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NOTE The Rise of the Motion Picture

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I forgot to tell my Hitler joke this morning, and I can't let it pass.

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I once wrote an essay that began, Adolf Hitler is no laughing matter, but I'll violate that principle today.

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In his office in Munich, Hitler had a painting called The Four Elements by Adolf Ziegler, one of his famous arts, and it's basically four nude women.

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The French ambassador said not to have liked it, and he always referred to it as the four senses.

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And someone said to him, now wait a minute, Mr. Ambassador, there are four elements, but there are five senses.

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And he said, not in Hitler's office, taste is missing.

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Ah, that was French.

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So, anyway, we're now turning to the emotion picture.

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My epigraph for this lecture comes from a nameless screenwriter who said of Hollywood,

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They ruin your stories. They massacre your ideas. They prostitute your art. They trample your pride.

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And what do you get for it? A fortune.

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so we're at a point now where I don't have to explain to you that there's

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something commercial about movies I mean you know I have to explain to you that

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the elegant French, Flemish tapestry industry was actually commercialized or

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that Bach and Mozart were making money off the sheet music of their music we

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tend to idealize the art of the past and think it had nothing to do with commerce

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But motion pictures are right in front of us. We know they're commercial.

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So really I should need to argue with you that it's art.

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But I really don't have to do that anymore because anybody recognizes that there have been many great artworks

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produced in the history of the motion picture and even out of Hollywood.

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So this really is a prime example of the intersection of commerce and culture.

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No one can deny that motion pictures are a commercial art form, and no one can deny that much great art has been produced in the form.

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Again, most movies are pretty bad as art, but an amazing number of them are very, very good.

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And so this is very important to any large-scale understanding of the relation of commerce and culture.

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In fact, what's really nice about movies is we can virtually recapture their birth.

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You know, it's really just over a century ago. I mean, the whole history of the motion picture can be encompassed in a little over a century.

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I can't talk to you about Renaissance Flemish movies. And for most of the art forms, their birth is shrouded in mystery and in antiquity.

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We really don't know the origins of epic. We really don't know the origins of drama.

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We have some theories about it and some evidence and so on, but you know, the history of the movie is right there for us to see, and there are some important lessons in that.

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For one thing, we can see that the motion picture was fully commercial in its birth.

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Edison was not sitting around thinking, how can I create a new art form?

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And he was not thinking, how can I help out Ingmar Bergman and Francois Truffaut?

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How can I give birth to the Godfather?

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He was just tinkering as usual.

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He came up with this gimmick that seemed pretty clever to him and a great novelty item.

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The motion picture was essentially a novelty item at its birth and its early years.

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You would not call it art.

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There were these things called Nickelodeons, where you put in a nickel, and you saw some,

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at most, five-minute film, and typically, it was a lady taking off her clothes, again,

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new medium pornography.

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And all sorts of, you got to see a train crash, and all sorts of stuff like that.

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So there seemed nothing artistic about this form, it was just a new sort of novelty item,

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and they showed it at state fairs and at arcades and no one was predicting in 1900, 1910 that this was going to be the great new art form of the 20th century.

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As far as I can tell, it's not until the mid-20s that anyone goes on record as saying, hey, this is going to be the new art form of the 20th century.

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The bandage should have been obvious, but of course it wasn't, especially to most scholars.

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The interesting thing is how quickly movies became artistic.

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You can't put a date on it, but certainly by D.W. Griffith and the great train robbery, you got something there.

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And by the time he's doing Birth of a Nation and Intolerance,

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Within roughly two decades, film had become something we can recognize as an art form and in the 20s it just blossoms.

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It's very interesting. This is far more typical of artistic development than we think.

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The way scholars' minds work, they try to think of slow evolution and it must take years and years.

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You can actually see that art forms develop very quickly, especially when there's money involved, to attract people to it.

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And by the 20s, especially in Germany, there's one great director after another, F.W. Mornau, Fritz Lang, the silent era.

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and so it's really quite remarkable. If it's evolution it's more Stephen Jay Gould's punctuated equilibrium than Darwin's slow step-by-step evolution.

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You get a new form comes along and quite quickly a lot of people realize its potentiality and it draws in lots of talent and it grew by leaps and bounds

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And then, of course, you get sound, and by the 30s, film was completely established, and great, great works of art are being turned out in the media.

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The only people who didn't realize this was professors. I can't quite date it, but I do remember, I went to Harvard as an undergraduate in 1962 to 1966,

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and I remember when some visiting professor offered a course in Alfred Hitchcock, and we thought it was the weirdest thing we'd ever heard of.

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and you know fortunately was a visiting professor and he taught it over in the

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Carpenter Center for Visual Arts and it was only at night and you know we we

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didn't have to feel that our undergraduate education was being

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sullied by this course about Alfred Hitchcock. I mean that seems utterly

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laughable to realize that at this time but it really took quite a while now of

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course there are whole departments of film and film programs and I give the

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the academic world credited for finally having discovered that movies are out for them.

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But it is interesting, there's a kind of a lag here where the public discovers it first.

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Really the market discovered how good movies are, and typically professors were saying,

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oh, well, it's a passing fad, you know, go to a play, save your money.

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So we actually, it's a cautionary tale that we should try to overcome our contempt for

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commercial culture, but it's really the reason academics resisted movies for so long is their

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prejudice against commerce in general and commercial culture in particular.

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So in discussing the motion picture industry today, I basically want to look at two major

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academic ways of viewing the motion picture industry which are basically anti-commercial

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in their orientation.

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One is the French school of criticism of the so-called auteur theory of movies and the

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other is German, the Frankfurt School critique of movies as culture industry.

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I think they'll help me highlight what I believe is true about motion pictures and about commercial

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culture.

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allow me to define my position better.

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So let me begin with perhaps the more famous of the two, the auteur school, and raise this

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whole issue of authorship of films.

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That is, when you're talking about a film, it's very difficult to assign authorship and

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And to say who made it. In fact, for most movies, and especially for the history of

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Hollywood and especially during the so-called studio era of the 30s and the 40s, movies

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were corporate products, collaborative products. That's in fact what a lot of scholars held

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against Motion Pictures. They couldn't be art precisely because they didn't have authors

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in the classic or traditional sense of authorship. Here's a perfect example of how this romantic

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and then modernist ideal of the solitary creative genius worked against the appreciation of

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of Motion Pictures as an art form.

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As I've said, from roughly 1800 on,

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this theory developed first with the Romantic poets

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that a solitary creative genius has to produce a work of art.

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And if anything interferes with it,

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that introduces elements of inauthenticity and corruption

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into the resulting work.

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And again, I can't stress enough how much

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We instinctively and unthinkingly buy into that myth today, and one reflection of that is the development in the 1950s in France of the so-called auteur theory.

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Auteur is just the French word for author.

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And in reaction to the Hollywood studio system where movies were manufactured, a group of French theorists came up with the idea that the only true movies are movies that have a single author and that single author is a director and preferably a writer-director.

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Now, Francois Truffaut, the French writer-director, was very instrumental in developing this theory.

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It's associated with the French journal, Cahiers du Cinéma, and it was adapted very early among US critics.

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For one thing, it finally gave academics a way to talk about movies in the way they like to talk about things.

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I found this myself, and we'll find it today and a bit tomorrow.

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It's very awkward to say, the group of people who produce decisions had this in mind.

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You want to be able to attach a name.

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And so what these French theorists looked for is a single name they could attach to a creative achievement.

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And they were thinking of people above all of Orson Welles, people like Alfred Hitchcock, people like John Ford.

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That is, what these French theorists of the 50s tried to identify was a subgroup of movies which they were claiming these were authentic art, unlike these inauthentic Hollywood productions, they were just corporate collaborative products, but if you could find a movie that had been made by one man, that and only that could be authentic art.

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So, their chief example was always Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, and you know, if you could see written and directed by on the screen, that was an auteur film, and you know, Charlie Chaplin was one of the great examples, so if you wanted to see written and directed and produced by Charlie Chaplin, with music by Charlie Chaplin, you know, Gaffer, Charlie Chaplin, electrician, Charlie Chaplin, best boy, Charlie Chaplin.

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And they were trying to imagine some way in which the whole movie could be the product

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of a single genius.

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Again, Citizen Kane was their example.

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They began to notice, this is how they began to speak of bodies of film, that you could

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take John Ford's films together.

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You could look at stagecoach and she wore a yellow ribbon and, you know, later the searchers

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and see a comprehensive vision of the West in his films.

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Now, there's a lot of truth to this.

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These people were pioneering and remade the way people talked about films

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and really discovered a great deal of creativity in filmmaking

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and began to understand that there are people in the field who have artistic things to say.

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Among them were Jerry Lewis, that's always the problem with French film criticism, that he was one of their great examples of auteurs, Jerry.

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So theory, like all theories, had its ups and downs.

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And again, I don't want to dismiss it, because a lot of the best film criticism ever written came out of this approach,

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approach, and they needed a way to talk about films as artistic unities.

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But notice the notion here was you couldn't have a unified work of art unless a single

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artistic consciousness had produced it.

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There's a kind of mythology at work here that Hayek identifies more broadly in thinking

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The thing about economy is that people really have a hard time of understanding how an economy

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worked if a single mind didn't plan it.

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I mean, Hayek sees it as almost tribal, that our human minds are conditioned to think that

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if something works, it's because a single person designed it, built it, and keeps it

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running.

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I think his point is the great advantage of the market is that it allows meaningful, coherent, rational results to come about even though no single mind is in charge of it, and that's the great advantage of the market, that it can produce results without a single consciousness being in control of it, it can in fact produce better results, and again through a process of feedback, trial and error, correction.

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Please take that Austrian model of spontaneous order and apply it to culture and to suggest

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that if a work of art looks planned, it doesn't mean it was perfectly pre-planned by a single

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consciousness.

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What Austrian economics tells us is you can get a result that looks perfectly planned,

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that actually was the product of trial and error, continuous revision, and although I'm

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I'm not dismissing the model of perfect planning in art because, again, when Yates sat down to write one of his modernist lyrics,

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yeah, that was probably a process of perfect planning by a single consciousness that is possible.

