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Ed Rampell on Muck Rack

Ed Rampell

(He/Him)
Los Angeles
As seen in: Flipboard, Jacobin, Truthdig, The Progressive, Portside, The Free Press (CICJ), CoverAction
Covers:  Cinema, theater, opera, books, travel, Indigenous issues, the climate crisis, human rights, politics.
Doesn't Cover: Fashion, fluff, sports.
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Ed Rampell’s Biography

Ed Rampell is one of the American Left’s foremost cultural critics and interviewers. His specialty is the intersection of politics and the arts.

Rampell was born in New York City in the 1950s and named after legendary CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow. Rampell majored in Cinema at Manhattan’s Hunter College. After graduating, Rampell lived in Tahiti, Samoa, Hawaii, and Micronesia, reporting for: the Australian Broadcasting Corp./Radio Australia, Radio New Zealand, ABC News’ “20/20,” AP, Reuters, NewsWeek, Honolulu Weekly, etc.

In 1999 Rampell relocated to L.A. and contributed to: “The Finger” column for New Times L.A., Variety, Written By, The Nation, L.A. Times, Washington Post, L.A. Daily News, Financial Times, L.A. Progressive, New York Press, Hustler, Guardian, The Progressive Magazine, Sierra Magazine, People's World, Earth Island Journal, In These Times, Progressive Populist, CounterPunch, Covert Action Magazine, Jacobin, Truthdig, etc., and co-founded HollywoodProgressive.com.

Rampell co-authored the film history books: 1995’s “Made In Paradise, Hollywood’s Films of Hawaii and the South Seas,” 2001’s “Pearl Harbor in the Movies, and “The Hawaii Movie and Television Book” (first published in 2013, now in its third edition), as well as 2015’s “Conversations with W.S. Merwin.” Rampell is solo author of the 2005 book “Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States.”

Rampell appears as a film historian in the 2005 Australian documentary “Hula Girls, Imagining Paradise” and the 2017 French documentary “Red In Blue.” In 2017 Rampell wrote, directed and co-produced the 70th Anniversary Commemoration of the Hollywood Blacklist at the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills, which repeatedly aired nationwide on C-SPAN. Rampell has been interviewed for a 2023 podcast series on the Hollywood Blacklist presented by Oona Chaplin, Charlie’s granddaughter.

Although Rampell focuses on film, theater, opera, books and travel, he also sometimes covers the greatest show on Earth: The course of human events.