Richard Maltby—The Dream Factory

Richard Maltby
Harmless Entertainment:
Hollywood and the Ideology of Consensus
(1983)

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PART 3

"I'D RATHER HAVE MANDRAKE FALLS"

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CHAPTER 6

THE AMERICAN WAY:
THE EVOLUTION OF A POPULIST ARCHETYPE

"It is not the easy way, but the
American Way, and it was Lin-
coln's way."

Herbert Hoover, radio broad-
cast, February 1931.

"Hip Hooray, The American
Way"--lyrics of "That's Enter-
tainment"

THE DREAM FACTORY

The industry leaders, and in particular the first- and second-generation studio heads, accepted the limitations imposed on their product by the Production Code in large part because they could accommodate these limitations within their own vision of the commodity they dealt in. That vision was the product of three factors which conveniently knitted together and reinforced each other: their attitude towards their audience; their conception of their own role as mediators between that audience and the filmmakers who worked for them; and the set of social and political assumptions which they, as a group, had in common.

The "movie moguls"--the small group of men who brought "Hollywood" into being and dominated the studio system from the 1920s to the beginnings of its decline--shared a narrow perspective on the expectations of their audience. The commercial nature of their product dictated that they seek to appeal to the widest possible spectrum, and in attempting to do so they assumed that there existed a broad consensus of taste little affected by regional or class varia-

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tion. Part of their marketing conservatism was the result of their low estimation of their audience's flexibility. Commercial experience, however, confirmed the validity of this assumption. Although Sticks might occasionally Nix Hick Pix, box-office failures and successes did not, in the main, vary greatly from region to region, while the available surveys indicated that movies attracted all socioeconomic groups. The economic need to appeal to the undifferentiated mass audience was reinforced by the profitable success of that appeal and, once established as a credo, it became almost impossible to challenge. The studios conducted little research into the composition of their audience because there seemed no need for it.

Such research would in any case have questioned the security of the role the moguls had defined for themselves. Expanding from their assumptions about the audience, they prescribed their product as being socially and politically reactive, a mirror reflecting attitudes already in common currency, not a beacon guiding its public to new opinions. Their own role was to angle this two-way mirror from behind it; as mediators between the creators and their public, they made sure the public got what they thought it wanted. Their apparent ability to predict the erratic taste of their mass audience guaranteed that their decisions would determine the nature of their studio's content, and that as a result they would define the personalities of the studios they ran. Only by asserting their own opinions and preferences on their product could they be seen to be doing their jobs. The function of the studio executive was to make decisions about what films were to be made, who would write, direct, and act in them, how their plots would be shaped, and so on. These decisions, which were the practical applications of their role as mediators between public opinion and creative activity, at the very least set the limits on the potential for political expression available to the creative personnel, and arguably exerted a much more determining influence on their films' political sentiments.

Yet it was rarely their individual political opinions that influenced their actions. Certainly Zanuck was more likely to make The Grapes of Wrath than California State Republican Party Chairman Louis B. Mayer, but the populist sentimentality that infused Zanuck's vision of Americana in the late 1930s would not have been out of place in Mayer's own small-town idyll of American perfection, the Carvel of the Andy Hardy films. Privately, most of the moguls were Republicans, antipathetic to the policies of the

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later New Deal. But publicly their industry was a beneficiary of Rooseveltian liberalism , at least until the enactment of the Paramount decrees. As Business Week put it in 1935,

Though not all of them favored the reelection of Roosevelt, his social program, so they say, plays right into their pockets. The President seeks higher wages, shorter hours, unemployment insurance and old age pensions. Wrap that into one small capsule and it means to the motion picture mentality more money to spend on movies and more leisure in which to spend the money.

The divisions of conventional party politics had little effect on the way the moguls ran their studios, and there is little to suggest that they deliberately and consciously attempted to influence their audiences' party political preferences through the films they produced.*

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*The one clear exception to this general rule was the notorious campaign against Upton Sinclair and his EPIC (End Poverty in California) program in the 1934 gubernatorial election. The studios' anti-Sinclair propaganda and other actions, including compulsory contributions to the Republican candidate's campaign fund, were probably more important in providing an impetus to unionization and other forms of political activity among resentful employees than they were in influencing the outcome of the election. Certainly the experiment was not repeated.

