Hollywood vs. America

The Explosive Bestseller that Shows How—and Why—the Entertainment Industry has Broken Faith with Its Audience

Michael Medved

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9780060924355
• eBook ISBN:
  9780062046208
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: American Drama
• Index: Social Sciences

Why does our popular culture seem so consistently hostile to the values that most Americans hold dear? Why does the entertainment industry attack religion, glorify brutality, undermine the family, and deride patriotism?

In this explosive book, one of the nation's best known film critics examines how Hollywood has broken faith with its public, creating movies, television, and popular music that exacerbate every serious social problem we face, from teenage pregnancies to violence in the streets.

Michael Medved powerfully argues that the entertainment business follows its own dark obsessions, rather than giving the public what it wants: In fact, the audience for feature films and network television has demonstrated its profound disillusionment in recent years, with disastrous consequences for many entertainment companies. Meanwhile, overwhelming numbers of our fellow citizens complain about the wretched quality of our popular culture--describing the offerings of the mass media as the worst ever. Medved asserts that Hollywood ignores--and assaults--the values of ordinary American families, pursuing a self-destructive and alienated ideological agenda that is harmful to the nation at large and to the industry's own interests.

In hard-hitting chapters on "The Attack on Religion," "The Addiction to Violence," "Promoting Promiscuity," "The Infatuation with Foul Language," "Kids Know Best," "Motivations for Madness," and other subjects, Medved outlines the underlying themes that turn up again and again in our popular culture. He also offers conclusive evidence of the frightening real-world impact of these messages on our society and our children.

Finally, Medved shows where and how Hollywood took a disastrous wrong turn toward its current crisis, and he outlines promising efforts both in and outside the industry to restore a measure of sanity and restraint to our media of mass entertainment.

Sure to elicit strong response, whether it takes the form of cheers of support or howls of enraged dissent, Hollywood vs. America confronts head-on one of the most significant issues of our times.

PART I:
THE POISON FACTORY

1
A Sickness in the Soul

Alienating the Audience

America’s long-running romance with Hollywood is over.

As a nation, we no longer believe that popular culture enriches our lives. Few of us view the show business capital as a magical source of uplifting entertainment, romantic inspiration, or even harmless fun. Instead, tens of millions of Americans now see the entertainment industry as an all-powerful enemy, an alien force that assaults our most cherished values and corrupts our children. The dream factory has become the poison factory.

The leaders of the industry refuse to acknowledge this rising tide of alienation and hostility. They dismiss anyone who dares to question the impact of the entertainment they produce as a “right-wing extremist” or a “religious fanatic.” They self-righteously assert their own right to unfettered free expression while condemning as “fringe groups” all organizations that plead for some sense of restraint or responsibility. In the process, Hollywood ignores the concerns of the overwhelming majority of the American people who worry over the destructive messages so frequently featured in today’s movies, television, and popular music.

Dozens of recent studies demonstrate the public’s deep disenchantment. In 1989, for instance, an Associated Press/Media General poll showed that 82 percent of a scientifically selected sample felt that movies contained too much violence; 80 percent found too much profanity; and 72 percent complained of too much nudity. By a ratio of more than three to one, the respondents believed that “overall quality” of movies had been “getting worse” as opposed to “getting better.”

In 1990, a Parents magazine poll revealed similar attitudes toward television. Seventy-one percent of those surveyed rated today’s TV as “fair, poor, or terrible.” Seventy-two percent of this sample supported strict prohibitions against “ridiculing or making fun of religion” on the air, while 64 percent backed restrictions on “ridiculing or making fun of traditional values, such as marriage and motherhood.” A Gallup Poll in 1991 turned up additional evidence of the public’s suspicious and resentful attitude toward televised entertainment. Fifty-eight percent of Americans said that they are “offended frequently or occasionally” by prime-time programming; only three percent believed that TV portrayed “very positive” values.

This widespread concern over the messages of the popular culture stems from an increasingly common conviction that mass entertainment exacerbates our most serious social problems. A Time/CNN survey in 1989 showed that 67 percent believe that violent images in movies are ”mainly to blame” for the national epidemic of teenage violence; 70 percent endorse “greater restraints on the showing of sex and violence” in feature films. A Los Angeles Times survey of the same year reported 63 percent who assert that television “encourages crime,” while a 1991 Newsweek/Gallup Poll showed 68 percent who hold that today’s movies have a “considerable” or “very great” effect in causing real-life violence.

