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ATTENTION: THIS IS ADVERTISING!!!

I often mentioned the status of Hollywood as an economical entreprise. Not surprising so, that the big studio bosses try to make some money. Of course selling tickets, DVD´s, blue-rays and merchandise is one main source to fill the cash boxes. Well, there still is the XXX rating their movies, but no nasty code is really preventing them anymore to produce blockbuster with a lot of blood or other nice pictures that attract the audience. Only too bad that the mechanism of dulling is coming in. At least that wouldn´t be surprising looking at the following statistic of the society pages:

Introducing with this little excursus, the main point lays somewhere else. There is another income source that Hollywood studios like very much: Using synergy-effects. Meaning that certain images of the movie follow specific interests of either econonomical/political partners or simply cooperating companys. Some examples:

- The universal studios like to produce movies like U-571 (2000) and Charlie Wilson’s War (2007). Maybe because Universal’s parent company is General Electric, whose most lucrative interests relate to weapons manufacturing and producing crucial components for high-tech war planes, advanced surveillance technology, and essential hardware for the global oil and gas industries, notably in post Saddam Iraq.

- Disney likes to produce pro-establishment messages in its films like In the Army Now (1994), Crimson Tide (1995), and Armageddon (1998), maybe because several movies received generous assistance from the US government and were Pentagon-backed.

- Disney released the TV movie The Path to 9/11, which kind of intended to exonerate the Bush administration and blame the Clinton administration for the terrorist attacks

- Twentieth Century Fox glossed-over the history of the aboriginal Natives and made the country look like a fantastic place to go on holiday in Australia, maybe because Twentieth Century Fox’s parent company (Rupert Murdoch's News Corp) worked hand-in-hand with the Australian government, that were waiting with millions of dollars of tax rebates in reward to the well done tourism campaign.

You get this kind of "product placement" or "opinion placement" free with your ordered ticket. Isn´t it great?

"The greatest movie ever sold" is a documentary coming up in Hollywood 2011. It deals with these topics of branding, advertising and product placement. It´s the new movie of Morgan Spurlock (" Super Size Me" 2004) Ironically it is financed and made possible by brands, advertising and product placement! Enjoy!

Hollywood´s blacklist

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:StormCenterPoster.jpg


Thomas: Are you a member of the Communist Party or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

Lawson: It's unfortunate and tragic that I have to teach this committee the basic principles of Americanism.

Thomas: That's not the question. That's not the question. The question is—have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

Lawson: I am framing my answer in the only way in which any American citizen can frame his answer to...

Thomas: Then you deny it?

Lawson: ...a question that invades his...absolutely invades his privacy.

Thomas: Then you deny... You refuse to answer that question, is that correct?

Lawson: I have told you that I will offer my beliefs, my affiliations and everything else to the American public and they will know where I stand as they do from what I have written.

Thomas: Stand away from the stand...

Lawson: I have written for Americanism for many years...

Thomas: Stand away from the stand...

Lawson: And I shall continue to fight for the Bill of Rights, which you are trying to destroy.

Thomas: Officer, take this man away from the stand.

"HUAC Hollywood Investigation Testimony, October 1947: Unfriendly Witnesses—Howard Lawson (Screenwriter)". Authentic History Center. October 29, 1947. http://www.authentichistory.com/1946-1960/4-cwhomefront/1-reactionism/19471000_HUAC_Hollywood_Testimony.html. Retrieved 2010-10-14.

The transcript is an excerpt from the interrogation of screenwriter John Howard Lawson by HUAC chairman J. Parnell Thomas.
Lawson is one of the so called Hollywood Ten who were accused of being active members of a communist party in times of McCarthyism.

The Great Depression and the World War II caused an uprise of the communist party that was fighting for the rights of the poor and was involved in campaigns for the improvement of the welfare, unemployment and social security system. Two major strikes in the fim industry during the 1930s increased tensions between the Hollywood producers and the unions, particularly the Communist-accosiated Screen Writers Guild.
The U.S. government saw a great danger in the Communism tendency in Hollywood. Under chairman Martin Dies, Jr., the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) released a report in 1938 claiming that communism was pervasive in Hollywood.
In October 1947, a number of persons working in the Hollywood film industry were summoned to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which had declared its intention to investigate whether Communist agents and sympathizers had been surreptitiously planting propaganda in U.S. films.^[9] The hearings began with several Hollywood professionals, including Walt Disney and Ronald Reagan, president of the Screen Actors Guild, testifying that the threat of Communists in the film industry was a serious one.

