By: Michael Medved
The distance the movie business traveled in a few short but disastrous years can be measured by the titles it chose to honor with Oscars as Best Picture of the Year.
In 1965, the Academy selected The Sound of Music. Four years later, it chose the X-rated saga of a homeless hustler, Midnight Cowboy. It is entirely coincidence that in the year of Midnight Cowboy (1969) Hollywood films drew scarcely one-third the number of paying customers who had flocked to the theaters in the year of The Sound of Music? To put the matter as directly as possible: Between 1965 and 1969 the values of the entertainment industry changed, and audiences fled from the theaters in horror and disgust. Those disillusioned moviegoers have stayed away to this day – and they will remain estranged until the industry returns to a more positive and populist approach to entertaining its audience. For some twenty-five years, Hollywood’s leaders have ignored – or denied – this painfully obvious pattern. They stubbornly refuse to face the historical evidence or to acknowledge the connection between the changing content of motion pictures and the diminished enthusiasm of the mass audience. At the time of the industry-wide upheaval that shook Hollywood in the late ‘60’s, only one member of the old guard grasped the full scope of the revolution in values and accurately anticipated its hugely destructive impact on the business he loved. Frank Capra, three-time Oscar winner and creator of several of the best-loved motion pictures ever made, walked away from the business at age sixty-four because he refused to adjust to the cynicism of the new order. In his 1971 autobiography, The Name Above the Title, he wrote of the altered attitudes that made his continued participation impossible:
The winds of change blew through the dream factories of make-believe, tore at its crinoline tatters . . . The hedonists, the homosexuals, the hemophilic bleeding hearts, the God-haters, the quick-buck artists who substituted shock for talent, all cried: “Shake ‘em! Rattle ‘em! God is dead. Long live Pleasure! Nudity? Yea! Wife-swapping? Yea! Liberate the world from prudery. Emancipate our films from morality!” . . . There was dancing in the streets among the disciples of lewdness and violence. Sentiment was dead, they cried. And so was Capra, its aging missionary. Viva hard core brutality: Arriba barnyard sex! Arriba SHOCK! Topless-shock! Bottomless-shock! Mass intercourse, mass rape, mass murder, kill for thrill – shock! Shock! To hell with the good in man. Dredge up his evil – shock! Shock!
Industry insiders may prefer to dismiss Capra’s complaints as the reactionary rantings of an embittered old man, but now, twenty-one years after he penned these words, they seem positively prescient as a description of Hollywood’s reigning aesthetic. The emphasis on “lewdness and violence” and the desire to “dredge up man’s evil” serve as guiding principles for many of today’s most honored filmmakers. Perhaps even Capra might not have guessed that just a few months after his death in 1991, a pitch-dark thriller about transvestite and cannibalistic serial killers would equal the achievement of his It Happened One Night by sweeping all the major Oscars as a representative of the industry’s highest achievement. The great director’s derisive mention of “barnyard sex” may have been hyperbole in 1971, but two decades later MGM announced plans for a picture about the President of the United States having sex with a cow. Can anyone doubt that the transformations of twenty years ago that Capra described so scathingly still hold sway in the Tinseltown of today?
Of course, those revolutionary changes in Hollywood mirrored simultaneous shifts in other segments of society, as the social and political convulsions of the ’60s uprooted old conventions and experimentation emerged as the order of the day. For a time, radical new thinking seemed to triumph in every arena of American life, but nowhere did its victories prove so sweeping – or so permanent – as they did in the entertainment industry.
Long after the rest of the country had abandoned its flirtation with freakiness, the entertainment elite maintained its countercultural perspectives. By the mid-1980s, social scientists noted a nationwide “return to traditionalism” among the population at large; with Ronald Regan riding high in Washington, heavy majorities recognized the dangers of recreational drug use and recreational sex, while asserting the importance of hard work, traditional family life, a strong national defense, and material acquisition. Millions of aspiring professionals and new parents gave up their warm and fuzzy Summer of Love sentiments along with their bell-bottoms and patchouli oil. The once trendy tenets of major philosophers such as Timothy Leary and Abbie Hoffman were discredited everywhere – except in Hollywood and some of the more cloistered corners of academia.
