FILMMAKERS FOR FREEDOM
As producer of the daring anti-fascist drama-romance-thriller Ticket to Kyiv, and the historical drama short The Road to Casablanca, Pacifico Studios is proud to announce the formation of FILMMAKERS FOR FREEDOM, the first organization of filmmakers to directly confront the rising tide of global fascism.
FILMMAKERS FOR FREEDOM is inspired by the “Hollywood Anti-Nazi League," the group founded in 1936 by many of the leading actors, writers, directors, and producers, with the assistance of studio heads like Jack and Harry Warner, and patriotic groups like the American Legion. Although the HANL was and still is criticized as a “front” for the Communist Party USA, the Warners were staunch Republicans and the American Legon opposed the very thought of a Soviet takeover of the United States.
By organizing as independent and independent-minded artists, we can resist any attempt to take over our industry, drive its best minds out, and turn it into a tool of oppression and domination against the freedom and civil rights of the people of the United States and the other nations aspiring to democracy.
On January 30, 1936, at the Shrine Auditorium next to the University of Southern California, leading actors and writers joined elected officials and U.S. military veterans at the first major event in Los Angeles that denounced the rise of pro-Hitler sympathies among the American people, and the threat of anti-American espionage by Americans sympathetic to fascist regimes.
Source: “Hollywood Fights Back” California State University-Northridge Library Digital Collection, 2019.
This page from the Anti-Nazi News in 1936 shows that Americans were made aware of the evils of Nazism, especially to Christians that defied the Nazi afront to their faith.
Source: “Hollywood Fights Back” California State University-Northridge Library Digital Collection, 2019.
Promotional postcard made for Ticket to Kyiv.
© February 2025, Pacifico Studios.
“The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds is to let it go through the medium of an entertainment picture when they do not realize that they are being propagandized.”
Elmer O. Davis, director of the Office of War Information (1942-1945)
See: “Marshall and the Office of War Information.” (The George C. Marshall Foundation)