Taking on Hollywood

...The head, which turns out to be a set piece for a Cecil DeMille movie about Burma, represents the kind of Hollywood chimera that Barrymore denounced...

...Dragon became the kind of can-do executive who, when pressed for a matinee idol, cheerily kidnapped one from a detox program...

...a character boasted...

...A wonderful, book...

...Hollywood speaks to us of lost and squandered opportunity--the kind of opportunity that fades as we leave childhood, make choices, and in doing so narrow our own options...

...Television professionals have attributed "Action's" failure, in part, to its dystopian vision...

...Power and wealth were demonically fascinating long before American film producers colonized Southern California, of course, and Hollywood narratives also resonate more specifically to the wavelengths of our culture...

...At the beginning of the book, which Fitzgerald left unfinished at the time of his death, a small earthquake has wreaked picturesque damage on the lot of a movie studio...

...TAK!NG ON HOLLYWOOD Action & other fatalities , !" ack in September, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman (DConn...

...The tale told is mostly true but is the movie fair...

...Michael Mann's direction holds the wide-ranging story together, giving it the proper measures of panoramic sweep and microscopic intensity, though I wish he had reined in a pretentious musical score that seems to set this entirely American story somewhere in the Middle East...

...This] fine cultural analysis of[La Leche League's] religious roots in Catholicism and the complex debates within the feminist movement should interest many people, from those in women's studies and history to those in religious studies and practical theology...

...But Fitzgerald makes a beautiful illusion: It symbolizes American creativity and the restless energy that is always ready to start afresh...

...Each halfhour episode boasted profanity (discreetly bleeped), sexual innuendo ("We all know the erotic effects of reptiles," ran one recent line), gratuitous vulgarity ("I have Harvey Keitel pummeling Winona Ryder's face with a fire iron-it's not a woman's movie...

...Even the buoyant Singin' in the Rain spends some time lampooning movie-star worship before and after that famous Gene Kelly dance with the umbrella...

...and what one might term an anti-P.C, aesthetic ("I'm gayer than a leather pifiata...

...This year, the winners were two new offerings from the impudent Fox network: "Get Real" and "Action," a dark Hollywood spoof that hype had crowned, on the eve of its debut, the hottest show of the season...

...Fair to Mike Wallace and Don Hewitt (producer of "60 Minutes"), who have complained that they never capitulated to CBS's fears...

...Hot, in this case, meant scandalous...

...We've had movies that are cynical about Hollywood as long as there's been a film industry," notes Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of media studies at NYU...

...The occasion was the presentation of the Silver Sewer Award, an honorific the twoman Morals Squad confers on objectionable cultural programming...

...Action's" creators might have been aiming deliberately for that Silver Sewer as they crafted the adventures of Peter Dragon (Jay Mohr), an ambitious blond film producer who would score in the negative numbers if there were ever a morals Olympics...

...Works like The Day of the Locust, Sunset Boulevard, Barton Fink, and The Player may not be as unrelievedly sour in tone as "Action," but they are just as firmly bent on exposing the greed, heartlessness, hypocrisy, and minor despotisms that have fueled the motion picture machine...

...On this point I plead ignorance, but I must say that Christopher Plummer, a supreme stage actor who at last has a screen role he can sink his thespian incisors into, makes Wallace a gleaming, magnetic prima donna, one whom the audience never sneers at but comes to regard as a lovable monster, almost a nonlethal version of Hannibal Lechter...

...The fruit is unreal, it doesn't taste of anything...

...Flooding has turned reality phantasmagoric, and Monroe Stahr, the tycoon of the title, is mesmerized by a surreal image: "On top of a huge head of the Goddess Siva, two women were floating down the current of an impromptu river...

...There are worse ways to be slandered...

...49.95 cloth / $19.95 paper Commonweal 2 | January 14, 2000...

...viewers spurned the show, the logic runs, because it contained not a single sympathetic character with whom they could identify...

...The whole place is a glaring, gaudy, nightmarish set, built up in the desert...

...Kathryn Kish Sklar, State University of New York at Binghamton 344 PP-, 22 illus...