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Many great works of art have been produced by that.

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But I think we have many alternate cases and that, as I was suggesting yesterday,

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Victorian novels were produced by a kind of helter-skelter, knock-em-sock-em social process

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in which the works got better and better and looked more and more planned.

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Not because someone was in charge all the time, but because you had to give and take

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a social system, this system of serial publication that brought it about.

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Hollywood is similar.

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These so-called corporate productions from Hollywood are similar, but it took a long

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It's a long time for people to realize that, and it's, you know, the story about a sausage.

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You don't want to look and see how a sausage was made.

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And frankly, you don't really want to see how most movies are made.

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If you simply describe the process, as I'll show in some cases, you'd think the movie

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would be a complete chaos.

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In a way what I'm attacking here is the so-called genetic fallacy in criticism that looking

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at the way something comes into being tells you in some ways very little about the final

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result aesthetically.

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A work can be beautifully composed even though the process that produced it was incredibly

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messy and chaotic.

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But again, that's what these auteur theorists could not accept.

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They wanted this single genius to stand behind the film.

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And the notion was that when Orson Welles made Citizen Kane, he was fully in charge,

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and that's why that's so great.

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And the thing that ruined all his other films was studio interference, and there were all

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these stories of Magnificent Amberson and how the studio rejected his cut of the film

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of Money, Human Re-Cutted, and that story's probably true in some sense, but you see there's

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this kind of idealization of the single creator here that, and again, Chaplin was one of their

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examples, Ford another one, the sense that to make these films aesthetically meaningful

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you had to posit and indeed locate a single genius behind them.

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Now, in fact, again, I'm a great admirer of all these directors, and some of them, like

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Wells and Chaplin, often did complain about studios.

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Chaplin, of course, went off and founded his own studio, United Artists, with Mary Pickford

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and Douglas Fairbanks, because he didn't like dealing with the existing studios.

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There's no question that, again, that many movie makers were frustrated by the studio system.

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On the other hand, there's also no question that the studio system, in many cases, worked.

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And these horrible commercial pressures that people always complain about, in fact, had beneficial results.

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And I'm going to choose as my chief example of a studio product of work the motion picture Casablanca

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Partly because I've written about it and I have the facts at my hands, but in part because it is an ideal example

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Casablanca is generally on anybody's list of the 10 greatest movies ever made

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were made on the American Film Institute list that came out a few years ago.

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It came in second right after Citizen Kane.

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So we're talking about a work here that is regarded as one of the peaks of cinematic

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history and people often speak about it in awe and talk about its perfection.

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I'm just going to read you a quote from one description of it.

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Every gesture, every turn of the head is important.

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Casablanca is that rare movie miracle.

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A film with not one inconsequential frame,

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not one insignificant line of dialogue.

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Don't even consider blinking during this film

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in which every moment is inextricable from the whole.

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Remove one note and there is diminishment.

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It's the same thing Salieri says about Mozart's music in the Schaffer-Forman film.

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There it is, the great ideal of artistic perfection.

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Every part of the whole is a part of the whole. It's there for some reason.

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You can't remove anything and not hurt the film. This film is artistic perfection.

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That may or may not be true, but at least a lot of people claim it. Certainly it's a well-made movie, certainly it's a very good movie.

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It bears re-watching and you do see something new in it each time you see it.

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But the inference from that for many people would be if it looks perfectly planned, it must have been perfectly planned.

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And if it has this perfect artistic unity, only a single mind could have produced it.

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Well, unfortunately, nobody could possibly identify that single mind.

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If it's a question of writers, there were nine different writers on the film.

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The director, Michael Curtiz, is a fine director, but, you know, name a great other work of art by him.

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Yankee Doodle Dandy, for example, Captain Blood, I mean, he made a good solid series of Hollywood films.

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This film was a completely collaborative enterprise.

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Moreover, its history of production is a complete mess and of a tale of utter chaos.

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Basically, they just lucked out in the end.

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I'll just give you a brief description of the writers involved in it.

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First of all, it's an adaptation from another medium.

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It's based on a stage play called Everybody Comes to Ricks.

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Just imagine if the film was called Everybody Comes to Ricks.

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It never was going to go anywhere.

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And someone in Hollywood, I think it was the producer, Hal Wallis, came up with the idea of calling it Casablanca.

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But anyway, Warner Brothers bought the rights to the play, and they gave the job of adapting it to the screen to two brothers named Julius and Philip Epstein.

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They started working on a script, but unfortunately, with middle World War II, they were called away to work on Frank Capper's Why We Fight, a documentary that the government wanted made.

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and so how Warner Brothers was left without writers so they called in a guy

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named Howard Koch to write on the screen and as things ended up the Epstein

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brothers are roughly responsible for what we know is the first half of the

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film and Koch for the second half but the studio was not satisfied what they

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were coming up with so they brought in a guy named Casey Robinson to integrate

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the two halves. And he's the one who thought up the idea of the Paris flashback. And moreover, he's

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mostly responsible for the romantic scenes, the love scenes between Bergman and Bogart. But then

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the Epstein brothers finished their work for Capra and they came back and they started to work on the

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end of the movie. There were several other writers involved. The official count is somewhere between

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between eight and nine writers, of whom I think only three got screen credit.

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But meanwhile, Michael Curtiz, the director, was constantly fumbling with the script and

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Hal Wallace, the producer, was always getting involved.

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So you feel like saying, too many cooks, more of the broth.

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I mean, this film should be a complete hodgepodge with all these people working on it.

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Remember this is always the criticism of Hollywood, that they get a script and they work it and

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they rework it and rewrite it and redo it and everyone's got to change things so the results

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should have no artistic unity.

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But somehow it worked in this case.

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Now in particular, the most amazing thing about the film is they never knew how it was

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The End of Casablanca is the greatest thing about the movie. It's what makes the movie. It's what everyone remembers from the movie.

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You almost automatically assume that this is what they had in mind from the beginning, that they always knew it was going to end with that airport scene.

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If you know Woody Allen's play against Sam, which pays the ultimate tribute to the ending by recycling it, in that film the way you come back to it, you just know it's the heart of that film that's going to recreate that scene.

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Again, it's one of the most parodied and recycled films in Hollywood's history.

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But they were just clueless and the actors were panicking because they didn't know how to play their roles.

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Ingrid Bergman's daughter reports that her mother kept complaining that the filmmakers didn't seem to know what they had in mind.

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And finally Ingrid Bergman confronted the Epstein brothers and said,

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said, who do I go off with in the end? Heinried or Bogart? And Julius Epstein said, as soon

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as we know, we'll let you know. And you see, everything hinges on that, and I don't know

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how to play the scenes with Paul Heinried if I'm going to leave him in the end. I don't

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know how to play the scenes with Bogart if I'm going to leave him in the end. The actors

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We're getting desperate about it. So, how did they finally get the end, the great sequence?

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Now, this is very disputed. Everybody claims he wrote the end of Casablanca now. There's

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a cameraman, I think, who claims he wrote it. I'm going by the account you get on the

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DVD. And the special edition DVD of Casablanca's grades got all this archival material. And

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and his interview with Julius Epstein, and I'm just going to read from his, my transcription of his account because it's so revealing how he tells his story.

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I mean they are under huge pressure. Every day the studio says, what's the ending going to be?

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And finally he and his brother are driving to work and he remembers the corner in Hollywood where they threw it up.

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They just turn to each other in the car and say, round up the usual suspects.

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and everything followed from that line is again if you were trying to think logically here you'd say they thought through they plotted the ending and then came up with a line but no somehow spontaneously they came up with this line round up the usual subject suspects and they they followed from that they decided that the scene would have to feature a murder then if that was going to be the big line and this is how Epstein reconstructs their thought process they asked themselves who does

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Who do the audience want to see murdered?

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Their answer was Major Strasser.

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The next question was, who do they want to see kill Major Strasser?

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And their answer was Humphrey Bogart.

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It's great to hear that these great Hollywood figures confuse actors with characters.

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Illusion reality, no difference to that.

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So Humphrey Bogart's got to kill him.

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And then their final question, and who do they want to see round out the whole thing?

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The brothers concluded, Claude Rains will end the film with round up the usual suspects.

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So here's the genesis of perhaps the most famous ending of a film in Hollywood history.

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And what I love about it is if that really was the logic, and this is the way Julius Epstein reports it,

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then they came up with this great ending by simply imagining what the audience wanted.

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The worst form of submitting to commercial pressure you can imagine.

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And again, according to the auteur theory, according to romantic theories, the autonomy

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of art, if you give the audience what they want, you're prostituting yourself and you're

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going to debase the quality of your art.

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And here we see this great scene was formed precisely by following out the logic in their

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account.

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Let's give the audience what they want.

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How do we do it?

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And it's interesting when you think it through, and I did, that in relying on their audience,

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they were essentially relying on the generic expectations of their audience.

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That is, when they ask, what does the audience want, they're saying, what does an audience

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want as a successful conclusion to a kind of romantic thriller?

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And as if they understood, audiences understand genre.

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They've seen hundreds of films, and in a certain sense, they know how a film should end.

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And it is interesting that, you know, when movies are made, they do testing, they show

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them to audiences, and one of the key things they do is test the ending. And they often

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have alternate endings and see which ones play best with the audience. Filmmakers know

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that one of the key things to a film is the ending. It can ruin your whole day if the

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ending is lousy. And so it's interesting the degree to which they allow audience expectations

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to govern that here.

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And again, if the ending was really lousy, we would say, oh, those Epstein brothers,

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they sold out.

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They went Hollywood.

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But since it's this work, genius, you know, we want to say, oh, they must have thought

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this up themselves, in a certain sense they did, but they thought it up by asking what

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the audience wants.

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But of course, that wasn't the end.