Forty-three people were put on the witness list, nineteen declared they would not give evidence. Eleven of these nineteen were called before the Committee. Interestingly enaugh, one of those eleven finally agreed to answer the question of the Committee. It was Bertold Brecht, who immigrated to the U.S. in 1941 to escape Hitlers regime and actually was a convinced Communist. The day after his testimony, were he had to deny his political conviction, he flew back to Europe after six years in America.

Still there were ten persons refusing to testify their "innocent minds" and were even accusing the Committee for its unconstitutional procedures . The Wikipedia-article summons the next events:

In light of the "Hollywood Ten" 's defiance of HUAC, political pressure mounted on the film industry to demonstrate its "anti-subversive" bona fides. Late in the hearings, Eric Johnston, president of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), declared to the committee that he would never "employ any proven or admitted Communist because they are just a disruptive force and I don't want them around."^[14] On November 17, the Screen Actors Guild voted to make its officers swear to a non-Communist pledge. The following week, on November 24, the House of Representatives voted 346 to 17 to approve citations against the Hollywood Ten for contempt of Congress. The next day, following a meeting of film industry executives at New York's Waldorf-Astoria hotel, MPAA president Johnston issued a press release on the executives' behalf that is today referred to as the Waldorf Statement.^[b] The statement declared that the ten would be fired or suspended without pay and not reemployed until they were cleared of contempt charges and had sworn that they were not Communists. The first Hollywood blacklist was now in effect.

Read the whole article to learn about the following activitys of the HUAC related to the Black List, that were reaching till the days in 1957.

What we learn of the accurance of the Hollywood blacklist is the following:
- the U.S. politics had a great impact on Hollywood structures in times of McCathyism
- the governmental strive for eliminating Communist tendencies attest the influence Hollywood has on the society and the formation of critical opinion
- the strive of Hollywood to get rid of governmental influence is one explanation for its left-leaning political opinion.

The first Hollywood movie to portray McCarthyism was Storm Center (see poster above) and appeared in 1956. Bette Davis plays a small-town librarian who doesn´t want to remove the book 'The Communist Dream' from the shelves when the local council valuate it subversive.

Mickey vs. Bugs

Two powerful studios were producing animated movies in the early days of Hollywood: Warner Bros. and Disney. But where as the Warner Bros. studio had problems, especially with there non-animated movies, to work within the boundaries of the Production code, Disney was even celebrating the moralty and purity it requested. Disney simply excluded the biological reality of sex and created characters with higher and deeper motives for action, such as love, power and friendship. Mickey Mouse is the typical example here. He could´t be created any more "harmless". Without whiskers and beastly paws he lacks attributes of a real mouse. He merely appears civilized like a human being and has hands (though four-fingered) which are neatly tied in white gloves. You could say his appearance is nearly sexless and due to his high voice (spoken of Disney himself) you can´t even tell weather he is child or adult. Same could be said for Minnie Mouse of course. As stated in the book "The myth of the American Superhero" from Lawrence and Jewett the sanatizing effort of Disney in its definite expression gets reflected in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937):

The mythic transmutation of the Grimm Brothers` fairy tale clearly indicates in both cleanliness and sexual purity.

In the original tale of Grimm, Snow White is messing around in the Dwarfs house, eating and drinking their reserves and sleeping in their bed, in Disney´s version she is tidying up and cleaning, while all her little forest friends are helping her.

The final detail in the sanatizing campaign is to erase any possible doubt about the sexual implications of a women living with seven dirty old men. Whereas the Grimms allowed the lucky dwarfs to sleep in their beds adjacent to the princess, Disney sends them all downstairs to sleep on the floor. (Lawrence, John Shelton & Jewett Robert, "The myth of the American Super Hero", Wm. B. Eardmans Publishing Co., Michigan, 2002, p. 183)

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2010/02/06/making-fun-of-the-mpaa-hays-code/

This image couldn´t by any means portray the problem any stronger.
It totally expresses the criticism of the hypocritical boundaries of the production code in which Hollywood had to compress his productions until 1968. Especially the parodied Ten Commandments of the Bible on the board in the background relate to the conservative influence of the church. Referring to an article of the society pages, the image was passed around among photographers and publicists in Hollywood as a method of symbolic protest to the Hays Code.

But where as this picture evokes the impression of a criticism of the old days of the Production code that was abandoned in the late 1960´s, the article also mentions the present impacts of censorship on contemporary movies through the MPAA that was displacing the Code and lessened the restrictions to a certain extent.