“This Simply Cannot Go On”

The Hollywood establishment chooses to ignore these public attitudes, or else to downplay their significance. Surveying the severe financial problems that currently plague every component of the entertainment industry, the top decision-makers see nothing more than a temporary slump in business. In one typical comment, John Neal, senior vice president for marketing for United Artists Entertainment, optimistically declared: “All it takes is one big hit movie and suddenly the whole picture changes.”

That “one big hit movie,” however, will do nothing to end the alienation of an increasingly significant segment of the mainstream audience. The public’s growing disillusionment with the content of the popular culture represents a long-term trend that won’t suddenly disappear with the end of a recession, or the release of a new batch of lucky box-office blockbusters. The depth and breadth of the current crisis suggests fundamental flaws in the sort of entertainment that Hollywood, in all of its many manifestations, seeks to sell to the American people. That is why ventures as varied as home video and rock ‘n’ roll radio, feature films and prime-time television, are all suffering similar and simultaneous setbacks.

Consider, for example, the baleful situation with the three major television networks. In the last fifteen years they have lost a third of their nightly audience—some 30 million viewers. As a result, their cumulative profits have sunk from $800 million in 1984 to $400 million by 1988, to less than zero in 1991. Business analysts advance many theories for this disastrous falloff, but even television insiders consider that much of the public’s disenchantment relates directly to the quality of the programs. “The networks have lost audiences because they’ve lost touch with the American viewer,” according to Gene DeWitt, head of a prestigious New York media consulting firm interviewed by Time in November 1990. “They haven’t delivered programs that viewers want to watch.”

Syndicated columnist Mike Royko spoke for many Americans when he recently declared, “I enjoy TV trash as much as the next slob. But the quality of truly trashy trash has declined.” He went on to explain that of the top seventy-one shows in the Nielsen Ratings, “there isn’t even one that I now watch regularly.” His fellow columnist Cal Thomas announced his resolution at the end of 1990 to give up watching the networks altogether. “They have not only abandoned my values,” he wrote, “they now have sunk to the sewer level, dispensing the foulest of smells that resemble the garbage I take to the curb twice a week.”

Many of the major networks’ lost viewers have fled to the new Fox Network, or to the abundance of alternatives on cable TV, but these additional options have done nothing to increase the public’s approval of what it is watching. A survey commissioned by the National Association of Broadcasters found that a growing number of households with TV sets “feel increasing dissatisfaction” and that “the majority of viewers believe television is a negative influence.”

One reflection of viewer restlessness is the tendency toward “grazing” in their nightly viewing—using remote controls to switch stations in the middle of a program. According to a major survey for Channels magazine in 1988, 48.5 percent of all viewers regularly change programs during a show—and nearly 60 percent of viewers in the crucial eighteen-to-thirty-four age group. “Grazing is by definition a sign of dissatisfaction,” explained James Webster, professor of communications at Northwestern University. “Viewers know what is going to happen, and they wonder what they’re missing on some other channel.” According to the Gallup Poll, in 1974, 46 percent of Americans rated watching television as their favorite way of spending an evening; by 1990, that number had fallen to 24 percent.

This diminished enthusiasm for the popular culture and its products has even infected the huge teenage audience for popular music—an audience never before noted for its finicky taste or searching discernment. Overall sales of records, cassettes, and CDs plummeted a disastrous 11 percent in the first six months of 1991, and signs of restlessness and frustration turned up everywhere in the music business. Bob Krasnow, chairman of Elektra Entertainment, told Billboard magazine: “In 1991, the record business finds itself dangerously close to creative stagnation. All the formulas have been played out.” Meanwhile, numerous articles asked “Is rock dead?” while all measures of public response suggested that this once robust art form was, at best, on life-support systems.

For instance, rock ‘n’ roll’s share of the music industry’s total take slipped from 46.2 percent in 1988 to 37.4 percent in 1990. Just weeks before his death in October 1991, the legendary concert promoter Bill Graham observed that “until now, rock was recession proof … but we have just gone through the worst six months ever in the rock concert industry.” Attendance at rock concerts across the nation plunged by more than 30 percent compared to the previous year.

