But in the 1930s and the war years, a liberal-minded film mocking ordinary people would have been a contradiction in terms.
Tom Carson at American Prospect wonders how left-wing Hollywood writers and producers went from being on the side of ordinary working Americans to viewing them with contempt (though he cites Roseanne and The Simpsons as honorable exceptions). He traces it back to Adlai Stevenson and Joe McCarthy, but surely genuine disagreements about race (and later sexual orientation) between Hollywood and Middle America must also have played a role. Further, a disproportionate number of the “wealthiest 1%” live or work in Hollywood, and whatever their politics they usually have little understanding of the lives of working people.
h/t Andrew Sullivan
I doubt that many of the wealthiest live or work in Hollywood. More likely, more than 1% of those who live or work in Hollywood belong to the wealthiest 1%.
This is an important distinction. Hollywood, even generously defined, is too small for many of the wealthiest 1% to belong.
I doubt that even many of the wealthiest 1% live or work in Silicon Valley, though I suspect that that is a less erroneous description.
Fair enough, post edited.
As a working class Southerner who grew up mostly in the 1960s, Carson’s criticism rings true for the most part. What I didn’t know at the time, but have since learned in my travels among the smug, is that New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and Berkeley are among the most provincial cities I have ever experienced in person. Perhaps this is true for legitimate reason. But it is unnecessary and unattractive.
BTW, Roseanne’s crack about Barbara Ehrenreich is indeed out of bounds. Roseanne needs to look in the mirror and reflect on whether she is still “working class.”
I agree with you on Ehrenreich, she is a national treasure.
In response to “…learned in my travels among the smug, is that New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and Berkeley…”
I am a life-long greater Boston resident who spend my college years in “Real America” (in this case Ohio). Arrogant, smug, judgmental, focused only on material things… that is the Ohio I saw. Far worse than anything I have seen in Boston. Anecdotes not being evidence I think we are all far safer agreeing that people are wonderful everywhere. And people are terrible everywhere. Bashing Boston and New York for smugness should just draw the equally true bashing of the heartland for smugness.
True, but it’s also worth noting that preconceptions exist everywhere. I grew up predominantly in Alabama and Florida and I can’t tell you how many times since I moved to NYC in 1980, when people I grew up in the South, people ask me why I don’t have an accent, while I would never presume that someone from NYC would be expected to have an accent.
You are absolutely right. “Smug” is everywhere, as is disdain and resentment (see below), and those other things in your list. Even in Boston and surrounds, if what I have seen in the news for the past 30 years is any guideline. But my point was that so is “provincial,” which has nothing necessarily to do with “from the provinces.” It follows that Real America is both everywhere and nowhere and thus not a particularly useful concept.
Tom Carson trots out a POV that would find some kind of great good about working class Democrats who bashed hippies (literally) in the 60′s, rioted against busing, and flocked to Reagan in the 80′s….trampling just about every ideal these “mocking liberals” hold dear. And you are surprised?
This is what the triumph of Republican propaganda looks: when even intelligent, moderate to liberal people start discussing why “Republican talking point X” is true, rather than pointing out how it’s propaganda and false. Next up on the Reality Based Community: “Why do filthy Arabs hate us, because they’re jealous of our Christian virtue, or because they’re jealous of our work-ethic?”, “Why are scientists conspiring to make us think climate change is happening?”, and “Should we invade Iran or just bomb the sh*t out of them?”
In other words: first convince me that a) Hollywood writers and producers took the side of middle-class Americans in some mythical nostalgic past time when Roger and Me would have swept the Best Picture Oscar; and b) there are now Hollywood writers and producers who are both leftist and who despise middle-class Americans (as opposed to critiquing middle class lifestyles and society, which, you know, is a big part of what art is about).
