High Noon
Anderson, Brian C.
High Noon The clash of Old and New Hollywood, Part Four. by Brian C. Anderson This year's Oscars reinforced for many Americans the view of Hollywood as the land of obdurate limousine liberalism....
...The Mayers immigrated in the early 1890s to Saint John, New Brunswick, where young Louis worked for his father's scrap-metal business and received a derisory formal education...
...The other big studios followed its lead...
...He divorced his long-suffering wife, Margaret Shenberg, in 1944 (later remarrying) and used his authority to bed aspiring starlets...
...One thing's for sure: with some notable exceptions, New Hollywood never caught fire with the public...
...Though diminutive, Mayer fearlessly dove deep into the icy Bay of Fundy, seeking scraps...
...The global audience is now as vital as the American one, and gravitates toward special effects that downplay verbal complexity...
...You often hear about American cultural imperialism, says the French writer Andre Glucksmann, but in Golden Age Hollywood, Europe "'colonized' the imagination of the New World...
...If you don't believe me, try sitting through Altman's meandering Nashville...
...In 1947, 136,000 sets illuminated American living rooms...
...Yet the future promises a momentous shift, perhaps even—after the Golden Age, New Hollywood, and the Empire of Licensing—a fourth moviemaking era...
...In 1918, wanting to make movies rather than show them, Mayer relocated to Los Angeles, forming Louis B. Mayer Productions...
...Then came television...
...Mayer may have demanded morality onscreen, but the MGM lot was more relaxed...
...With Mickey Mouse in the twenties, Disney found an inexhaustible profit pool, argues Epstein: "children at play at home and around the world...
...At its peak, the studio employed 6,000 and sprawled across 167 acres, with sets that ranged from a Victorian street to a tangled jungle...
...disgruntled talent had nowhere else to turn...
...At a time when the movies had unmatched influence over the American imagination, Mayer's MGM celebrated traditional verities...
...One striking fact about many contemporary youth-targeted movies, which often lack New Hollywood's sophistication, is how they tend to hark back to the MGM era in their values...
...Nor was Mayer himself—by 1937, the highest-paid salaried worker in America, worth around $1.3 million a year before taxes—all that upright in his personal life...
...Actors were salaried employees under long-term contracts, not free agents...
...long Republican, Mayer reigned over Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)—the biggest and best of the studios that built Hollywood—from its inception in 1924 until a boardroom coup forced him out in 1951...
...Yet Hollywood hasn't always been a left-wing encampment, as Scott Eyman's recent, superb biography of Louis B. Mayer showed (Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer...
...Everyman Spencer Tracy, vulnerable Judy Garland, the "shopgirl heat" of Joan Crawford (as Eyman has it)—all were MGM personas...
...So what about all the Good Night, and Good Lucks that Hollywood has been rolling out...
...So we could soon see more of Thomson's "grown-up" cinema...
...First, the 1948 Supreme Court antitrust decision in U.S...
...Yet while it's true that some of the nervy films produced during these years stand up, others seem more dated—even less "grown up"—30 years on than do MGM's older masterpieces...
...Two factors helped bring down MGM and the studio system...
...Central to MGM's success, Mayer believed, was "clean, wholesome entertainment...
...a black man known as Slick-um supplied hookers...
...To win a big award and cocktail party kudos, a "hard-hitting" film exposing Big Oil machinations will get you a lot farther than, say, Finding Nemo...
...And despite a swelling U.S...
...Griffith's technologically innovative (and racist) 1915 film The Birth of a Nation...
...And because his cartoon figures needed little verbal elaboration, they could also reach a global audience...
...Munich (on how fighting terror militarily just unleashes greater terror...
...And the movies...
...and Brokeback Mountain (celebrating gay cowboys in love...
...Earlier biographies saddled Mayer with the reputation of being "the devil incarnate," as Helen Hayes described him...
...The chief means of doing this is massive television advertising, targeting the demographic most willing to get out of the house on weekends: kids, especially teens...
...As audiences started staying home to watch the tube, MGM films began losing money...
...Thanks to new technology, the cost of producing independent movies diminishes by the month, and the web provides a distribution network that doesn't require budget-busting ad campaigns...
...eventual winner Crash (on how everyone is racist...