To a remarkable extent, the leaders of the entertainment industry remained true to the irreverent attitudes of their youth – maintaining antifamily, antireligious, antibusiness, and antimilitary biases long after they had ceased to be fashionable in the country at large. The flood of feature film and television projects about Black Panthers, doomed rock stars, Vietnam atrocities, aging hippies, Native American militants, CIA conspiracies, environmental activists, and assorted revolutionaries on the run glorified both the “idealism” and paranoia of the ‘60s in outrageously uncritical terms. These projects reflect the shallow but unrepentant radicalism of an industry lost in its own curious time warp, its outlook permanently frozen in the worldview of the sour summer of ‘69, set in amber somewhere between the release of Easy Rider and the messianic mudfest at Woodstock.
The counterculture’s comprehensive conquest of Hollywood involved more than an enduring alteration of the attitudes of the elite, but also included the outright abolition of one of the industry’s most powerful and well-established institutions.
Beginning in 1922, the major studios came together to establish a full-time office designed to regulate the content of all movies produced in Hollywood. After 1930, this so-called Hays Office (named after its first administrator, former Postmaster General Will H. Hays) enforced the provisions of a detailed Production Code which placed specific restrictions on obscene language, sex, violence, religious ridicule, ethnic insults, drug abuse, and other potentially offensive elements in movies.
From the outset, Hollywood’s most powerful moguls planned these self-policing efforts as a response to public pressure concerning immorality in movies: by pointing to internal efforts to control motion picture content the industry managed to avoid the very real threat of state or federal censorship.
In practice, the day-to-day workings of the Hays Office proved far more lenient than the written strictures of the Productions Code might suggest; nevertheless, for more than forty years this operation exerted a powerful influence that reached every corner of the popular culture. Its very existence reminded moviemakers of the need to work within broadly accepted standards of decency and good taste. Critics of the Production Code Administration (PCA) suggested that its regular review of movie scripts and its required approval on all final cuts amounted to an intolerable interference in the creative process. Defenders of the system insisted that in order to keep the confidence of the mass audience and to avoid potential offense or outrage, the industry had to impose its own clear-cut standards on the products it presented to the public.
The debate ended in 1966, shortly after Jack Valenti assumed the leadership of the industry-wide organization of major producers. “The first thing I did when I became president of the Motion Picture Association of America,” Valenti proudly recalled a quarter century later, “was to junk the Hays Production Code, which was an anachronistic piece of censorship that we never should have put into place.” Instead of the old guidelines declaring certain elements altogether out of bounds for Hollywood movies, the industry initiated a new policy that would allow anything that the filmmaker chose to present, but would rate every new picture in terms of its suitability for family viewing. With several relatively minor modifications, that rating system remains in place today.
Needless to say, the new procedure drew unanimous praise from the creative community as a liberating step totally in keeping with the adventurous spirit of the times. Industry leaders predicted that the demise of the outmoded Production Code would lead to two immediate benefits for the motion picture business – uplifting the artistic quality of films by providing greater freedom to the filmmakers, at the same time that the exciting new offerings sure to result would draw an eager and greatly enlarged audience.
One needn’t be a fan of the old Hays Office, with all its hypocrisies and inefficiencies, to recognize that its elimination never produced the desired results. In terms of the aesthetic excellence of motion pictures, the long-term impact proved dubious; in terms of the expansion of the audience, it was downright disastrous. The years immediately following the change most certainly produced a flurry of superb, challenging, and highly original films (They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, 1969; Five Easy Pieces, 1970; A Clockwork Orange, 1971; The Godfather, 1972) in which brilliant filmmakers reveled in their newfound artistic freedom, but few observers would suggest that the overall quality of motion pictures has improved since the removal of the Production Code. Considering all of the films of the ‘80s and ‘90s, for instance, and comparing them to the Hollywood product of the ‘30s and 40’s, it is difficult to imagine that anyone could claim that the increased latitude for filmmakers has brought about a more distinguished body of work. While many of the specific rules in the old Production Code look thoroughly ludicrous by today’s standards, it is instructive to recall that Alfred Hitchock and Howard Hawks, John Ford and Billy Wilder, George Cukor and Frank Capra and Orson Welles all somehow managed to create their masterpieces under its auspices.
