City of Nets

...The locals—there are few true natives—know: these people are searching for something which no longer exists...

...Most of it is trash which no intelligent person would wish to waste time reading, but in the hands of a truly cultivated, witty, and charming narrator such as Otto Friedrich, it can be converted into material worthy of attention...

...The final paradox was that all this worked: she won the role of the femme fatale in Fox's Blood and Sand, "not as a Latin," Friedrich observes, "who would never have been considered worthy of such an important part, but as a Latin pretending to be an Anglo pretending to be a Latin...

...Part B BUDIDFDRUM®Soldier's Story), anti-union sentiment (Nine to Five), militarism (Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Coming Home), big business (The China Syndrome), American foreign policy (Miming Reds Daniel) . . . the list could go on and on...

...Some misguided souls might imagine that these people despised Hollywood, its works, and themselves for selling out to it, but as Friedrich points out, this was far from the case...

...Today the archetypical Hollywood mogul is actually a television producer, Norman Lear, who is also the principal financial supporter of a liberal-left political lobby, People for the American Way...

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...The reality was quite different...

...Thus chapter one is entitled "Welcome (1939)," chapter four "Americanism (1942)," chapter eleven "Expulsions (1949)," and so forth...

...I THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1987 41...

...Our 15th year...

...Friedrich is balanced, careful, fair, and often admits that interpretations uncongenial to him personally may be true anyway...

...by 1950, the figure reached 11 million...

...This is particularly evident in his treatment of the activities of the Hollywood Ten and the House Un-American Activities Committee—a chapter entitled "UnAmericanism (1947)," which is worth the price of the book...

...course is unconditionally guaranteed...

...Nelson hired a detective to wire the bedroom, and then, as required by the primitive technology of the day, established himself in a sound truck parked in a nearby canyon...

...He finds the "Hollywood Tenn---a group of screenwriters who were subsequently blacklisted by the industry for refusing to discuss their political views or affiliations before congressional committees—at best arrogant and self-indulgent, at worst sinister and dishonest...

...Far from being bold innovators, they "had stumbled into the use of sound almost by accident and they were reluctantly beginning to experiment with color...

...Apparently since the 1950s the American book-reading public has shown an inexhaustible curiosity about movies and the people who make (or rather, made) them...

...This place is just like Asbury Park, New Jersey," the dyspeptic Nathanael West wrote when the legend was at its height...

...He is out to expose malefactors of great wealth, and to discredit what he regards as the myth of capitalism and the freemarket—and truth to tell, in the case of the movie industry, he has happened upon a treasure trove of evidence...

...The objective conditions, as it were, which had granted Hollywood a quasi-monopoly on the entertainment industry in America, and even in the world at large, no longer existed...

...And then there is the unforgettable memo from the MGM Music Department to its stable of composers: "From this day forward, no MGM score will contain a minor chord...

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...The facts are clear enough...

...The U.S...

...She was compelled not only to change her name and her hair color, but to undergo painful electrolysis treatments in order to alter her hairline and make her appear more "Anglo-Saxon...

...Yet, even as the author of City of Nets concedes, they Mark Falcoff is a writer living in Washington D.C...

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...Reading this vastly satisfying book in 1987, one cannot help wondering how Otto Friedrich feels about American films today...

...0 presents more complex structures and additional vocabulary...

...But it is beyond dispute that in the late 1940s the mood of suspicion and accusation in Hollywood became extremely ugly...

...It hardly knew that political purposes existed...

...Part A introduces the simpler forms of the language and a basic vocabulary...

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...That was, of course, the era in which Hollywood fell heir to some of the best talents of Central Europe—not merely film makers like Fritz Lang or dramatists like Max Reinhardt, but writers like Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Maurice Maeterlinck, Franz Werfel, and the ubiquitous Bertold Brecht, and composers and conductors like Igor Stravinsky, Hanns Eisler, and Bruno Walter...

...Liberal though he may be, Mr...

...Friedrich not only takes the inquisitors to task, however, but also their intended victims...

...This is one of the many paradoxes which enrich Otto Friedrich's book, and make it one of the few serious works ever written on the subject...

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...One such is the sheer incompetence, stupidity, and philistinism of the production moguls...

...Martin Sheen sleeps on grates in Washington, D.C...

...As the author of City of Nets puts it more acutely, "Hollywood really is an imaginary city that exists in the mind of anyone who has, in his mind, lived there...

...By the end of the course, you'll be learning and speaking entirely in French...