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Curtiz and Wallace shot the script and confronted the Epstein brothers and said, your ending

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does not work. And in fact, when the Epstein brothers saw how it had been cut, they thought

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it had been cut too quickly. And they explained to Curtiz, you've got to have a few more shots

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here. And indeed, they worked together the ending from that. But we're still missing

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something, right? This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship, right? The really

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clincher at the end, that wasn't from the Epstein brothers, it wasn't from Curtiz,

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It was from Hal Wallis, the producer, at least according to his account, and again everyone

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claims they wrote the line, but Wallis decided this is too abrupt, this scene, shooting Strasser

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and so on, and just letting Bogart and Rains walk off into the distance.

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So he wrote a little scene, about six or seven lines of dialogue, interchange between Bogart

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and Reigns, Beginning with Louis, This is a Beautiful Friendship, they have his memo

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and it's wonderful, he misspells Louis, so you know how all of us must have been writing

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it.

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But he wrote, This is the Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship was just going to be the beginning

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of a dialogue, they were talking about going to Algiers or something like that, and when

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In post-production, Wallace has to get back Bogart, get back Raines, and shoot the scene.

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Raines is unavailable, making another film. They can't get Raines back.

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So poor Hal Wallace has to cut six of the seven lines, and the film now just has to end with Louis.

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I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

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Next time you watch the film, you'll see you never see Bogart's lips move.

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He's, his, the back of his head is to the camera when you hear Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship, because it was dubbed in weeks after they shut down a production. It's actually very easy to do.

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So look at that. When you, when you see this sequence, again, it is considered the classic Hollywood ending. Everything is perfect about it. In fact, different people wrote different things.

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And that doesn't sound right to us. It doesn't feel right. We really would like to think that some single artistic genius wrote that whole ending from the beginning and designed the whole film to lead up to the ending.

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And that doesn't sound right to us. It doesn't feel right.

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We really would like to think that some single artistic genius wrote that whole ending from the beginning

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and designed the whole film to lead up to the ending.

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Unfortunately, the facts disprove that view.

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And, you know, when in doubt, we have to go with the facts.

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And just accept the fact that sometimes you just luck out.

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Again, if you read an account of the production of Casablanca and didn't know what this movie was like, you would say, boy, it must have been a bad film.

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They didn't know what they were doing. A couple of guys driving a car just trying to spin out the ending there.

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The producer intervening at the last minute. Imagine that. That's the ultimate sin to a tour theory.

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The producer ruined the film. The Epstein's had written the ending. Kurtis had filmed the ending.

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and who is Hal Wallace, this cheesy Hollywood producer, to decide this isn't good enough, I need to add a line here.

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Again, even to me, it just doesn't feel right. It's taken me a long time to come around to understanding that art is often a matter of luck.

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It isn't always a matter of perfect planning. But as an economist, I should have known that.

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that a lot of things that happen in the economic world, which are the right outcome, are still a product of luck and certainly not of perfect advanced planning.

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And as I've studied film and television more and more, I've seen more and more examples.

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This Casablanca situation is more the model than the model of auteur theory.

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And a classic example of that is Citizen Kane. It's on the initial bibliography, but I really recommend this book by Jack Stillinger, a great romantic poetry editor and scholar, multiple authorship and the myth of solitary genius.

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I read this book 15 years ago and refused to accept its thesis then. I was a big solitary genius fan. Well, we solitary geniuses have to stick together, basically.

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So, I just, I resisted and resisted this book, but the more I've thought about it, you know, he's right, and it has an excellent chapter,

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chapter plays and films, authors and auteurs, and it's a good way to get a very quick overview of the subject.

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And one thing he does is just take on Citizen Kane. This again, exhibit A for the auteur theory, and he's drawing upon a book here by Robert Carringer

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Citizen Kane

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Credit for the Citizen Kane screenplay, which won an Academy Award, were shared with Herman J. Mankiewicz and Wells, in that order.

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And there were other writers as well.

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is not certain of first thought of doing a film about William Randolph Hearst, Wells said

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that it was his own idea, while others have claimed priority for Mankiewicz, who died

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in 1953. Mankiewicz, with the help of John Hausman, wrote a 268-page first draft titled

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American, between the beginning of March and the middle of April 1940, some 40 pages of

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revisions shortly afterward, and a complete second draft by May 9.

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At this point, 308 pages into the script, Wells took over the script, and the individual

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responsibility for writing became more difficult to sort out.

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Amelia Kent reworked the second draft into a continuity version that added visual and

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mechanical details necessary for budget and production planning, and drafted a breakdown

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script containing scene designations with physical descriptions.

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After approval from the RKO executives and department heads, the script was further heavily

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was revised during June and July mostly by Wells but also by Mankiewicz in four further drafts the last of which was the shooting script from his painstaking analyses of cuts and other changes from one version to the next Carringer concludes concerning the shares of Mankiewicz and Wells that Mankiewicz's main contributions were the story frame including the rosebud gimmick Mankiewicz not Wells so Mankiewicz's contribution with the story frame

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characters, many of the individual scenes, and much of the final dialogue.

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While Wells, as he said, added narrative brilliance, the visual and verbal wit, the stylistic fluidity,

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and such stunningly original strokes as the newspaper montages and the breakfast table

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sequence.

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Carringer comments, this is really interesting, that Citizen Kane is the only major Wells

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film on which the writing credit is shared.

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Not coincidentally, it is also the Wells film that has the strongest story, the most fully

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realized characters, and the most carefully sculpted dialogue.

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Mankiewicz made the difference.

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Now he goes on and on and shows, in the making of the film, all sorts of people gave Wells's

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suggestions, including the actors, and he concludes that even Citizen Kane was a collaborative

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effort.

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and that the primary exhibit for the auteur theory was not the single product of Orson's Welles Ma.

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You know, you couldn't say that in the presence of Orson Welles, he would sit on you.

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He said that.

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And notice the other implication that this was the film in which Welles had the most collaboration

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And it's his best film that the more artistic control he got over his later films, I won't say the worse they got, the less good they got.

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That's really interesting and well, maybe if I have time I'll trace that in some other careers, including Chaplin's and Coppola's.

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But Stillinger goes on to discuss a couple of other examples. It turns out, even now with Hitchcock,

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I mean, Hitchcock was a maniacally controlled freak in this film, but even with Hitchcock it's turning out that, well, for example, that a number of his screenplays he was collaborating with Ben Hecht, and, you know, I try to show even with Shakespeare, he sometimes accepted some help on his plays and collaborated with others.

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In other words, we are so captive of this idea of the single author that it's hard for us to face the facts, but they're staring us in the face.

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And I will say this, you know, as Austrian economists, we love individualism.

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We really do like to think of the great entrepreneurial geniuses, and we do want to focus on the individual, and we hate collectivist thinking.

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But let's be careful about this, because what we're talking about here, when we talk about the making of films, is a social process which is collaborative.

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And that's our view of the economy, in general. That's the whole point about the economy, is it allows people to collaborate and produce something better by working together than they could ever produce by working alone.

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It's Marxism that talks about social interaction as purely exploitative.

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It's Marxism for which social interaction is a zero-sum game.

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And one person can profit only if another person loses.

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For Austrian economics, just the opposite.

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The market is not a zero-sum game.

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When there's a trade, a transaction, both sides gain.

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We think of social interaction as a collaborative, cooperative process, so it really should be okay for us to talk about even artistic production in those terms.

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And you can see, I've been repeating this, whenever Marxists look at these kind of processes I've been describing, they balk at it and they say someone's exploiting someone else.

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Welles exploited Mankiewicz, he took too much credit and so on.

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Well, maybe there's a bit of element of truth to that.

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But what you see when you look at this is examples of division of labor.

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People work together and they produce something better by working together.

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When you read accounts of Casablanca, you see how Wallace and the studio were aware of what writers could do what things.

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The Epstein Brothers were known for snappy dialogue, and a lot of the humor in Casablanca comes from them.

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This guy, Koch, I guess, was known for writing romantic scenes or whatever.

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I talked about this earlier, that in Hollywood they have writing specialists, people who are just good at writing endings,

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people who are good at punching up the dialogue with humor and so on.

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and you know that's an old established economic principle the division of labor

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and so the you know the idea that one single artist could produce everything

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00:43:03.800 --> 00:43:10.880
you need to produce a great film that really is questionable so again I I'm

396
00:43:10.880 --> 00:43:15.280
more impressed with the results of the auteur theory in the criticism of

397
00:43:15.280 --> 00:43:18.960
individual films and explaining them that I am with it as a theory of how

398
00:43:18.960 --> 00:43:24.040
great movies are produced these critics are able to see the aesthetic pattern

399
00:43:24.040 --> 00:43:31.780
in movies very well they are reading them as unified and it sort of helps them

400
00:43:31.780 --> 00:43:35.880
to have it in their heads that one single unified mind created them but

401
00:43:35.880 --> 00:43:39.200
those are two entirely separable questions if you understand the

402
00:43:39.200 --> 00:43:44.080
principle of the genetic fallacy whether the movie is a unified work of art or

403
00:43:44.080 --> 00:43:50.240
not has nothing to do with how it was produced in a way for Casablanca

404
00:43:50.240 --> 00:44:06.240
Everything just fell into place, but there was no way of telling that until they put it together, test screened it, finally made the plunge, released the final cut and put it on the screen.

405
00:44:06.240 --> 00:44:11.480
Banking. I put on your supplementary bibliography a wonderful book called Fiasco, which I've

406
00:44:11.480 --> 00:44:20.720
mentioned already, which traces film disasters from Cleopatra on down to the present films

407
00:44:20.720 --> 00:44:26.000
like Waterworld and The Postman. Kevin Costner is the great distinction of being the only

408
00:44:26.000 --> 00:44:33.460
one with two films in that book. And, you know, it's a very good book. It's very good

409
00:44:33.460 --> 00:44:39.780
to learn, to read, to counter these Marxist theories that Hollywood studios are in charge

410
00:44:39.780 --> 00:44:43.580
of their audience and can shape their audience and create demand.

411
00:44:43.580 --> 00:44:51.300
But the conclusions of the author, whose name escapes me at the moment, draws from it, are

412
00:44:51.300 --> 00:44:56.020
wrong because, you know, he describes all the things that can go wrong on a film.

413
00:44:56.020 --> 00:45:03.340
For example, he says, this shows never to start filming a film without a finished script.

