I wasn't actually surprised by the ignorance of history displayed by Hollywood insiders on the subject of the Gulag, mentioned in Steve Sailer's review of The Way Home. Steve wrote
Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag: A Historyand a consultant on The Way Back, notes: "Weir told me that many in Hollywood were surprised by the story: They'd never heard of Soviet concentration camps, only German ones."
This isn't only Hollywood's politics—although that's certainly a factor—any graduate of California schools might say the same.
This would also apply to a movie about Japanese prison camps—King Rat was a 1965 movie about Changi Prison, a typical Japanese POW camp, with torture and killing of British POWs by the Japanese.
It was based on a novel by James Clavell, who was actually in Changi Prison during the war.
Today, if you told Hollywood producers that you wanted to make a movie about a "Japanese Prison Camp," you'd have to explain carefully that you meant a prison camp run by Japanese, not an internment camp run by Americans.
and a consultant on The Way Back, notes: "Weir told me that many in Hollywood were surprised by the story: They'd never heard of Soviet concentration camps, only German ones."