I couldn’t help but feel that this article never quite got around to making its point. The author makes quite clear his opinion that liberals are uncomfortable with “Ordinary Americans” as it were but never really develops a strong explanation for why. As many others here have already discussed, the term “Ordinary Americans” is also fairly loaded. It is plainly true that the white working class is less and less frequently portrayed on our many screens. Having said that, the ‘little guy’ (whatever the heck that means) is still presented with regularity. Frank discussion of race, gender, and sexuality are far more common today than they were in the 1930s-1960s. I would argue that we have seen the same schism in our entertainment media which we have seen in our politics. When cultural issues become the over-riding identifiers of ‘liberalism’ and ‘conservatism’ it was inevitable that Hollywood would start to come into conflict with a large portion of the country. If the author had looked more closely at this transition it would have made for a more interesting article.
“wonders how left-wing Hollywood writers and producers went from being on the side of ordinary working Americans to viewing them with contempt”
Am I being dumb here? It strikes me that there is no great mystery.
Leftists in the 30s, 40s and 50s could imagine that “ordinary working Americans” were decent people because they did not have enough evidence otherwise. In 2011 that is no longer true. It was “ordinary working Americans” who were against civil rights and pro-Vietnam war in the 60s, who voted for Nixon — twice, who were gulled into being vehemently anti-abortion in the late 70s, who were alway anti-gay, but were happy to become loud about in starting in the early 80s, who cheered on the anti-immigrant fervor and the “war on terror”, etc etc. The whole POINT of _What’s the Matter with Kansas_ was this sort of thing.
The lower classes have ALWAYS been horribly conservative, and all to willing to trample others. The Founding Fathers were well aware of this hence, for better or worse, the variety of limitations in the US political system that slow down and limit what a bare minimum (rather than 2/3 plus 3/4s of states) of the populace can do.
People who support a variety of minority rights and a rather less hegemonic US look with (IMHO justified) disdain and contempt on people who don’t share those beliefs. What’s the great mystery here?
My guess is that the 30s..50s were different only in that, for that period of time, leftists agreed that the rich should have less money, and the lower classes had no complaints about this agenda. Perhaps, after they’ve been immiserated enough, the lower classes might return to thinking this a good idea, re-establishing that commonality between themselves and the left, but as of today many of the American lower classes seem to think it’s a fine thing that millionaires get more tax breaks, just as long as, along the way, gay marriage is prevented, welfare is destroyed, and abortion is made illegal.
It’s a big topic, to be sure. A lot has probably changed in the American electorate. But what exactly? We certainly seem to have fractured into ever more diverse social groupings; society seems to have been more homogeneous - at least aspirationally.
But doesn’t this article start with that tired old conservative defensiveness about being under attack from an “out of touch” progressive elite, who looks down its nose at the common, conservative folk? Yet the reality is that this so-called elite is largely defined by its expression of solidarity with groups who are not merely “looked down the nose upon”, but actively discriminated against and disenfranchised: minorities, women, the poor, gays, etc.? Take the “war on Christmas”. Sold as an attack on regular Americans, its origin is merely in an attempt to be respectful of religious diversity. Conservative punditry makes great hay out of portraying this as an attack on regular Americans, creating a false sense of outrage and paranoia it purports to attribute to them.
This is an old tactic on the left: raising class consciousness. Yet conservatives aren’t actually offering so-called regular Americans anything as nothing is being taken away - save their “right” to dominate the month of December, keep gays out of the military, not purchase heavy duty weaponry, and plenty of other non-issues. Yet they are sold as serious issues, mostly by framing them as attacks on “regular American” identity itself. I recall at a recent family gathering a relative talking passionately about “they’re taking our guns away!”. This, from a man who has never owned a gun in his life.
Much of the discussion seems to assume that Hollywood can choose a subject or character or group of characters and then produce a successful show or movie about it. We look at “Rosanne” or “The Simpsons,” and in retrospect we think “of course Hollywood could make a hit show about ‘ordinary’ Americans if they wanted to. Alevai, as they once might have said in Hollywood.
