and theater chains were separated from their distribu- tor-producer owners, the industry — as Fortune magazine put it — "began to feel like a man with a loud humming sound in his head." In March, 1951, just before the hearings began, Variety reported that in New York, Joyce O'Hara, acting president of the Motion Picture Association, had met with studio advertising and publicity heads and announced that movie people who did not firmly deny communistic ties would find it "difficult" to get work in the studios after the hearings closed. The Association had no intention of repeating the mistakes that had made Hollywood look foolish in 1947. The House Committee on Un-American Activities was different too. In December, 1949, J. Parnell Thomas was convicted of pay- roll padding and was later reunited with members of the Holly- wood Ten in prison. If the film industry managed to salvage any consolation from that, it was short-lived. For this time the Com- mittee returned to the subject of Communism-in-Hollywood under new auspices (Georgia's John S. Wood had succeeded Thomas as chairman) and vastly changed circumstances. In 1947 the wartime friendship between the U.S. and Russia was still a fresh memory. By 1951 U.S. soldiers were at war in Korea with the forces of two Communist powers and the Cold War with Russia was at its height. With the Hiss-Chambers, Klaus Fuchs and Judith Coplon cases behind it, the nation was becoming ever more security-conscious and, in the opinion of many, was af- flicted with a bad case of political jitters. A Senator named McCarthy was becoming a front-page fixture. And, above all, the House Committee itself had a spanking new policy implemented by the Committee's new research director, an ex-FBI man named Raphael I. Nixon. Nixon, comparing the 1947 with the later hear- ings not long ago, commended Parnell Thomas' work but said it was unfortunate that in 1947 the Committee had focussed its at- tack on movie content, "the weakest argument." 93