Moviemaking is a marriage between art and business.

By Jack Valenti

In 1968, as film studies began to appear on the curricula of American universities, the New Yorker’s film critic Pauline Kael complained that students who interpreted a movie’s plot as a mechanism for producing audience response were being corrected by teachers who explained it in terms of a creative artist working out a theme, “as if the conditions under which the movie is made and the market for which it is designed were irrelevant, as if the latest product from Warners or Universal should be analyzed like a lyric poem.”

… What has been drawing us to movies, Kael argued, is the opening they provide “into other, forbidden or surprising, kinds of experience,” “the details of crime and high living and wicked cities . . . the dirty smile of the city girl who lured the hero away from Janet Gaynor.” As the title of this chapter indicates, I want to take entertainment seriously. But in doing so, it is important to bear in mind Kael’s structure that “If we always wanted works of complexity and depth we wouldn’t be going to movies about glamorous thieves and seductive women who sing in cheap cafés.

”Taking Hollywood seriously involves acknowledging the cultural importance of the entertainment industry and examining its products for what they are, rather than evaluating them according to criteria borrowed from other critical traditions. If Hollywood is not a suburb of Los Angeles, perhaps it is best thought of as a place in our communal imaginations, or as a gateway to a place of common imagining. In The Wizard of Oz (1939), when the screen turns from black-and-white to Technicolor, Dorothy (Judy Garland) tells her little dog, “I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more, Toto.” It turns out that she is both right and wrong. The inhabitants of Oz are all familiar figures from the Midwest farm she left, and when Dorothy finally achieves her ambition to get back to Kansas, she has realized that “If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t go looking any further than my own back yard, because if you can’t find it there, then you probably never lost it in the first place.”

… Many people who have visited Los Angeles to look for Hollywood have written about their encounters as if they have been discovering a familiar foreign land. European writers of travel books about America in the 1920s and 1930s often included a chapter detailing some of the exotic features of the place, and in due course it fell prey to the investigations of anthropologists. In 1946 Hortense Powdermaker, whose previous fieldwork had been among the Melanesian peoples of the south Pacific, spent a year among the natives of Hollywood. Her book, Hollywood the Dream Factory: An Anthropologist Looks at the Movie-Makers, provided the model for a stream of later journalistic and sociological investigations. In it she compared ex-cannibal chiefs and magicians to front-office executives and directors. In Hollywood’s atmosphere of permanent crisis and its belief in “the breaks” as the cause of success, she found elements of magical thinking that might have been recognizable in New Guinea: “Just as the Melanesian thinks failure would result from changing the form of a spell, so men in Hollywood consider it dangerous to depart from their formulas. . . . Powdermaker found Hollywood to be a fundamentally irrational place, where a “pseudo-friendliness and show of affection cover hostility and lack of respect.” The Hollywood she observed was a site of contradictions, both “a center for creative genius” and “a place where mediocrity flourishes;” at the same time “an important industry with worldwide significance” and “an environment of trivialities.”

…“Making movies must be either business or art, rather than both.” For many filmmakers, she suggested, “there seems to be a continuous conflict, repeated for each picture, between making a movie which they can respect and the ‘business’ demands of the front office. It is assumed . . . that a movie which has the respect of the artist cannot make money.” This opposition also structured her own account of Hollywood, as it has structured so many other writers’ tales. Describing one of her informants, “Mr Literary,” a successful writer of A-features, she suggested that: He has been regarding his work at the studio as a form of play and rather enjoys it as such. He uses the word “play” because he says that he cannot take it seriously. . . . He has never been working on any movie which has even moderately satisfied him. Each time he starts with high hopes that this one will be different, but each time it is the same: so many interferences, so many changes, that the final script is not his, although he has had far more influence over it than most writers have… He is concerned with working out a real problem and any interference with it he would regard as a real crisis.