...The phenomenon, he believes, springs from that dissatisfaction many of us experience when we contemplate our lives: "People are fascinated by the haves, and are particularly interested in any story that simultaneously celebrates power and wealth, and yet seems to deplore them morally...

...We have made Hollywood our dream factory, but we are disappointed with our dreams--disappointed enough to imagine an antihero like Peter Dragon, and too disappointed to watch his escapades on network TV...

...In 1932, the acclaimed British stage actress Ethel Barrymore, who spent her last years acting for the camera, said acidly of Hollywood: "The people are unreal...

...Bonnie ]. MiUer-McLemore, Vanderbi[t University 248 PP...

...The remark seems to betray a broader unease with the unrootedness and occasional superficiality of American culture...

...Thomas A. Tweed, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill "A vital contribution.., integrating [the history of Catholic sisterhoods] into the larger narrative of American history . . . . Required reading for students of American religious history...

...And partly because it is situated on the Pacific coast, where the nation's westward expansion had to come to a halt, the town represents, on some level, opportunities America has lost...

...America's longstanding love-hate relationship with the film industry has produced a stream of movies and novels, Commonweal 2 0 January 14, 2000 not to mention nonfiction accounts, about mercenary, unscrupulous doings in Tinseltown...

...But the cultural climate that fostered "South Park," Howard Stern, and the urination poster for the latest Adam Sandler movie turned cold on "Action"--the show landed such low Nielsen ratings that Fox took it off the air during the sweeps month of November, and then, after reviving it for a few weeks in early December, canceled it altogether...

...This scenario provided "Action's" scriptwriters with ample opportunity to deride the movie business...

...The crudeness and ribaldry were, of course, part of a deliberate marketing ploy, designed to tickle palates grown jaded by constant repasts of R-rated movies and cable shows...

...Pu-leeze...

...And he worked and hobnobbed with people as despicable as he was...

...What makes this turn of events more intriguing, of course, is the fact that dystopian visions of Hollywood have a distinguished history...

...and William J. Bennett, author of The Book of Virtues, held a press conference...

...Fair to cigarette manufacturers...

...Film's magnificient illusions furnish sffil more thematic ore, symbolizing mutability, quackery, insincerity, the triumph of style over substance, the cult of the new...

...39.95 cloth / $15.95 paper SPIRITED LIVES How Nuns Shaped Catholic Culture and American Life, 1836-192o CAROL K. COBURN 8L MARTHA SMITH Demonstrates that nuns were a powerful force in the expansion of American Catholic culture and its influence on the nation's common good...

...For example, in a plot twist that skewered the widespread practice of product placement (in which companies buy screen time for their brands), Peter signed on to a tobacco-lobby campaign to sell cigarettes to teen-agers-after all, he needed cash to finance Beverly Hills Gun Club, Dragon Productions' follow-up to its action release Slow Torture...

...The show chronicled such exploits in a style that required an on-screen warning label--"The program is recommended for mature viewers...

...at the of medicine femt~*ism, a~ld religion THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS AT BOOKSTORES OR CALL [800] 848-6224 www.uncpress.unc.edu LA LECHE LEAGUE At the Crossroads of Medicine, Feminism, and Religion |ULE DEJAGER WARD A theologian looks inside the group known for its promotion of breastfeeding...

...A more optimistic comment on these same traits whispers from a marvelous scene in The Last Tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald's curiously romantic novel about Hollywood...

...The flowers are unreal, they don't smell...

...The luminaries of the film world are, Miller points out, "our version of the aristocracy," and a grim portrait of their lives may please us '%ecause it reassures us that people with all these advantages are really quite miserable...

...The exploited and compromised writer figures who populate such stories ("Action's" Peter Dragon hounded one scribbler right into a hospital emergency room) embody our misgivings not just about Hollywood's values, but about broader aspects of our society--materialism, competitiveness, and the troubled relationship between art and commerce...

...But this same passage also hints at the deep disillusionment that stokes so many caustic movie-business tales: "Under the moon the back lot was thirty acres of fairyland," Fitzgerald writes, "not because the locations really looked like African jungles and French chateaux and schooners at anchor and Broadway by night, but because they looked like the torn picture books of childhood...