Reel Power

Hollywood Cinema and American Supremacy

Matthew Alford

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2010
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781783714445
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Hollywood is often characterised as a stronghold of left-liberal ideals. In Reel Power, Matthew Alford shows that it is in fact deeply complicit in serving the interests of the most regressive US corporate and political forces. Films like Transformers, Terminator: Salvation and Black Hawk Down are constructed with Defence Department assistance as explicit cheerleaders for the US military, but Matthew Alford also emphasises how so-called 'radical' films like Three Kings, Hotel Rwanda and Avatar present watered-down alternative visions of American politics that serve a similar function. Reel Power is the first book to examine the internal workings of contemporary Hollywood as a politicised industry as well as scores of films across all genres. No matter what the progressive impulses of some celebrities and artists, Alford shows how they are part of a system that is hard-wired to encourage American global supremacy and frequently the use of state violence.

Part I

Controlling the Dream Factory

Reporter [to Emilio Estevez]: ‘Emilio, how historically accurate … ’

Orange representative: ‘Hey, sister, the Discovery Channel is down the block. We just want to blow things up and sell some phones, don’t we Emilio?’

Orange mobile phone advert, 2009

1

Hollywood Screened

Conventional wisdom holds that Hollywood has long opposed and undermined US power. From its inception in the early twentieth century, the LA-based movie industry was viewed with suspicion by European and American elites who saw it as a degraded, Jewish influence undermining traditional values with minority views. In the 1950s, conservative concerns about Communists in Hollywood became so severe that the US embarked on a purge, blacklisting film-makers who were considered ‘un-American’. Setting the tone of public debate for the 1990s and beyond, Michael Medved’s bestseller Hollywood vs America argued that since at least the 1960s Hollywood had presented America, including its military, as ‘the enemy’.¹

In fact, as Reel Power demonstrates by analysing scores of high-budget contemporary movies that depict the application of US power, such as True Lies (1994), Independence Day (1996) and Iron Man (2008), the film industry routinely promotes the dubious notion that the United States is a benevolent force in world affairs and that unleashing its military strength overseas has positive results for humanity. US intervention, furthermore, is rendered not pre-emptive but rather the only reasonable response to ‘bad guys’ and the best way in which the US can gain closure.

Absent from these films is much, if any, sense that US authorities serve private interests (although there may be ‘bad apples’ who are weeded out by the system itself), that US action is irrational or nationalistic, or that there might be more satisfying and effective peaceful solutions worth pursuing. The most critical position Hollywood adopts on screen is to say that well-meaning forays into other countries may backfire, with Americans – particularly those representatives of powerful institutions – being the significant victims of such innocent lapses, as in Black Hawk Down (2002), Munich (2005) and The Siege (1998).

These films are not usually made or rejected through ‘conspiracies’, censorship, or other heavy-handed government activity, but rather, as George Orwell put it in regard to literary censorship: ‘Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban not because of direct government intervention but rather because of a general tacit agreement that “it wouldn’t do” to mention that particular fact.’²

It is the case that there is some public demand for simplistic, unchallenging narratives and also that it is not always easy within traditional genre constraints to present more interrogative political perspectives. However, there are several less obvious but decisive industrial factors that ensure Hollywood generates considerable sympathy for the status quo and, indeed, frequently glorifies US institutions and their use of political violence. The cumulative effect of these factors, which are discussed below in detail, is that it is extremely difficult for a film to emerge through the Hollywood system that criticises US power at a systematic level, while it is relatively easy for an explicitly pro-establishment or status-quo film to be made, particularly one which is America-centric and at ease with the spectacle of US high-tech violence against villainous foreigners.

Of course, most of the time, any issues of US power politics are simply ignored altogether in favour of other narratives, with a particular emphasis on formulaic, commercially friendly films and franchises that dominate the highest box-office lists.

So what are these factors and how do they affect the content of Hollywood studio productions?

