Richard Reeves on Political Books
Richard Reeves on Political Books The last time he was seen regularly in Washington, Benjamin Stein was writing the final defenses of the president he worked for, Richard Nixon. His later...
...Most people don’t even look at their bills...
...Now they have their hands on the levers that move the world...
...The super-medium of television is spewing out the messages of a few writers and producers (literally in the low hundreds), almost all of whom live in Los Angeles...
...Businessmen were bad people and workers were good people...
...I noticed further that the lives of men and women and children on TV shows, so different from any life I had ever seen or participated in, was really the life of Los Angeles-the clean streets...
...Gary Mars ha1 (“ H ap p y Days,” “Laverne and Shirley”) “Money has no value anymore...
...In another age they would have been garment salesmen,” Stein told me...
...Lee Rich Entertainment television, Stein argues, is run by a collection of rich, conspiracy-minded populists-most of them irreligious Jews who came from New York and now live on the west side of Los Angeles...
...If America wants to watch television for four or six hours a day, fine...
...the polite, handsome police...
...In the midst of the most inane and repetitious television shows, comedy and adventure, and even soap operas, there was a spate of political and social messages so clear and interesting...
...Richard Reeves is the author of Convention...
...Mort Lachman ("All in the Family") "There's definitely a link between big business and organized crime...
...rebel, idiosyncratic cops were the salt of the earth and smart, too...
...Even if they are, as Stein describes them, “the finest, most thoughtful people I had ever met...
...The introduction explains what Stein was trying to do: "For the first time in my life, I started to watch a lot of television...
...It was a revelation...
...Their business manager pays them...
...Leonard Goldberg (“Charlie’s Angels”) “Is the church i m p o r t a n t in American life...
...Television is not necessarily a mirror of anything besides what those few people think...
...Stein, who now works for Norman Lear's Tandem Productions, may or may not be right about the political and social impact of prime-time television, but he makes a hell of a case that most of it is the interchangeable product of a few folks with a rather bizarre view of the world...
...Taft Goes To Hollywood...
...His later work---screenplays, television scripts, and a novel, DREEMZ--has been better received...
...These are some of their other opinions, not atypical, as recorded in the book: "In the world we have built there is almost no middle class any more...
...What does a young (34) Republican see in LaLaLand...
...the shiny new cars issued to everyone over 16...
...Lee Rich ("Eight is Enough," "The Waltons") "[Government] makes everyone in the country have to hire a tax attorney and an accountant...
...That has helped to incur crime...
...To begin with, they think they're poor and oppressed even though many of them are making upwards of $ 10,000 a week...
...I] arranged to interview in person and by proxy about 40 important TV writers and producers...
...but do they have the power to impose their values on the larger, televisionaddicted society...
...There is a lower class and a medium-toupper class...
...The fit between the message of the TV shows and the opinions of the people who make the TV shows was excellent...
...There has to be a link to make big business work...
...Stein has, as they say, gone California: sort of Mr...
...High-level police were bad people...
...Do these people, a very talented group, have as much control over the times, the nation, and the future as Ben Stein believes they do...
...The answer, an extremely interesting one, is his book just published by Basic Books: The View From Sunset BoulevardAmerica As Brought to You by the People Who Make Television...
...the strong-jawed men and the lean, unthreatening women...
...He finds them antireligious, anti-business, anti-military, anti-small town, pro-bureaucracy, pro-minority, and a lot more...
...But it’s insanity to let a few people hold such control over the content of the most powerful communications medium...
...I asked them a set of questions designed to draw out their feelings about American life...
...But I do believe the potential-or the dangeris there...
...His c'oluinn is a regular feature of The Washington Monthly...
...I’m not as sure as he is about the effectiveness of their power...
...That last sentence is the key...
Vol. 10 • February 1979 • No. 11
