The Roots of Modern Hollywood

Nick Smedley

Description

In this insightful study of Hollywood cinema since 1969, film historian Nick Smedley traces the cultural and intellectual heritage of American films, showing how the more thoughtful recent cinema owes a profound debt to Hollywood’s traditions of liberalism, first articulated in the New Deal era. Although American cinema is not usually thought of as politically or socially engaged, Smedley demonstrates how Hollywood can be seen as one of the most value-laden of all national cinemas. Drawing on a long historical view of the persistent trends and themes in Hollywood cinema, Smedley illustrates how films from recent decades have continued to explore the balance between unbridled individualistic capitalism and a more socially engaged liberalism. He also brings out the persistence of pacifism in Hollywood’s consideration of American foreign policy in Vietnam and the Middle East. His third theme concerns the treatment of women in Hollywood films, and the belated acceptance by the film community of a wider role for the American post-feminist woman. Featuring important new interviews with four of Hollywood’s most influential directors – Michael Mann, Peter Weir, Paul Haggis and Tony Gilroy – The Roots of Modern Hollywood is an incisive account of where Hollywood is today and the path it has taken to get there.

Introduction 

Chapter 1: The failure of American liberalism and the cinema of despair: Hollywood in the 1970s 

Chapter 2: The disappointment of the liberal renaissance: Hollywood in the Clinton era, 1992–2000 



Fantasy in the 1990s 

Exemplar film one: Groundhog Day 

Exemplar film two: The Truman Show 

Author’s interview with Peter Weir 

Introduction to the published screenplay of The Truman Show, by Peter Weir 

Chapter 3: The rise and fall of the Republicans: Melancholy meditations on America’s destiny, 2000–2012 

Film noir for the new millennium

Exemplar film three: Collateral

Author’s interview with Michael Mann

Exemplar film four: Michael Clayton 

Author’s interview with Tony Gilroy 

Chapter 4: The enduring appeal of pacifism: Hollywood and American global imperialism, 1978–2010 

The pacifist tradition 

Exemplar film five: In the Valley of Elah 

Author’s interview with Paul Haggis 

Chapter 5: The creeping advance of feminism: Hollywood and the changing role of women in America, 1970 to the present 

The feminist debate 

Two-faced woman – Julia Roberts as the incarnation of the American woman 

Exemplar films six and seven: Pretty Woman and Erin Brockovich 

Conclusion

Sujets

• Película fotográfica
• General officer
• Television
• General
• Radio
• Film
• Hollywood
• Cinéma
• Cinema