The people in TV-movieland are not primarily interested in making political points. They are interested in making successful product — i.e., stuff that a lot of people will want to watch. And when it comes to producing and reproducing success, as William Goldman says, “Nobody knows anything.”
So the left complains that Hollywood ignores “ordinary” Americans (are they the same as Palin’s “real” Americans?), the righties complain that Hollywood either ignores or vilifies business and the wealthy. Someone else is probably complaining that sitcoms have relegated traditional families to the periphery in favor of singles, the childless, and the homosexual. And although the Bill O’Reillys right and left rail that “How I Met Your Muppet” and the rest are brainwashing us and our children, there’s precious little evidence of the effect of these shows on the poltical views of people who watch them.
(Most of my TV watching these days is limited to the Steelers (good, working-class name), but isn’t “Entourage” about a bunch of working class guys from Queens? “The Wire” was mostly about sympathetic cops (working class), drug dealers (certainly not elite), and sympathetic dock workers? The bad guys were the brass and the politicians — the elite of that world.)
I’m not sure “The Wire” is representative of modern television but I think your point is well taken. If ‘out of touch’ moral values have been so offensive to the public, why do these shows continue to be so popular? I don’t get the sense that a hedonistic farce like “Two and One-half Men” is watched mainly by liberal elites. If there is an overwhelming desire to see “ordinary Americans” portrayed sympathetically, I am a bit surprised the marketplace hasn’t produced more content along these lines. Is the antipathy so deep as to prevent ANY examples? If these shows (movies, etc.) were wildly successful would Hollywood be afraid to embrace them?
Two Broke Girls
The Middle
That awful Tim Allan “comedy”, Last Man Standing (though maybe that’s been cancelled already)
Raising Hope
That’s what I can think of after just a few seconds.
Maybe Weeds and Breaking Bad (though I haven’t seen either, so I’m going on my very limited knowledge of them).
Orwell wrote about this; trying to remember in which essay he comments that the highbrows are not nationalists, and the working class are.
“Some ideas are so stupid,” Orwell said, “that only an intellectual could believe them.”
Orwell has a 20-page essay titled “Notes on Nationalism,” which is published in volume 3 of the 4-volume “The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell” (1968). Volume 3 is titled “As I Please: 1943-1945.” I don’t know whether he comments in it on highbrows versus the working class, but he distinguishes nationalism (bad) from patriotism (good), seeing nationalism as inseparable from a desire for power.
“Notes on Nationalism” is also published in the book, “Such, Such Were the Joys,” which, of course, also contains the famous title essay.
As a somewhat anachronistic old-school anti-Communist liberal, I’ve nevertheless often felt that the purge of Communist writers and directors from the movie industry also purged a kind of upbeat and homespun (even corny) “we’re all in this together” ethos that a lot of movies from the 30s and 40s seem to project. I’m by no means the first person to notice this, for example, but a movie we’re going to see lots of in the next few weeks (less than we used to though) — “It’s a Wonderful Life” — is a blatant message movie, the message being that the good life — as endorsed by heaven yet! — stems from a dedication to the life of one’s community, not individual self-actualization. (That the banker in the movie is an isolated cripple and a thief is just icing on the cake really from a propaganda perspective.) And as a matter of fact “Sullivan’s Travels” makes pretty much the same point addressing the precise question of how filmmakers should relate to the rest of society.
This is why I read blogs — I’d never heard this theory before, that kicking the “communists” out of Hollywood changed what movies got made, but yes, that makes perfect sense. Thank you for a great “AHA!” moment.
What great mileage the right has gotten out of that purge! The closest thing to “The Grapes of Wrath” that’s been made since was probably “Roger and Me,” and we all know we can discount that completely because, well, Michael Moore.
OM, thank you for the thank you.