At the same time, the “Top 40” radio format continued its long-term slide in the Arbitron radio ratings, abandoned by even those teenagers who have always provided its core of support. In 1991 an unprecedented 56 percent of the teenage radio audience preferred listening to other formats; as a result, country and western for the first time passed Top 40 in overall popularity. In fact, the steady growth in the audience for country music, with its earthy and unpretentious attempts to connect with the everyday concerns of Middle America, provided one of the few bright spots in the general gloom of the music business. Country star Garth Brooks confounded all expectations by creating 1991's top-selling album, Ropin’ the Wind, which is expected to reach sales of more than 7 million units. Music industry analyst Bob Lefsetz, publisher of The Lefsetz Letter,declares, “Country music, unlike the rest of popular music, is talking about real lives. About real people. These artists are telling you what they feel. They’re making honest records, and that’s why their music is connecting with the public.”

Feature films, by contrast, are connecting with a shrinking percentage of the American people. Sharply increased ticket prices and the controversial content of recent films have combined to make moviegoing a form of entertainment that appeals primarily to an elite audience. According to 1991 figures from the Motion Picture Association of America, 27 percent of those who have attended college describe themselves as “frequent” moviegoers, but only 11 percent of those who failed to complete high school place themselves in that category. More significantly, 45 percent of all Americans are identified as “infrequent” moviegoers (less than twice a year), and a full 33 percent declared that they never go to the movies. Several other recent studies (Gallup, Gordon Black Corporation, Barna Research Group, Media General) show similar percentages (ranging from 35 up to 45 percent) who stay away from motion pictures altogether.

The absence of these potential patrons has devastated the movie business. At the height of the usually prosperous summer season, ticket sales plunged more than 31 percent in 1991, bringing the feature film business its worst August in twenty-three years. Even video rentals, whose seemingly inexorable rise has played such a significant role in keeping struggling studios afloat, declined 6 percent during the year. Industry analysts reported that poor audience response to the new feature films had begun to rub off on the home video business, producing a new wariness on the part of prospective renters.

An upsurge in ticket sales during the holiday season generated some reassuring headlines about the movie business, but year-end reckonings offered no real grounds for joy. According to figures from Variety, 1991 brought only 960 million motion picture admissions—the lowest total in fifteen years. The first months of 1992 confirmed the disastrous long-term trend: according to Exhibitor Relations Co., a widely used box-office data tracking firm, movie grosses between January 1 and April 15, 1992, fell an additional 9 percent from their already dismal performance of the previous year. This meant reduced income for the major studios of some $200 million. During the usually busy Presidents’ Day weekend, Variety reported that movie admissions fell a spectacular 30 percent from 1991.

As a result of the shrinking movie audience, the precarious economic situation of the major studios began attracting headlines of its own. Two of the industry’s most important and respected production companies, Orion and MGM, have recently frozen their release and production schedules as they teeter on the verge of financial collapse. Cannon Films and Weintraub Entertainment Group, both of them well-financed and high-flying independents as recently as a few years ago, have now closed down altogether. Even Carolco Pictures, producer of the year’s top hit, Terminator 2, found itself forced to cut production and to lay off one-fourth of its employees as part of its December 1991 retrenchment plan.

Peter Dekom, the universally respected entertainment lawyer and show business analyst, describes the current condition of the movie industry as “a catastrophe.” In a widely circulated September 1991 memo entitled “Chicken Little Was Right,” he concludes that “We in the industry are all wondering how we keep our life-styles together, because each and every one of us knows this simply cannot go on.”

Sleaze and Self-Indulgence

Even without the pronouncements of experts, ordinary Americans understand that Hollywood is in serious trouble. As a point of reference, ask yourself a simple question: when was the last time that you heard someone that you know say that movies—or TV, or popular music, for that matter—were better than ever? On the other hand, how recently have you listened to complaints about the dismal quality of the movies at the multiplex, the shows on the tube, or the songs on the radio?

