Not Coming to a Theater Near You

I was aware of it as a child, yes …

Yes, I saw it in the early seventies, and I was amazed. But many of the ideas for the book come from teaching classes at New York University and Cooper Union—in which I sometimes included The Next Voice You Hear as a model of “sociological propaganda.”

Nothing I found in contemporary reviews mentioned either communism or television—although, The Next Voice You Hear was bracketed with Destination Moon, because they opened a week apart. It was seen as a kind of science fiction film like Destination Moon, which people saw as very naturalistic. So, in that sense there was some recognition.

That was a big issue as a result of the rise of fascism in the 1930s, although to the Communists propaganda was not a dirty word, and during World War II it was obvious that Hollywood was producing positive message-movies. Certainly this idea of propaganda was being taken much more seriously than it ever would be again.

In the sense that movies could mold opinions, as opposed to what came about later with the Kefauver committee hearings, which were premised on the idea that movies could set bad examples—like The Wild One. Kefauver and others weren’t so much concerned that it had a political message (although you could probably extrapolate one), but that it would just encourage teenagers to act badly. And that was true even into the sixties, with the Yippies and the Students for a Democratic Society who thought that Bonnie and Clyde offered a program for political action, and others who were upset because they thought that the violence would be socially destructive.

I started working on the book early in the Iraq War, when there was a brief attempt to make use of certain movies – Black Hawk Down and The Sum of All Fears were coopted by the Bush Administration – as well as attempts to plant “real-life” movies into the media like the story of Jessica Lynch or create living photo-ops like Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech. But as I continued to work on the book, things changed, and things that I couldn’t have anticipated became palpable.

That was a big thing during the Cold War. People forget that Eisenhower was actually very instrumental in introducing Christianity into public culture. But of course at that time most fundamentalists were southern Democrats. Incidentally, when people talk about socialism now, they’re really talking about the New Deal. For Eisenhower and even Nixon, the New Deal was just something they accepted as a social reality. So, in some ways, they were even further to the Left than Obama.

As I try to make clear in the book, there’s a Left-Right schism in Hollywood that goes back even before the Second World War. People like the Committee for the First Amendment saw the HUAC investigations as analogous to certain things that had happened just before or during the War. So it was possible to rally all these liberals and New Dealers to this particular cause. However, it was framed as a free speech issue which was counterproductive in that really had to do more with the right of association and even workers’ rights. I believe that the blacklist was directed more at liberals, New Dealers, and fellow travelers than at the Communists. It intended to frighten them by generating a lot of bad publicity and it worked, even though the media at the time didn’t think the initial hearings were particularly successful—in fact, they thought they were ridiculous. But the studio bosses extremely nervous—they remembered all the other times that Hollywood was accused of being un-American, a foreign element, and so on. They overreacted, and of course the people that they used to implement the blacklist were frightened liberals like Dore Schary and Walter Wanger. Of course, the Committee did at first call unfriendly witnesses whom they knew to be Communists. And the first of these John Howard Lawson, who was kind of a self-important blowhard, saw this as his opportunity to put the Committee in their place. He became the voice of the opposition – none of the others were allowed to read their statements – and this didn’t help the situation.

The HUAC hearings that happened afterwards, in 1951, ‘52, and ‘53, were much more vicious, because then it was a matter of getting people to name names and forcing people out of their jobs. The Committee never quite got what it was looking for – a big star, like Edward G. Robinson or John Garfield – but they did get a lot of publicity.

Back then, people were deeply politicized, first by the Great Depression and then by the war. The actors, writers, and personnel in the studios were much more politically aware and committed than they would be again. This is not to say that there weren’t causes, and certainly the 1972 election was characterized by a tremendous contribution from Hollywood. But I think that in terms of people’s daily lives, the ’40s were much more political.

Or they came from families that had been destroyed by the Depression. They just had a different experience of life, and they didn’t have this absolute faith that America was perfect. At the same time, many of them were active anti-fascists even before World War II. To me, one of the great paradoxes was that many of these gung-ho, patriotic movies that were produced during World War II – many of the most outrageous, sentimental, and manipulative ones – so many of these were written by Communists. People like Dalton Trumbo and Albert Maltz were really anxious to do their part.

Some. Atomic City was one. And Reign of Terror I hadn’t seen before working on this. Only the Valiant, by Gordon Douglas, who was a sort of Cold War auteur.

I use reviews because there aren’t many ways to determine how these movies were perceived in their moment. You can find out how successful they were; you can see what the ads were like; occasionally, if you go into the studio archives, you can find reports from preview screenings. But other than that, you really have to depend on the critics. For me, Crowther became a more interesting figure in the course of my working on this book. Because I became aware of him toward the end of his career in the sixties, I saw him as this hopeless figure. For Sarris, he was the enemy. But he was in many respects a pretty thoughtful, responsible critic, and not a bad writer, either.