CONCENTRATED CORPORATE OWNERSHIP

Just six theatrical film studios, known collectively as ‘the majors’, control the vast majority of the world’s movie business from production to distribution: Disney, Columbia/Sony Pictures Entertainment, Paramount Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Warner Brothers and Universal. The majors are owned by multinational ‘parent’ corporations, respectively the Walt Disney Company, Sony, Viacom Inc., News Corp, Time Warner Inc. and (until 2009) General Electric/Vivendi.³ Smaller but still significant companies include MGM, United Artists, Lionsgate, as well as Dreamworks SKG, which is named after its billionaire founders Steven Spielberg, Jeff Katzenberg and David Geffen. ‘The studios are basically distributors, banks, and owners of intellectual copyrights,’ summarises Richard Fox, vice-president of Warner Brothers.⁴

Claiming that its cultural heritage must not be ‘surrendered to another nation’,⁵ the US government has jealously protected the US film market, as well as supporting the majors with numerous tax incentives,⁶ representation at an international level and very relaxed media consolidation rules. Some of the majors have overseas owners – News Corp (Australian), Vivendi (French), Sony (Japanese) – but Washington limits foreign ownership to 25 per cent and control of studio output remains in California and New York.⁷ The magazine Canadian Business even dubbed the studios ‘Hollywood’s welfare bums’.⁸

What impact does concentrated corporate ownership have on film content? First of all, it has squeezed out competition from foreign films, which accounted for nearly 10 per cent of the North American market in the 1960s, 7 per cent by the mid-1980s, but just 0.5 per cent by the late 1990s.⁹ For the 2006 Oscars, a record 91 countries submitted entries to the foreign language category but only seven had American distributors.¹⁰ Variety magazine had already summed up the situation with the pithy headline, ‘Earth to Hollywood: You Win’.¹¹ Thus, while of course Hollywood is aware of its international markets, it is liable to make films about and for America and Americans, marginalising the importance of foreigners and foreign perspectives.

Secondly, the majors use their main tool – capital – to set the industry standards for bankable stars and high-tech special effects, thereby marginalising lower-budget productions. But with the average cost of producing and marketing a movie sky-rocketing to $106.6 million in 2007¹² – the last year for which data was released – studio executives are under pressure not to squander any opportunity to maximise profits. Films will consequently tend to avoid political narratives that are unfamiliar to American audiences. Producer Robert Evans explains that film-makers ‘don’t do the unexpected, they’re too scared – the prices are too high’. Evans believes it would no longer be possible to make a movie like The Godfather (1972) – the biting metaphor for capitalism in America that he helped make in the 1970s – because studios would consider it too risky for the price tag.¹³

Former president of Paramount David Kirkpatrick agrees: the result is that ‘You need a homogenized piece of entertainment … something that is not particularly edgy, particularly sophisticated.’¹⁴ That much is accurate, although Kirkpatrick’s characterisation of the resultant output as ‘fluffy’ is not so appropriate for the scores of distinctly non-fluffy national security-themed films discussed in this book, such as The Kingdom (2007), Body of Lies (2008) and Vantage Point (2008).

COMMERCIALISATION

Product placement and merchandising deals for toys, clothing, novelisations and soundtracks are attractive to movie-makers because, even if the movie fails, the manufacturer incurs the loss. This is only fair, since the movie is the advertisement. Product placement in motion pictures is valued at $1.2 billion annually and, since the average movie costs $30 million just to market,¹⁵ such deals can be very useful in adding millions to turnover.¹⁶ Indeed, the James Bond movie Die Another Day (2002) made between $120 and $160 million from associated brands for the twenty or so product placements.¹⁷

Nowadays, and particularly since the 1990s, the majority of Fortune 500 companies are involved in product placement¹⁸ and specialist companies exist to place products as efficiently and comprehensively as possible.¹⁹ ‘We choose projects where we have maximum control,’ explained one plugster as early as 1990. ‘We break a film down and tell the producers exactly where we want to see our clients’ brands.’²⁰