414
00:45:03.340 --> 00:45:20.340
and then at the end in his grand paration he says, so if you see a movie that went into shooting without a finished shooting script and if there's a lot of hype about it and you're being told it's the next blockbuster, you really know the next Hollywood bomb is coming

415
00:45:20.340 --> 00:45:31.340
and the joke is he's just mentioned the fact that Titanic reflected all these same conditions that these big blockbusters that failed were

416
00:45:31.340 --> 00:45:35.900
If you know, the advanced publicity on Titanic was disastrous.

417
00:45:35.900 --> 00:45:41.060
They were saying, you know, there was over budget, over schedule, they didn't have a script,

418
00:45:41.060 --> 00:45:45.660
they didn't know if the special effects were going to work.

419
00:45:45.660 --> 00:45:52.540
Titanic was being predicted to be the biggest flop ever, and at the time it was the biggest success ever.

420
00:45:52.540 --> 00:46:00.140
What I'm getting at is Hollywood's unpredictable, and of course artistic creation is unpredictable.

421
00:46:00.140 --> 00:46:07.460
What I see here is this desire on the part of critics, the same desire you see on the part of mathematical economists.

422
00:46:07.460 --> 00:46:13.980
They want to be able to predict things. For obvious reasons, they can make a lot of money if they can predict things.

423
00:46:13.980 --> 00:46:23.420
This human desire to predict things is what subverts so much understanding, and I'm saying it's the same in the cultural realm as well.

424
00:46:23.420 --> 00:46:28.780
People think I can figure out ahead of time what makes a great movie or a great television show.

425
00:46:28.780 --> 00:46:34.780
Believe me, if you could, you could make a lot of money, and it wouldn't be as an economist or a literary critic.

426
00:46:34.780 --> 00:46:36.380
It would be as a film producer.

427
00:46:36.380 --> 00:46:42.380
But what any study of Hollywood will tell you is it's simply unpredictable.

428
00:46:42.380 --> 00:46:47.980
The same things that produce disaster, in one case, produce triumph in another.

429
00:46:47.980 --> 00:46:51.480
And I'm talking about financial success and artistic success.

430
00:46:51.480 --> 00:47:02.000
for example, Titanic or Casablanca or even The Godfather, the advance word on The Godfather

431
00:47:02.000 --> 00:47:07.840
was awful, there was quarreling between the director and the producer and they didn't

432
00:47:07.840 --> 00:47:11.360
have a script and Brando was acting up and all that.

433
00:47:11.360 --> 00:47:18.640
So it's very hard for people to face the fact that life is unpredictable and that therefore

434
00:47:18.640 --> 00:47:24.240
Your art is unpredictable, but I think that's the conclusion we have to draw here.

435
00:47:24.240 --> 00:47:28.800
So in terms of your thought theory, again, I don't want to denigrate these abilities

436
00:47:28.800 --> 00:47:33.540
to read a movie, give an interpretation of it, but their idea that you have to have this

437
00:47:33.540 --> 00:47:42.880
single author behind it, and you see the anti-commercial bias behind it, the notion that to the extent

438
00:47:42.880 --> 00:47:52.880
If anyone or anything interferes with a solitary artistic genius of some great creator like Wells or Hitchcock, it's a problem.

439
00:47:52.880 --> 00:47:59.880
Now in fact, the history of Hollywood suggests the opposite, the history of television.

440
00:47:59.880 --> 00:48:04.880
It's something I've sensed for a long time and only have begun to formulate recently.

441
00:48:04.880 --> 00:48:12.380
Many directors did their best work under the greatest commercial pressures.

442
00:48:12.380 --> 00:48:15.380
You can go back to Chaplin.

443
00:48:15.380 --> 00:48:25.380
You know, I do love the full-length movies, Gold Rush, Modern Times,

444
00:48:25.380 --> 00:48:34.380
but in some ways people will, you know, his absolute genius as a comic filmmaker is in the shorts,

445
00:48:34.380 --> 00:48:38.380
in part because they're so brilliantly compressed.

446
00:48:38.380 --> 00:48:52.080
And let's face it, the movies, they are in some ways a string on which he hangs a number of brilliant routines.

447
00:48:52.080 --> 00:49:01.980
That's a little cruel to say, but when you think about it, what stands out, you know, with the gold rush, you probably don't remember the plot.

448
00:49:01.980 --> 00:49:08.780
You do remember the scene where Charlie has to eat his boots and, you know, in a way,

449
00:49:08.780 --> 00:49:12.780
his movies were stringed together, some of the shorts.

450
00:49:12.780 --> 00:49:16.820
The shorts were his great commercial work, where he was working for Hal Roach, I guess

451
00:49:16.820 --> 00:49:23.000
it was, and then gradually went off on his own.

452
00:49:23.000 --> 00:49:29.820
And the more independence Chaplin got, the worse his films got.

453
00:49:29.820 --> 00:49:37.300
You know, The Great Dictator, wonderful film, brilliant, funny, again, what you remember

454
00:49:37.300 --> 00:49:47.100
are bits, Hinkle dancing with the globe, the barber, Charlie is the barber shaving the

455
00:49:47.100 --> 00:49:48.100
man's...

456
00:49:48.100 --> 00:49:56.060
I mean, and someone should have told him, Charlie, lose the final speech.

457
00:49:56.060 --> 00:50:01.700
I don't know if you know The Great Dictator, but the moment when it's about a man impersonating

458
00:50:01.700 --> 00:50:07.260
Hitler and getting to give this big speech at a rally, and he gives a great speech in

459
00:50:07.260 --> 00:50:08.940
favor of international peace.

460
00:50:08.940 --> 00:50:12.380
At the very least, the speech needed to be cut.

461
00:50:12.380 --> 00:50:15.620
Forty-seven minutes was a little long for this.

462
00:50:15.620 --> 00:50:20.860
Well, it's about five minutes, but it's interminable when you see the film, and it's actually a

463
00:50:20.860 --> 00:50:22.540
bit embarrassing now.

464
00:50:22.540 --> 00:50:27.580
And you know, Charlie Chaplin could do anything he wanted at that point. Again, that's one

465
00:50:27.580 --> 00:50:32.540
of those films written, directed, produced, music by Charlie Chaplin. He was a genius

466
00:50:32.540 --> 00:50:38.520
and it's amazing to think he could do all these things and do the gaffing on his own.

467
00:50:38.520 --> 00:50:47.440
I don't even know what gaffing is. And then you get to Monsieur Verdoux and then the really

468
00:50:47.440 --> 00:50:48.440
and so on.

469
00:50:48.440 --> 00:50:53.440
I mean, there are probably other reasons for his decline, but a bad case of autourism was

470
00:50:53.440 --> 00:50:54.440
one of them.

471
00:50:54.440 --> 00:50:57.440
And I mean, this is a story that goes on and on.

472
00:50:57.440 --> 00:51:00.440
Coppola, I've already mentioned.

473
00:51:00.440 --> 00:51:06.440
I mean, to me, the greatest films ever made are Godfather I and II, and they're arguably

474
00:51:06.440 --> 00:51:09.440
therefore the greatest artistic achievement of the 20th century.

475
00:51:09.440 --> 00:51:12.440
Samuel Beckett, the greatest artist of the 20th century.

476
00:51:12.440 --> 00:51:20.440
The Greatest Artistic Achievement of the 20th Century, Samuel Beckett, eat your heart out.

477
00:51:20.440 --> 00:51:29.760
They are commercial art, a big money-making film, the product of as close to a studio

478
00:51:29.760 --> 00:51:34.000
environment as you can find now.

479
00:51:34.000 --> 00:51:35.940
Those two films are perfect.

480
00:51:35.940 --> 00:51:41.100
They are the only films I know that are completely perfect, and they're just magnificent in every

481
00:52:11.100 --> 00:52:18.900
The turning point of this career is Apocalypse Now, which has about one and a half hours

482
00:52:18.900 --> 00:52:24.300
of the most brilliant filmmaking ever, and then an hour that's completely incoherent,

483
00:52:24.300 --> 00:52:28.600
otherwise known as Marlon Brando's part in the film.

484
00:52:28.600 --> 00:52:32.000
But there's the point, there's the point.

485
00:52:32.000 --> 00:52:38.260
Coppola had to get his independence as a director, and Marlon Brando now had to have his independence

486
00:52:38.260 --> 00:52:44.260
This is an actor. No script that Marlin's going to follow. He's just going to ramble on and on for 40 minutes.

487
00:52:44.260 --> 00:52:51.260
And, you know, the independence Coppola and Brando had in making that film ruined it.

488
00:52:51.260 --> 00:52:57.260
I mean, again, whenever Robert DeValle is on the screen, for whatever reason, that's a great movie.

489
00:52:57.260 --> 00:53:06.260
Robert DeValle, the consummate professional actor. And I just say to myself, you know, somebody needed to kick Coppola's butt.

490
00:53:06.260 --> 00:53:22.260
And now, of course, we have, now I can turn to the issue of director's cut, we have the director's cut of Apocalypse Now, and who in the world needs that French plantation owner for another hour?

491
00:53:22.260 --> 00:53:32.260
And so we start talking about this with Amadeus, because thanks to my misplaning, I brought the director's cut of the movie, and it's a really fascinating...

