In the 1930s, a prominent film historian advanced the thesis that popular culture reflects and represents the dreams and nightmares of nations. While it was certainly true then, this has not been the case in America since the 1960s. The dreams and nightmares emanating from Hollywood are principally those of a small elite core of people who can hardly be said to represent mainstream America. Politically they have little in common with the people who elected the likes of Ronald Reagan and George Bush. Morally and culturally they have even less in common.
How did this come about? Why is the television and motion picture industry—which once sent the American dream around the world and made it, literally, the dream of the world—so hostile to that dream now and so out of touch with the values that made it possible? Why is an alternative dream, one antithethical to American interests, being peddled and exported abroad?
The answers to these questions may be made clearer by examining the life of a relatively obscure Italian philosopher and writer, Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci was born in Sardinia in the last decades of the 19th century, miserably poor and with few prospects in life. As a young man, he became a socialist and a theater critic. He helped found the Italian Communist Party, but was soon to be thrown into jail by Mussolini for his radical views. He died at the end of World War II, still a prisoner. But before his death, he had been remarkably productive as a thinker and a writer. It is to Gramsci that we owe the enormously influential idea of “capturing the culture.”
Gramsci believed that the way for Marxists to come to power was by taking over the cultural institutions of nations: schools, universities, churches, popular entertainment. By working within such institutions and fields, a small number of people could influence the thinking of thousands and even millions. In a certain sense, Gramsci’s vision has actually come to pass in the United States, not so much a deliberate plan on the part of a few, but more as a natural by-product of the growth of liberalism. The “long march through the institutions,” an idea much bandied about by leftists in the sixties, is what Gramsci foretold.
As early as the 1920s, Lenin himself recognized the powerful propaganda value of film; in fact, he saw the cinema as the most powerful propaganda weapon in the world, even though the film industry was then still very much in its infancy. It was through his support that men like Eisenstein made films like Ten Days That Shook the World and Battleship Potemkin. Eisenstein, Podovkin, Davchenko, and others like them are seminal figures in film history and who are considered today giants of the film world even though they used their talents to push blatantly Marxist political goals.
The Old Hollywood
In the 1920s and 30s, Hollywood filmmaking was dominated by a group of producers who were all Eastern European Jews from extremely poor families, and who were desperate to escape their situation. Paramount, Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Brothers, and Universal were founded by men who even in their adolescent years dreamed of coming to the United States one day.
Samuel Goldwyn’s story is typical. He was born in a Warsaw ghetto. By the time he was sixteen, he had decided to emigrate. He walked over 500 miles to Hamburg and from there got himself first to England and then to the United States. He became a glove cutter in upstate New York and later a successful glove salesman. Then one day he went to the “flickers” as they were called, and it was a revelation for him. He walked home in a daze; by the time he had walked from the theater on 34th Street to Central Park, he realized that movies were the thing. In no, he enlisted his brother-in-law Jesse Lasky, a vaudeville actor, to help him learn how to become a producer.
Goldwyn, then Goldfisch, made his dream come true. He raised money; he taught a young man, Cecil B. de Mille, who had never directed a movie and who had only seen a few of them, how to become a movie director. They bought a property, The Squaw Man, that became the first Hollywood feature film.
Goldwyn was an inveterate gambler, as almost every Hollywood producer is in some fashion. It seems to go with the profession. Nobody knows if a movie is going to make money. It is a matter of salesmanship, talent and luck. As a result, we have seen some great movies and some perfectly ghastly ones. Goldwyn had Wuthering Heights and Best Years of Our Lives to his credit; he also had a lot of perfectly dreadful films which faded mercifully into oblivion, both at the box office and in people’s memories.
The Samuel Goldwyns, Louis B. Mayers, and Warner Brothers of the Hollywood world were not particularly loveable men. One would not care to have been their wife or children. But one thing was certain. They had made it in America and they were infinitely grateful. They knew that if it were not for America, they would have ended up in the Czar’s army or died in a pogrom, or simply would have never amounted to anything in their native land. They ruled their studios, Hollywood, and, in some sense, American popular culture, with this in mind.
Hollywood Transformed
But by the 1950s, profound changes swept away the old system; the big Hollywood studios were broken up and box office receipts dropped. Of the million or so people who went to the movies every week, about half stopped going at all. The movies ceased being a mass art form. Television became the dominant popular medium and the movies became an elite form, a status they still enjoy today. The movie audience is tiny compared to that of the television audience.
