Richard Maltby
Harmless Entertainment:
Hollywood and the Ideology of Consensus
(1983)
CHAPTER 2
THE BUSINESS OF FANTASY
THE CONDITION OF CRISIS
...
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THE SEAT OF HARRY COHN'S PANTS
The industry as a whole needed the stability of predictable box-office earnings to guarantee the production and advertising pattern of large-scale short-term investment. This was a division of interests which corresponded to the requirements for novelty and predictability of the films themselves. Movie economics resembled those of the fashion industry in their dependence on stable consumption of a product which was constantly being modified, and in their ambiguously determining and dependent relationship with audience "taste." Many of Hollywood's moguls had worked in clothing trades early in their careers and may have acquired the particular skills which entrepreneurial success in both industries required: in particular, "the ability to suspend one's own tastes and calculate the desires of others."
The promotion of fashion as a mechanism for the superficial alteration of a fundamentally consistent product was as important to the workings of the film industry as it was to the garment business, because it attached unnatural limits to the durability of the product in question. Films, like clothes, went out of fashion before they were worn out. This imposed an attitude towards the product on the part of the producers that influenced their manner of distribution. The felt need to be fashionable reinforced the notion of the product having a short commercial life, and being worthless after expiry. Fashion had to be latched on to quickly; producers, like dress designers, had to stay one step ahead of public taste, anticipating it by at least a year in order to have product ready for the market.
The studio heads' claim to control over production was in part based on the assertion that they had unique intuitive abilities to gauge and predict audience reaction to the individual films their companies produced. In their interventions over story development, characterization, casting or costume design, all the moguls insisted on their mediating role as arbiters of the Common Taste, though few were as terse in expressing their peculiar gift for judgment as Harry Cohn:
When I'm alone in the projection room, I have a foolproof device for judging whether a picture is good or bad. If my fanny squirms, it's bad. If
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my fanny doesn't squirm, it's good. It's as simple as that.
The claim to insight, whether exercised in Cohn's manner of demanding nineteen minutes cut from a completed print because his fanny started to squirm nineteen minutes from the film's end, or in the extensive and detailed control over productions maintained by Thalberg or Selznick, was a crucial element in the moguls' power over their employees. It provided a rationale one step short of naked authoritarianism for their intervention in creative matters, and served as a constant reminder to writers and directors that their objective was to produce profitable entertainment, not art.
The moguls' claimed abilities to predict audience taste were also central to their relationship with their financial overlords in New York. It amounted to a justification of autonomy for production, by providing a further mechanism for stability. Industry economics dictated that films should be designed to appeal to the widest possible audience as the most reliable guarantor of profitability. The mythology of Hollywood constructed by the moguls insisted that audience taste was inherently unpredictable and that, as a result, film could not be subject to simple financial expedients. Film production did not require conventional accounting abilities so much as a capacity to manage the irrational and the unpredictable, skills to which the moguls laid an exclusive claim. Rather than encouraging programs of audience research which might undermine their claims the studio heads promoted their own image as predictors of the public taste as a means of securing their independence from East Coast financial pressure. The effectiveness of this strategy, and the extent to which it was endorsed by their parent companies, was confirmed by the enormous salaries the studio executives were paid.
The moguls made themselves the men who gave the public what the public wanted. What the public wanted was in large part revealed by what they went to see, but the studio heads secured for themselves the vital position of determining what it was about any successful film that had appealed to audiences, and that could therefore be capitalized upon in later productions. The moguls' mediating role was, therefore, not only between their companies' creative employees and New York executives, but also between audience reaction and subsequent product. Their attitudes permeated everything Hollywood produced, and those attitudes
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were chiefly influenced by a commitment to short-term profitability which geared production to the repetition of successful ingredients via generic formulae and the star system, and by an equal commitment to the ideal of "harmless entertainment" which structured the expression of ideology in the American cinema.
Hollywood's existence as a major industry, and its need for long-term economic stability to provide a secure base for its short-term financial adventurism encouraged its acceptance of the existing status quo. The moguls defined their activity as responding to audience tastes rather than formulating them, and hence saw their product as reactive, not innovative. This essentially conservative definition of the cinema's ideological function allowed films to reflect changes in social and political attitudes by fitting them in as topical, novel elements in basically stable patterns . A new idea introduced as a superficial variation on an established theme or plot structure no more disturbed the overall ideology of the combined studio product than a new star disturbed the mechanisms of the star system. A superficial and topical radicalism was always permissible if it could be bracketed into a stable and already comprehensible narrative structure. The attitude was neatly summarized by Darryl F. Zanuck, head of production at Twentieth Century-Fox, in a memo of May 1940 to Ernest Pascal, a writer working on the script of How Green Was My Valley:
This is a revolutionary type of story; therefore, our treatment should not be revolutionary. Now it fumbles around and I get the impression that we are trying to do an English Grapes of Wrath and prove that the mineowners were very mean and that the laborers finally won out over them. All this might be fine if it were happening today, like Grapes of Wrath, but this is years ago and who gives a damn? The smart thing to do is to try to keep all the rest in the background and focus mainly on the human story as seen through Huw's eyes.