492
00:53:32.260 --> 00:53:58.260
I mean, here's how the auteur theory is infecting DVD sales, you know, we're all like sheep, we run out and buy the director's cut, wow, the director's cut, well, more than half the time the director's cut's inferior to the theatrical release, I want to get the thing where you get both on the one DVD,

493
00:53:58.260 --> 00:54:04.580
D. I mean, even with Lord of the Rings, I love seeing the extra scenes, but I wouldn't

494
00:54:04.580 --> 00:54:11.700
have in the theater. And again, it's a perfect...Director's Cut is auteur theory brought to life. It's

495
00:54:11.700 --> 00:54:18.340
romantic autonomy of art. It's this whole theory that somehow the director knew right

496
00:54:18.340 --> 00:54:25.620
and the studio didn't. But, you know, half the time...You know, we were watching Amadeus

497
00:54:55.620 --> 00:55:02.740
grandfather is in the film playing the flute around the gangsters and you know

498
00:55:02.740 --> 00:55:06.420
they're marvelous scenes but when you see where it's placed it really

499
00:55:06.420 --> 00:55:12.500
interrupted the powerful cutting continuity of the film so you know it's

500
00:55:12.500 --> 00:55:16.980
nice that technologically we have the choice and I think eventually soon we're

501
00:55:16.980 --> 00:55:20.560
gonna be cutting the films ourselves we're given these scenes and we get to

502
00:55:20.560 --> 00:55:25.560
The Triumphs of Capitalist Technology

503
00:55:25.560 --> 00:55:31.560
But what I'm pointing to is this issue that, you know, the director doesn't always know best

504
00:55:31.560 --> 00:55:37.560
and having someone else look at what you do with a more objective eye

505
00:55:37.560 --> 00:55:40.560
and telling you, you know, lose that scene

506
00:55:40.560 --> 00:55:46.560
in studying the Casablanca, I was amazed that at the end of the DV

507
00:55:46.560 --> 00:55:54.800
They have all these surviving correspondents on the film, and it's quite amazing the notes,

508
00:55:54.800 --> 00:55:58.780
read some of these too, that Hal Wallace wrote.

509
00:55:58.780 --> 00:56:02.180
This in a way is the auteur theorist's nightmare.

510
00:56:02.180 --> 00:56:08.700
Hal Wallace watched dailies of the film, commented them on detail to Curtis, and it was things

511
00:56:08.700 --> 00:56:16.540
like this, 1942, June 4th, Wallace wrote to Curtis, I don't like your choice of the bartender,

512
00:56:16.540 --> 00:56:21.540
I don't think he sees it all funny, and I want to give him as little to do with the picture as possible.

513
00:56:21.540 --> 00:56:27.540
On August 21st, he writes some detailed notes on the cutting of the film that goes on for several pages,

514
00:56:27.540 --> 00:56:29.540
and it's at this level of detail.

515
00:56:29.540 --> 00:56:36.540
In the opening shot of the café, lose the silent cut of the woman crying, cut before the pan.

516
00:56:36.540 --> 00:56:39.540
Occasionally, even Jack Warner himself got involved.

517
00:56:39.540 --> 00:56:44.540
The boss of all bosses went over Hal Wallace's head, Director Curtiz, and he writes,

518
00:56:44.540 --> 00:56:54.540
Dear Mike, I can't understand why a 54 second take must be started 7 times. You must cut down on the amount of negative and positive film.

519
00:56:54.540 --> 00:57:02.540
Signed Jack. And everybody knew who Jack was on the set.

520
00:57:02.540 --> 00:57:07.540
And you see again, according to the author theory, this was the worst thing possible.

521
00:57:07.540 --> 00:57:13.540
Jack Warner was getting involved, Hal Wallace was getting involved. They were interfering with the authorial vision of Michael Cortese.

522
00:57:13.540 --> 00:57:23.540
I was amazed at how carefully these studio people supervised what was going on.

523
00:57:23.540 --> 00:57:28.540
And I'm not at all convinced that they made the film worse with their suggestions.

524
00:57:28.540 --> 00:57:33.540
So see it one way or another.

525
00:57:33.540 --> 00:57:40.540
I mean, the great auteur was Orson Welles, but you know who else was an auteur?

526
00:57:40.540 --> 00:58:00.540
The greatest film in the history of Hollywood, according to most people, Citizen Kane, and the worst film in the history of Hollywood, according to everybody, Plan 9 from Outer Space, were both produced by auteurs, Orson Welles.

527
00:58:00.540 --> 00:58:06.540
Ed Wood, who thought he was Orson Welles, and wrote and directed, you know, Glender, Glenda, and all those terrible films

528
00:58:06.540 --> 00:58:14.540
And Tim Burton made that wonderful movie about Ed Wood, which culminates in the scene of Ed Wood meeting Orson Welles in a bar

529
00:58:14.540 --> 00:58:26.540
And what are they talking about? Orson Welles has just learned that the studio has insisted on casting Charlton Heston as a Mexican in Touch of Evil

530
00:58:26.540 --> 00:58:33.540
Orson Welles, the studio, they're ruining my film, and Edward has said, oh yeah, they've ruined a couple of my films too.

531
00:58:33.540 --> 00:58:43.540
And, you know, again, the auteur theory, it just doesn't work if auteurship can produce both Citizen Kane and Plan 9.

532
00:58:43.540 --> 00:58:49.540
Complete autonomy as part of the director does not necessarily produce good results.

533
00:58:49.540 --> 00:59:01.540
So, again, I really wish that directors could have autonomy and have their freedom and not be too pressured.

534
00:59:01.540 --> 00:59:05.540
But many times, that pressure turns out to produce better results.

535
00:59:05.540 --> 00:59:14.540
And then time and time again, one can see that a person has one big hit as a filmmaker, and then gets too big for his britches,

536
00:59:14.540 --> 00:59:30.540
so much for the auteur theory, let me turn briefly to the Frankfurt School and another Marxist anti-market way of viewing Hollywood

537
00:59:30.540 --> 00:59:44.540
Now, if you read nothing else of Marxist culture criticism, read the culture industry chapter in Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Teodor Adorno.

538
00:59:44.540 --> 00:59:53.540
I can't begin to say how influential this essay has been. It's probably the single most influential essay in cultural studies.

539
00:59:53.540 --> 00:59:59.300
studies, I disagree with it, it's at times unreadable although that may be

540
00:59:59.300 --> 01:00:04.540
because it's a bad translation for the German but but still it's actually

541
01:00:04.540 --> 01:00:10.380
brilliant in certain areas and you could learn a lot from it but this is the it's

542
01:00:10.380 --> 01:00:15.980
the full title of the chapter is the culture industry enlightenment as as mass

543
01:00:15.980 --> 01:00:22.700
deception. This is a product of a kind of historical accident called World War II

544
01:00:22.700 --> 01:00:33.700
That is, Horkheimer was Jewish and Adorno was half Jewish. In any case, they were Marxists and had to flee Nazi Germany.

545
01:00:33.700 --> 01:00:43.700
And by some grotesque quirk of fate, they ended up in the only place that seemed worse to them than Nazi Germany, namely Los Angeles.

546
01:00:43.700 --> 01:00:47.700
And you have to appreciate the fact that they couldn't drive.

547
01:00:47.700 --> 01:00:54.780
so it really I mean I can't sympathize with their circumstances so there was a

548
01:00:54.780 --> 01:01:01.220
huge colony of German emigres in Los Angeles centered around Hollywood a

549
01:01:01.220 --> 01:01:07.740
number of these directors had come there and in conjunction with that a number of

550
01:01:07.740 --> 01:01:12.700
musicians Arnold Schoenberg ended up in Hollywood and Louis B. Mayer felt sorry

551
01:01:12.700 --> 01:01:15.700
and ask them to write a film score.

552
01:01:15.700 --> 01:01:19.700
One of the most bizarre ideas of Arnold Schoenberg writing film music.

553
01:01:19.700 --> 01:01:26.700
But anyway, Horkheim and Adorno ended up, actually Adorno was good friends with Schoenberg.

554
01:01:26.700 --> 01:01:35.700
And in a way, the whole modern field of cultural studies was born out of the alienation and dissatisfaction

555
01:01:35.700 --> 01:01:39.700
of these German emigres stuck in Los Angeles.

556
01:01:39.700 --> 01:01:50.980
and watching Hollywood movies with, I think, a minimal concept of comprehension, as I'll try to show in a minute.

557
01:01:50.980 --> 01:02:01.740
But they were weirdly driven in a sense. I mean, they were German to the core, very cultured, especially Adorno.

558
01:02:01.740 --> 01:02:09.660
Adorno was a composer himself and a decent pianist, very learned in musicology, wrote excellent books on musicology.

559
01:02:09.660 --> 01:02:39.660
And here they are listening to Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians on the radio and all this slick Hollywood music and it's driving them crazy and they're watching these films and it really led them to conclude that this, there was a conspiracy going on here and part of it was they were, one thing that could be said for them is they were profoundly anti-fascist

560
01:02:39.660 --> 01:02:45.860
They were trying to understand what had gone wrong in Germany and it is interesting they

561
01:02:45.860 --> 01:02:53.500
were among the first to try to see Germany as not an exceptional case but that what had

562
01:02:53.500 --> 01:03:01.260
happened in Germany was the logical outcome of, they felt, capitalism and in general of

563
01:03:01.260 --> 01:03:03.020
enlightened rationale in the West.

564
01:03:03.020 --> 01:03:10.340
The thesis of this book is that fascism goes back to the Odyssey, to put it in a nutshell,

565
01:03:10.340 --> 01:03:19.300
that the Greek rationality of Odysseus, which led him to blind that cyclops, eventually

566
01:03:19.300 --> 01:03:22.580
leads through the Marquis de Sade to Hitler.

567
01:03:22.580 --> 01:03:28.300
I'm compressing this book very quickly for you, but that's essentially its thesis.

568
01:03:28.300 --> 01:03:34.140
And in a way, I mean, some of the insights, the reading of the Odyssey, for example, is

569
01:03:34.140 --> 01:03:37.020
completely brilliant.

570
01:03:37.020 --> 01:03:42.700
But they wanted to spread the blame and not locate it in Germany.

571
01:03:42.700 --> 01:03:45.700
And so they found it in Hollywood.

572
01:03:45.700 --> 01:03:52.900
And one of the great claims of this chapter is Hitler's speeches, Hollywood films, propaganda.

573
01:03:52.900 --> 01:03:54.340
It's the same thing.

574
01:03:54.340 --> 01:03:56.980
It's mind control, it's thought control.

575
01:03:56.980 --> 01:04:04.180
And Adorno had it in for Arturo Toscanini, the conductor, and so at one point it's Hitler

576
01:04:04.180 --> 01:04:06.260
dictator, Toscanini dictator.

