I'm not Anti-American, I'm from Hollywood

2005-07-25T22:36:00.000-07:00

Most every week, I travel along the 110 freeway to the campus of the University of Southern California in downtown Los Angeles. The 110 freeway intersects with Highway 101, known in that part as the Hollywood Freeway, and on a clear day, the Hollywood sign dominates the hills overlooking Los Angeles. The origins of that world-famous icon are anything but glamorous. True to America’s inclination for hucksterism, it derives from a 1924 real estate builder’s flashing metal sign consisting of thirteen letters fifty feet tall and four thousand twenty watt light bulbs to announce a new tract of homes in a 500-acre subdivision of Los Angeles known then as Hollywoodland. Today, refurbished and four letters short, Hollywood stands out as a euphemism for all that is American culture in its global, commercial, reach.

Along with the American Left, there is no other sector of American culture so derided or accused of hating America than the dream factory known as Hollywood. Hollywood is part place and part idea. It is first a euphemism for the film and television industry that dominates Hollywood, California, more in history than in modern practice. So much of the commercial media industry has followed the path of globalization and cheaper labor markets from New York and Los Angeles to Vancouver, Louisiana and North Carolina. The Hollywood of Old is about as accessible as the condemned Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard that contains the ghosts of Robert F. Kennedy and the Academy Awards in the Cocoanut Grove nightclub. But just like its counterpart America that is used interchangeably in brand-speak as the United States, popular culture in America is used interchangeably with the stamp, Hollywood. And the perception of American popular culture in Hollywood is that what gets produced and distributed there is more secular, more obscene, and more over-the-top than what the real Main Street American culture offers.

The widely held viewpoint of many cultural critics is that being too patriotic or too religious in the Hollywood market spells a death knell for getting your project green lighted and accepted by the powers-that-be. Australian-born film actor and director Mel Gibson made this point famous when he individually financed his film, “The Passion of the Christ,” and bypassed Hollywood big-budgeted marketing altogether. Using primarily word-of-mouth, Internet-based and pre-release screenings in Christian churches across America, Gibson promoted a film about the last twelve hours of Jesus Christ that broke all records in ticket sales for 2004 and grossed the ninth highest domestic gross ahead of “Jurassic Park” and two of the “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy. To date, with a production budget of $30 million and an even smaller marketing budget of $25 million, it has grossed over $600 million ($370 million domestic, $241 million international).

Given the obvious appeal that a traditional religious-based film has both home and abroad, why isn’t Hollywood answering the call? Doesn’t it want to make money? Part of the problem may be the dominant values of the Hollywood insider culture. Born-again Christians do not necessarily flock to the industry, and the dirty little secret about the American film industry is that pornography is the highest-grossing sector, not the type of film the family or teenagers flock to at the multiplex theater every weekend. According to the National Coalition for the Protection of Children & Families, American porn industry revenues in 2003 alone were over 12 billion, more than double the combined profits of the Big Three networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC (6.2 billion). American porn is more profitable than the combined revenues from the Big Three sports entertainment franchises of professional baseball, basketball and football. It is more profitable than annual revenues generated from American popular music genres like Rock-n-Roll, Country, Jazz, and Classical music combined. It dwarfs the annual revenue from Broadway productions. This accounts for a legally-protected adult entertainment industry that generates annual worldwide revenue of over $60 billion. Closer to the American home is a mainstream Hollywood market that is still out of touch and over the top. Michael Medved writes in his book, Hollywood vs. America, that the film and television industry is equivalent to a “poison factory” that promotes filth, favors the outlandish over the mundane, all but ignores the religiosity of the American people, and maligns the American nuclear family while spreading offensive language, sexual promiscuity and addictive violence across the globe. Hollywood is a land of popular sleaze and indulgence, a picture of America that infects a most negative stereotype about the American people in the minds of our overseas counterparts who are impacted the most in their attitudes and opinions about America through its popular media:

As a nation, we no longer believe that popular culture enriches our lives. Few of us view the show business capital as a magical source of uplifting entertainment, romantic inspiration, or even harmless fun. Instead, tens of millions of Americans now see the entertainment industry as an all-powerful enemy, an alien force that assaults our most cherished values and corrupts our children. The dream factory has become the poison factory.