...In the decade after Easy Rider, Hollywood films like Paul Mazursky's Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and Robert Altman's M*A*S*H* questioned nearly every aspect of American life...
...But as Eyman notes, he also inspired fierce loyalty: "To work at MGM in these years was to have a sense of security unparalleled in the movie industry—many employees were like enlightened Moonies, spouting a cult of MGM...
...Off screen, of course, Hollywood's elite has campaigned nonstop against the Iraq War and the Bush administration...
...Borrowing and striving, escape he did, to Haverhill, Massachusetts, where he opened his first movie theater in 1907, proclaiming its devotion to "high-class films...
...Soon Mayer had six movie houses, each with its own theme: one ran westerns, another romances, and so on...
...The home video market, another source of licensing profits, is now larger than that of movie theaters, and will get larger still as more Americans lug home those wide-screen high-def TVs...
...Theater ticket sales now make up less than 15 percent of studio revenues...
...v. Paramount et al...
...If a story makes me cry, I know it's good...
...strong-armed the studios into giving up their theaters, weakening the moguls and shifting power to actors, independent filmmakers, and the agents who represented them...
...Drawing on age-old heroic archetypes, box office giants like Spider-Man 2 and The Chronicles of Narnia focus on the struggle between good and evil, extol self-sacrifice and martial virtues, and come down on the side of Truth...
...He later attributed his intimidating strength—occasionally unleashed on mulish filmmakers—to this harsh experience...
...And the politics of some of these movies may surprise...
...The mogul's mogul and a lifeBrian C. Anderson, senior editor of City Journal, is the author of South Park Conservatives...
...A star is made," Mayer explained, "carefully and cold-bloodedly built up from nothing...
...It was proper to tell stories of success and its importance, so others could achieve what he had achieved," says Eyman...
...By the mid-1930s, MGM stood at the apex of this system...
...How do such films get the green light...
...population went to the movies weekly...
...A small, vibrant moviemaking right is emerging, centered around the annual Liberty Film Festival, film mogul Philip Anschutz, and a growing group of conservative and libertarian screenwriters and documentarians...
...They don't usually pack 'em in on opening night, and Edward R. Murrow doesn't lend himself to an action figure...
...Out of this crucible was Louis B. Mayer formed," writes Eyman...
...The first movie he screened, The Passion Play, was a smash, and Haverhill residents got used to seeing long lines snake up to the theater doors...
...Thomson looks back fondly on this period, Easy Rider notwithstanding: "I believe that there was a narrow window (from about 1967 to about 1975) in which the prospect of grown-up American cinema . . . came into being...
...It had its own barber shop, round-the-clock eatery, police force, and zoo (home to the lion that roared before every MGM production...
...No movie captured the trans-valuation of cinematic values more perfectly than Dennis Hopper's 1969 biker epic Easy Rider, "one of the worst acclaimed films ever made in America," in the words of David Thomson in The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood...
...Walk into a toy store or fast-food restaurant and see how quickly Hollywood has embraced Disney's model...
...Under his direction, MGM released a steady stream of hit movies, making stars out of Clark Gable, Katharine Hepburn, and many others, and helping to create Hollywood's Golden Age of the 1930s and '40s, when as much as two-thirds of the U.S...
...Writers packed the studio opium den...
...Directors sometimes arrived after script and casting were finished...
...Mayer knew just what the public wanted...
...Spencer Tracy's eulogy evoked the end of an age: The story he wanted to tell was the story of America—the land for which he had an almost furious love, born of gratitude—and of contrast with the hatred in the dark land of boyhood across the seas...
...Merchandizing tie-ins are omnipresent, ranging from action figures to video games...
...Looking to younger audiences has made sense for today's movie business for another reason, in Epstein's view: Since the studios can't rely on automatic turnout in the theaters, they must generate a unique audience for every movie on its opening weekend...
...Instead of the right habitually reproving Hollywood, we might see a new cinema that artistically reflects— rather than crudely imposes—a different, nonliberal, worldview...
...But he credits Mayer's generosity, his "fervent love affair with America," and his uncanny business sense, too...
...If he liked a screenplay, he'd exclaim: "It hit me here"—and thump his stomach...
...The ad campaigns usually cost more than the studios' box office take— and actors get paid a lot more these days, driving production costs higher still—so licensing becomes even more essential to profitability...