577
01:04:06.260 --> 01:04:10.420
There's some really bizarre things in the book, and you have to wonder how much of a

578
01:04:10.420 --> 01:04:16.900
Fort Fangler fan do you have to be to equate Toscanini with Hitler.

579
01:04:16.900 --> 01:04:22.220
And they equate the Budapest string quartet with Montevani in the strings and Guy Lombardo

580
01:04:22.220 --> 01:04:28.020
in the Strings, because they feel the Budapest String Quartet has been corrupted by coming

581
01:04:28.020 --> 01:04:33.460
to Hollywood and they play too sweetly now instead of this very odd thing going on in

582
01:04:33.460 --> 01:04:34.460
this essay.

583
01:04:34.460 --> 01:04:42.380
And I do, I think it is a feature of their feeling so out of it in the Hollywood community

584
01:04:42.380 --> 01:04:47.660
and frankly watching films in a language that they didn't really understand.

585
01:04:47.660 --> 01:04:51.620
And so what they saw was this completely manipulative system.

586
01:04:51.620 --> 01:04:58.120
and I'll just read you a few things from the essay to give you a little flavor of it.

587
01:05:00.120 --> 01:05:04.320
They're reacting to defenses of Hollywood as mass culture.

588
01:05:04.320 --> 01:05:09.920
It is alleged that because millions participate in it, certain reproduction processes are necessary

589
01:05:09.920 --> 01:05:15.820
that inevitably require identical deeds in innumerable places to be satisfied with identical goods.

590
01:05:15.820 --> 01:05:20.420
They see Hollywood films as mass production, being turned out on a mass production line,

591
01:05:20.420 --> 01:05:22.820
Standardized Product for Standardized Audience

592
01:05:22.820 --> 01:05:26.020
The technical contrast between the few production centers

593
01:05:26.020 --> 01:05:29.020
and the large number of widely dispersed conception points

594
01:05:29.020 --> 01:05:32.420
is said to demand organization and planning by management

595
01:05:32.420 --> 01:05:35.420
Furthermore, it is claimed that standards were based

596
01:05:35.420 --> 01:05:37.820
in the first place on consumers' needs

597
01:05:37.820 --> 01:05:40.020
I mean, they have complete scorn for the idea

598
01:05:40.020 --> 01:05:44.820
that Hollywood could be responding to any kind of genuine demand

599
01:05:44.820 --> 01:05:47.420
And for that reason, we're accepted with so little resistance

600
01:05:47.420 --> 01:05:54.420
The result is the circle of manipulation and the retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows ever stronger.

601
01:05:54.420 --> 01:05:59.420
A technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself.

602
01:05:59.420 --> 01:06:03.420
It is the coercive nature of society alienated from self.

603
01:06:03.420 --> 01:06:11.420
Automobiles, bombs and movies keep the whole thing together until their leveling element shows its strength.

604
01:06:11.420 --> 01:06:23.420
automobiles, bombs and movies. It's all this technological structure of capitalism, which in Germany produced fascism, in Hollywood, as you will see, produced Donald Duck.

605
01:06:23.420 --> 01:06:39.420
And they're equally sinister in their effects. They were struck by market surveys by the studios, because they were doing them even as now.

606
01:06:39.420 --> 01:06:46.420
and mark differentiations such as those of A and B films or of stories and magazines in different price ranges

607
01:06:46.420 --> 01:06:52.420
depend not so much on subject matter as on classifying, organizing and labeling consumers.

608
01:06:52.420 --> 01:06:58.420
Now their idea here is Hollywood doesn't follow a market and accordingly label the consumers.

609
01:06:58.420 --> 01:07:01.420
No, it labels the consumers and invents the markets.

610
01:07:01.420 --> 01:07:04.420
Something is provided for all so that none may escape.

611
01:07:04.420 --> 01:07:06.420
The distinctions are emphasized and extended.

612
01:07:06.420 --> 01:07:14.420
The public is catered for with a hierarchical range of mass-produced products of varying quality, thus advancing the rule of complete quantification.

613
01:07:14.420 --> 01:07:22.420
Everybody must behave as if spontaneously, in accordance with his previously determined and index level.

614
01:07:22.420 --> 01:07:29.420
They can't believe in any spontaneous human action. If people decide which movies to go to, it just looks as if it's spontaneous.

615
01:07:29.420 --> 01:07:33.420
But no, Hollywood has planned it all ahead of time.

616
01:07:33.420 --> 01:07:41.820
They've decided who will see which movies, rich people will like this movie, poor people will like that movie, and it just looks spontaneous.

617
01:07:41.820 --> 01:07:50.540
Everybody must behave as if spontaneously in accordance with his previously determined and index level and choose the category of mass products turned out for his type.

618
01:07:50.540 --> 01:07:57.580
Consumers appear as statistics on research organization charts and are divided by income groups into red, green and blue areas.

619
01:07:57.580 --> 01:08:01.380
The technique is that used for any type of propaganda.

620
01:08:01.380 --> 01:08:04.020
You know, talk about getting the cart before the horse here.

621
01:08:04.020 --> 01:08:08.780
They see these charts in Hollywood that are the result of market surveys, and they think

622
01:08:08.780 --> 01:08:14.060
Hollywood producers create the charts and then create the demand from them.

623
01:08:14.060 --> 01:08:18.940
Now again, this is this fallacy, it's a kind of Monday morning quarterbacking, the fact

624
01:08:18.940 --> 01:08:23.980
that a movie is a hit, they think Hollywood knew how to do it, that they could produce

625
01:08:23.980 --> 01:08:29.620
a hit any time they wanted to, obviously untrue from the history of Hollywood as that book

626
01:08:29.620 --> 01:08:30.620
Fiasco Shows.

627
01:08:30.620 --> 01:08:31.940
Well, this goes on and on.

628
01:08:31.940 --> 01:08:37.980
For one thing, their notion of Hollywood is that it was designed to, the movies are designed

629
01:08:37.980 --> 01:08:43.940
to reconcile Americans to the capitalist system so that they won't rebel against it.

630
01:08:43.940 --> 01:08:45.860
And so this is actually rather clever.

631
01:08:45.860 --> 01:08:52.020
They analyze quiz shows as giving everybody the false hope that they can strike it rich.

632
01:08:52.020 --> 01:08:55.500
And you know, if you just let one guy in a million strike it rich, everyone else will

633
01:08:55.500 --> 01:08:59.260
put up with their poverty because they still have the hope of striking rich.

634
01:08:59.260 --> 01:09:03.260
That actually is a rather insightful idea of why game shows are so popular.

635
01:09:03.260 --> 01:09:06.260
But then comes Donald Duck.

636
01:09:06.260 --> 01:09:15.260
Cartoons are there, we would say itchy and scratchy, so we can watch people get beaten up worse than we get beaten up by capitalism.

637
01:09:15.260 --> 01:09:23.260
Let me read you this, my favorite passage.

638
01:09:23.260 --> 01:09:28.260
And this is also great. This is the nostalgia of culture critics.

639
01:09:28.260 --> 01:09:33.260
This is like, he's now saying, Steamboat Willie, that was great cartooning.

640
01:09:33.260 --> 01:09:39.260
But Donald Duck, now, cartoons were once exponents of fantasy as opposed to rationalism.

641
01:09:39.260 --> 01:09:43.460
They ensured that justice was done to the creatures and objects they electrified by

642
01:09:43.460 --> 01:09:45.980
giving the main specimens a second life.

643
01:09:45.980 --> 01:09:52.420
All they do today is to confirm the victory of technological reason over truth.

644
01:09:52.420 --> 01:09:53.820
Feel that way about cartoons?

645
01:09:53.820 --> 01:09:58.380
A few years ago, they had a consistent plot, which only broke up in the final moments in

646
01:09:58.380 --> 01:10:01.700
the crazy chase, and thus resembled the old slapstick comedy.

647
01:10:01.700 --> 01:10:04.660
Now, however, time relations have shifted.

648
01:10:04.660 --> 01:10:09.240
In the very first sequence, a motive is stated so that in the course of the action, destruction

649
01:10:09.240 --> 01:10:10.720
can get to work on it.

650
01:10:10.720 --> 01:10:15.460
With the audience in pursuit, the protagonists become the worthless object of general violence.

651
01:10:15.460 --> 01:10:18.620
He would have died if he'd seen an itchy and scratchy cartoon.

652
01:10:18.620 --> 01:10:24.600
Insofar as cartoons do any more than accustom the senses to the new tempo, they hammer into

653
01:10:24.600 --> 01:10:29.700
every brain the old lesson that continuous friction, the breaking down of all individual

654
01:10:29.700 --> 01:10:33.340
resistance is the condition of life in this society.

655
01:10:33.340 --> 01:10:39.040
Donald Duck and the cartoons and the unfortunate in real life get their thrashing so that the

656
01:10:39.040 --> 01:10:44.700
audience can learn to take their own punishment.

657
01:10:44.700 --> 01:10:53.700
The Character of an Artita Enta, Degenerate Duck, as it would be in German, Donald.

658
01:10:53.700 --> 01:10:59.700
I mean, that's where I thought, you know, maybe they didn't understand the Donald Duck cartoons.

659
01:10:59.700 --> 01:11:05.700
Maybe, you know, and I just, I'm thinking of my, I went and saw Macbeth in German in Frankfurt,

660
01:11:05.700 --> 01:11:13.700
and I understood about 60% of it. My German's okay and I knew the play, but I still got about 60% of it.

661
01:11:13.700 --> 01:11:30.700
and I'd be hesitant to write an analysis of Macbeth based on seeing it only in German that I didn't understand very well, or as in Vienna, they were performing Grillparte's Königsautiker's Glück.

662
01:11:30.700 --> 01:11:35.700
I figured I'd skip that because I didn't know the play and I had no prayer of following it.

663
01:11:35.700 --> 01:11:41.700
But I sympathized with Jorge Amador, they're stuck in Hollywood, what are you going to do on a Friday night?

664
01:11:41.700 --> 01:11:49.100
Go see a Donald Duck cartoon, but I don't think they really get the Donald Duckness of the film there.

