For weeks, I’ve been shouting into the void, urging the most influential people in Hollywood to stand up against authoritarianism. Today, Jane Fonda answered the call (or maybe I answered hers).
The Oscar-winning legend, an actress, producer and longtime activist, has reconstituted the Committee for the First Amendment, a group first formed in the 1940s to fight against the House Un-American Activities Committee, which targeted protesters and questioned the loyalties of American citizens — eventually resulting in prison terms for the Hollywood Ten, a group of producers, writers and directors accused of being Communists. The fervor would soon spiral into McCarthyism, named for Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who led a Black List that raged through the entertainment industry, destroying countless careers and lives in the process.
When the Committee for the First Amendment first launched in 1947, Fonda’s father, Henry Fonda, was among the founding members, alongside Golden Age legends like Lucille Ball, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and more. (Fonda said she found a recording of one of the group’s meetings when she was preparing for her speech at the Screen Actors Guild Awards earlier this year, and she might someday play the audio for new Committee members.)
“The only thing that can defeat authoritarianism is people coming together in large numbers, as solidarity is unity,” Fonda told me on today’s Rushfield Lunch.
This was Fonda’s first interview about the reformation of the Committee for the First Amendment, which relaunched on Wednesday with signatures from more than 550 of Hollywood’s biggest names (plus yours truly).
“Our opponents, for decades, have wanted us to praise individuality. It has been raised up on a pedestal. It wasn’t always this way,” Fonda told me. “I was born in 1937, so I know a time in the United States when individualism was not the way to go. People were unified. People were together. There was a sense of common good. We have to get that back.”
During our insightful conversation, a call-to-action for the industry that’s in dire need of such rabble-rousing, Fonda explained how Hollywood is so well-positioned to fight back against Trump and his cronies. In fact, it’s something she sought to do before Jimmy Kimmel’s recent suspension following government pressure.
“We’re creatives, we’re storytellers, and we should be able to model creative, nonviolent, non-cooperation methods of resisting authoritarianism,” Fonda said. “That’s what we do. Freedom is essential to artists. It’s in our blood. We can’t function without the freedom of expression and of speech. So let’s get together in large numbers, and let’s find creative ways to ridicule the awfulness that is happening.”
Plans for the Committee are still being formed, Fonda said today, and I’ll be on the lookout for concrete initiatives to emerge. However, she emphasized the importance of a unified front, a sentiment that was evident in the industry’s response to Kimmel’s ouster.
“Our democracy will fail if we continue on the ethos of every person for themselves,” she said bluntly. “Strength in numbers. They come for one, darn it, they’re going to come for all of us. This is not — I don’t feel — about building, yet again, another organization. We want to build a movement.”
Please watch our inspiring conversation above and read the full, fiery transcript below.