The principles of censorship of the MPAA and who exactly made decisions seemed to be kind of mysterious for a long time. For this reason the miraclous decision standarts are subject of investigation in Kirby Dicks movie "This film is not yet rated" (2006), which tries to get an inside into the nontransparent criteria of the MPAA rating board which lead to the deviation of movies into five categories:

G (general audience)
PG (parental guidance suggested)
PG 13 (some stuff unsuitable for under 13)
R (under 17 with an adult)
NC 17 (old "X" rating, must be over 17)

A review of the film describes the crucial points introduced in the documentary:

The best part of the film is the first one [...]I, mainly because we get to know the rules of the game a bit better. Apparently, any kind of "weird sex" is not welcome: oral sex (`Boys Don't Cry`), threesomes(`The Dreamers`, `American Psycho`), gay stuff (`Mysterious Skin`, `Where The Truth Lies`), female masturbation (`Jersey Girl`, a PG-13 movie, almost got an R just because Liv Tyler talks about it)... the list is quite long. Of course, you're better off if your film is endorsed by a major studio. That's why a glimpse of Maria Bello's pubic hair got independent film `The Cooler` an NC-17, while Sharon Stone doing much more in the audience-baiting `Basic Instinct` was "appropriate" enough to receive an R. No wonder most filmmakers hate the MPAA! Hell, we even find out that Trey Parker and Matt Stone deliberately put distasteful material in Team America just to make fun of the ratings board.

The censorship nowadays isn´t criticized mainly for its tabooing of specific subjects like it was back in the days of the production code that actually prohibited movie releases, it´s more about the doubtful classification in the U.S. that is more liberal when special economical interests are in focus and that seems to accept pictures of violence more than pictures of sex.

An actual example of the debate is the comparison of classification of "Black Swan" and "Blue Valentine". Cristy Puchto writes in her article for the film stage: ‘Black Swan’ Vs. ‘Blue Valentine’ – MPAA’s Dark Secret

Simply put Black Swan is drawing comparisons to Blue Valentine because both involve a scene where oral sex is preformed on a woman – but while the former got an R rating, the latter received the dreaded (and box office killing) NC-17 rating. As the Weinstein Company has pointed out in their press release, the MPAA has a clear double standard when it comes to violence and sex in their ratings, noting films that deal with violence against women or rape have often garnered an R while movies involving woman’s ardent pleasure are branded with NC-17. Susman furthers this disparity argument drawing comparisons between the films’ supposedly scandalous scenes.

You Nazty Spy!

Beside banning sexual and violent content their was a political censorship as well. When Warner Bros. wanted to produce a movie about concentration camps in Germany, the production office forbade it with threats to take the matter to the federal government if the studio went ahead. This policy prevented a number of anti-Nazi films being produced in the time before the Second World War started.

In 1938, the FBI prosecuted a Nazi spy ring, subsequently allowing Warner Bros. to produce Confessions of a Nazi Spy being the first anti-Nazi film in Hollywood.

At the same time the short film " You Naszy Spy" were produced that openly satirized Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany months before Chaplin's controversial and more famous movie "The Great Dictator" came up.

You can see it as Propaganda work or the necessary discussion of a political threat in public. Definitely Hollywood here takes a political position within a period where the U.S. was still neutral about World War II.

Warner Bros. Movie World

Beside banning sexual and violent content their was a political censorship as well. When Warner Bros. wanted to produce a movie about concentration camps in Germany, the production office forbade it with threats to take the matter to the federal government if the studio went ahead. This policy prevented a number of anti-Nazi films being produced in the time before the Second World War started.

In 1938, the FBI prosecuted a Nazi spy ring, subsequently allowing Warner Bros. to produce Confessions of a Nazi Spy being the first anti-Nazi film in Hollywood.

At the same time the short film " You Naszy Spy" were produced that openly satirized Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany months before Chaplin's controversial and more famous movie "The Great Dictator" came up.

You can see it as Propaganda work or the necessary discussion of a political threat in public. Definitely Hollywood here takes a political position within a period where the U.S. was still neutral about World War II. As already displayed, the "Warner Brothers" were everything but d´accord with the hanky-panky of the censorship bureau.
The Warner Bros. cartoon "A Tale of two kittys", obviously using Charles Dickens novel "A tale of two cities" as naming basis, directly criticizes the Hays office and code.

In one sequence the character Catstello turns to the audience and says: "If da Hays Office would only let me... I'd give him 'da bird' all right" (with the "bird" being an euphemism for the middle finger, that is an insulting gesture, which were of course band from screen due to the Hays code)

Unsurprisingly the sequence was cut out, before the short first aired on "The Bugs N' Daffy Show", introducing sweet, crazy bird Tweety to the world. Thank you Brothers!