During the 1920s and through the early 1940s, screenwriters were always the people at the bottom of the totem pole, the disaffected, the people held in contempt. It is even true today; American producers truly do not believe the writer is essential to the making of a movie. He is the hired hand. He generally gets paid less, and is accorded little respect. It is for these reasons and others that many Hollywood writers were drawn into Communist cells. The writers did have a hard time, even if they were paid magnificently compared to the average U.S. wage earner.
Nathaniel West, who was one of America’s great natural talents, was told by his supervisor that if he worked very hard he might qualify to write “B” films, but he doubted very much if he’d ever get onto an “A” production. William Faulkner accepted work in Hollywood because he needed the money, but there is little of his work that appears on screen even though he is often listed in movie credits.
By the 1960s, with the old Hollywood having virtually died away, writers had more opportunities to act upon their dissatisfaction. Many belonged to what has been called the soft left, without a hard, radical program, but still ideological in intent. (Even working with an elite form like film, there is the need to appeal to an audience, so hardline radicalism is out.) The soft left is much more willing than the hard left to float lightheartedly from one notion to the next, often without any clear idea that different political beliefs rest upon different clear-cut precepts and are sometimes quite incompatible. The defining element of the soft left is a kind of persistent utopianism, in the name of which some shining social ideal, no matter how unworkable, will always be honored.
These days most producers and directors are the children of the 1960s, the children of Easy Rider, as it were. They are all college graduates, and are, as several excellent studies by Stanley Rothman and Robert Lichter have demonstrated, basically white, male, Jewish, atheistic, and Democratic. The people in question would feel it was akin to McCarthyism to describe them so, but statistics are statistics. They’re precious few female Hollywood executives, although there are some token gestures made. Since Ashley Boone has left Warner Brothers, there are no more black Hollywood executives. It is a very closed world out there even though the people who inhabit it are filled with liberal feelings and most anxious to decry the faults of our society: Above all, blame America first and foremost, and export that blame to the world. It is mea culpa all the way.
Movies of the ’80s
If there is a film that touches on the drug business, for instance, who are the villains? Why, the DEA. Take Tequilla Sunrise, a big, big Hollywood movie, directed by Robert Towne. Towne is one of the Hollywood insiders, and he has story-doctored more films and projects than one can think of. He put this film together with Mel Gibson, Kurt Russell, Michelle Pfeiffer, a trio of very popular, very appealing actors. Also included was Raul Julia, who is a well considered professional Broadway actor. The protagonist is Mel Gibson, who has played many a hero in many a film including Mad Max as the near-epitome of the modern hero today. But in this film he plays your average loveable drug dealer. He has “dropped out” of the business and the story is a pretext for why he has to get back into one last drug deal because of loyalty. This shows what a nice person he is because he is loyal and sticks to his buddies. The one really bad person in the whole lineup is a representative of the DEA.
The “moderate” is Kurt Russell; he does not get Michelle Pfeiffer in the end because, after all, he’s a member of the LAPD. He only gets away with his life because he is the hero’s best friend. At no point in the entire film is there any hint of what taking drugs can do to people, what it can do to society, or what it does to human relationships.
Few of the film’s reviewers even picked up on this. They had a few criticisms of the film, but hardly anyone said, “Hey look folks—we’re going crazy about the drug problem and here’s a movie making it look like it’s no problem at all.” Mel Gibson lives in a beautiful house on the beach, has an adorable child that he is very good to, he drives a new Porsche, and he gets Michelle Pfieffer—what more can a man ask? The drug kingpin is Raul Julia who played him as the most singularly adorable character since Santa Claus. The Washington Post critic in Washington, D.C., which is the murder capitol of the United States with drug deaths higher than casualties on the West Bank, called it “one of the most sophisticated, sparkling films of the year.” The film certainly had glamour and glitter, and it portrayed a very appealing, laid-back lifestyle. The actors were attractive, it was very well shot; it looked good. But what are we being asked to swallow? The messages was: “Drugs—why not?”
That is just one of the problems in modern Hollywood. Political films are produced the same way. Running on Empty is a Sidney Lumet film about a nice father and mother who have been on the run for twenty years and who turn out to be Weatherpersons. The film is based on a real life story in which two real people were killed in a lab that was blown up by Weatherpersons. In the film, one person was merely crippled. The father and mother in the film are supposed to feel “really bad” about this, but, nonetheless, the whole film projects that there is something fundamentally wonderful about them; something wonderful about two people who were responsible for the injury of another person, who have never faced up to the consequences, who have spent twenty years on the run from society, and finally in a “great” act of bravery let their nearly adult son go off to benefit from a scholarship at Juilliard. It was a film that everyone in Hollywood thought would be nominated for many Academy Awards. The Hollywood world felt proud about the film. The consensus was, “Well, those Weatherpersons had their ideals and we must give credit to idealism where ever we can find it.”