The Cahiers du Cinéma editors' suggestion that Young Mr. Lincoln was a piece of Republican propaganda does not stand up to detailed examination. Their contention that Lincoln was, in the context of the 1940 election, a specifically Republican mythic figure is dubious, to say the least. Although Zanuck was involved in the 1940 election campaign in support of Wendell Wilkie, Wilkie had not announced his candidacy at the time of the film's release, let alone at the time of the project's inception. Moreover, Wilkie was not the choice of the conservative business hierarchies of the G. O. P.; he secured the nomination substantially because the Republicans were almost certain to lose. The film was released on June 9, 1939, 19 months prior to the election. At the time of shooting, John Ford was a vocal member of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, which had already been accused by Martin Dies (then Chairman of H.U.A.C.) of being a "Communist front," and which can hardly be seen    (cont.)

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Indeed, political activity was only exceptionally a matter of consequence to them, normally seen as external to their real world, and little more than an alternative form of glamour. They wore their politics as they wore their suits, aiming to produce a public image of restrained respectability, occasionally marred by their tendency to garish overstatement in their choice of ties, their private opulence, or their public protestations of belief in the American War. From their political affiliations they sought a confirmation of their social status:

[Harry Cohn] became a Republican--not out of any political conviction, because he was completely apolitical. All rich men were Republicans, hence, Harry Cohn became a Republican.

[Thomas, King Cohn]

From their associations with politicians, they sought public acknowledgment that they belonged with the rich, the influential, the powerful. The attraction of power, the recognition of apparently similar personality, and the lack of direct competition drew the moguls to the politicians as their publicity value and the Hollywood mystique drew politicians to them. Prestige was at least as important as business self-interest, and much more important than the allegiance provided by shared opinions.

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as the natural residence of a propagandist for the Big Business interest. Rather nearer the election date, Ford and Zanuck produced The Grapes of Wrath (released March 15, 1940), which, however compromised a version of Steinbeck's novel it might be, can hardly be called a pro-Republican film. Zanuck was shortly to encounter hostility from right-wing isolationist Senators Nye, Clark and Vanderbilt in their investigations into Hollywood's interventionist bias. He was a liberal Republican who held himself in high esteem for his liberalism and the way it manifested itself in his films. When, in 1944, he did make a film explicitly intended as a statement of his political beliefs, it was a biography of Woodrow Wilson (Wilson, Twentieth Century-Fox; dir. Henry King). At the time of the making of Young Mr. Lincoln, Zanuck was a frequent visitor to Roosevelt's White House. The Cahiers editors suggest "it would ... be wrong to ex aggerate the film's political determinism." Not so. It is just that the film's political determinism has very little to do with what they suggest.

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Zanuck has always been politically aware, and at least behind the scenes he has usually been politically active. But he has no political philosophy, except that he usually votes Republican, and likes Presidents whoever they are.

[Gussow, Zanuck]

He saw no anomaly in frequently visiting the White House at the time he was actively campaigning for Wilkie in 1940. Most telling of all, perhaps, was the cupboard in Jack Warner's office in which he kept two sets of autographed portraits of leading politicans--one of Democrats, one of Republicans. Whichever was appropriate could be exhibited for visiting dignitaries.

Such curiously anachronistic attitudes to politics echoed many of the business practices of the film industry, which were not merely out of step with those of other business concerns, but lagging a generation behind them .* The moguls saw themselves as benign but autocratic fathers to their companies. Their hostility to organized labor seemed to be as much because the existence of the unions questioned the benevolence of their despotism as because they might demand better pay and conditions. This paternalist self-image fitted closely the pattern of first-generation capitalist entrepreneurs, as initially modeled by the founders of the English Industrial Revolution. The moguls' lack of education, the underlying feeling of inferiority implied by their desire to avoid personal publicity, their frequently brutally autocratic behavior towards their employees, and the depth of personal animosity they exhibited towards each other (best exemplified, perhaps, by Goldwyn allegedly attending Mayer's funeral "to make sure he was dead"), present a retrospective image that appears to have more in common with characters out of Trollope than with the expected behavior of twentieth-century industrial magnates.

