Hollywood Scripting

[justdrew]

oh man, now here's a good western, at least watch from 4 minutes to 8, great situational joke at ~7min



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Genius,_Two_Partners_and_a_Dupe

[Hammer of Los]

...

I saw that years ago.

Terence Hill is so funny man.

...

[JackRiddler]

.

No, the following article, a look at the life of one Prof. Sol Yurick, whom I did not know before today, is NOT mainly about movies. Except that he wrote the novel that was adapted into "The Warriors"! However, I find it very insightful about several RI dimensions that we have been hitting in this thread including CIA attempts to guide and shape cultural and media institutions. Some of it could fit the Sociopatholigarchy thread, or any of the many RI threads that come up in a search for "The Cultural Cold War."

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ar ... =firefox-a

My intuition says it's best placed here.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/01/09/ ... rior/print

January 09, 2013

Sol Yurick 1925-2013
The Death of a Culture Warrior

by LOUIS PROYECT

Although my only contact with Sol Yurick was a class I took with him at the Brecht Forum in New York in the early 80s, his passing genuinely touched me. For a good overview on his life, I recommend the obituary by Eric Homberger that appeared in the January 7, 2013 Guardian. It starts off:

The American novelist Sol Yurick, who has died aged 87, was too radical, too extreme and too violent for the respectable literary establishment of New York, yet no writer more fully embodied the city’s anguished spirit in the 1960s. His novels The Warriors (1965), Fertig (1966) and The Bag (1968) constitute a trilogy of vibrant energy, biting satire and high, though irreverent, artistic seriousness.

The Warriors, a tale of gangs and street violence, was rejected by 27 publishers before it finally appeared. With its carefully crafted parallels with Xenophon’s Anabasis, it was more literary than Hubert Selby Jr’s Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964), but shared its gritty feel for the city’s underclass. In 1979 it was made into a stylish film by Walter Hill. Vincent Canby in the New York Times considered the film “a mish-mash of romantic cliches, moods and visual effects”.

When I was a kid I loved this!

Yurick, who thought it trashy and sentimentalised, agreed. After the New York premiere, his daughter, Susanna, said: “It’s all right, daddy, the kids will love it.” And they did. The Warriors became a cult classic, later embraced by hip-hop acts including the Wu-Tang Clan, spoofed in a Nike commercial and adapted as a PlayStation 2 game.

Hill’s movie drew upon comic-book characterisation but Yurick, who came out of the proletarian belly of New York, knew better. His parents, Sam and Flo, immigrants from eastern Europe, were communists and trade-union activists. Marx and Lenin, strikes and demonstrations, were regular topics of dinner-table conversation. His earliest political memory was, at the age of 14, the anguish he felt at the Stalin-Hitler pact. Yurick enlisted in the US army in 1944 and trained as a surgical technician. A long illness led to a medical discharge in 1945. The GI bill enabled him to attend New York University, where he studied literature. He read James Joyce with intensity and conceived (half-seriously) the Joycean idea of using the Anabasis of Xenophon as a way to tell the story of a gang battling through the city towards their home at Coney Island.

He went to work as a social investigator in the department of welfare in 1954. Life within the welfare bureaucracy led Yurick to conclude that such programmes were designed solely to control the poor. He later wrote an angry essay on welfare which he submitted to Commentary, a leading Jewish magazine with intellectual pretensions. It was repeatedly rejected by the editor, Norman Podhoretz. Yurick had committed the unforgivable sin of writing with too much passion, of violating the canons of civility and detachment. He was sure that the rejection was political.

Like Tuli Kupferberg, who was born two years before Yurick and to whom he bore a striking resemblance, he had an amazing ability to connect with much younger people. As eternal hipsters, such radical writers always had ‘tude to spare.

When the 60s kicked in, Sol Yurick jumped into the deep end of the pool as Homberg’s obit recounts:

From the mid-1960s Yurick became increasingly involved in street protests against the war in Vietnam. As the protests accelerated into free speech confrontations with “liberal” educational establishments such as Columbia University, he worked with Students for a Democratic Society, contributing to the SDS tract Who Runs Columbia? and sharpening their strategy.

Unlike many 60s leftists who “repented” for their excess, Yurick never backed down or apologized. Like many of us, he regarded periods of “normalcy” as displaying all the abnormality of a social system in terminal decay.

In a special 1984 Social Text issue titled “The 60′s without Apology”, there’s a Yurick piece titled “The Other Side” that blasted the dominant narrative depicting the sixties as some kind of nervous breakdown. The “other side” referred to in his title were the forces of law and order that did everything in their power to get the genie back in the bottle. Challenging the idea that the movement “ran out of steam”, Yurick viewed repression as key to the movement’s retreat.

