Hearts of the City / Exploring attitudes and issues behind the news : A New Screen Test

To paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, who understood the place as well as any, Hollywood is in Los Angeles but not of it. The movie people have forever created their own, closed community within the city. They work within walled studios, which really are small towns unto themselves. At night they flutter toward their own restaurants like moths, and to their own resorts for vacation. If too many of the rest of us show up at their chosen locales, they flutter away to find a new place.

You can think of their world as a kind of parallel universe in Los Angeles, physically close yet eternally separate. Not much palaver goes back and forth between Hollywood and the urban mass that surrounds it.

So when Hollywood is attacked, as surely it has been recently, a curious phenomenon takes place in Los Angeles. The city does not rally ‘round its luminary industry. We have quite the opposite response to that Texans would evince over an attack on, say, Big Oil. Remember back in ’73 when Exxon and the rest were accused of profiteering from the oil embargo? Texans began sporting bumper stickers that addressed their critics. They said, “Let ‘em Freeze in the Dark.”

No, we don’t do that. When Bob Dole made his attack on the hyperbolic violence and sex spewed out by Hollywood, L.A. watched with some detachment. The old separation prevailed, and it turns out that separation has its advantages. You see a few things that otherwise might be missed.

First, it was clear that Bob Dole had scared Hollywood. You knew it because the appointed responders in Hollywood tried desperately to shift the discussion away from Dole’s central point, the profiteering from blood-sport movies and records. They wanted to talk about Casper the Ghost movies or folk song collections or Dole’s hypocrisies, anything but the issue at hand.

And they succeeded for a couple of days. But this issue will only grow meaner and meaner because it’s not really a struggle between Hollywood and Dole, or Tipper Gore or Dan Quayle. It’s between Hollywood and an America of rectitude. On two other occasions in its history, Hollywood has gotten out of step with that America, and it has paid dearly.

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The official responders know their history, and that’s what scares them. In a struggle over values, they know Hollywood will lose because Hollywood has few principles, almost no backbone, and it depends on the America of rectitude for its white limos and adoration. In any such struggle, Hollywood will cave. It has happened before.

The first episode of straying took place in the 1920s when Hollywood began flaunting its wealth and declared itself exempt from middle-class morality. Initially, America tolerated this behavior because Hollywood has always been granted some leeway in personal behavior.

But then Fatty Arbuckle was charged with the murder and “unnatural rape” of a young woman during a three-day drunken blowout at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. Soon after, director William Desmond Taylor was shot to death in Los Angeles and two young actresses were suspected of pulling the trigger. Another director died of drug use, and Mary Pickford’s sister-in-law, a glamorous ingenue, committed drug-related suicide. It was all capped off when the chauffeur of Mabel Normand, one of the actresses already connected to the Taylor murder, shot and killed visiting oilman Courtland Dines.

Hollywood had crossed some invisible line. Its customers were no longer amused but sickened by the excess. At the same time, Hollywood’s movies began to mirror its jaded view of life. Sexual seduction, cynicism and corruption became the themes of the era. Their titles suggest all: “Old Wives for New,” “Male and Female,” “Forbidden Fruit” (all by none other than Cecil B. De Mille), “Blind Husbands” and “Foolish Wives” (Erich von Stroheim), and “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” (Rex Ingram).

In the heartland, audiences began booing Arbuckle movies and holding rallies against the tide of movie degradation. The studio bosses found themselves staring into a backlash, and the rollover began. They hired William Harrison Hays to create the infamous Hays Office and hunt down the drinkers and dopers and exile them from Hollywood. They also gave Hays authority over the content of movies, and he enforced rigid rules of sexual decorum that prevailed for the next three decades.

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To some degree, the efforts of what came to be known as the Hays Office were not necessary. De Mille got the message and began cranking out the religious movies that eventually would make him a rich and famous man. Others followed suit in their own ways. If survival required an overnight shift from bawdy cynicism to hoary religion, then so be it.

The second rollover, of course, involved the blacklisting of the 1950s, a very different kind of cleansing. No need to recount its details, except to point out that Hollywood, in fact, had grown chockablock with Commies. Harmless Commies, certainly, whose major effort to the cause of international conspiracy amounted to reading the letters page of the Daily Worker.

Problem was, the America of rectitude had not gone Commie in the 1950s, and Hollywood again found itself over the line. America would permit Hollywood to tilt genteelly to the left but it would not permit consorting with the enemy. So Hollywood caved again. It turned on the Commies, drove them out, destroyed their careers. And brought itself back into line with its customers.

And that dynamic--Hollywood staying in spiritual sync with its customers--is the one to watch in the current squabble. Interestingly, Dole quoted Columbia studio chief Mark Canton in his speech. Canton said, “Any smart business person can see what we must do--make more PG-rated films. If we don’t, this decade will be noted in the history books as the embarrassing legacy of what began as a great art form. We will be labeled, ‘the decline of an empire.’ ”

I’m not sure that “more PG-rated films” really addresses the problem, but you catch the drift. Hollywood senses backlash. As major league baseball has learned, the customers will only take so much in the way of egregious self-indulgence. Hollywood might take note of baseball’s current troubles. Like baseball, Hollywood depends on the deep emotional bond between themselves and their fans. Break that bond, and it can take a long time to repair.