From Hollywood and Huey Long, Benjamin Mankiewicz, 2003, Hulverd Press:
...[The] complex relations between the 1930s reformers and Hollywood began before Huey Long became president. When Upton Sinclair became governor of California in 1934, the agents of Hollywood were outraged. Many in the business, led by Cecil B. DeMille, threatened to move their operations to Florida or elsewhere, or even back to the East Coast, but these plans were largely unfounded. The more right-wing members of Hollywood stayed, but disconsolate...
Perhaps one of the greatest hits of the era were Tod Browning's Freaks (1933), which survived a censorship attempt, and while it was panned by some critics and moviegoers, it was enormously popular, said to have even been seen by even the President himself. It was banned in a number of other countries, however, such as the United Kingdom. Another was Showboat (1936) a lavish musical about the Old South, directed by James Whale, best known for Frankenstein (1931) and The Return of Frankenstein (1936). Its conclusion, featuring an exquisite dance scene with a number of Afro-American performers, is often cited as one of the definitive interracial moments in Hollywood history.
Another fiesta of the South was Tomorrow is Another Day, by Margaret Mitchell. This picturesque novel, about Pansy O'Hara on her great estate, Fontenoy Hall, and her various trials and tribulations during the Civil War, was well received when it first came out, in 1936; Huey Long appeared with Mitchell on occasions, for she endorsed his candidacy. Long viewed the novel as a sort of homage to the glory days, and he read it often. Reputedly, he had Orson Welles in talks to direct the film version of it, but Welles declined. The film was released in 1939, directed by George Cukor, starring Paulette Goddard as O'Hara and Errol Flynn (on loan from Warner Bros.) as Rhett Butler, the roguish love of Pansy. Welles was in the film, strangely enough as Ashley Wilkes, O'Hara's other love. The film, nearly four hours long, was intensely well received at its release, but some have found that Cukor put in a number of subversive elements into the film.
From The American Hero: A History of Comic Books, 1930-1964, A.R. Olson, 1986, New Horizon Press:
The 1930s, that most tumultuous period of American history, were the first to truly produce superheroes as we know them today. Perhaps the first was the Shadow, voiced on radio by Frank Readick, Jr. and later by Vincent Price. But he, although he does today have comics, was not originally a comic hero; this mantle falls to Mandrake the Magician, a newspaper comic. But the true first popular superhero was, intriguingly enough, a female character: the Queen of the Congo, Sheena, crated by Will Eisner. (Others say that the first was perhaps Doctor Occult, created by Jerry Siegel and Joseph Schuster, but they are relatively unknown outside of scholarly circles.) She is still popular today, most recently portrayed by Carrie Fisher in 1983's Sheena: The Revenge, directed by Stephen Speilberg...
Next came Siegel and Shuster's the Superman, who, while an enduring idea, was not particularly well-recieved, and was dropped by AC soon after its first release. Their other idea, a so-called "Bat-Man," was never finished...
With the election of Huey Long in 1936, many in the comics industry worried about its future. After all, Charles Couglin vehemently opposed him, and his theocratic faction was indeed powerful in Long's White House, but the Kingfish was too smart to let a madman have such power. Thus, the comics still rolled.