Who this “other side” is would require a massive book and this is only a sketch. Certainly E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class gives us a glimpse. The “other side” is a fluctuating entity. But we can say this much. They evince two kinds of police activity. The overtly repressive and the covert. The covert attempts to maintain proper cultural climates: white and black propaganda, disinformation, control of the popular media, news, culture. In the west there is no one agenda. Todd Gitlin, Stuart Ewen have written about this. Although not perfectly distinguishable, the non-ideological covert involves intelligence and counter-intelligence operations, spying, provocation, penetration, deception, the use of fronts and cut-outs, the creation of disruptive splinter groups, seizing control of leadership positions, and so on.

Now a good 30 years after having taken a class on debunking “the world’s great literature” with Sol, I can remember what a great learning experience it was. Like most people fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to endure a typical freshman humanities class, I was taught to adopt a worshipful attitude toward Homer, the Bible, Shakespeare and company.

I imagine that these sorts of classes (indoctrination really) were inspired by the introduction of classes on “Great Literature” into the British university of the Victorian era. As religion and belief in the monarchy began to subside among the working class, astute servants of the ruling class came to the conclusion that Shakespeare, Jane Austin, et al could help bind the nation together in pursuit of the ruling class’s ambitions. Before literature became elevated to this lofty status, it was simply seen as entertainment–something that ladies and gentlemen enjoyed in their leisure.

All this is discussed in some detail in The Rise of English, an article in Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory, an Introduction. Eagleton states:

If one were asked to provide a single explanation for the growth of English studies in the later nineteenth century, one could do worse than reply: ‘the failure of religion’. By the mid- Victorian period, this traditionally reliable, immensely powerful ideological form was in deep trouble. It was no longer winning the hearts and minds of the masses, and under the twin impacts of scientific discovery and social change its previous unquestioned dominance was in danger of evaporating. This was particularly worrying for the Victorian ruling class, because religion is for all kinds of reasons an extremely effective form of ideological control…

Fortunately, however, another, remarkably similar discourse lay to hand: English literature. George Gordon, early Professor of English Literature at Oxford, commented in his inaugural lecture that ‘England is sick, and . . . English literature must save it. The Churches (as I understand) having failed, and social remedies being slow, English literature has now a triple function: still, I suppose, to delight and instruct us, but also, and above all, to save our souls and heal the State.’ Gordon’s words were spoken in our own century, but they find a resonance everywhere in Victorian England. It is a striking thought that had it not been for this dramatic crisis in mid-nineteenth- century ideology, we might not today have such a plentiful supply of Jane Austen casebooks and bluffer’s guides to Pound.

About the closest analogy to Sol Yurick’s brilliant take-down of Great Literature was the memorable scene in the 1989 Batman, when Jack Nicholson goes through a museum writing graffiti like “the joker was here” on immortal masterpieces one after the other. The vandalism was preceded by an announcement to his henchmen, “Gentlemen, let’s broaden our minds.”

Determined to find some example in print of Yurick’s assault on High Culture, I struck a bit of gold in JSTOR, a database of scholarly articles, once again tapping in to the Social Text vein. In the Autumn 1989 issue, there’s an article with the wonderfully provocative title How the Athenians Planned to Colonize the Mind of the West and Immortalize Themselves. No groveling at the altar of Greek Civilization here! He reminds his readers how the “culture wars” that burned so hot at the time were ultimately about preserving the status quo:

The CIA and other First World intelligence agencies were found to have penetrated newspapers, advertising agencies, public relations firms, think tanks, corporations, experimented with psychology and mind-altering drugs…the list seemed endless. They also infiltrated the world of literature and even made agents of dead authors (such as Dostoevsky and Henry James) in the great Cold War struggle. They promoted living writers, critics and philosophers, to say nothing of artists. The Cold War was not only a covert and overt political, military and economic struggle, but an intellectual war to preserve the values of what it called “Western Civilization” against the leveling, canon-devouring “Communist” Bloc, who were barbarically seen to be trying to destroy, devour and loot capitalism and the culture some capitalists seemed to deem necessary for the West’s survival.

Artistic “freedom” and modernism were counterpoised against repression and Socialist Realism. “Western Civilization,” it seemed, consisted of more than accumulating capital; it had vital, energizing, mnemonic, psychic and cultural commodities to protect. From 1967 on it became impossible to think of literature, indeed all art, as being above and beyond politics. Such cultural interventions did not arise only as a response to the exigencies and crudities of the Cold War period. They are more ancient.

The bulk of Yurick’s article is a deconstruction (but not in the narrow academic sense) of Sophocles’s “Oedipus Rex” that first of all challenges to our understanding of “tragedy”.

From what we have seen, and from the point of view of the oppressed, of those assaulted by newer, yet ancient modes of cultural domination, we must ask of tragic figures: why, only after being brought down from power, do they develop conscience and sensitivity and insight, begin to feel for others, and suffer? Why didn’t they exhibit these “human” attributes before? What if all the characters in such tragic dramas are bad?

This is a brilliant insight and it's as true of a number of real-world political leaders as well. For example, why did Carter become so much more a man of conscience once out of power, when he could no longer have the same impact?

If so, no dramatic tensions, as we have been forcibly taught to understand drama, can be built out of such a construct. There would have been no drama, no suspense if we suspected that the committee that judged Nixon was as bad as he was. But the solemn intonation of the word “tragedy” summoned up a series of associations from a collectivized brain that had become “hard-wired” and prevented us from seeing this. Not only do these old mnemonic corpses still pollute the realm of our senses but the newest mnemonic corpses pollute the past.

He also considers the possibility that the act of incest, despite being unintentional, that leads to the main character’s tragic fall, might be a key to understanding Greek power politics and its legacy on the contemporary era.

But what if the woman wanted to rule and determine the pleasure structures of the realm? Her “sacred” reproductive chamber might be denied access to the right sperm and its genes. And, we all know, don’t we, that “Western Civilization” traditionally considers women sexually uncontrollable. Look at the trouble, from the patriarchal point of view, Helen of Argos/Troy caused; the war against Troy was both a trade conflict and an attempt to recover a sacred woman’s sacred womb. Sexual disorder, in just about every mythology (and indeed today), is seen to lead to genetic contamination and political, economic, cultural and even cosmic chaos in the realm, threatening a return to primeval anarchy. (Even today we hear the assertion that unrestrained sexuality has led to political and economic decline, to say nothing of disease as Fate’s or God’s punishment.) As for men, not having a womb, it doesn’t matter who and how they fuck, so long as the line of succession is not in question.

Therefore, what we see happening in Oedipus can be seen not merely as a political conspiracy, but is also a genetic drama, a struggle for the control of the continuity of power. Oedipus, indeed all tragedy, is a drama of succession, whose later manifestations are to be found in the novels of Balzac, Dickens, Zola and such teleplays like Dynasty and Dallas.

There are 13 articles by Sol Yurick listed in JSTOR, including the two I cited above. As most of you know, JSTOR has been a kind of battleground over the past several years with a 26 year old Stanford dropout named Aaron Swartz being arrested for downloading all of the JSTOR articles from MIT with the obvious intention of making them available to the hoi polloi—in other words, the opposite of the Athenian ruling class revered by Sophocles.

If there were any justice in the world, those articles above all should be accessible to the kinds of people who would have taken a class with Sol 30 years ago at the Brecht Forum or who are CounterPunch readers today. In the same defiant spirit as Aaron Swartz, but on a scaled-down level, I invite anybody who wants to read a Sol Yurick article without paying 15 dollars for the privilege to contact me at lnp3@panix.com and we’ll work something out. You can get a list of Sol Yurick’s articles doing a search on jstor.com without paying a penny and I encourage you to so without delay.

Louis Proyect blogs at http://louisproyect.wordpress.com and is the moderator of the Marxism mailing list at http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/ma ... fo/marxism.

[Nordic]

So I just read on Facebook that Aaron Swartz killed himself, or was "suicided", opened the opera browser on my phone to come here, and there's his name and JSTOR staring me in the face.

Maybe it's the Dayquil, but coming here the last 18 hours or so has been a truly bizarre experience.

[Luther Blissett]

Can someone help me out - what's going on with page 19 of this thread? I'm trying to do some research and I believe that the information about CIA posting desk positions at major studios and news agencies in the mid-20th Century exists on that page. However, whenever I try to browse to that page - or even the information contained on that page in the search results - my browser freezes. Unless someone knows that it exists elsewhere.

[IanEye]

Can someone help me out - what's going on with page 19 of this thread? I'm trying to do some research and I believe that the information about CIA posting desk positions at major studios and news agencies in the mid-20th Century exists on that page. However, whenever I try to browse to that page - or even the information contained on that page in the search results - my browser freezes. Unless someone knows that it exists elsewhere.

this what you are looking for?

viewtopic.php?p=487284#p487284

http://www.alexcox.com/blog.htm

TONY SCOTT'S SUICIDE NOTE
2012.10.7

The Scott brothers, Ridley and Tony, lived in the north of England at the time of the Vietnam War. So did I. Britain didn't send troops to Vietnam and so Ridley, Tony and I didn't have to worry about being drafted and sent to die. But that vicious and immoral conflict played nightly on our televisions: it was the only non-sanitized war of our lifetime. It left many people - me included - with contempt for the CIA - which ran assassination and torture operations such as the Phoenix Program - and for the whole political/military/industrial machine.

My reaction was not uncommon. The United States and Europe are quite different in that in the US there is a nominal culture of respect for the military (though in practice it is the employment option only of the poor, invariably avoided by the rich and middle class), whereas in Europe armies and uniforms are widely disliked. Most of my generation grew up distrustful of governments, opposed to the military and to the creeps and provocateurs who spied on the peace movement. Remember The Clash song, The Call Up? It is an overt call to refuse to serve in anybody's army. Remember Strummer singing Straight To Hell? "There ain't no need for you..."

The Scotts went down a different path. They made commercials, and when they moved to the States became absorbed intothe Pentagon's Hollywood cheer-leading machine. The bros created glossy, highly dynamic recruitment propaganda like TOP GUN and BLACK HAWK DOWN, and - in the case of Tony - torture propaganda in the form of MAN ON FIRE.

So I wonder as to the contents of the various suicide notes Tony Scott left before jumping off that bridge. For a police force famous for leaking celebrity gossip, the LAPD has been close-mouthed about the matter. Perhaps the notes were merely tender messages to his family. Perhaps they were long screeds condemning the Hollywood studios for being a duplicitious, blacklisting mafia cartel. Or - and this is what I hope - perhaps they have been kept secret because they are a mea culpa: an apology for the years Scott wasted his talents working for the Pentagon and the CIA, promoting torture and war.

David Robb's Operation Hollywood is still the key text regarding the entertainment industryand the Pentagon. It is an important book, citing numerous examples of how studio producers, directors, and writers changed the content of their scripts in order to gain free tanks, battleships, and marines. Recently, three other books have appeared which begin to give a picture of how the CIA has shaped the cinema, and the careers of filmmakers.

The best of these books is the most general: Frances Stonor Saunders' Cultural Cold War (in England its title is Who Paid The Piper?). This is a broad look at how CIA money was used to influence the arts. It explains how the work of a talentless boozer, Jackson Pollock, found its way into museums owned by the Rockefellers, and thence onto gallery walls all over the US. Pollock's slap-dash canvases were bought and sold - at US taxpayers' expense - to show that American art was "better" than the crude naturalism which Russians supposedly preferred. Unfortunately, most Americans prefer crude naturalism, as do I: given a choice between a Pollock or a Norman Rockwell I would gaze on the Rockwell any day. Heck, I'd rather spend an afternoon in the Thomas Kinkaide store.

But intel influence didn't end with paintings. For some reason the spooks hated the writer Howard Fast, and managed to get him blacklisted by the American publishing industry. FBI agents visited Little, Brown and seven other publishers to persuade them not to publish Fast's great popular novel, Spartacus. Alfred Knopf sent the manuscript back unopened, saying he wouldn't read the work of "a traitor". Fast, a Jew, was no traitor: he served time in jail rather than "name names" to the House Un-American Activities Committee. And when Kirk Douglas made a film of Spartacus, he gave the screenwriting assignment to Dalton Trumbo, another blacklisted writer who had been jailed rather than betray his friends.

Nevertheless, buoyed by the blacklisting of Fast, the CIA went all out on a massive book-burning binge. A terrified State Department was obliged to remove from American libraries in foreign countries the work of Fast, Dashiell Hammett, Langston Hughes, John Reed, Tom Paine, Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, and many other authors: Herman Mellville's Moby Dick, magnificently illustrated by Rockwell Kent, was also deemed unAmerican, and removed from the shelves. As Saunders observes, many of the books banned by the State Department had been burned by Hitler's Nazis, too. Some writers became active, witting agents of the CIA - including Peter Matthiessen and James Michener, "who used his career as a writer as cover for his work in eliminating radicals."

But, as Allen Dulles - head of the CIA till he was fired by John F. Kennedy - said, "nobody reads". So the spooks threw a wider net - arranging concerts and art exhibits, coming up with a $20,000 poetry prize for the fascist Ezra Pound (who at the time was in a hospital for the criminally insane), and quickly turning their attention to the propaganda possibilities of film.

According to Saunders, a secret campaign was undertaken by the CIA and Pentagon in 1955, called "Militant Liberty". This was designed to insert the theme of "freedom" into American movies, and to remove any elements which were critical of the United States. In June and July of 1956, representatives of the Joint Chiefs of Staff met with a group of Hollywood acolytes which included John Ford, Merian C . Cooper, John Wayne, and Ward Bond, to promote the illegal domestic propaganda program. A producer named C.V. Whitney, not coincidentally the cousin of CIA agent Tracey Barnes, signed on and made THE SEARCHERS (in the light of which we might view the film as an anti-Communist parable, with "redskins" standing in for "reds").

Saunders also observes that when, in 1946, Ford and Cooper set up their independent production company, Argosy, the principal investors were all intelligence men: William Donovan (former head of the OSS), Ole Doering, David Bruce and William Vanderbilt. C.D. Jackson, a CIA agent and vice president of Time, listed as helpful "friends" Cecil B. DeMille; Spyros P. Skouros and Darryl Zanuck at Fox; Nicholas Shenk, president of MGM; producer Dore Schary; Barney Balaban, president of Paramount; Harry and Jack Warner; James R. Grainger, president of RKO; Milton Rackmil, president of Universal; Harry Cohn, president of Columbia; Herbert Yates, head of Republic Pictures; and, inevitably, Walt and Roy Disney.

If Jackson's claim is true, then all the studios except United Artists were in the CIA's pocket by 1954. But CIA influence didn't stop with studio heads. A CIA agent, Carleton Alsop, worked undercover at Paramount, where he prepared lists of actors and technicians to be blacklisted, ordered script changes, and shut down films of which he disapproved. Alsop was quite powerful: he killed the project GIANT at Paramount because it was unflattering to rich Texans and depicted racism against Mexicans.

How many other studios had in-house CIA censors isn't clear: but it's unlikely that Carleton Alsop worked all alone.

Daniel J. Leab's Orwell Subverted deals with the first feature fully-funded by the CIA, ANIMAL FARM. As anyone who has seen it knows, ANIMAL FARM is an unsuccessful movie. The animation is reasonable, but the end - in which the animals rise up and overthrow their Soviet-Pig oppressors - contradicts Orwell's novel and the purpose of the parable. Reading Leab's book one cannot help but note how like studio executives the film's CIA "investors" were: they had no concept of filmmaking, or storytelling, but they were certainly full of ideas, demanding new scenes in which "a sheepdog, walking beside a kindly farmer, hears word of the revolt and laughs it off; so also does a plough horse, driven by another kindly farmer."

Leab has actually unearthed the stupid notes the CIA execs gave to their underlings: like David Robb he has found real material showing exactly how the spooks went about constructing their propaganda film. Years later, does it matter? ANIMAL FARM did not do well. But the filmmakers - John Halas and Joy Batchelor - were paid by the CIA to make a feature, something no other British animators could afford to do. Thereafter they received work from the BBC and the commercials industry. When I was young, animation from the Halas and Batchelor studio dominated British television. There was no other notable British company in the business till Ardman came along. That the CIA "set up" Halas and Batchelor as feature filmmakers, and that the BBC continued to promote them, gave them an incredible advantage over other animators, and set the rather mediocre tone of British animation for twenty years.

Per Saunders, the CIA was also behind the production of NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR, pumping at least $100,000 into the picture via the "US Information Agency". Again, Orwell's bleak vision didn't satisfy the spooks, and the end had to be changed: in fact two endings were shot, one for American audiences, and another for the British - in which Winston Smith is gunned down shouting, "Down with Big Brother!" Ironically, the film starred Michael Redgrave, one of 125 people Orwell had shopped to the British secret service for crimes such as Communism, Jewishness, or being gay.

Tricia Jenkins' CIA in Hollywood isn't as comprehensive as one might like. Partially this is due to the spooks' inherent secrecy and refusal to reveal the details of the deals they make with Hollywood filmmakers. But it's also due to a certain authorial naivete regarding the CIA. Jenkins refers to five aspects of the public's perception of the CIA: 1) that the Agency assassinates people, 2) that it is staffed with rogue operatives, 3) that it fails to take care of its assets, and 4) that it is morally ambiguous, and 5) that it is marked by buffoonery and ineffectiveness.

This is an incomplete list. The fact that the CIA assassinates people is not in any doubt: CIA-directed drones perform extra-judicial killings for us on a weekly basis. But what about the DRUG DEALING? After assassination and torture, the biggest complaint, made consistently against the CIA since the Vietnam War, is that it is involved in the international drug trade, and uses the traffic and resale of illegal drugs to enrich its operatives and fund its "black" operations. The reader may consult Alfred McCoy's Politics of Heroin in South East Asia, or Henrik Kruger's The Great Heroin Coup (for chapter and verse detail of CIA involvement in the heroin trade), or Cockburn and StClair's Whiteout, or Gary Webb's Dark Alliance (for the same on CIA complicity in the importation and sale of cocaine). The CIA inspector general, Frederick Hitz, was unable to disprove any of Gary Webb's reporting (the unfortunate Webb was fired from his job, and committed suicide).

Even if Jenkins doesn't believe that the CIA smuggles drugs, the accusations are there, they've been there for a long time, and they're backed up with evidence. A book dealing with the reputation of the Agency and its manipulation of the media should address the issue of alleged CIA drug dealing. This is not done.

This is strange, as it was with Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes - a supposed history of the CIA which also ignored the Agency's "drug problem". This is a re-writing of history, in which some of the worst blowback from US intelligence activities is simply ignored. The Hollywood movie AIR AMERICA - based on a book about CIA drug dealing operations - airbrushed the drugs out, but not all pictures dealing with US intelligence have done likewise. What about that highly intelligent thriller WHO'LL STOP THE RAIN, in which a merchant marine played by Nick Nolte is pursued by CIA agents who want their cut of his drugs operation? Not worthy of mention? It is a good fiilm.

CIA in Hollywood also suffers from an incomplete index, which covers only a handful of the names and motion pictures cited, and an incomplete bibliography, which doesn't contain all the books the author cites.

Jenkins makes an excellent point that by choosing to support certain films and to deny other filmmakers assistance, the CIA is violating the First Amendment to the Constitution. And since the Agency is not allowed to propagandize domestically, its support of Hollywood films and TV shows like 24 is a violation of its own Charter. Not that the CIA is all that worried, I suspect. As Robb observed, the Pentagon, the FBI, the Secret Service and numerous other federal agencies breach the First Amendment in exactly the same way. And Hollywood - an illegal cartel - is unlikely to utter any protest. The CIA has even acted as a TV distributor - pumping episodes of DYNASTY into East Germany during the Cold War "in order to sell those residents on capitalism and the luxury life it could afford."

For your edification, here follow the actors, directors, writers, producers and studio execs who the author links to the CIA, usually found 1) visiting CIA headquarters to party with the spooks, 2) taking instructions from CIA, or 3) actively helping to encourage CIA recruitment. Tony Scott heads the list: Jenkins reports that CIA was particularly fond of his masterpiece TOP GUN, "the single best recruiting tool the navy - and specifically naval aviation - ever had" and "was looking for a project that could help them do something similar."

Tony Scott, RIP; John Ford; John Wayne; Cecil B. DeMille; Darryl Zanuck; Luigi Luraschi (head of domestic and foreign censorship at Paramount in the 1950s); Joseph Mankiewicz; John Chambers and Bob Sidell (studio makeup men); Jack Myers; David Houle; Scott Valentine (VP of Sony Pictures); Jack Gilardi (ICM agency); Rick Nicita (CAA agency); Ron Meyer (COO of Universal); Matt Corman; Chris Ord; Kristy Swanson; Tim Matheson; Roger and Robert Towne; Tom Berenger; Ron Silver; Michael Frost Beckner; Jennifer Garner; Jeff Apple; Roger Birnbaum; Colin Farrell; Ben Affleck; Phil Alden Robinson; Lawrence Lasker; Mark Bowden; Mike Myers; Kevin and Michael Bacon; Mace Neufeld; J.J. Abrams; Paul Attanasio; Doug Liman; David Arata; Kiefer Sutherland; Tom Cruise.

(Not all Hollywood actors are thus inclined. Post 9-11, some have spoken out against CIA and government spying: Jenkins lists Al Pacino, Martin Sheen, Hector Elizondo, Richard Dreyfuss, Holly Hunter, Kristin Davis, Samuel L. Jackson and Jake Gyllenhaal as standing up for the American Civil Liberties Union in a series of advertisements.)

as far as the freezing goes, not sure what to say.
i used to get weirdness on some of my ri blog posts, but i just assumed it had something to do with the amount of images and video links i was posting...

[JackRiddler]

Huh.

Iran now hosts an annual conference, with top political brass, on "Hollywoodism."

A mix of our themes and some not-so our themes.

Bold on what might be interesting, or revealing, riffs:

http://www.hollywoodism.org/ArticleEN.aspx

3rd Hollywoodism Conference
Bridging the Gap between Human Ideals

It is our pleasure to invite you to attend the Third International Conference of World cinema and Hollywoodism, held within the framework of the 31st Fajr International Film Festival in Tehran. The conference will host filmmakers, scholars and activists from around the world to discuss different aspects of world cinema as they relate to human ideals on one hand and the realities of Hollywood on the other.