The most obvious impact on Hollywood productions is that the value placed on artistic quality is further diminished. ‘Studios are run by MBAs whose entire training and experience is to avoid risk,’ explained Mark Litwak in an article that pointed to the importance of networking, rather than creative talent, in Hollywood. ‘Ironically it’s movies that are most original that become blockbusters. People want variety even if the studios don’t.’²¹

Peter Bart (2001), editor-in-chief of industry magazine Variety, recalls his experiences of making the decision to move a film project to the pre-production phase (known as ‘green-lighting’):

The green-light meeting, when I first started at Paramount, would consist of maybe three or four of us in a room. Perhaps two or three of us would have read the script under discussion. And people said stupid things like, ‘I kind of like this movie.’ Or, ‘I look forward to seeing this movie.’ Inane things like that. The green-light decision process today consists of maybe 30 or 40 people. There’s one group there to discuss the marketing tie-ins. How much will McDonald’s or Burger King put up? There’s somebody else there to discuss merchandising toy companies and so forth. Someone else is there to discuss what the foreign co-financiers might be willing to put up. So everyone is discussing the business aspects of this film. And it’s sometimes unusual for someone actually to circle back and talk about the script, the cast, the package – whether the whole damn thing makes any sense to begin with.²²

Bart goes on to explains that the movies now being made are those which ‘appeal to the marketing and distribution team most of all. [They] have the heavy votes.’ In some cases, large chunks of script are generated with the primary aim of selling products, as with James Bond’s BMW scene in GoldenEye (1995), the extensive Bugs Bunny/Michael Jordan brand associations in Space Jam (1998) and the alien in Mac and Me (1988), who lives on a diet of Coke and Skittles. Just as insidious though, explains David Lancaster, ‘a fog of fudge and compromise hangs over almost everything’;²³ the order of the day is happy endings, light entertainment and an absence of disturbing political narratives.

The economic penalties for not buying into this system can be serious. In 1997, Reebok sued Tristar Pictures, claiming it had reneged on its promise to feature its placement prominently in the ‘happy ending’ scene of Jerry Maguire.²⁴ The parties settled out of court, purportedly for millions, and the Reebok advert was reinstated for the DVD.²⁵ In a similar case in 1990, Black & Decker settled a $150,000 lawsuit out of court over a promotion it had developed for a drill that Bruce Willis ended up not using in Die Hard 2.²⁶

There was also the case of the kids’ cartoon movie Iron Giant (1999), an unusually sensitive Cold War allegory, which was a box-office flop despite receiving a spectacular 97 per cent rating on rottentomatoes.com (a website which processes all available movie reviews from established critics). A major reason was that the film had been poorly marketed by Warner Bros.²⁷ Writer Tim McCanlies explained:

We had toy people and all of that kind of material ready to go, but all of that takes a year! Burger King and the like wanted to be involved. In April we showed them [Warner Bros] the movie, and we were on time. They said, ‘You’ll never be ready on time.’ No, we were ready on time. We showed it to them in April and they said, ‘We’ll put it out in a couple of months.’ That’s a major studio, they have 30 movies a year, and they just throw them off the dock and see if they either sink or swim, because they’ve got the next one in right behind it. After they saw the reviews they [Warner Bros] were a little shamefaced.²⁸

Others took away a more reductive lesson from Iron Giant. ‘People always say to me, “why don’t you make smarter movies?”’, said Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Warner Bros’ president of production at the time. ‘The lesson is: every time you do, you get slaughtered.’²⁹

Jay May, president of a Los Angeles-based product placement agency, sees the logical outcome of Hollywood’s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Part I Controlling the Dream Factory
• Part II Power Projected
• Part III Reel Violence
• Endnotes
• Filmography
• Film Index
• General Index