665
01:11:49.100 --> 01:11:58.900
And again, this is one, it's extraordinary that so much of cultural studies flows from this essay of two emigrate Germans confronting a culture they barely understood.

666
01:11:58.900 --> 01:12:08.700
They were almost like anthropologists, you know, going to a South Seas island and relying on native informants to explain American popular culture to them.

667
01:12:08.700 --> 01:12:21.700
I think a lot of the errors of modern cultural studies grow out of the fact that these original Frankfurt School analyses basically miss the point.

668
01:12:21.700 --> 01:12:28.700
They just don't understand the degree of feedback that goes on in Hollywood production.

669
01:12:28.700 --> 01:12:35.380
And again, they see everything, typically Marxists, that they focus on the production and they

670
01:12:35.380 --> 01:12:41.140
think that the people who produce the product can then foist it on the audience by clever

671
01:12:41.140 --> 01:12:42.140
marketing.

672
01:12:42.140 --> 01:12:44.580
Now, all films are marketed.

673
01:12:44.580 --> 01:12:49.100
You may know that half the budget of films is sometimes on the marketing and indeed it's

674
01:12:49.100 --> 01:12:54.100
one of the tough discussions, decisions any film producer has.

675
01:12:54.100 --> 01:12:56.400
You've made a film, it's a turkey.

676
01:12:56.400 --> 01:13:00.400
You know it, the audience surveys show it, what do you do?

677
01:13:00.400 --> 01:13:05.540
You then sit down and say, well, we've dumped $12 million into this.

678
01:13:05.540 --> 01:13:11.800
We could put $12 million into marketing, do saturating marketing, operate it in 1,500 theaters

679
01:13:11.800 --> 01:13:18.760
in one weekend, get the ads on Thursday night TV, and get as many people into the theater

680
01:13:18.760 --> 01:13:19.760
that weekend.

681
01:13:19.760 --> 01:13:22.680
Maybe we can recoup the $24 million.

682
01:13:22.680 --> 01:13:29.680
or you can send it straight to DVD hell and save the 12 million dollars on advertising or something in between.

683
01:13:29.680 --> 01:13:34.680
But nobody in Hollywood thinks you can market anything.

684
01:13:34.680 --> 01:13:40.680
Now sometimes they obviously think they can market something, which it turns out they can't.

685
01:13:40.680 --> 01:13:47.680
And you know, you do know this saturation strategy, open the film in as many theaters as you want.

686
01:13:47.680 --> 01:13:58.680
Maybe don't release it for reviewers so there will be no bad reviews, you hope that word-of-mouth won't kill it between Friday and Saturday, but sometimes even that happens.

687
01:13:58.680 --> 01:14:10.680
And that fiasco book is extraordinary to see how unbelievable, you know, films made for $82 million grossing a total of $3 million with a $17 million advertising budget.

688
01:14:10.680 --> 01:14:24.680
So, you know, what strikes me about these Marxist theorists, these cultural theorists in general, they seem to have no idea how the industry actually operates.

689
01:14:24.680 --> 01:14:30.680
You just wish one of them could intern in a studio office for a change.

690
01:14:30.680 --> 01:14:36.680
And then maybe they'd have some idea how markets operate.

691
01:14:36.680 --> 01:14:48.680
So in general in films, yes, a lot of planning goes into a film, but the final film rarely resembles the thing that was originally planned.

692
01:14:48.680 --> 01:14:54.680
A lot of planning even goes into a studio strategy.

693
01:14:54.680 --> 01:15:03.680
But again, if you're not adaptable in this industry, you're not going to be in it very long.

694
01:15:03.680 --> 01:15:09.680
It is a case of feedback, revision in the process of producing the play.

695
01:15:09.680 --> 01:15:14.680
You'll see that movies are sometimes changed even after they're released.

696
01:15:14.680 --> 01:15:17.680
They will do another ending for it and rush to get it out.

697
01:15:17.680 --> 01:15:21.680
Ad campaigns, you can see, get refined in the process.

698
01:15:21.680 --> 01:15:26.680
Again, we are so obsessed with this idea of pre-planning, getting it all right ahead of time.

699
01:15:26.680 --> 01:15:30.680
I mean, it's sort of the way academics tend to write their books.

700
01:15:30.680 --> 01:15:40.680
They do write them, you know, sort of in a kind of isolation, and they project that then on the rest of the world, how they operate.

701
01:15:40.680 --> 01:15:49.680
But in fact, again, the whole world of the motion picture, as we look at its history, is a world of, it should be studied with chaos theory.

702
01:15:49.680 --> 01:15:55.680
It's a world of unpredictability, of all sorts of elements of contingency.

703
01:15:55.680 --> 01:16:01.680
And that's why we need thousands of movies to produce one good one.

704
01:16:01.680 --> 01:16:09.680
Again, the way you see some aesthetic critics write about films, the way you see some cultural studies write about films,

705
01:16:09.680 --> 01:16:14.680
you'd think that you could figure out ahead of time how to make the perfect movie.

706
01:16:14.680 --> 01:16:22.680
That just neglects how complex it is to make a movie.

707
01:16:22.680 --> 01:16:33.680
There are so many elements involved, so much chemistry involved, the chemistry among members of the cast, the chemistry between the cast and the directors.

708
01:16:33.680 --> 01:16:40.680
Many of the actors in Casablanca, for example, had worked together in other Warner Brothers movies, and that helps very much.

709
01:16:40.680 --> 01:16:44.680
You can actually see that on the screen, that these people are comfortable together.

710
01:16:44.680 --> 01:16:51.680
On the other hand, Bogart and Bergman had never worked together, and yet they hit it off, and that's obvious on the screen.

711
01:16:51.680 --> 01:16:52.680
on the screen.

712
01:16:52.680 --> 01:16:57.480
Kurtis was a very professional director and easygoing and worked well with everybody.

713
01:16:57.480 --> 01:16:58.480
So that helped.

714
01:16:58.480 --> 01:17:02.320
But all these things are unpredictable.

715
01:17:02.320 --> 01:17:05.680
Warner didn't know they had a hit when they were making Casablanca.

716
01:17:05.680 --> 01:17:12.600
They certainly didn't know they had a film classic going when they made Casablanca.

717
01:17:12.600 --> 01:17:19.120
If people waited for everything to be in place to make the perfect movie, no movies would

718
01:17:19.120 --> 01:17:20.280
ever be made.

719
01:17:20.280 --> 01:17:27.680
So the structure of the movie industry and its cultural product is basically just what

720
01:17:27.680 --> 01:17:34.280
we saw in the serial novel and also I'm claiming we saw in the Elizabethan Theater and I think

721
01:17:34.280 --> 01:17:37.640
you'd find in Greek tragedy if you look back.

722
01:17:37.640 --> 01:17:45.360
Again it is not a case of a few single geniuses turning out a few single perfect products.

723
01:17:45.360 --> 01:17:47.440
It's a mess.

724
01:17:47.440 --> 01:17:53.160
It's everybody working against everybody else and I think the formula is the more people

725
01:17:53.160 --> 01:18:02.040
working the better, the more competition the better, you know, the larger the movie industry,

726
01:18:02.040 --> 01:18:07.240
the more likely it is to turn out hits and so when you look at the record of the motion

727
01:18:07.240 --> 01:18:14.560
picture of the 20th century, just an unspeakable number of bad movies and many of them have

728
01:18:14.560 --> 01:18:24.560
have mercifully been lost. You look at some of the genres like the Hollywood Western in the 30s, just what were called B-movies then.

729
01:18:24.560 --> 01:18:33.560
One that Horkheimer referred to that back in those days, studios did decide, typically movies were shown in a double bill in those days,

730
01:18:33.560 --> 01:18:42.560
and you had an A-movie and a B-movie, and that they decided ahead of time, they put their famous actors and actresses and directors

731
01:18:42.560 --> 01:18:46.560
the big budget of the A-movies and the script on the B-movies

732
01:18:46.560 --> 01:18:50.560
often made more money on the B-movies in terms of profits because the costs were lower

733
01:18:50.560 --> 01:18:54.560
but in any case, you look at those things, I mean, no one looks at them now

734
01:18:54.560 --> 01:19:00.560
except maybe on TCM very late, 3 a.m. in the morning

735
01:19:00.560 --> 01:19:04.560
but all those movies, again, they're like the base of the pyramid

736
01:19:04.560 --> 01:19:08.560
it's the one thing I'm trying to get across, culture is like a pyramid

737
01:19:08.560 --> 01:19:18.560
It needs a broad base to reach those peaks in the view of many analysts as if we could jump to the peaks immediately.

738
01:19:18.560 --> 01:19:27.560
Who made Boxtop Bertha? Was it Scorsese or Coppola? One of the two.

739
01:19:27.560 --> 01:19:36.560
Boxcar Bertha, Scorsese. In order to make Raging Bull, Scorsese had to make Boxcar Bertha

740
01:19:36.560 --> 01:19:45.560
early in his career. That's the typical pattern. You take the greatest directors, they don't

741
01:19:45.560 --> 01:19:53.560
consistently turn. The people closest to auteurs, like Ingmar Bergman or Fellini, they don't

742
01:19:53.560 --> 01:20:00.720
They don't turn out consistently great films. Any place you look in culture, there's inconsistency.

743
01:20:00.720 --> 01:20:05.960
Shakespeare wrote Troilus and Crescent and Titus Antroticus, for that matter.

744
01:20:05.960 --> 01:20:17.480
We know this from the economy in general, that entrepreneurship is a gamble, that nobody knows ahead of time what works.

745
01:20:17.480 --> 01:20:25.560
you can only guess at it and culture it's almost even more extreme becomes a matter of taste

746
01:20:25.560 --> 01:20:33.720
there's more more uncalculable elements so that's why commercial culture can be successful it throws

747
01:20:33.720 --> 01:20:42.040
so much money so much resources here at the making of movies that you make enough movies you'll make

748
01:20:42.040 --> 01:20:47.760
make a great one. And again, you'll see that for the sort of movie economy as a whole.