However one might argue the aesthetic impact of Hollywood’s new direction in the late ‘60s, there can be no question of the reaction of the mass audience: Americans overwhelmingly rejected the dark themes and shocking elements that audacious filmmakers introduced in the films of the period. While individual examples of the countercultural trend might achieve respectable box office returns (Bonnie and Clyde, 1967; Easy Rider, 1969; Midnight Cowboy, 1969; M*A*S*H*, 1970), the general distaste for the industry’s emphasis on sex and violence provoked an unprecedented flight of the mass audience.
In 1967, the first year in which Hollywood found itself finally free to appeal to the public without the “paralyzing” restrictions of the old Production Code, American pictures drew an average weekly audience of only 17.8 million – compared to the weekly average of 38 million who had gone to the theatres just one year before! In a single twelve-month period, more than half the movie audience disappeared – by far the largest one-year decline in the history of the motion picture business.
There is no way to test the extent to which these appalling numbers represent a direct response to the closure of the Hays Office, but the statistics nonetheless definitively deflate the notion that liberating the industry from its established standards would help it to win a huge new audience. The suspension of the Production Code may have contributed to some extent to the alienation of the public, but is seems unlikely that it constituted a primary cause of the crisis. Rather, the removal of the code and the collapse in movie attendance both represented symptoms of the same underlying illness that afflicted the popular culture in the late 1960s.
The seriousness of that sickness is shown by the fact that it prevented the entertainment industry from responding in a normal way to the forces of the marketplace. Even as Hollywood marched merrily into the fever swamps of alienation and self-indulgence, indications abounded that the new directions made no commercial sense. In April 1973, the chairman of the National Association of Theatre Owners blamed “a commensurate drop in the morality quotient of films for much of the erosion in patronage.” In a passionate speech reported in depth by the Hollywood Reporter, industry leader B. V. Sturdivant declared that Hollywood’s problems originated “some three years ago, when the scatological stench permeated so many production circles, and obscenity coupled with violence threatened to explode beyond acceptable limits . . .” Noting that movie attendance had recently plunged to an all-time low, the veteran theater owner saw scant hope of recapturing the confidence and enthusiasm of the mass audience unless we have producers, distributors, and exhibitors who seek the dirty dollar as panderers of filth . . . the outlook for reconciliation is dim.”
The most surprising characteristic of these “panderers of filth” and their energetic pursuit of “the dirty dollar” is their chronic inefficiency in achieving their goals. At the very moment that the new countercultural values won their first great triumphs in Hollywood, the moviegoing public sent powerful signals of its unfriendly attitude toward the revolution. Variety’s review of the movie business for the turning point year of 1969 featured the revealing headline: YEAR’S SURPRISE: “FAMILY” FILMS DID BEST. In the accompanying article, Robert B. Frederick pointed out that the Disney comedy The Love Bug, hardly a work of hard-hitting social criticism, turned out to be the year’s box-office champ. Despite the enormous attention lavished on Easy Rider by the press, Oliver, Funny Girl, and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, all holdovers from the previous year, easily earned more money at the box office. “If there were a surprise in the year-end check of the big business pix,” Frederick wrote, “it was that the real whoppers of $10 million and above were, with a single exception (Midnight Cowboy) what could easily be considered ‘family’ fare.”
In one sense, the current hostility to heroes reflects Hollywood’s underlying attitude toward American civilization and all its works. According to its defenders, the entertainment industry focuses on violent, corrupt, and demented characters only because it is trying to provide an honest view of a violent, corrupt, and demented society.