...No less a legendary figure than Irving Thalberg, producer of the immortal Jazz Singer, is on record as having said that "talking pictures are a passing fad," and when offered an option on Gone With the Wind, dismissed the proposal with the remark, "No civil war picture ever made a nickel...

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...Some of the most piquant pages of City of Nets describe in exquisite detail the appearance of both men before the House Committee on Un-American Activities...

...There, they made perfect fools of themselves...

...Secondly, Friedrich is a "progressive" historian, in the sense of Charles and Mary Beard or Gustavus Meyers...

...Simply follow the spoken and written instructions, listening and repeat- ing...

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...There were very few real Communists in the industry...

...By discussing carefully theproduction decisions surrounding some of the more successful films—particularly Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice—Friedrich shows how fine was the line between a turkey and a towering artistic achievement...

...Before actually discussing its content, it might be useful to make two methodological points...

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...Anti-Mexican feeling was likewise strong, particularly in the context of Los Angeles's special geographical position, but carried over into such patently ridiculous decisions as the de-Latinization of Rita Hayworth (born Rita Cansino...

...Jack Lemmon allows as how the fantasies of Missing are historically accurate, and so forth...

...Then there was the sheer kinkiness of the people who made up the film community...

...Hughes swung wildly at the cuckold but missed...

...Fr he "blacklist" and the atmosphere that surrounded it is not one of the prouder events of American cultural history, but as City of Nets shows, it hardly crippled the film industry...

...We are light years from City of Nets...

...This is not merely legend, but fact: these folks were very, very strange, made so perhaps by the context, or other people's expectations, or merely the absence of restraints so far from the centers of civilized life in the United States...

...Well, not exactly...

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...They were so "blinded by ideology, or perhaps simply by egotism," he writes, "that [they] seemed to think that they were devastating [Congressman J. Parnell] Thomas and the committee with their wit, their defiance, their devotion to humanitarian principles...

...Their best works—The Maltese Falcon, King's Row, Casablanca, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Shanghai Express, Citizen Kane, The Wizard of Oz, The Best Years of Our Lives, without even beginning to exhaust the list—are still a credit to the process which gave them life, and the town with which they were inevitably associated...

...Ironically, the two most pro-Soviet films, Mission to Moscow and Song of Russia, were made by two of the most reactionary, union-baiting moguls of them all—Jack Warner and Louis B. Mayer...

...Even Friedrich himself says more than once, "it is difficult to maintain a sense of perspective...

...But that much said, there is a huge difference between his outlook and that of what passes for historians at most American universities today, New Left or post-New Left "revisionists" who are out to vindicate the American Communist Party and its supporters and apologists...

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...Ed Asner raises money for Communist guerrillas in El Salvador...

...the charge of Communism was used to fight the unionization of the industry, or between unions for control of specific branches of the work force...

...This is useful to the author as a means of organizing a vast amount of material, although inevitably he finds himself shifting back and forth in time even within his prescribed limits, and many of the same themes appear and reappear throughout the book...

...to expect the benighted illiterates who ruled the industry to transcend somehow the common culture of the day is really unfair...

...What [the committee's members] could not seem to understand," Friedrich somewhat wearily remarks, was that Song of Russia was rubbish not because of any political purpose, subversive or otherwise, but because M-G-M was in the business of producing rubbish...

...Nor were refugees the only ones to gather under the roof of the Brown Derby: such American writers as Theodore Dreiser, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Robert Sherwood, Dorothy Parker, even William Faulkner, earned fabulous salaries as members of script-writing stables (the term "collective," though politically compatible, was not yet in vogue...

...M-G-M was the home of Andy Hardy, of Judy Garland, and Esther Williams, and no Communist ideology could ever penetrate or take root in such a playland...

...O f course, politics is the very heart of this book...

...Bette Davis, the only one in the triangle who showed any sense of honor at all, insisted on repaying Hughes every cent...

...But in explicating the topic, Friedrich departs from progressive writ again and again, offering some very surprising twists...

...Of course, these prejudices were silly or pernicious, but they were widely shared by even quite well-educated Americans...

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...You see them as tourists on Saturday afternoons in the summer (some in saris, some in leisure suits) patrolling the main boulevard of what is now a rather seedy district of Los Angeles, having finally breached the wall of the magic city, their faces fallen in disappointment...

...As for Bertold Brecht and Hanns Eisler—both of whom subsequently proved their devotion to the Soviet Union—they got off by lying...

...Indeed...