Mission statement:

The conference mission is providing a forum for deliberation and debate on various aspects of world cinema; facilitating professional, academic, and activist action; bridging the gap between the human ideals we hold in common & strive to achieve, as well as highlighting the stark realities which confront us in our global community.


Key dates:

Deadline for submission of articles or films: Sun January 20, 2013
Arrival to Tehran: Fri, February 1, 2013
Conference Opening Session: Sun, February 3, 2013
Conference Closing Ceremony: Wed, February 6, 2013
Departure of Guests: Thu, February 7, 2013


Call for papers

In a cognitive environment whose main streams of thought are dominated by cognitive elements produced and represented by corporatist interests, it is important to counter this condition by promoting independent cinema and thought. As such, Hollywoodism Conference welcomes proposals for papers & films addressing the following issues:

Conference Sessions February 3rd & 4th 2013


Hollywood economy :

- Examining the flow of money throughout the Hollywood film industry
- Hollywood and its economic and social domination towards immoral benefits

The role of Independent Cinema in World awakening

- Examining various aspects of the Occupy movements in the United States & Europe
- Approaches to supporting the Occupy Wall Street Movement
- Using cinema as a way to exp& the wave of global awakening

Hollywood and human values

- Exploitation of women and its inherent incompatibility with family values
- Manipulation of Human identity and religious values
- Dehumanization of relations & demoralization of human life-style
- Darwinism and Liberalism

humhmmmm

Hollywood and violence

- Modern Violence & Terrorism
- Provoking clashes between religions & populations

Hollywood's portrayal of world future

- Hollywood & the End of Days(the creation of an Armageddon theory towards total destruction)
- Alternative Interpretations of the Future
- Hollywood & Confronting the Outcome of Natural & Social Disasters in the world

Discussion Sessions February 5th & 6th 2013

Hollywood & Islam phobia, Iran phobia
Discussion & debate concerning some recent movies (extracts will be shown):
- Argo (Directed by Ben Affleck)
- Dictator (Directed by Larry Charles Starring Sacha Baron Cohen)
- 300 (Directed by Zack Snyder) & (Part 2)
- Unthinkable (Directed by Gregor Jordan Starring Samuel L. Jackson)
- Jerusalem Countdown (Directed by Harold Cronk)

You can submit your questions or requests by contacting our office by email at:
info@hollywoodism.org

We look forward to hearing from you soon.
Best regards

At the bottom of the homepage there's also a literally rolling blog roll with a bunch of 9/11 sites, largely in Fetzerish vein. On other pages you can see pics of Ahmedinejad addressing the conference and such.

Why aren't we holding an RI Hollywoodism Conference? What, just because we don't possess the equivalent of Iran's state resources? I mean, as bks observed to me recently, hip and far-seeing we may be, and skeptical of many things, and anti-this and that, and full of wild ideas, and oh-so superior to the sheeple, but you read this place and one things seems to be true, that we all love to watch and watch those movies...

.

[crikkett]

There have been hints that he took up residence at a certain other RI-users forum...

No, believe me, I've looked there.

I hope he's not dead.

[FourthBase]

Sol Yurick, FTW! ("For the win", for anyone not familiar with sports-boards)

I hate it when I find out about some great person only because of an obituary.

Anyway, thank you JackRiddler, for that link.

I remember being at a hipster gathering several years ago (I, too, was a hipster, at least peripherally) where a few Chicago grads couldn't get over the fact that I was not only not a fan of tragedy, but that I considered myself an enemy of tragedy...

"Man, how can you not appreciate the beauty of Hamlet, or...?"

"Nope. Fuck tragedy."

"But life itself is tragic!"

"Not necessarily."

And so on. I do love Hamlet, but that's despite his impaling of Polonius and the resultant spiral. I also love me some Greek tragedies, especially Euripides, but I see them more as useful, not beautiful. Didactic morality plays rather than exquisite trauma simulations to inhabit mentally for a masochistic rush. I would much, much rather read Aristophanes, or pretend I'm clowning on Socrates in the agora, or try to picture just what kind of comedy it is that Aeschylus wrote (true story) which unfortunately wasn't preserved.

Sigh. Can't wait to read more of Yurick.

[JackRiddler]

Sol Yurick, FTW! ("For the win", for anyone not familiar with sports-boards)

I hate it when I find out about some great person only because of an obituary.

Anyway, thank you JackRiddler, for that link.

SNIP

Sigh. Can't wait to read more of Yurick.

Send me an e-mail by PM, I'll send you the essay quoted in Proyect's obiturary. It's hot. I think of it as "Sophocles and the CIA."

.

