by Stacey Osbeck, Staff Writer

Christian Blauvelt is known for writing a series of Star Wars books including, How Not to Get Eaten by Ewoks and Other Galactic Survival Skills, as well as holding the position of Managing Editor for IndieWire. Several things separate Hollywood Victory, his soon to be released book on the film industry during WWII, from others of the like.  

Rarely do you turn the page without seeing a photo. Details of these engaging stories transport you to a different time, but the visuals help ground you in that world.

Minorities and women are not delegated to a sidebar. Anna May Wong (who incidentally will grace the back of the quarter next year), Lena Horne and Hedy Lamarr among many others made contributions both on and off the screen and are given their due.  

Bringing true tales of bravery and unity to light, does not mean Blauvelt ignores the dishonorable effects of war hysteria. Like the film Across the Pacific, forced to recast some Japanese-American actors with Chinese because their initial picks had been confined to internment camps.  

I recently had the opportunity to have a phone conversation with Christian Blauvelt about this passion project he feverishly compiled during lockdown.

MJ: A book is like a marathon. So you felt committed to Star Wars and you felt committed to Hollywood during WWII. Is there something there, I mean besides the obvious good vs. evil?

Christian Blauvelt: Isn’t that interesting. It’s funny I hadn’t actually thought that much about the thematic similarities but I do see them. You know what, the 1940s is my favorite movie decade. No doubt about it. I love everything about that particular decade. The war movies, the melodramas, the romantic films. Some that combined all of the above like Casablanca. But also I love Film Noir. That decade to me had so much interest. There’s just so many different types of movies that were made. I’ve always been a huge classic film buff. And I will say that Star Wars, when I was a kid, was a real gateway drug to becoming a classic film buff, since they are very old style movies and they do draw from the movies of the 40s and 50s. It made going from one to the other very easy as a fan when I was a kid. Writing Star Wars books is very easy to do because I lived in that universe it feels like for so long. But in a strange way I kind of felt that with WWII as well. It’s something that even long before I pitched this book or I was committed to writing it I just cared deeply about WWII and about what was at stake. 

MJ: You took some things I already knew and expanded on them. Especially in the beginning with Billy Wilder. I think with the European Jews there’s this kind of blanket ‘they fled the troubles of Europe.’ But you decided to go into individual backstories. 

C: I felt like if I’m telling a story about Hollywood and WWII what better resource to draw from than Hollywood storytelling. I wanted to focus on some particular personalities and introduce them in a way like I would if I were writing almost a screenplay or a fictional story like really introduce them as characters. Makes you realize these are such interesting people who lived so much life and had such a distinct point of view on the world and were witty and clever or beautiful. I wanted to regard them as characters themselves in a sense. Even though it’s a book full of photos and it’s glossy and it’s like a coffee table book in a way I wanted it to feel like you’re almost reading a novel. That you’re being taken on a journey and you’re being taken back in time.  

MJ: There’s one part where Charlie Chaplin and Luis Buñuel went to see a movie together at the MOMA and I’m thinking of Chaplin’s films and Buñuel’s films and going these guys were pals? And they were going to the movies together? But it was a smaller industry. Are there any other relationships you looked at and went, what?

C: There’s so many like that. I think there’s a photo that we included of Chaplin going to the Santa Anita Racetrack with Walt Disney. I feel like we included that or maybe we cut it for space. So interesting you would never think that but yeah. It was a small world. Probably if you were of that level you knew everybody else who was of that level.

MJ: Are there any fun facts you’d like to share that didn’t make the final edit?

C: Oh, I’m sure there’s so many. I mean there’s so many. Where to begin?  

MJ: Breaks your heart

C: Yeah, it really does. It’s just that infinite nature of WWII that there’s always going to be more stories to find, always more things. Everything I discovered with Walt Disney during that time was so interesting. The whole thing with having the troops garrisoned at the Disney Studio. It’s just remarkable that they set up an anti-aircraft division there because it’s like we’re gonna station everyone here at Disney Headquarters in Burbank just in case there’s an invasion. People forget about how much panic there was regarding the possibility of an invasion. Oh, I wasn’t able to include these but there were these incredible Life Magazine spreads from like February or March of 1942 which are so fear mongering. It’s kind of wild. But they show different invasion routes that they thought the Germans and Japanese would take in invading the United States. It was like six different scenarios and it was mostly led by the Japanese, but it was also reading into so much stuff that ultimately we’ve learned didn’t really pan out. But you know those days were bleak. Those days were really bleak. I think we forget that. We forget that through the haze of history which just lets us focus on our ultimate triumph.

MJ: There were a lot of groups where star power was the only power they could be allotted for the time period. Let’s say Jewish people or Black people or for Chinese-Americans like Anna May Wong, Hollywood was a hot bed that they could leverage their power to help others. And all of the sudden the War effort came and it was something they could all come together for. Do you see that as something that can happen in the future in Hollywood?

C: Oh, that’s such a big question. It’s hard to think of there ever being quite the level of cohesion and the clarity of messaging that some of these people had during the war. We do see in Hollywood of that period people from different backgrounds really trying to assert themselves and achieve an understanding about their background that had not been there before. The way that Anna May Wong even in the years leading up to the war sent that memo to Thalberg at MGM about I don’t want to play just this small villain character in The Good Earth. I want the lead and it’s really offensive that you want a white woman to play the lead as a Chinese character.

MJ: And I get to be the bad guy. 

C: Yeah and I’ll just be the bad guy. I think there was early advocacy like that you see echoes of today in a really powerful way. I mean, that said, the industry is a lot more fragmented than it was back then. But on the other hand that can allow for more voices to be heard.  

Hollywood Victory is Christian Blauvelt’s tenth book.  Published by Running Press, it’s set for release November 2, 2021, just ahead of the 80th anniversary of Pearl Harbor.