In recent years, not even Jack Valenti, the well-paid cheerleader for the Motion Picture Association, can claim with a straight face that the movie business is scaling new artistic heights. David Puttnam, Oscar-winning producer of Chariots of Fire and former chairman of Columbia Pictures, reports, “As you move around Hollywood in any reasonably sophisticated group, you’ll find it quite difficult to come across people who are proud of the movies that are being made.” In December 1991, industry journalist Grover Lewis went even further when he declared in the pages of the Los Angeles Times: “The movies, which many of us grew up regarding as the co-literature of the age, have sunk to an abysmal low unimaginable only a few years ago.”

In fact, nearly everyone associated with the industry acknowledges the obvious collapse in the caliber of today’s films, and at the same time manages to blame someone else for the disastrous situation.

Jeffrey Katzenberg, production chief at the beleaguered Walt Disney Studios, shrugs his shoulders and cites inscrutable Higher Powers. “We’re in the hands of the movie gods,” he told the Los Angeles Times, “who will either shine down and give us good fortune or not…. That’s part of what keeps people going in this business—the magical and mysterious nature of it.”

Producer Gene Kirkwood (Rocky) offers a less “magical and mysterious” explanation for Hollywood’s troubles, pointing his finger at the writers. “When you look at the writing that’s around today, most of which is not very good, it makes you want to go back to the old films,” he explains. One of the writers of those old films, Oscar-winner I. A. L. Diamond (The Apartment) in turn cites “the lawyers and agents who run the studios, and the sublite rate subteenagers who form the bulk of the audience” for creating the present problems. Julia Phillips, the outspoken outcast who produced The Sting, specifically accuses Mike Ovitz, head of the Creative Artists Agency, who “first ruined movies, then sold out to the Japanese.”

Film critic Michael Sragow manages to identify an even more nefarious and omnipotent culprit, blaming the industry’s whole sorry mess on an over-the-hill Warner Brothers star who actually abandoned the movie business more than twenty years ago. Asserting that “American movies are still reaping the harvest of Ronald Reagan’s reign of

mediocrity and escapism,” Sragow concluded in 1990 that it was actually the former President who “ate Hollywood’s brain.”

While searching for scapegoats, the entertainment industry ignores the obvious: that Hollywood’s crisis is, at its very core, a crisis of values. It’s not “mediocrity and escapism” that leave audiences cold, but sleaze and self-indulgence. What troubles people about the popular culture isn’t the competence with which it’s shaped, but the messages it sends, the view of the world it transmits.

Hollywood no longer reflects—or even respects—the values of most American families. On many of the important issues in contemporary life, popular entertainment seems to go out of its way to challenge conventional notions of decency. For example:

• Our fellow citizens cherish the institution of marriage and consider religion an important priority in life; but the entertainment industry promotes every form of sexual adventurism and regularly ridicules religious believers as crooks or crazies.
• In our private lives, most of us deplore violence and feel little sympathy for the criminals who perpetrate it; but movies, TV, and popular music all revel in graphic brutality, glorifying vicious and sadistic characters who treat killing as a joke.
• Americans are passionately patriotic, and consider themselves enormously lucky to live here; but Hollywood conveys a view of the nation’s history, future, and major institutions that is dark, cynical, and often nightmarish.
• Nearly all parents want to convey to their children the importance of self-discipline, hard work, and decent manners; but the entertainment media celebrate vulgar behavior, contempt for all authority, and obscene language—which is inserted even in “family fare” where it is least expected.
  

As a working film critic, I’ve watched this assault on traditional values for more than a decade. Not only have I endured six or seven movies every week, year after year, but I’ve also received a steady stream of letters from moviegoers who are upset by one or another of Hollywood’s excesses. At times, they blame me for failing to warn them ardently enough about avoiding a particular film; in other cases they are writing to express their pent-up frustration with an industry that seems increasingly out of control and out of touch. My correspondents frequently use words such as “disgusting” or “pathetic” to describe the sorry state of today’s films. In 1989 a young woman from Westport, Connecticut, expressed...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the Paperback Edition
• PART I: THE POISON FACTORY
• PART II : THE ATTACK ON RELIGION
• PART III: THE ASSAULT ON THE FAMILY
• PART IV : THE GLORIFICATION OF UGLINESS
• PART V: AN INESCAPABLE INFLUENCE
• PART VI: BELOW THE BOTTOM LINE
• Notes on Sources
• Index
• Acknowledgments
• Also by Michael Medved
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher