Posted on 01/13/2004 2:37:26 PM PST by quidnunc
You usually hear the tune on Oscar night, but not often the lyric, which is more to the point:
Hooray For Hollywood
Where youre terrific if youre even good.
When someones really terrific, its a different story. In a town where everyone from Johnny Depp to Janeane Garofalo is an artist, Hollywood doesnt always know how to deal with the real thing. In 1996, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, mulling over their Career Achievement Award, decided to reject Elia Kazan and honour instead Roger Corman, the director of Swamp Women, Attack Of The Crab Monsters and Teenage Caveman. Swamp Women and Attack Of The Crab Monsters are good, and Teenage Caveman is not only good, its also an eloquent plea for world disarmament, at least according to its youthful star Robert Vaughan. But On The Waterfront is terrific. This should not be a difficult call.
But apparently it is. Kazan can make a claim to be the father of modern American acting, the man who brought Stanislavskian techniques to Broadway and then to the silver screen. Insofar as the young lions of our present-tense culture aspire to emulate any of the old guys, its not David Niven or even Jimmy Cagney who resonate, but Marlon Brando, James Dean, Rod Steiger on all of whom Kazan was the greatest single influence. He was a great theatre director, and later a fine novelist, and, when he walked on stage in 1999 to receive a belated Lifetime Achievement Oscar, he might reasonably have expected the orchestra to be vamping Leonard Bernsteins theme to On The Waterfront for a good ten minutes while Hollywood roared its appreciation. Instead, outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, elderly hack screenwriters led protests and, inside, the likes of Sean Penn sat on their hands. For both Hollywoods ancient D-list Communists and its A-list anti-anti-Communists, theres only one thing about Kazan that matters: he named names.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
It turns out I don't have to. Steyn's tribute to her follows his article at the head of this thread. Here it is
Leni Riefenstahl was a brilliant cinematographer and editor who could compose and edit anything, except, in the end, her own life. If only shed been able to snip one problematic decade out of her 101 years, wed know her as a game old gal who in her 60s went off to live with an African tribe, in her 70s learned to scuba dive, and at the age of 98 survived a plane crash in the Sudan.
If only it werent for that awkward patch
In the 1930s, Fraulein Riefenstahl put her formidable film-making talents to the cause of the Third Reich, and produced one of the most remarkable films ever made: Triumph Of The Will. Granted that audiences were a lot less media savvy in 1934 and granted that a people dumb enough to fall for National Socialism will fall for anything, its still hard to believe that even in its day anyone accepted what remained Fraulein Riefenstahls official explanation to the end that this was just a documentary record of the 1934 annual party convention. Whatever Triumph Of The Will is, its not a documentary. Its language is that of feature films not Warner Brothers gangster movies or John Ford westerns, but rather the supersized genres, the epics and musicals where huge columns of the great unwieldy messy mass of humanity get tidied and organized and, if that isnt the essence of fascism, what is? Today, you can see Riefenstahls influence in the work of George Lucas (Star Wars) and Paul Verhoeven (Starship Troopers), both film-makers for whom the principal thrill of directing seems to be the opportunity it affords to subordinate the individual.
Her directing career died with the Third Reich. Art is my life and I was deprived of it, said Leni Riefenstahl. Tough. Whatever her disclaimers, she made evil look better than it had any right to: a cautionary tale in the art of film.
Someone made a documentary of Reifenstal's life in which she explains what she did and why she did it. Steyn is far too glib in his descriptions...but he does recognize the power of art - particularly in his last sentence.
Sorry, you do. The art that you see is filtered by the "art world."
Wrong again. I just can't be lazy and uninterested. Great fortunes have been repeatedly made by perceptive people with taste of their own and the courage to pursue it...and the Internet has made it so much easier.
Pablo Picasso
I have my own view of Picasso's work. I'd care about what others say only if I find their views insightful or if I were trying to put a price on one of his pieces.
If somebody was advocating the violent overthrow of the US government to impose communism, I do see that as something the government should be concerned about.
I am troubled though about our government trying to figure out if a sitcom writer ever was a member of the communist party and to grill them under oath.
Should we have in the 90's, grilled every person who intellectually agreed with the militia movement? I am just wondering if the cure is greater than the disease? A limousine communist in Hollywood, who wanted the workers to unite, and was actually more of a socialist, than a hardcore commie, was probably being swept up in this. They may be wrong, wrong about politics, economics, ideology, but, so what? As long as they weren't spying for the Soviet Union, what business is it of the federal government if they wanted a Utopian world where everybody sang kumbaya while they shared all the wealth? It doesn't work that way, but I don't think it's a federal offense.
The times were different, and tough measures needed to be taken, against people who were fronting for the U.S.S.R., but I am a bit of a civil libertarian when there is no justification for abridging somebody's constitutional, and God Given right to believe something foolish.
First, I think we have to consider the HUAC in the context of the time. Communism worldwide was on quite a roll, the Soviets controlling Eastern Europe & getting both the atom & hydrogen bomb, China just going Red, etc. TV was just a new medium and unquestionable film just as much, if not more, an influence on the culture as it is today. In that context I can understand the fear of communist influence on the US.
If somebody was advocating the violent overthrow of the US government to impose communism, I do see that as something the government should be concerned about. I am troubled though about our government trying to figure out if a sitcom writer ever was a member of the communist party and to grill them under oath.
Agreed. The whole thing is troubling.
The times were different, and tough measures needed to be taken, against people who were fronting for the U.S.S.R., but I am a bit of a civil libertarian when there is no justification for abridging somebody's constitutional, and God Given right to believe something foolish.
Again I agree. But if Hollywood would have stood up to the Committee, they could have called their bluff. As Steyn called it a ...moment of colossal Hollywood cowardice any obstacle.... had he chosen to, Wasserman and his talent agency could have broken the blacklist as decisively as he broke the studio system.
We, the people, and even Hollywood, ARE the government. WE are responsible for OUR government.
Im just tired of the Hollywood-types blaming the government on one hand for a non-existent blacklist, and on the other hand sucking up to liberal politicians trying to make this country as socialistic as possible.
Bottom line; communism bad, communist in Hollywood bad, and the methods (HUAC) our government employed in the late 40s-early 50s were troubling. And to the actors who feel they must be active in politics or on some crusade during their down time between movies; JUST SHUT UP.
You've done some research, it seems. So it won't be hard for you to answer this: Why didn't Robeson ever practice law with that well-earned degree?
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