To be clear, although I do think their perspective and message had a lot to do with making me a better person and America a better place, and that the Communists in Hollywood were really more idealistic believers than a subversive danger, still, many of them really were Communists, not “communists”, and in other contexts — how they followed the Party line on whether Nazi Germany was a threat, say, or on the Moscow show trials (a real purge, far more grotesque and maniacal than anything that subsequently happened to them) — I would curse them as “useful idiots”. I voted for Obama and I support him — but I was upset that Pete Seeger played at his inauguration. The man is a barely repentant Communist who followed the Party line dutifully for almost his entire life — barely able to condemn even Stalin decades after his death and long after even the Soviet Communists had denounced him. Did I sing “If I had a Hammer” in summer camp? Yes, and it’s a great song that evokes a great feeling. But still.
Back 30 years ago when I first got here to Hollywood, a lot of the people you’ve just smeared as “mostly Communists” were still around. Allow me to tell you from personal knowledge that the majority of those writers were “communists” like the majority of Vietnam anti-war protesters were “pro-Viet Cong” or the majority of OWS protesters are “socalists.” In other words, not much.
Oh, and when it comes to “It’s A Wonderful Life”? Frank Captra and Jimmy Stewart were both Republicans. In fact, Jimmy Stewart was such a conservative Republican he went and flew three missions in B-52s to bomb the commies in Vietnam, to top off the 35 missions he flew over Germany in 1944-45. I had the privilege of knowing Mr. Stewart, and I can assure you he was well to the right of his good friend Ronald Reagan. A helluva nice guy, though.
Excuse me, did I say (or even imply) that Frank Capra or Jimmy Stewart were Communists? Did i question their patriotism? No, I didn’t. You put the phrase “mostly Communists” in quotation marks. Is that something I wrote? No, it isn’t.
Beyond noting those specific errors, I’ll just say you seem to have missed the entire point of my notes, which I think express a lot of ambivalence about the impact (for good and bad) of those beliefs.
Isn’t this article just one writer yapping about a snotty joke one producer made? How is this even important enough to discuss here?
Are we supposed to think that the right-wing elite is somehow more ordinary-people-friendly than certain *presumably* left-wing individuals are? If so, how would that jibe with their actual policies?
There is no there here.
Isn’t this article just one writer yapping about a snotty joke one producer made?
Yes.
It may be that many liberal intellectuals feel disdain for the less intellectual members of society, but the latter also feel disdain for the former, expressing their feelings through an enthusiastic embrace of Sarah Palin and other promulgators of resentment. But as this post and the referenced column show, the former often engage in critical self-examination of their sentiments, asking themselves whether they have been snobbish and unjust towards people they hardly even know. I ask how often this happens the other way around; when did you last hear or read a member of the populist anti-elite ask, “Have we been too judgmental toward the people we resent as elitist? What makes us think we are any more real Americans than they are?” The “self-criticism gap,” I suggest, is wide and the gap reveals a difference in something that makes a difference.
Ed, it’s not symmetrical. The etiolated left might feel “disdain” for the Palin right. But the Palins aren’t feeling disdain back. They’re feeling resentment.
Disdain is invariably the hallmark of a secure aristocracy flaunting its privilege. Resentment, however, is bidirectional. Hofstader wrote about the resentment of the privileged who could not keep parvenus out. (I forget if he used the word “resentment.”) So resentment can be that of an insecure aristocracy, or that of an insecure proletariat. (Of course, Palin combines the two: already low status conjoined to loss of white skin privilege.)
Whenever I think of resentment, I think of antisemitism. Palin’s resentment resembles Czarist antisemitism; Hofstader’s resentment resembles aristocratic antisemitism.
As a certified member of the “left wing Hollywood writers,” (member of the WGA for 26 years) I believe I have a few answers for this.
Forget all the questions about McCarthyism, since nobody actively working in Hollywood (i.e., people under 40) have a clue what McCarthyism was, other than when (if) they go to a meeting at the local Guild office and see pictures of people who are about the age of their great-grandparents, who they know nothing about since to them an “old” movie is anything made before 1985 and most of them do not watch Turner Classic Movies. So they aren’t out to get revenge on the working class for supporting Old Tailgunner Joe. They barely know who he was.
What happened in Hollywood over the past 30 years is that the system changed. People like myself, who really did come from a lower-middle/working class background, can’t break in any more because we can’t afford to work for free for however many years it takes. Myself, like many others way back when, I was able to learn the business while paying the rent and buying food regularly because I was fortunate enough to get hired to work for Roger Corman. One didn’t get paid much, but did get paid enough if you worked fast enough, and if what you did was good enough to get made you got to work some more and pay your bills while learning. We who went through it call it the “Roger Corman Film School,” and it’s got a pretty good list of grads, none of whom could repeat that today.
That system has been dead for at least the past 20 years.
What happened is that Hollywood became “cool” as a career destination for the upper classes back then. Starting in the early 1990s, kids with trust funds became the majority graduates of USC, UCLA and NYC Film Schools. They came to Hollywood and were willing to work as (unpaid) interns. All of a sudden, the people in those low-paying jobs one learns the ropes in were confronted with the worst kind of low-wage competition: no-wage competition. Why hire someone who needs $500 a week to survive when you can get someone with an Ivy League degree who will work for free????
The end result is that for the past 20 years, the people who “make it” into being in the paid part of the business come from social class backgrounds where they never had a clue what the working class was about (other than the illegal immigrant servants back home). There’s an old saying, “writers write what they know.” So how does someone who never worked for a living in their life write about those who do?
Another change was that many of us who came into the business, particularly those of the generations ahead of mine, came here with life experience. They had done other jobs, had other experiences. And that colored the choices they made about the stories to tell and how to tell them. Personally, it’s why I think movies made before 1980 were mostly good, and those made since are in ever-increasing numbers mostly bad.
In addition to the question of who writes, directs and acts in the movies is the more important question: who decides what movies get written, directed and acted in. 23 years ago at the time of the Great Writer’s Strike of 1988, the studios were still independent corporations, and were mostly run by people who were there because they mostly liked movies. Today, the studios are minor arms of intergalactic corporations run by bean-counters who think of movies as widgets. What they hate is the uncertainty of the old adage that the three rules of Hollywood are “Nobody. Knows. Anything.” They don’t like that every great movie was a crapshoot that could have turned out as bad as they were good, with equal chance. So they make “sure things,” or at least what they think are sure things (though the truth is there is no such thing), and the end result is the crap that fills the theaters every Friday, all tuned to the perceived likes and wants of teenage boys under 24. I was recently talking to Roger Corman, and I mentioned that I missed going to the movies every Friday night like I used to, that nowadays I might get to 3 or 4 movies in a year, 5 or 6 in a good year. Roger said he has the same problem.
But if you want to know where all those good movies are that you can’t find anymore, all those interesting stories, go look at the original programming on basic cable and premium cable. Want to know how capitalism grows and develops? Get the DVDs for “Deadwood.” Nothing Hollywood ever did on the subject of urban politics comes close to the incredible honesty of “Boss” on Starz - trust me, I worked 10 years in professional politics before I came here, and that story tells the truth as I experienced it, and not just in Chicago. Want a good western? Try “Hell on Wheels” on AMC. Want a story nobody else on the planet would have ever touched (I still can’t figure out how they pitched it to get it made)? “Breaking Bad” is what you want (“Mr. Chips goes to hell”). “Mad Men” is so far beyond “The Man In The Grey Flannel Suit” there’s no comparison. Want a great spy story? “Homeland” on Showtime. Want to know how politic corruption happens? Get “The Shield.” I could go on, but you get the idea.
To get health insurance as a member of the Writer’s Guild of America, one must have income from union-paid writing in a 12 month period equivalent to the sale of a 30 minute sitcom script at Guild Scale Minimum (which I believe is nowadays around $24,000). Fact: the majority of the members of the WGA in any given year do not qualify for WGA health insurance. In other words, they don’t make $24,000 per year from writing. (I was never so happy when I finally hit the right age and that year in Vietnam kicked in for something worthwhile and I finally qualified for the best health insurance in America - the Veteran’s Administration). Fact: the figures for writers in most other fields are similar. Being a writer may be some big romantic ideal for some people, but the reality is, shall we say, “a bit different.” Writers who write books that you find at places like Barnes and Noble are lucky if they get paid at all, since the publisher is being “paid” with “returns credit” from the bookstore.
TCinLA: I don’t think you have posted before, so let me tell you that we don’t allow gratuitous insults to people here. Normally I would have just deleted your comments, but because you knew Jimmy Stewart, I am giving you a break and just taking out the nasty bits and leaving your content (which was interesting BTW).
“I think movies made before 1980 were mostly good, and those made since are in ever-increasing numbers mostly bad.”
Oh, no! Not another Golden Age whine! Come on! You know this is complete nonsense. The difference between then and now is that we see every flop come out on DVD and plugged into circulation, while prior to 1980s, he flops were locked away forever in the vaults, never to be heard from again. Even when VHS became common, few people were buying pre-recorded movies and rentals tended to skew toward blockbusters. So there was little need for most rental joints to carry old flops. There were some that specialized in cult films and experimental works, but that still excluded run-of-the-mill schlock. Not any more. Everything is now encased in plastic, replayed 15 thousand times on TV-whether anyone wants to watch it or not. But even watching the “classics” on TCM and AMC points to just how bad some of those older films have been. Corman knew when he was making schlock and he never lost money on a picture. Not so for others. The difference is that the flops now cost millions when in the 1960s they were only in the tens of thousands. In other words, Ishtar was history, but now we have several high-profile flops every year that make Ishtar look like a bargain.
And Humphries is not much better, following Carson into the rabbit hole. “But in the 1930s and the war years, a liberal-minded film mocking ordinary people would have been a contradiction in terms.” This is patently untrue. What is more likely, in the 1930s, liberal-minded writers and directors (of which there were plenty) would have avoided making a “liberal-minded” film, opting for a populist film with subtle messages. Now, subtlety is no longer an artform that is admired in Hollywood. Most messaging is layered on with a heavy hand. Apparently Carson never heard of Hitchcock-although most of his work came after the war years. And Carson forgets Meet John Doe-which, although starting out with a working-class hero, mocks the the very premise. One thing that many “liberal-minded” films in the 1930s did is mock all classes equally. Few were preachy on the subject of ordinary people. The difference don’t come from Hollywood-they come from the very “ordinary people”. “Ordinary” in this sense, has always stood for mediocrity and conformity. Now it also implies gullibility and ignorance. What’s not to mock?
ShadowFox said What is more likely, in the 1930s, liberal-minded writers and directors (of which there were plenty) would have avoided making a “liberal-minded” film, opting for a populist film with subtle messages. One thing that many “liberal-minded” films in the 1930s did is mock all classes equally.
Many films of the period contradict these assertions. Grapes of Wrath and Mr. Smith goes to Washington, both made in 1939 and both very good, are as deeply and un-ironically on the side of the little guy as anyone could ask.
Dear Larry,
“…many of them really were Communists.” Well no, they were not. Unless you draw the circle so tightly that, well, “many” = most. This is an attitude that is utterly repugnant, and the smear job on Seeger was hackneyed, without context, untrue in its particulars, and mostly utter bullshit. I cannot imagine Seeger making a movie that got your fellow political scold, Tom Carson, so worked up.
So who is the elitist here?
Boy, I couldn’t have done a worse job expressing myself. The scope of “many” wasn’t “writers”, it was “writers being referred to as ‘communists’”.
In any case I don’t think that relating factual statements about Pete Seeger counts as a “smear job”. By all means tell me the particulars that are untrue, or the context I’ve missed.
Finally, (a) I don’t get the bit about “my fellow political scold”, and (b) I never addressed the original point about elitism which didn’t particularly strike a chord with me one way or the other.
The answer is that back in the 30s and 40s film production and film consumption was controlled by big movie studios. Back in the day Paramount owned not just the movie production company but the movie theater itself. The same was true of all the other big features. MGM owned theaters that showed only MGM movies. People working under contract with MGM only starred in MGM features unless they were really big and were leased out to another studio for serious cash.
Eventually the studio system gave away in the 50s and 60s, leading to the rise of independent films. First, with independent theaters showing films that weren’t part of the studio system - usually foreign films - and later films that weren’t made by a big studio.
You have to remember that the tools a filmmaker uses used to be enormously expensive. The filmstock alone for making a movie runs in the tens of thousands of dollars. And that was doing it cheap in the 90s. A big budget film could rack up six figures just on celluloid. So it was easy at first for the film studios to carefully control all the aspects of production and to be careful that nothing upset the audience or the public for fear of loss of revenue.
I noted that the original article made some claims, and didn’t back them. Keith, please - you know better.
Barry: You and others seem to be assuming that linking to an article implies complete agreement with every aspect of it. That simply isn’t the rule of the web, indeed I disagreed with one aspect of it in short post I made about it. I link to things because they are interesting and might spur thought and discussion — something wrong with that?
Whatever.
Well, I guess that does it. A medium that depends critically on a mass audience simply cannot resist mocking its customers. Who could imagine? Why Shakespeare is rolling in his grave. Flaubert is weeping copiously. Rilke is speechless. Upton Sinclair is sorry. Hemingway is curt. Righteous working class solidarity, disguised as denizens of ‘flyover states’ (you know, those lightly populated ones that have many farms, few factories), will undoubtedly teach them an unforgettable lesson. Aye, the dustbin of history awaits, and those who mock the working class whilst professing to love it will go the way of Wilde, or Pete Seeger (yes, that Commie-big, big C there! veteran of WWII-but only under orders from Moscow) usefully idioting for Uncle Joe, and the pure bright flame of working class solidarity will continue to deliver practically no votes to the likes of George McGovern…that liberal anti-war, and actual war hero sap. It’s Deer Hunting for Jesus time. Thank God that guy died, but Tom Carson couldn’t bring himself to mention it.
Yes. It all started with Lenny Bernstein hosting those Panthers, grist for Tom Wolfe…and Barbs Streisand…well, enough said. The Upper West Side and its Hollywood annex needs to be taught a lesson. They need to be stomped out and shut out, but only after they give the Democratic Party all their money or write thousand word essays denouncing their inability to hew to the party line and fight unjust redistricting to their last breath, support Obama’s so-called liberalism, and die in shame…just like Joe Stalin would have wanted.
Uh oh. bobbyp has been hitting the sauce again.
It wasn’t Hamilton who called the people a beast, it was John Jay, target of my favorite bit of graffiti.
Few things:
•Weinstein is based in New York, not Hollywood.
•In the 30′s-40′s a far greater number of films featured and took the side of “swells” like Nick and Nora Charles and Topper than “ordinary working Americans.” Fred Astaire starred in 17 films from 1933-1943. Tom Joad was the exception, not the rule.
•Movies have always pandered to the masses. From the Nickelodeons to Avatar the point of movies has been to make money no matter how vapid the story. That’s a global phenomenon as true in India as America. Not even the French are immune.
•This year’s top-grossing movies according to IMDB:
1. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 2, $381 million
2. Transformers: Dark of the Moon, $352 million
3. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 1, $261 million
4. The Hangover Part II, $254 million
Tom Carson is as ignorant of film history as he is of current reality, but he won’t let that stop him from flogging “Hollywood” to equally ignorant conservatives to pay his rent. Just another form of pandering, if you ask me.