Books discussed in this essay:
The Chrysanthemum Palace
by Bruce Wagner
Simon & Schuster, 2005, 224 pp., $31

The Big Picture: The New Logic of
Money and Power in Hollywood
by Edward Jay Epstein
Random House, 2005, 396 pp., $36

Disneywar
by James B. Stewart
Simon & Schuster, 2005, 572 pp., $44

Life the Movie: How Entertainment
Conquered Reality
by Neal Gabler
Alfred A. Knopf, 1998, 290 pp., $25

At the beginning of the last century, church leaders denounced film as the devil’s instrument. This new entertainment drew people out of the light and into the darkness, a perfect metaphor for damnation. That refrain has been repeated often since then by various groups: the Moral Majority, Congress, and Henry Ford (his anti-Semitic newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, noted that the majority of studios were owned by Jews: “We [have] a movie problem”). Usually the battle is fought on moral grounds—the violence, sex, profanity, and cigarette smoking will corrupt a new generation. And perhaps it will. As summer passes and we continue to digest its blockbusters, the question must be raised once again: how dangerous is Hollywood?