Leading members of the entertainment establishment have become remarkably candid in expressing their bitter feelings toward their native land. “The United States is a land that has raped every area of the world,” declared Thelma and Louise star Susan Sarandon in an interview in May 1991. In the same month, Sean Penn spoke to a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival about the rage expressed in his bloody, brooding directorial debut, Indian Runner. “I don’t think it scratches the surface of the rage that is felt, if not acted upon, by most of the people in the country where I live,” the outspoken star solemnly declared. “I was brought up in a country that relished fear-based religion, corrupt government, and an entire white population living on stolen property that they murdered for and that is passed on from generation to generation.”
Two-time Oscar-winner Oliver Stone expressed similar sentiments when accepting the “Torch of Liberty Award” from the American Civil Liberties Union in September 1987. “Our own country has become a military-industrial monolith dedicated to the Cold War, in many ways as rigid and as corrupt at the top as our rivals the Soviets,” he proclaimed, shortly before the total collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. “We have become the enemy – with a security state now second to none. Today we have come to live in total hatred, fear, and the desire to destroy. Bravo. Fear and conformity have triumphed.”
In Stone’s view, “this Darth Vadian empire” of the United States must pay for its many sins in the near future. “I think America has to bleed.” he told an interviewer for American Film in 1987. “I think the corpses have to pile up. I think American boys have to die again. Let the mothers weep and mourn.”
While Stone expressed his public hopes for high casualties, other Hollywood heavyweights devised nonverbal means to express their contempt for patriotic conventions. In 1990 television star Roseanne Barr raised a considerable public furor (and risked her show’s popularity) with her shrieking, spitting, crotch-grabbing rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner” prior to a San Diego Padres baseball game.
In the rap music industry the antipatriotic imagery is even more explicit. Ice Cube’s best-selling 1991 Death Certificate album boasted a cover photo of a flag-draped corpse on a morgue slab with the soles of its bare feet facing the camera; one big toe is prominently tagged with the label “Uncle Sam.” Meanwhile, the popular, twenty-three-year-old rapper Paris enjoyed considerable success with his album The Devil Made Me Do It, released along with a nightmarish video that shows a jovial, top-hatted Uncle Sam suddenly transformed into a raging, bloodthirsty Satan. The controversial rap star Sister Souljah summed up the judgment of many in the entertainment industry with her 1991 single “The Final Solution”: “We should’ve read the books and understood / That America is no damn good.”
If these attitudes represented only off-screen opinions they would never merit serious discussion. Actors, directors, and popular musicians are unquestionably entitled to their private prejudices, and those ideas become significant only when they are advanced in a consistent and self-conscious manner in the popular culture. Unfortunately, when it comes to the deep-seated disgust with America and its major institutions, the personal biases of the entertainment establishment show up with increasing regularity in the movies, television, and popular music.
Consider, for example, Hollywood’s treatment of the military. In 1990 researchers from Smith College and New York University released the results of painstaking scientific analysis of a representative sample of forth-three years of feature films. “The thematic analysis reveals that since the mid-1960s, the United States military has more likely been portrayed negatively than positively,” concluded Professors Stanley Rothman, David J. Rothman, and Stephen P. Powers in their paper in Society/Transaction. Between 1946 and 1965, only 23 percent of movies portrayed the military in critical terms; between 1965 and 1989, those negative treatments jumped to 40 percent, with another 40 percent classified as “mixed.” Concerning Washington’s leadership of the armed services, the change in focus was even more pronounced. “In military movies where the government plays a role only 25 percent portrayed the government negatively prior to 1966. Since then 64 percent have done so.”
This research project conclusively rebutted the common assumption that the Reagan era witnessed a notable upsurge in reflexively patriotic films that glorified our armed forces. While movies like Top Gun (1986), Iron Eagle (1986), and Rambo (1988) most certainly won huge audiences, they each featured rebellious, nonconformist, individualistic heroes struggling against a military establishment that was portrayed in largely unflattering terms.
