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The last episode of TCM’s Moguls & Movie Stars, “Fade In, Fade Out,” (1960-1969) airing on Monday, Dec. 13, covers Hollywood during the Sixties. It is not a pretty sight.

The series, with more of the same Soviet and communist apologia of the last few episodes, gets it partly right that the 60s saw the rise of government power over Hollywood and America, though it isn’t put that way. Yet the facts are plain for anyone to see. Hollywood’s Golden Age was over, with moguls making way for upstarts tapping into cultural turmoil and going dark with horror movies like the zombie picture, Night of the Living Dead, an asinine exercise in nihilism which made $42 million in international box office, or Stanley Kubrick’s vacant 2001: A Space Odyssey or his satirical Dr. Strangelove, a favorite of the New Left. Somehow, movies with middle class appeal (the incisive In the Heat of the Night, the sexy and exciting James Bond pictures, the enthralling The Sound of Music starring series narrator Christopher Plummer) managed to get made. When they did, they usually made money.

Studio titans like Jack Warner were still around, hating hippies and wondering how Tinseltown went counterculture and it’s left to New Hollywood writer and director Robert Benton (Kramer Vs. Kramer), seeing movies as distinctly American, to recall the era’s confusion, noting that the studio system, which had been all but destroyed by the government, gave way to mediocrity, with the worst thrown at artists and audiences alike.

The most interesting business tale comes from Richard Zanuck, who at age 27 suggested himself to his Fox studio boss dad as the executive to save the struggling studio (though curiously there’s no mention of Fox’s 1968 hit Planet of the Apes). But this was the beginning of the dark times, with the rise of the Cannes Film Festival, and making money was out of fashion. Somebody mumbles that publicists handed out drug cigarettes at movie screenings and admits that many of the 1960s movies were made under the influence of drugs. Doris Day, Katharine Hepburn, and Cary Grant stepped aside for unwashed hippies and drug addicts and the sorry sight of Joan Crawford in a fright wig catfighting with Bette Davis or a Cro-Magnon man. This is what Hollywood, born of inventor Thomas Edison, bankers, Jews and capitalists, the most hated types in the modern world, powered by men like Laemmle, Zukor, Fox, DeMille, Disney and Warner came to. It was during the Sixties that anything remotely coherent, attractive and appealing was mocked, mutilated, or killed and anything larger than life barely stood a chance of getting made, let alone sold and seen. At least TCM host Robert Osborne reminds us that future filmmakers of quality made it through this awful decade.

The series’ closing episode will be presented with such films as the insightful Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (1967), horror film Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and The Magnificent Seven (1960) on Dec. 13, as well as the era’s dark, horror-themed pictures, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1969) and Easy Rider (1969) on Wednesday, Dec. 15. Don’t expect to feel the Christmas spirit by watching a batch of zombies and glorified murderers, drunks and drug addicts; those movies are devoid of peace, love and good will, but they do represent the 1960s and they coated the way with slime for today’s malevolent muck.

So it is fitting, in a way, that TCM ended its History of Hollywood in the Sixties, which marks an end to Hollywood’s beginning and, with nihilistic No Country for Old Men being considered Hollywood’s best picture, possibly a beginning of the end of a bright and innovative art form that was born of great creators over 100 years ago.

Part six of Moguls & Movie Stars on Turner Classic Movies (TCM), Attack of the Small Screens (1950-1960), marks the arrival of television. This episode of TCM’s History of Hollywood series premieres on Monday, Dec. 6, scheduled with films including the excellent Marty (1955) starring Ernest Borgnine, Elia Kazan’s biting A Face in the Crowd (1957) starring Andy Griffith as a folksy O’Reilly/Olbermann type TV blowhard (also with Patricia Neal), Sweet Smell of Success (1957) with Burt Lancaster and the maudlin A Streetcar Named Desire (1951).

Among the highlights in this one-hour feature are bits on Lucille Ball, a woman with real studio power in Hollywood, Louis B. Mayer and others including Judy Garland, Billy Wilder, and Alfred Hitchcock, who, after describing himself as a producer and being asked what he produces, responded with the answer: “goosebumps.” The episode covers an important period of transition in movies, which someone rightly remembers as an “era of philosophical disturbance”, from classic romantic fare to realism with stark, neurotic themes and method actors such as Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift (Red River). Also covered here: Jimmy Stewart, Jack Warner, James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor, Stanley Kramer, Sidney Poitier, Burt Lancaster, and the influence of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey.