I asked Philip Lopate, “Weren’t you struck by the fact that this guy actually wrote some interesting reviews?” And he knew what I was talking about, but he’s a little older than me so for him even more, Crowther was the enemy. Crowther did get involved in certain things—he was part of the defense of Monsieur Verdoux, and he made fun of Ayn Rand. He was very skeptical about the anti-Communist movies, which took a certain amount of nerve on his part. Certainly Variety never criticized those movies.

And I was always interested in what The Daily Worker wrote. Even if what they wrote was going to be predictable – which it wasn’t always – to find reviews that were that explicitly ideological was very useful. When I was writing about the sixties, I was always looking for stuff in the underground press, because to me they gave you something very close to what a particular self-identified dissident would think.

Yeah, I’m like the Bosley Crowther of the 21st century.

I’m grateful that there’s still a number of new films that I look forward to writing about. And even in weekly criticism I like to write historical pieces, but doing this book is a different thing. It’s really more like writing history rather than criticism.

Well, I hope that it’s possible to tell which ones I think are better movies, but it’s more like looking at a continuum, and these movies take on an interest that’s not necessarily aesthetic.

I think that at first there was a certain meaningless debate about whether film criticism could even exist online, but that was kind of a red herring. I think the issue of what’s happening to criticism mirrors what’s happening to journalism in general. You don’t hear as much about the decline of art criticism or theater criticism or book criticism.

It doesn’t pay to be nostalgic about something that’s a historical process. I mean, you can be, but it’s kind of an indulgence. I try to understand the historical forces that make certain things happen. Some people are nostalgic for the Hollywood of the 1970s—it’s never going to happen again. And if it does, it’ll come in another form. And I think it was somewhat overrated in any case.

The only thing is that the bad movies made then were more interesting.

Well, I see reviewing as a form of journalism. You’re reporting on something, and you get to be much more subjective and playful than you would be if you were simply reporting a news story, but I think that you need to provide a certain amount of information and context. People have been asking me since I started, “Should I go see this?” And I say, “How do I know? Does it sound like something you would want to see?” And that’s all you can do.

And in terms of bad movies: here’s an example. I thought that, in some respects, Black Swan was just terrible. But it wasn’t boring and it was so much fun to write about that I had to give it credit. I can’t really come down that hard on a movie that I enjoyed writing about, because it clearly had something about it.

There are people who enjoy panning something. I’d actually prefer to write positive reviews—if I can. But if you’re doing this once a week, you come across lots of things that you think are really just mediocre, where you think, “Why even have an opinion about it?”

Originally, this was all going to be one book, which turned out to be kind of an insane idea. I did have this chapter on Nashville and Jaws [in an anthology on the seventies]. But now I’m actually trying to do something else that I thought would be a quick project—a book for Verso about 21st century cinema. So, only on new stuff, and not as theorized, much more episodic. And then I was going to start working on the next book, but given the way I work, it’s never taken me less than five years to do something like this.

Well, I’ve been thinking about it—I’ve been thinking about where I want it to begin. One of the important things that I don’t talk about in The Dream Life is The Godfather. So, I was thinking I might begin with a flash-forward to The Godfather, and then pick it up later in the mid-1970s. Then, the question is how long to take the book—ideally, I’d like to end it around 1986, because the movies get really horrible.

Yes, well, only the stuff in the eighties. There would definitely be some things. Once I would be dealing with Top Gun or Rambo or Platoon, I would have reviewed all of those movies when they came out, which would be a little strange.

I want to find some alternative view, so I think I would probably be looking more to the Right. Because it’s really about Reagan, and I think that Hollywood did go way to the Right by the end of the seventies. So, I’d like to see how things were being viewed in The National Review, for example—and there probably wasn’t much in the way of an alternative press, certainly not the way there was in the early seventies.

It’s going to be tricky. And you had journals like Jump Cut, so everything was already parsed in ideological terms—it was already part of the package. To be able to historicize that as well will be a challenge.

The thing is that the year that I really started was 1979-1980—even though I was a third-string critic, so I certainly wasn’t reviewing big movies. But I was around, so I may have to make use of personal things. [For example] when Apocalypse Now had its premiere at the Ziegfeld, there was just enormous anticipation—it would be hard to think of a movie that was more eagerly awaited. They had no early screenings, although it had been at Cannes; everyone else in the press saw it at the same time. I didn’t get very good seats—I was up there very close to the screen—but the opening of the film just stunned me. You can never recapture what it was like to see that, with the napalm exploding in sync with The Doors. It was just stunning, so I might have to go back to those experiences.

I’ll never be able to write something like The Dream Life again. That was just the perfect confluence, since I was a sentient being when that stuff was going on. Whether I saw all those movies then or not, I certainly understood the milieu. With the fifties, I do remember these issues as a child – the way a six-year old would be aware of it – but except for Davy Crockett, I really saw these movies later on television or in the seventies.