Some other left-leaning films were nominated for the Academy Award this year. A World Apart is a South African story, billed as a nice little human drama about a teenage girl and her parents. The story is based on the real-life tale of Ruth First who was a member of the Communist Party. Her father was the head of the terrorism wing of the ANC. He is presented in the film just briefly, played by a very sympathetic Dutch actor, and is just shown to be a loveable, caring father. The film is one about which the critics were very uncritical and they couldn’t seem to say enough about how wonderful and sensitive it is. They did not say much about its strongly biased political message.
One Hollywood film, Walker, was written into the Nicaraguan national budget a few years ago, but sank beneath the waves because Ed Harris is not a box office star, and because it was a very amateur production. The Last Emperor, which swept the Academy Awards and which is a stunning film visually, had a special proviso written into the contract between the producer and the Chinese Communist government. The proviso stated that the only reason that Bertolucci, a Westerner, was being allowed to shoot the film was because he was a member of the Italian Communist Party.
Although the politics are not that obvious, the film presents nonetheless a very slanted version of Chinese history. Once again, the critics and the public remained silent.
One of the more interesting examples of what happens when a political producer gets in the saddle is provided by an examination of the case of David Putnam, who gave us Chariots of Fire, Greystoke, and The Killing Fields, all films that have something of a political cast to them. He managed to maneuver himself into a position of great influence in the studio world. He is not like the old Hollywood producers in that, as a person he appears to be a man of much greater intelligence, education, and personal charm. His grown children claim that “life with Daddy” was wonderful. (At least none of them seem to be seeing psychiatrists, which I suppose says something over the old Hollywood.) When he became a studio head, Putnam proclaimed that he was not going to be trapped by Hollywood; he was going to transform it and make “good little movies”—no more huge multi-million dollar budgets, no Ishtars, no Ghostbusters II—none of that. He forgot that Hollywood is a business like any other and that profit and loss counts there too. It is one thing to make a political movie that makes money; it is another thing to make a political movie that takes a tremendous dive at the box office. Mr. Putnam headed Columbia Pictures for only one year, and the studio is only beginning to release his films now. See how many titles you recognize: Zelly and Me, School Days, Little Nikita, Stars and Bars, A Time for Destiny, Vice Versa, and Leonard, Part VI. Most of these films, with the rarest exception, cost somewhere between five and thirteen million dollars. Most of them grossed under a million dollars and many have not even been released.
There is another film worth mentioning.
The Adventures of Baron Munchenhausen, which reputedly cost $75 million and even as a 18th-century fantasy film manages to have a plea for anti-nuclear activity in the middle of the plot. Somehow, one feels that is not going to add any glory to Mr. Putnam’s career either. In any case, Mr. Putnam also spent his time at Columbia doing things like banning the release of all of the studio’s films in South Africa. He felt very virtuous even though Jack Valenti of the Motion Picture Exporters Association pointed out to him that 85 percent of the movie theaters in South Africa were at that time fully integrated. When Putnam was virtually fired at the end of the year and he and his wife decided to go on a vacation, they went on a three-month safari in South Africa. There are limits to principles, it seems.
The Need for Balance
These days, Hollywood is a definitely politicized place. The stars are eager to talk politics and they call the shots on film content in conjunction with a small number of agents and an even smaller number of producers. Bankable actors like Robert Redford and Paul Newman have enormous influence. As do Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Eddie Murphy, but there are more liberal box office stars, so they often win out by simple arithmetic.
Hollywood can be considered as a changing phenomenon, but what has not changed is the fact that our nation’s popular culture has been captured by this small town. As a new generation is coming along, a much more conservative generation, there is hope for a considerable change and a return to traditional values, but since everything always moves forward, we will never return to an exact replica of the old traditional Hollywood or its films. For a start, what we can support, as movie-going patrons, are individuals and films that are not ashamed of displaying pride in their own country or celebrating traditional values. It has often been an excuse to say that “Well, we criticize America because we want it to be better.” But criticism must be balanced in order to be constructive. The world really doesn’t want to see America continue to throw ashes on its own head.
There may well be a new generation of people in Hollywood coming along who will make the kind of films that make Americans feel good about themselves and the world feel good about us. It is to be hoped that this new generation will remember the concept “capturing the culture” and take it to heart.