TCM’s fine host Robert Osborne explains why wealthy comedian Charlie Chaplin was run out of Tinseltown at the age of 63, after it was discovered that the preachy Communist was not an American citizen and therefore did not pay income tax like everyone else. The segment on Walt Disney, who is seriously underreported in this series, is informative, reveling in the Midwesterner’s intermedia interests in creating arts and sciences across multiple platforms and his brilliant plan to finance the creation of Disneyland through a television network (ABC, now owned by the studio that bears his name) featuring his innovative motion picture-driven theme park as a work in progress.

But the series’ problems continue, with a feminist’s attack on actress Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962), one of the screen’s most talented comediennes, who is also one of Hollywood’s most innocent victims, reduced here without objection to a tart who “makes women look bad,” an outrageously baseless assertion from a bitter source. I have never heard such an explicit assault on this skilled, feminine actress, one of the few truly deserving of the term movie star, the premise of this television series. Besides more falsehoods about anti-communism, more blather about nothing from Gore Vidal (who offers no value in the series), and a distinct lack of performance and film clips, the most glaring omission is one of the decade’s top box office stars: Doris Day, an immensely talented artist who is completely ignored. But it’s hard to take any of this seriously after the despicable, misogynistic attack on Marilyn Monroe.

For the repeat of this episode on Wednesday, Dec. 8, TCM announced that they plan to run the unforgettable Sunset Blvd. (1950) starring William Holden with Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond, Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) starring Cary Grant and Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones (1958) with Disney board member Sidney Poitier and the late Tony Curtis, among other pictures. The series concludes with the next episode, which covers America’s new, emergent cultural depravity: the darkness of the 1960s.

Bringing the series to the 1940s, the Monday, Nov. 29, “Warriors and Peacemakers” (1941-1950) episode (part five) of TCM’s Moguls and Movie Stars falters. Giving more screen time to Mickey Rooney than to Howard Hawks, John Wayne or Gary Cooper, who made Meet John Doe, Sergeant York, and Ball of Fire in 1941 alone, the episode loses perspective. When it comes to presenting the facts of Communists in Hollywood, the series goes pink if not entirely red.

It does contain a few insights, briefly covering legendary director John Ford’s ability to create a movie on time and under budget, assuring his creative independence, and demonstrating that Joseph P. Kennedy (the assassinated president’s father) was a Nazi appeaser who tried to force the moguls to remove Jewish names from picture credits to placate those who were exterminating Jews by the millions. Narrator Christopher Plummer, who famously portrayed a refugee from National Socialism, reminds us that government intervention harmed the studio system with a Supreme Court decision against Paramount for having an alleged “monopoly” while President Franklin Roosevelt considered targeting Hollywood’s moguls for making too much money.

Then it’s back to the rose-colored lens, with pro-Communist speakers, such as the vacuous Gore Vidal, actress Marsha Hunt, and the obnoxious son of writer Dalton Trumbo. Communist Trumbo is practically lionized here while TCM discards any mention of the most oppressive regime in history, the Soviet Union, which is proven to have infiltrated Hollywood. TCM blatantly evades Soviet sponsorship of American movies and the treatment of Communism in Hollywood is dishonest.

What may be the greatest movie ever made, Casablanca, is practically regarded as an accident. Instead, we get more proselytizing about Big Labor, Soviet apologist Lillian Hellman and the anti-business picture The Best Years of Our Lives, while Walt Disney, an anti-Communist, Jimmy Stewart (It’s a Wonderful Life), a veteran, and more deserving stars than Marsha Hunt and Mickey Rooney, such as Barbara Stanwyck, John Wayne, and Gary Cooper, are practically blacklisted. As those appeasing Soviet Russia are treated as martyrs, movie stars such as Cary Grant, described as an insecure actor, barely merit a few lines.

The disgustingly Communist-slanted “Warriors and Peacemakers” impairs the series’ credibility, which is unfortunate, since the first four episodes capably present a captivating history of the business of making movies. “Warriors and Peacemakers” will be featured with Casablanca (1942), Charlie Chaplin’s send-up of Hitler, The Great Dictator (1940) and director John Ford’s They Were Expendable (1945). The Wednesday, Dec. 1 repeat will be joined by Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) starring John Wayne, Citizen Kane (1941) and Joan Crawford’s melodramatic ode to human suffering, Mildred Pierce (1945).