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 décembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783203758
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2014 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2014 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2014 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover designer: Gabriel Solomons Copy-editor: MPS Technologies Production manager: Heather Gibson Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-373-4 ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-374-1 ePub ISBN: 978-1-78320-375-8
Printed and bound by Short Run Press, UK
For Hannah, for bringing so much fun into my life and being an Absolute best friend
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1: The failure of American liberalism and the cinema of despair: Hollywood in the 1970s
Chapter 2: The disappointment of the liberal renaissance: Hollywood in the Clinton era, 1992–2000
Fantasy in the 1990s
Exemplar film one: Groundhog Day
Exemplar film two: The Truman Show
Author’s interview with Peter Weir
Introduction to the published screenplay of The Truman Show , by Peter Weir
Chapter 3: The rise and fall of the Republicans: Melancholy meditations on America’s destiny, 2000–2012
Film noir for the new millennium
Exemplar film three: Collateral
Author’s interview with Michael Mann
Exemplar film four: Michael Clayton
Author’s interview with Tony Gilroy
Chapter 4: The enduring appeal of pacifism: Hollywood and American global imperialism, 1978–2010
The pacifist tradition
Exemplar film five: In the Valley of Elah
Author’s interview with Paul Haggis
Chapter 5: The creeping advance of feminism: Hollywood and the changing role of women in America, 1970 to the present
The feminist debate
Two-faced woman – Julia Roberts as the incarnation of the American woman
Exemplar films six and seven: Pretty Woman and Erin Brockovich
Conclusion
Bibliographical essay
Index
Acknowledgements
I would like to offer my sincere thanks to the four film directors who agreed to talk to me about this book – Tony Gilroy, Paul Haggis, Michael Mann and Peter Weir. Their contributions are of immense value, not just to this book but to the film-research community in general. Every one of them gave their time generously and it was, in all four cases, an enormous pleasure to have them share their thoughts and insights with me.
I would never have got to talk to them had it not been for the help of Rose Kuo, Executive Director of the Film Society at the Lincoln Center, New York. Rose responded instantly to my request for assistance, and was very patient in helping me chase the directors down. I found Rose through the intercession of Sascha Ferguson in Los Angeles, to whom I therefore owe a great debt of gratitude. I was introduced to Sascha by my friend Hannah Platt in London, and so the chain of gratitude ends – or starts – with her. I would also like to thank in particular Jillian Tonet and Tracy Gossett for their considerable assistance in setting up the interview with Michael Mann.
I would like to thank most warmly Kate Bradbury for so skilfully and rapidly transcribing the interviews with the film directors. Kate was a delight to work with, and highly professional.
The manuscript was reviewed by two anonymous peer reviewers who offered some helpful suggestions for improvement. The bibliographical essay at the end of the book, which I think adds considerably to the text, would not have been written but for their comments. I am grateful for their input.
The Introduction to the published screenplay of The Truman Show is reproduced by the kind permission of Peter Weir.
As ever, my greatest debt is to my darling Kate, for her inspiration, her consideration, her wisdom – and, of course, her love.
Introduction
T here are two common misconceptions about Hollywood cinema, particularly about more recent American films. The first is that American cinema is politically disengaged, neutral at best, or devoid of social criticism and mindlessly patriotic at worst. The second is that Hollywood films exist for the moment, and are – indeed, are meant to be – disposable populist culture. Accordingly, they do not have an intellectual history in the way that, for example, painting, music and literature clearly have. This book sets out to refute both of these notions.
First, I want to show that modern American cinema (by which I mean films that were made around and after what I see as the watershed of modern Hollywood, 1969–1970) can be as politically and socially informed as any other national cinema. And then second, related to this, I mean to demonstrate that modern American cinema owes a debt to films from the Golden Age (roughly, the 1930s and 1940s) and, in key cases, picks up and develops the very same themes and values from its progenitors. In making this second point, I want to argue that Hollywood cinema has a respectable intellectual heritage from which recent film-makers have drawn and continue to draw.
It would be surprising if one were to discount European cinema as having no real content, and no political or social analysis. Indeed, one would be unlikely to do this in respect of South American cinema, films of the Far East, or African cinema. Yet it is quite common for people to write off Hollywood cinema’s political engagement. Hollywood films, it is often said, are not ‘about’ anything. They are harmless, even mindless, entertainments, designed to amuse, thrill or make us cry, and then be forgotten about shortly afterwards. While such sentiments are understandable, they are misconceived. Hollywood is, of course, a commercial enterprise, and the way in which most films are budgeted and marketed means that they must capture very large revenue flows to recoup their huge costs. Accordingly, as a rule Hollywood films need to appeal to mass audiences, a condition that militates against radical social commentary, marginal attitudes and minority causes. Such a context certainly does inhibit the extent to which modern American films can tackle controversial subjects that will divide audiences and reduce revenue prospects. Yet it is equally true to say that American cinema is heavily value-laden, and always has been. Even in the period of the Golden Age, when every film was intended for family viewing and there was an elaborate system of censorship, Hollywood film-makers invested their works with political and social values.
Moreover, these values were seldom on the ‘conservative’ end of the spectrum. As I have argued elsewhere (Smedley, 2011), New Deal film-makers formulated an impressive body of works that proclaimed the benefits of Roosevelt’s social programmes in the 1930s, and lamented the passing of the New Deal and the rise of Republicanism in the immediate post-war years. It is, perhaps, counter-intuitive to argue that Hollywood as an industry was (and remains) an essentially liberal, left-of-centre community. Viewers of modern American cinema will be familiar with the patriotic bombast of many films, and the apparent complacency with which American values of individualism and democracy are proclaimed. Yet closer examination of these themes reveals, more often than not, a liberal critique of capitalism, an ingrained suspicion of the forces of American authority such as the military, the government and corporate business. This is particularly true of those film-makers who might be said to express a personal and serious world-view in their movies (and on whose works this book will concentrate). Why might Hollywood be more attuned to the liberal agenda in American life, and why might individual writers and directors be more likely to support the Democrats rather than the Republicans? I do not have the definitive answer to this, but one dimension undoubtedly lies in the fact that many film-makers in Hollywood would see themselves more as artists making artistic statements, rather than businessmen and women making commercial products for sale. Many of those who worked in Hollywood in the New Deal era fervently embraced the new, left-wing politics of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and many of them joined the Communist Party, or flirted with the idea (and hence became subject to scrutiny after World War II by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee). Many of those working in Hollywood today have inherited this legacy of liberalism, and give voice to it in the modern era through their socially critical films. Those film-makers to whom I spoke while writing this book (and whose interviews appear in the text below) are politically engaged, and seek to offer direct social commentary in their works.
Modern Hollywood thus continues that liberal dissection of modern American life which made itself so apparent in the New Deal era. Conditions for making films are different now from what they were in the Golden Age, and so I have constructed my analysis of this trend differently from my previous work. In the New Deal era, and for many years thereafter, Hollywood was an industrial conglomerate. It was a vertically integrated industry, in which the major studios owned not only the resources for film production, but also the mechanisms for distributing their products to the market place, and then the cinemas in which the films were exhibited. Actors, writers, producers, directors, technicians, costumiers – all of the people associated with taking a film from the first idea or first draft story through to the completed film ready for distribution – were employees of the studios. This created a far more homogenous film industry than we have today and it produced a much larger volume of films. In my earlier study of the films of this period, it was possible and se