[FourthBase]

I see all the respect that the zombie genre gets for subversive subtext, and it makes me wonder if the same people responsible for zombie flick exegeses ever got around to watching a comedy like The Other Guys, and if they did, whether they realized it was probably more subversive than most zombie movies they had ever fawned over. I also wonder where the putative Hollywood-CIA gatekeepers were when the script for The Other Guys was passing by their desks. Sleeping on the job, I guess. Or, laughing on the job. Gives me hope that a script with an even more subversive worldview could get produced and distributed, as long as it's funny enough. I'd like to find out.

[Spiro C. Thiery]

I see all the respect that the zombie genre gets for subversive subtext, and it makes me wonder if the same people responsible for zombie flick exegeses ever got around to watching a comedy like The Other Guys, and if they did, whether they realized it was probably more subversive than most zombie movies they had ever fawned over. I also wonder where the putative Hollywood-CIA gatekeepers were when the script for The Other Guys was passing by their desks. Sleeping on the job, I guess. Or, laughing on the job. Gives me hope that a script with an even more subversive worldview could get produced and distributed, as long as it's funny enough. I'd like to find out.

I agree and really dig that movie. Nevertheless, as inauspicious as the covert & overt actions taken by the Dual Corps of Big Business Interest & Intelligent Commie Paranoia were for artistic freedom in the main, it would seem that much of the job of shaping the general consciousness of the culture was complete somewhere around the time that Bedtime for Bonzo guy took his seat on Pennsylvania Ave++. I don't imagine the job of gatekeeper is as all-encompassing as it may once have been. The "free" portion of Global Society is pretty-well under control, I think, and the perpetual war on the rest continues unabated. Most of those making films of subversive flavor do so, maybe unwittingly, within an invisible border of conventional belief, and the so-called liberal elite in Hollywood dictate what is acceptable discourse. So in a sense, the likes of Clooney and Affleck serve as default gatekeepers. Even the makers of The Other Guys are status quo liberals. They ain't rockin' nobody's boat.

++ In terms of what those who strived for a stranglehold on the industry might have believed. I'm not even sure any of it was necessary: give people the freedom to worry about family and mortgage and a few leisure distractions to while away their lives, and what the world's owners are up to is of no real concern. That is, submission to power seems to be in part at least self-perpetuating.
Edited to change "subversiveness" to "submission" in footnote. Not sure what "subversiveness to power" is, but it sounds interesting.

[FourthBase]

Even the makers of The Other Guys are status quo liberals

Eh, I seem to remember Adam McKay writing some editorial stuff that impressed some people here.

[Spiro C. Thiery]

Even the makers of The Other Guys are status quo liberals

Eh, I seem to remember Adam McKay writing some editorial stuff that impressed some people here.

Adam is a nice fella. Definitely smart. Pretty funny too. In my opinion he had a huge hand in saving SNL when it had reached its most dismal of lowpoints. Nevertheless, he is incredibly vocal politically when it comes to criticizing the one American party, carries a lot of water for the other, which naturally leads to token criticism that amounts to little when it comes to holding them to a higher standard. I guess the f-obama thread would summarize a lot of people's feelings on this issue, right down to the disagreements as to what it means to be a liberal.

I don't hold his general mum-ness regarding the absolutely horrid policy emanating from the WH against him too much. It is what it is. I just find it odd that after all we have witnessed the last decade that anyone really takes the dog and pony show of electoral politics for genuine, and that they would reserve 99% of their public criticism for Republicans. For better or worse, McKay is now part of Liberal Hollywood. At least his movies are funny.

[JackRiddler]

Entertaining illustration of how effective CGI and backdrops have become:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbvgOFxp-hk

Observations:

1) It almost seems now like the more expensive a production is, the less likely it is to be shooting on location. Or that there is a budget range from broadcast TV to upper-middle feature where most productions are rarely on location anymore. Indy stuff is on location. Blockbusters like Batman can afford to shut down New York City for a location shoot. (Little of which will show up unobscured by CGI in the film, of course.) CGI offers total and realistic visual control, lower insurance risks, fewer headaches. But is the product a piece of dead meat?

2) I won't, but I should make a list of conventional films and scenes with and without emotional resonance and then explore whether relatively more of the withouts are of actors surrounded by blank green walls. I just don't believe the feel of Moscow is delivered without actually shooting in Moscow, but others will argue that's nostalgic superstition.

3) I wonder if the film industry is employing substantially fewer carpenters.

4) The usual. Don't believe half of what you see and none of what you hear. Especially stuff that is outside your own areas of expertise, or happening in places where you don't know the languages, or that is unconfirmable by networked real-life informants. Especially stuff relating to war.