...There are some choice quotes from Louis B. Mayer which recall the sage remark of George Orwell that "if you want to understand the origins of anti-Semitism, the best book to read is still the Old Testament...

...Jane Fonda rationalizes Stalinism in Vietnam...

...T he book itself is divided by year and by theme...

...The decline of the industry, which followed shortly afterwards, was due not to cultural impoverishment, as some would have it, but to the breakup of the industrycartel (which formerly permitted studios to own the theaters which exhibited their wares) under the Sherman Anti-Rust Act, and even more, to the spread of a new and competitive medium, television...

...Thus, in 1945, there were only 6,500 television sets in the United States...

...In City of Nets Friedrich is also out to expose Hollywood's racial and religious prejudices, above all its anti-Semitism, notwithstanding the fact that so many leaders of the industry came from Jewish backgrounds (or perhaps even because of it...

...When Louis B. Mayer of Minsk decided to make a movie about Russia, he would inevitably make it the Russia of Andy Hardy, accompanied by Tchaikovsky...

...Nelson decided to salvage his honor by blackmailing CITY OF NETS: A PORTRAIT OF HOLLYWOOD IN THE 1940s Otto Friedrich/Harper & Row/$25.00 Mark Falcoff 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1987 Hughes for seventy thousand dollars, and Hughes, terrified by the threatened disclosure of his sexual problems, paid the money...

...The same stucco houses, women in pajamas, delicatessen stores, etc...

...Several ended up serving prison terms which granted them a martyrdom they did not deserve...

...There is nothing to do except tennis, golf, or the movies...

...The prevailing fashions in Hollywood itself are decidedly left-ofcenter...

...few films even remotely leftist were made...

...Or perhaps never did...

...Friedrich his brief: as individuals they had no taste, no culture, and no class...

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...It would be difficult to argue that the industry prevents us—as apparently it once did—from seeing films which excoriate racism (A What sort of people need to learn a I I I foreign language as quickly and effectively as possible...

...Miss Davis went into hysterics...

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...This Hollywood owed its existence to good weather (which made it possible to film outdoors most of the year, at a time when slow-emulsion films imposed massive lighting requirements) and distance from New York and Europe, where the owners of motion picture patents were too far away to enforce their rights...

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...There was, of course, a real Hollywood once—a few orange groves and wheat farms which became a suburb of Los Angeles, "an array of low-lying buildings and streets and people . . . a community that was partly an industry, partly a technology, partly a style and a quality of mind, partly a negation of all those things, partly just a hunger for money and success...

...Hollywood would linger on fOr a few more years, but by the end of the following decade, it was a name which could only be placed between quotation marks—not merely a memory, but a legend...

...After World War II there was a deflation of leftish enthusiasms in the United States, although to what degree this was due to the conscious decision of the government, and to what degree to other matters, the author—in spite of his false certainties—does not know and probably cannot...

...After listening for a while to his wife and Hughes struggling to achieve some sort of climax, Nelson went running down the hill to his home, burst into the bedroom, and threatened to make his recordings public...

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...All were crude, some were actually evil...

...A glance at Friedrich's bibliography, which runs a full twelve, double-column pages of six-point type, gives some sense of the vast store of memoirs, gossip, and scandal literature through which the author had to wade in order to find his material...

...Even committed Marxists like Bertold Brecht and Hanns Eisler were ready for "money and success," and when their material failed to win approval from their superiors, it often reappeared elsewhere in a different, more "serious" form...

...Friedrich also emphasizes the remarkable cosmopolitanism of the industry, at least in the 1940s...

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...One tale, dealing with aircraft-cum-cinema mogul Howard Hughes, gives an example of Friedrich's wry narrative style, and also summarizes the subject for the entire book: Hughes apparently suffered an affliction known as ejaculatory impotence, which rather surprised Bette Davis, who had taken him quite seriously...

...to call attention to the plight of the homeless...

...In fact, virtually no top stars were permanently barred from the screen, and as for the writers—well, good as John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo could be, replacements for them were found...

...So much so, in fact, that her husband, Harmon Nelson, who spent his evenings as a bandleader in the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, became suspicious...

...The founders of the motion picture industry were actually a bunch of thugs and gangsters on the make, many born in Eastern Europe and schooled in the hard experience of immigrant childhoods...

...made a permanent contribution to American life and to the common culture of the twentieth century...

...This new Hollywood, however, is incapable of producing one Maltese Falcon...

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...That was its function, its nature, its mission...

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...It would be interesting to know just why...

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...Friedrich seems to believe that Communists, unlike witches, actually do exist...

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