In novels about Hollywood, it is the individual who is at risk. We know that the town is unkind to aspiring starlets from the Midwest, slumming novelists, and middle age, that it rewards venality and beauty. People arrive daily to have their dreams vivisected. But in the growing body of cautionary non-fiction, it is the world that is at risk. Hollywood is emerging as a global menace.
The traditional fictional starting point is Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939), followed by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon (begun in 1939 and unfinished at his death), and on through Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? (1941), Robert Stone’s Children of Light (1985), Michael Tolkin’s The Player (1989), and finally to Hollywood’s most effective modern chronicler, Bruce Wagner: I’m Losing You (1996), I’ll Let You Go (2001), and Still Holding (2003 ).
The Chrysanthemum Palace is Wagner’s latest warning. His Hollywood is an imaginatively cruel place where your vindictive, ice-queen mother belittles the size of your trailer (“Awfully small, this trailer, no?”), where your successful novelist father leaves you $10 million in his will with the proviso that you write a book that makes the New York Times bestseller list. Like Wagner’s other novels, real personalities drift in and out of the pages: coffee with Sharon Stone, spotting Nick Nolte at a bookstore or Rob Reiner at a funeral. There is a slight blurring, a documentary feel to his work. It is the perfect segue to the growing canon of non-fiction books in which the recurring theme is that Hollywood is no longer content to eat its young; it wants to eat the world. We have all become Hollywood offspring.
In 1998, David Puttnam, a former head of Columbia Pictures, sounded the alarm in his book Movies and Money. “It is frankly dangerous to allow Hollywood’s extraordinary dominance in the field of filmed entertainment to go on intensifying,” he wrote. “To do so presents the very real prospect of a fundamental dislocation between the world of the imagination created by the moving image and the everyday lives of people around the globe.”
Neal Gabler took that idea further in his book Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality, arguing that reality is being supplanted by film. We are becoming the stars of our own films, borrowing gestures, catchphrases, and attitudes from the movies we watch; we are becoming Homo scaenicus—man the entertainer. That entertainment has triumphed over culture isn’t a surprise, but Gabler warns that it is now prevailing over life itself. The historian Daniel J. Boorstin was probably the first to sound the warning in his 1962 book, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo Events in America. “We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that they can live in them.”
Manufacturing drama has become part of modern life, a staple of advertising and retail. When you enter a Gap store, the employees are equipped with headsets. Why? The clothes are heroically static, almost unchanged over the last decade. It’s unlikely that an emergency restocking of khakis will have to take place. The headsets are props to communicate the idea that something exciting is going on, that the generic clothes, the anonymous employees and shoppers are somehow all part of a larger, unstated drama, in which the consumer is playing the lead.
Entertainment is about power, Gabler says, “the power to replace the sublime with fun.” The American brand of fun has helped displace many national cinemas and has evolved into the equivalent of cultural (or anti-cultural) shock troops that land on foreign shores. The US government immediately grasped the power of the medium as a vehicle for propaganda. In 1915, President Woodrow Wilson drafted an agreement with the studios to disseminate American values to other countries. Under the deal, any film intended for export had to be approved by the government Committee on Public Information. Since all films were intended for export, it meant the government had a voice in shaping domestic cinema as well. During World War II, President Roosevelt established the Bureau of the Office of War Information and used film to influence American public opinion on the war. Now you don’t need a war (though it doesn’t hurt). The films are their own cultural ambassador, not for a wholesome America, which is a tough sell, but for a badass, righteous, wisecracking, big-breasted America.
In The Big Picture, Edward Jay Epstein provides a comprehensive schematic of the film business, its structure and implications for the future of entertainment. The industry is controlled by six studios (Viacom, Time Warner, nbc Universal, Sony, Fox, and Disney). All are part of large multinationals for which film provides between 2 and 21 percent of revenues. They own most of the independent studios (New Line, Miramax, etc.), most of the television networks (cbs, nbc, abc, Fox, upn), more than 100 cable networks (cnn, espn, Bravo, mtv), pay TV (hbo, Showtime), radio stations, print media (Time, People, Entertainment Weekly, TV Guide), and control 96 percent of the video and dvd rentals in the United States. While there is competition among the studios for stars, release dates, and audience share, the studios often work together in a complex network of alliances. It is, effectively, a multi-pronged juggernaut.
The business is important because the evolution of film has followed, to a degree, the evolution of the business. In 1947, the seven major studios made nearly 500 films and sold 4.7 billion tickets. (By contrast, in 2003, with twice the population, the six majors made eighty films and sold only 1.57 billion tickets.) Most theatres showed a new film every week, and more than a third of America went to see whatever was playing. Westerns, dramas, and comedies were cranked out cheaply and quickly. Labour costs were low because actors were committed to seven-year contracts that paid them relatively modest salaries, and almost everything was shot on sound stages. Still, the films were a wholesale operation, and the biggest profits were in retail—ticket sales in theatres, which, at the time, were owned by the studios.
The advent of television introduced competition, so movies had to be better, or at least more popular. And antitrust legislation forced the studios to sell their profitable theatre operations. The studio system began to crumble, and a new, equally frightening system took over.
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