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* The idea that one man should alone make major policy decisions had been abandoned by the automobile industry by the 1930s , for example. Henry Ford's refusal to relinquish sole control of his company is commonly cited as the principal explanation for its relatively poor performance during that decade. And it is worth remembering that the Paramount decrees enforced on the motion picture industry regulations passed under the Sherman Act of 1890 and the Clayton Act of 1914.

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In any orthodox sense, the studio heads were almost without exception poor businessmen: their unwarranted extravagance was one of the causes of the mutual antagonism between them and the men, frequently their relatives, on the East Coast, who might more fairly be called the true entrepreneurial force in the industry. But the moguls were more showmen than businessmen , and perhaps more salesmen than showmen . They conjured up the myth of unpredictable public taste which it took a special ability to prejudge, and reinforced it with each of their successes. Even more importantly, they created something amounting to a private, enclosed world, that in the complexities of its internal relationships resembled some strange tribal society, of which they were "czars" and "emperors." Then they sold that creation to the rest of the world. Hollywood the Dream Factory, acknowledged and to a degree reflected on by almost every writer on the American cinema, was the deliberate creation of a small, often personally as well as professionally interrelated group of men, who fabricated a world and sold it to the rest of America. That their creation grew in large part to be out of their control, and that it attracted others who came to specify and define the myth, is undoubtedly true, but Hollywood, as an empire, as a mythical entity, as an institution, and as a concept governing audience responses to the films it made, was fabricated by the men who founded and ran its studios.

In retrospect, they have acquired an ambivalent commercial heroism, partly because of their improbably anti-social and anachronistic behavior. Neither quite the last entrepreneurs nor the last showmen, the movie tycoons resembled Hughes or Hearst in being fantasists on a grand scale, and more than that, enacting their fantasies in such a way as to make others adopt them as their own. In this none was perhaps more successful than Walt Disney , who, in dominating American film animation, built an empire on the periphery of Hollywood. Not satisfied with that, he built a magical kingdom, Disneyland, and at the time of his death had begun to build a better world--Disney World--in the wilderness of the Florida swamps. Most impressively imperial of all is the fact that his grandiose schemes have survived him, because, like the less enduring creations of the other moguls, his fantasies of innocence were rooted in the commercial reality that, whatever they might signify ideologically, their American Dreams were a salable commodity.

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The moguls embedded into the conventions of American film production a trait common to American immigrants: the need to demonstrate oneself as more American than native Americans . Privately, it encouraged them to political conservatism; elsewhere it led them to change their stars' names, disguising their ethnic origins by nominally absorbing them into the dominant Protestant culture. The specifications of the Production Code against giving offense to any group, race or religion reinforced a concomitant tendency, implicit in the rationale of entertainment, to offer the audience a vision of a perfect America, in which the assumptions of its fundamental political doctrines were enacted, while social problems were skirted by invariably couching them in individual terms. Even Warners' "social conscience" films did not so much portray a divided society as one seen to be in the process of achieving harmony through the resolution of invididual conflicts. Here was more than a simple preference for harmless and escapist entertainment. There was, lying obscurely behind the nostalgic and benevolent community fabric of Mayer's Carvel, Zanuck's Old Chicago, and most explicitly Capra' Washington and Shangri-La, an idealistic vision--perhaps not greatly understood and certainly hardly ever articulated--of an essentially unified society, devoted, above all, to the pursuit of spiritual peace through material acquisition and good neighborliness.

By insisting on simple narrative constructions which above all exploited the devices of sentiment, the moguls restricted the range of emotional experience the American cinema might provide its audience. They also limited its possibilities for political expression to the narrow range which they, as first- or second-generation immigrants, saw as being consensual. In embedding their assumptions so deeply in the structures of their narratives, they could at the same time ruthlessly operate an unacknowledged ideology, and systematically deny its existence by insisting that their preference for happy endings was never any more than a concern to give the public what it wanted. Their cinema's conservatism of theme and content was the fulfilment of its social role as reactive affirmation for its consumers' beliefs. As speculative mediators, the moguls presumed on their intuitive understanding of what those beliefs might be. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the virtues of America they thought Hollywood might most profitably celebrate were those reflected by its most persistent tradition of political thought.

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