...A Night at the Opera, The Philadelphia Story, The Human Comedy—on and on the list goes...
...Mayer had final say in what movies MGM made, and what made it into those movies...
...Our pictures," he observed, "must show religion—love of flag and home—respect for father and mother...
...More than any rival studio, MGM revolved around the "star...
...population, weekly attendance wouldn't get close to 30 million again until the mid-1990s, when Hollywood began to downplay consciousness-raising and started entertaining again—and entertaining kids, especially...
...I'm a sucker for humanity...
...There are too many who look at these themes as 'unsophisticated' and lacking the 'realism' of actual life...
...New Hollywood exactly inverted Mayer's filmmaking philosophy...
...And Mayer was out, victim of a changing industry...
...A Greta Gar-bo tragedy like Camille, directed by George Cukor (the son of first-generation Hungarian immigrants), is as much Old World as New in sensibility...
...The New Hollywood spirit survives, albeit diminished, in today's industry...
...Eyman doesn't gloss over Mayer's dark side: the thirst for vengeance, the will to power, the narcissism...
...Working as a junk dealer also made him entrepreneurial...
...That would represent a big step forward in reclaiming popular culture from the left...
...Its vision of America as corrupt to its core struck a chord with younger viewers, and it earned more than $160 million in today's dollars and two Oscar nominations...
...As Edward Jay Epstein explains in The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood, the true genius of the industry's post-studio-system future was Walt Disney, a Midwesterner who never felt at home on the West Coast...
...But while he guaranteed MGM movies' wholesome values, he shrewdly delegated key responsibilities to gifted deputies like the producer Irving Thalberg...
...Four of the five best picture nominees were self-consciously "progressive" films: Good Night, and Good Luck (on fighting McCarthyism...
...Religious characters appeared in a harshly negative light, if at all...
...a year later, 700,000...
...Enlightening, not entertaining, became Hollywood's mission...
...The shining epoch of the industry passes with him...
...As the movies embraced the counterculture in the late sixties and early seventies, weekly attendence plummeted below 20 million, down from over 35 million just a few years before (television had siphoned the rest of the Golden Age's 90 million or so regular film-goers...
...Explicit sex, violence, coarse language, and nihilistic storylines characterized Hollywood's product...
...MGM's Golden Age reflected the energy and optimism of the American democracy that had lifted a poor Ukrainian Jew from peddling scrap to the pinnacles of wealth and power...
...Big business was the bad guy...
...Heroes disappeared, and the western, once a Hollywood mainstay, became the subject of mockery...
...The change was gradual, but by the 1960s the old moguls and the system they ruled were gone...
...Epstein argues that Hollywood functions according to a social and political logic as well as an economic one: Elite filmmakers want to make money, but the desire for recognition from peers and critics is also important...
...A few years later, theater owner Marcus Loew bought the successful firm and folded it into the new MGM, with Mayer appointed master of the show...
...Like so many American institutions, Hollywood was radicalized in the 1960s and '70s, and a new filmmaker elite emerged whose worldview—secular, anticapitalist, celebrating sexual liberation—was at odds with the bourgeois ethos that Mayer so loved...
...The movies came to Saint John in 1897, entrancing Mayer, who burned to escape...
...Wowed by Easy Rider's box office, the industry rushed to install younger left-of-center executives who could replicate its connection with alienated youth...
...His funeral was like that of a head of state, with former President Herbert Hoover among the honorary pallbearers and all of Hollywood's glitterati in attendance...
...Working at MGM meant that you were on call six days a week, 40 weeks a year, and had zero say in what movies you did...
...Disney could tap this colossal market by licensing the animated characters from his movies to book publishers, toy manufacturers, and scores of other industries...
...Shortly after becoming an American citizen, Mayer struck gold by buying the New England rights to D.W...
...And the studios owned the theaters, which meant that big players like MGM could freeze out independent producers and run their own movies on their own terms...
...He wandered about, seemingly forgotten, until his death in 1957...
...But the studio's sophisticated classics could also carry a darker European subtext...
...Born Lazar Meir to a Jewish family in the Ukraine in the 1880s, Mayer lived the American Dream...
Vol. 12 • November 2006 • No. 11
