In Policing Show Business, Francis MacDonnell explores the starring role played by J. Edgar Hoover in the development of the Hollywood blacklist in the 1940s and 1950s. As director of the FBI, Hoover poured resources into scrutinizing show business, a policy choice unjustified by any corresponding threat to public security. He detailed agents to write regular reports on actors, screenwriters, lyricists, singers, and studio executives. His frequent handwritten comments on papers inside the files of film industry personalities demonstrate a level of interest bordering on obsession.

Policing Show Business is not just another book about the Hollywood blacklist. MacDonnell approaches the Red Scare through biography using FBI records on such luminaries as Marlene Dietrich, Walt Disney, Hedda Hopper, Adolphe Menjou, Lena Horne, Fredric March, Cecil B. DeMille, and Burl Ives to present in unexpected, surprising, and sometimes poignant ways the rich human dramas experienced by both targets of the bureau and its collaborators.

MacDonnell's meticulously researched account, drawing on many newly available FBI files, evokes the passions and resentments; the courageous acts and calculated evasions; and the petty tyrannies and self-interested campaigns of an ignominious episode in the annals of American freedom.