This picture of Hollywood as sleaze central does not apply to military campaigns and American soldiers stationed in Iraq. Shortly after 9/11, the Bush Administration extended an olive branch to Hollywood in order to engage this industry in the newly declared war on terror. The president’s chief advisors, including Karl Rove, met in Los Angeles with top Hollywood producers and directors to discuss a plan to use film to engage in the information and image battle to win global hearts and minds susceptible to ideologies of terrorist leaders like Osama Bin Laden. Nothing fully coordinated between the political power center and the cultural power center ever came from these 2001 meetings, though Hollywood did delay the release of feature films like Arnold Schwarzennegger’s “Collateral Damage” and Jerry Bruckheimer’s “Black Hawk Down” due to the sensitivity of the content in the aftermath of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. The advance of time seemed to make a difference in accepting that branch. In 2005, just two years after the start of the war in Iraq, Hollywood had finally come to answer Washington’s call. No less than four feature films about the U.S. military and the Iraq war were scheduled to film or completed, including “No True Glory: The Battle of Fallujah,” starring A-list actor Harrison Ford of “Indiana Jones” fame, and “Jarhead,” scheduled to open Veterans Day 2005. A documentary film, “Gunner Palace,” told from the point of view of U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq, reality-based youth at war, Baghdad style. Michael Moore’s critical op-ed style documentary about Iraq, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” released during the election campaign of 2004, was left in the dust of the Hollywood-Washington nexus in 2005. USA Today reported that “not since World War II has Hollywood so embraced an ongoing global conflict. It took years for pop culture to tackle the Korean and Vietnam wars, and it took time before the country was ready to be entertained by those politically charged conflicts…But not any and every angle of war is being depicted. One aspect is glaringly absent from most projects: negativity. The U.S. soldier is the hero; his cause is just. Storylines featuring the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal or war protests are no-nos.” Phil Strub, head of the Pentagon’s film liaison office, says that presently “there is an unwillingness to criticize individual servicemen and women, which was quite common in the Vietnam era. Americans are very disinclined to do that now, and we’re very glad this attitude tends to pervade all entertainment.”

It’s not clear that the present pro-military bandwagon in Hollywood will either last or is reflective of patriotic values. The follow-up to show is business, and Hollywood producers, directors, and marketers know the power of films with traditional heroic themes to draw crowds both domestically and internationally. The average movie costs over $100 million in production and marketing, and most American films don’t even turn a profit until they distribute the film overseas where at least half of all grosses come from these days. What sells well on the global media marketplace will undoubtedly contribute more to the bottom line decision making in Hollywood than how patriotic the theme. Just ask Namrata Singh Gujral, an ethnic Indian actress who began working in Hollywood shortly before 9/11 and was moved to respond to the Bush Administration’s call for Hollywood to help in the war on terror. She and her Naval Reserve pilot screenwriting partner, Joe Cooper, penned “Americanizing Shelley,” a pro-U.S. romantic comedy, which they shopped around Hollywood to no avail. Their film’s dedication to “our troops who laid their lives on the line for our freedom,” was especially criticized. What to do? They “pulled a Mel Gibson” and formed their own film production company, American Pride Films Group. Its mission statement boldly goes where other film production and distribution companies haven’t dared to go—at the heart of Hollywood’s alleged Achilles heel: “Hollywood is doing a shoddy job of portraying the many blessings and freedoms our nation offers—not just to Americans, but to people worldwide.” On the menu of their films is an effort to overcome the most negative images of Americans in the world. America may be a wealthy nation, which Hollywood shows to a strong degree, but it is also a nation of values beyond material wealth, according to Gujral, and these include to “portray Americans as decent, generous people,” which “will be handy tools in combating anti-Americanism abroad.” Military pilot Cooper says, “When’s the last time you saw a war movie where the top brass aren’t villains?” He may need look no further than 2005.

So, in answer to the present question, “Is Hollywood anti-American?” the answer seems to be a gray bag, not as stark a black and white picture that Michael Medved paints, particularly in propagating a pro-military stance for the world’s top military culture. Los Angeles Times reporter Ronald Brownstein writes in his book, The Power and the Glitter, that Hollywood and Washington have a common feature, propaganda. One may sell an ideology of political substance, military prowess, and hard power, while the other sells an ideology of glitz, fame, enormous wealth and soft power, but both delve into respective fantasy worlds. Richard Stengel writes that “the two cities are the source of much American mythology. Washington promulgated the fable that any boy—or girl—could grow up to be President; Hollywood invented the fantasy that the same boy or girl could become a movie star. Both cities must appeal to hearts and minds; both require a mass audience; both thrive on applause.” Similarly, David Culbert writes, “Feature film is a wonderful medium for the propagandist. Every feature film—good or bad; lavish or spartan in its production values; frivolous or earnest—is loaded with cultural propaganda for the country or society that produced it.” This power of film to change attitudes and opinions has never been lost on modern American presidential administrations from Woodrow Wilson’s screening of D. W. Griffith’s Civil War revisionist epic film, “The Birth of a Nation,” to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Office of War Information series, “Why We Fight,” directed by legendary Hollywood film maker, Frank Capra.

While the epic films of Griffith and Capra are lost to Hollywood’s hey day history, what is not lost is the paradox of Americanism that is Hollywood. Part advertisement for America, part propaganda, it can avoid marketing a Christian blockbuster like “The Passion of the Christ,” but join the pro-military call for movies that celebrate the American hero in combat. Like the paradox that is anti-American sentiment, Hollywood is a puzzle and contradictory in tone and content. It is not anti-values because Hollywood is anything but neutral on social issues from militarism to gender, race, and sex. It is at times messianic in its pro-military stance and at other times, seemingly conflicted by America’s war history, as films like “Saving Private Ryan,” “The Deer Hunter” and “Apocalypse Now” have shown. What will stand the test of time is that Hollywood will remain a symbol of America’s image in the world—glamour, glitz, power and domination, full of inspiration one moment, and at other times, dread.

WPW Archives: Dr. Nancy Snow (2005)

I'm not Anti-American, I'm from Hollywood