[Gussow, Zanuck: Don't Say Yes Until I've Finished Talking]
The conservatism of this attitude blended perfectly with the entertainment ethic, to which the studio heads adhered until, at the earliest, 1940. Under the questioning of their political impartiality by the 1941 Nye-Clark Senatorial Investigating Committee, a few members of the Hollywood community, including Zanuck, proposed a defense of such
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cinematic social comment as there has been by arguing that the cinema's social responsibility obliged it consciously to enter contemporarv political debates. But, among senior studio personnel, this opinion was held only by a small minority, and its influence over production was slight, even for Zanuck, who managed without difficulty to combine it with a wholehearted endorsement of the entertainment ethic:
Zanuck did not question the extent to which making a political statement correspond to the requirements of entertainment as understood by the studio formulae might distort its message, any more than the question bothered him during the supervision of The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley:If you have something worth while to say, dress it in the glittering robes of entertainment and you will find a ready market ... without entertainment no propaganda film is worth a dime.
In The Grapes of Wrath we had to make a very vital decision ... whether to tell the story of the Okies as a whole or the story of one isolated family. This meant the elimination of the flood ... the elimination of the fights with the police ... the dropping of certain characters very important in the book and writing an entirely new last act.... When I think what I got away with [on How Green Was My Valley] ... and won the Academy Award with the picture, it really is astonishing. Not only did we drop five or six characters but we eliminated the most controversial element in the book, which was the labor and capital battle in connection with the strike.
In both cases, Zanuck was effectively taking potentially controversial material and rendering it safe by placing it within an established context for a socially conservative Hollywood narrative. Both films endorsed the stabilizing influence of the family as a cohesive unit, and presented the tragic element of their stories as being the fragmentation of the family, without digressing into a consideration of the underlying causes of that fragmentation. While Zanuck did not strip the films completely of a political context, he nevertheless drastically altered their political implications by fitting them into a narrative that depicted "nice people involved in heartbreak," defusing their radical potential.
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This was less the deliberate imposition of a conservative viewpoint than ideological censorship by default. The Grapes of Wrath was nevertheless sufficiently "political" to earn the condemnation of Martin Quigley, the influential editor of the Motion Picture Herald and co-author of the 1930 Production Code. While Zanuck argued that the movies could educate through pleasure, Quigley firmly maintained the extreme conservative version of the entertainment ethic: "The entertainment motion picture is no place for social, political and economic argument."
Well, as so often, this insistence seems ideological and motivated rather than principled. The principled question is: are
social, political and economic arguments well-served by the existing entertainment mediums?
Sure, a strong "no" evinces a conservative view: conservative as in modest. Modesty is principled, and it serves the activist better than ostentation. Alinski as quoted by Lasch:
"If the real radical finds that having long hair sets up psychological barriers to communication and organization, he cuts his hair."
The entertainment ethic provided for social and political conservatism in two ways. Firstly, it proscribed an area of human activity, going to the movies, as being detached from political significance. Movies were, according to the accepted wisdom of their manufacturers, mere "harmless entertainment," at most influencing only fashion and such inconsequentialities as whether or not men wore undershirts. They might aspire to "Art" so long as it was defined along the narrow middle-brow lines of Goldwyn's adaptations of "the classics of literature." In discussing the Production Code, Joseph Breen maintained:
Entertainment, then, is the keynote of the Code, in its practical application to the production of motion pictures. With the artistic character of pictures the Production Code Administration is not seriously concerned. But it is concerned with the attempts to justify immoral themes and indecent scenes by the sophistry of the excuse of beauty.
[quoted in Moley, The Hays Office]
Similarly, the Legion of Decency did not concern itself with "art," but with "immorality," even if its definition of that term was rather broad.
But this definition of films as mere entertainment required that the range of human activities presented by the movies must be taken as devoid of any political consequence. In 1938 the Institute for Propaganda Analysis criticized common value-judgments in motion pictures:
1. That the successful culmination of a romance will solve most of the dilemmas of the hero and heroine.
2. Catch the criminal and you will solve the crime problem.
3. War and preparation for war are thrilling,[56]
heroic and glamorous.
4. The good life is the acquisitive life, with its emphasis on luxury, fine homes and automobiles, evening dress, swank and suavity.What they objected to was what the industry and the majority of its critics regarded as the beneficent conventions of an escapist entertainment. Moreover, industry heads presupposed that such value-judgments accorded with the contemporary consensus. Their reactive cinema reinforced attitudes that were presumed already to exist, while also providing a mechanism by which these attitudes could be permitted to reflect upon topical issues or subjects of debate.
Secondly, the entertainment ethic, bolstered by the economic necessity the studio heads saw in appealing to the mass audience, encouraged the tendency, implicit in the idea of entertainment as it was then understood, to appeal to the lowest common denominator of public taste. This did not necessarily mean appealing to the spectator's baser instincts; rather, it proposed that the films it produced should be as inoffensive as possible in order to keep them available to the largest possible audience. Since the righteous were more vocal, if not more numerous than the prurient or the permissive, once the industry had begun to seek respectability in the early 1920s, it expressed a more or less consistent willingness to cooperate with the most morally conservative elements of society.
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