749
01:20:47.760 --> 01:20:54.080
But even in a director's career, I was really struck, for example, with Tim Burton, how

750
01:20:54.080 --> 01:21:02.040
strong his first movies were. I couldn't remember anyone who was that good from the beginning,

751
01:21:02.040 --> 01:21:08.960
starting off with Pee Wee's Big Adventure, then doing Beetlejuice, and then doing the

752
01:21:08.960 --> 01:21:13.460
The Batman film and the second Batman film. As I recall, Edward Scissorhead, I think his

753
01:21:13.460 --> 01:21:19.440
first six films were all successful and all extraordinarily good. And then things have

754
01:21:19.440 --> 01:21:25.860
actually started to drop off lately. M. Night Shyamalan, I think his first three films were

755
01:21:25.860 --> 01:21:31.080
extraordinarily good and now he's kind of falling off. But, you know, Hitchcock made

756
01:21:31.080 --> 01:21:36.960
some bonds, John Ford made some pretty bad movies. I mean, he made so many movies. Of

757
01:21:36.960 --> 01:21:40.800
Of course that happened, but that's what you should expect.

758
01:21:40.800 --> 01:21:46.920
Again, if you read critics, they always look at things in retrospect.

759
01:21:46.920 --> 01:21:53.440
When a movie works out, when everything is perfectly in place, then they can go back

760
01:21:53.440 --> 01:21:57.800
and a critic can explain to you the pattern, I'm very good at doing stuff like that, it's

761
01:21:57.800 --> 01:21:59.700
my profession.

762
01:21:59.700 --> 01:22:06.200
But the mistake is to think it has a perfect pattern because it was perfectly planned from

763
01:22:06.200 --> 01:22:13.440
from the beginning. Scholars are very uncomfortable with contingency and messiness and with the

764
01:22:13.440 --> 01:22:19.600
sheer element of contingency and luck in artistic achievement. And they tend to write it out.

765
01:22:19.600 --> 01:22:26.960
They tend to write out everything that makes a culture unpredictable in a way, everything

766
01:22:26.960 --> 01:22:35.240
that makes it fun. But if you really see how the pattern of the Victorian novel is the

767
01:22:35.240 --> 01:22:42.640
The same as the pattern of movies, a whole series of really bad novels and novelists,

768
01:22:42.640 --> 01:22:49.520
about 20 who were really good, some who were real peaks and one powering genius like Dickens.

769
01:22:49.520 --> 01:22:52.040
You see the same thing when you look around at movies.

770
01:22:52.040 --> 01:23:00.280
Again, as I started to say, I'll say it again, that if you took the 100 best movies of the

771
01:23:00.280 --> 01:23:07.280
in the 20th century, around the globe, but even just out of Hollywood, it really would be an extraordinary body of work.

772
01:23:07.280 --> 01:23:12.280
I sat down to compile the list of the 100 best movies and came up with 200.

773
01:23:12.280 --> 01:23:19.280
I really couldn't whittle it down to 100 because it's quite extraordinary when you start thinking about it.

774
01:23:19.280 --> 01:23:26.280
Now, I don't know how many billions upon billions of dollars went into the movie industry in the 20th century,

775
01:23:26.280 --> 01:23:31.280
But it's one of the reasons why it resulted in such an extraordinary production

776
01:23:31.280 --> 01:23:37.280
And that's the point I would make and we'll be making about television as well

777
01:23:37.280 --> 01:23:41.280
We have great contempt for commercial culture

778
01:23:41.280 --> 01:23:46.280
But one thing it does is throw money at culture and it attracts talent

779
01:23:46.280 --> 01:23:54.280
American drama has not been so great in the 20th century

780
01:23:54.280 --> 01:24:08.280
There's O'Neill, and maybe you can talk about Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams and come down to David Mamet, but you know the reason why American drama has not been so good is there's been so much more money and opportunity in making films.

781
01:24:08.280 --> 01:24:21.280
Why should Francis Ford Coppola or Martin Scorsese be writing drama when they could be making these films, which are not, it's not just that they make more money, it's not just they get more fame,

782
01:24:21.280 --> 01:24:34.280
It's even not just that they reach a larger audience, but the final product is in fact more exciting than just the stage play, and it allows them to do things that they couldn't do on the stage.

783
01:24:34.280 --> 01:24:45.280
And so it's obvious that the movies have siphoned off talent from the area of drama, but that's what happens in the history of culture.

784
01:24:45.280 --> 01:24:56.280
New media come along when theater was introduced and ancient Greek drama drew talent away from people who otherwise might have been writing old style epic poems.

785
01:24:56.280 --> 01:25:11.280
And so that's what we see here. To sum up then, the motion picture is a perfect example of a new medium that comes along without any particular artistic thinking behind it.

786
01:25:11.280 --> 01:25:18.280
and the medium itself is initially attractive. People were fascinated just by the fact that

787
01:25:18.280 --> 01:25:23.040
something is on film and that they've got a moving picture now. And similarly when they

788
01:25:23.040 --> 01:25:29.460
introduce sound to it, there was an absolute fascination just now with talking pictures.

789
01:25:29.460 --> 01:25:34.060
What happened very quickly though is people with artistic talent were attracted to this

790
01:25:34.060 --> 01:25:40.120
area. In some cases we always see this migration from Broadway to Hollywood. W.C. Fields would

791
01:25:40.120 --> 01:25:58.000
The New Medium draws out people who never would have even thought of being artists in

792
01:25:58.000 --> 01:25:59.000
the old medium.

793
01:25:59.000 --> 01:26:02.480
Someone like John Ford was just a Hollywood roustabout.

794
01:26:02.480 --> 01:26:07.240
I think he starred out as a stuntman in silent films and one day he said, hey, let me use

795
01:26:07.240 --> 01:26:08.240
the camera.

796
01:26:08.240 --> 01:26:09.240
I can do that.

797
01:26:09.240 --> 01:26:19.240
He's a man who didn't grow up with any artistic ambitions, ended up one of the great artists of the 20th century with films like The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance to his credit.

798
01:26:19.240 --> 01:26:28.240
So a new medium gives new opportunities to people who worked in the old medium. Above all, it opens up new opportunities to people who never worked in any artistic medium.

799
01:26:28.240 --> 01:26:32.240
And the result, as we say, is aesthetic and cultural history.

800
01:26:32.240 --> 01:26:35.240
Okay, I'll stop here. Yes?

801
01:26:35.240 --> 01:26:40.240
Sir, there's a couple of things that ought to be said here.

802
01:26:40.240 --> 01:26:47.240
Fried is one of the greatest sims, and these critics, and the Germans, especially the German people.

803
01:26:47.240 --> 01:26:58.240
I mean, I was in the service when the Germans were restoring their own military system.

804
01:26:58.240 --> 01:27:02.240
Could you ask me a question? Could you just ask a question?

805
01:27:02.240 --> 01:27:29.240
Well, the question is, well, the thing about it is, all of this commotion about these things has to take in people with pride, for instance, critic, and then, but the point of the thing is that the human nature is operating here,

806
01:27:29.240 --> 01:27:40.740
And movies and their fate is just like comparing it to a golf and holds in one. You have to play a lot of golf to get a hold of a golf.

807
01:27:40.740 --> 01:27:42.240
I agree with that, yeah.

808
01:27:42.240 --> 01:27:57.240
In other words, it should be asked, the question should be asked if it's going toward the highest form, the highest desire in mankind, it's good.

809
01:27:57.240 --> 01:28:04.740
If it's going to the lower attitude that mankind has, it's bad.

810
01:28:04.740 --> 01:28:10.240
Yeah, I mean, I agree with that. It's a problem. We can't tell ahead of time whether a movie is going to hit the heights and depths.

811
01:28:10.240 --> 01:28:12.240
Other questions? Yes?

812
01:28:12.240 --> 01:28:21.240
I'm afraid that the epic first will be seen quite hard, as we have deliberately planned these movies to turn on it under the makeup of recent films a lot.

813
01:28:21.240 --> 01:28:33.240
You did do some streaks in this role of film in the vehicle of radiology, and it's not but a way to be pre-capitalist in the sense that you have parodic wisdom, but you also be very pro-communist in a way.

814
01:28:33.240 --> 01:28:41.240
You used to think about multi-stopped and photobiological films, which are novels written by communists, and they're certainly contained in the novel.

815
01:28:42.240 --> 01:28:49.040
Films are ideological and they often express the ideology of the people who make them and

816
01:28:49.040 --> 01:28:54.880
sometimes more generally the ideology of the filmmaking community.

817
01:28:54.880 --> 01:28:59.240
Ben Stein wrote a wonderful book called The View from Sunset Boulevard, which shows how

818
01:28:59.240 --> 01:29:04.000
the way people live in Los Angeles gets reflected in the films they make.

819
01:29:04.000 --> 01:29:11.580
And for example, the fact that films generally portray businessmen as sleazy reflects the

820
01:29:11.580 --> 01:29:17.020
The Greatest Center of Sleazy Businessmen is Hollywood.

821
01:29:17.020 --> 01:29:23.100
If you look, he used Dallas on television as an example, JR would sit down and sign

822
01:29:23.100 --> 01:29:26.460
a $6 million oil deal on a handshake.

823
01:29:26.460 --> 01:29:32.340
And Stein pointed out, there's no way Shell Oil or Mobil is going to do business that

824
01:29:32.340 --> 01:29:33.340
way.

825
01:29:33.340 --> 01:29:36.540
There'd be 52 lawyers and 112 accountants there going over things.

826
01:29:36.540 --> 01:29:41.020
But he said, in Hollywood, that kind of crazy thing actually does happen, that you sign

827
01:29:41.020 --> 01:29:43.020
and a big deal on the basis of just a handshake.

828
01:29:43.020 --> 01:29:46.020
So that's an example where they have a certain view of business

829
01:29:46.020 --> 01:29:49.020
which really is a projection of their own situation outward.

830
01:29:49.020 --> 01:29:53.020
What I will say that I do like about Horkheimer and Adorno

831
01:29:53.020 --> 01:29:56.020
is they point to ideological aspects of Hollywood

832
01:29:56.020 --> 01:30:00.020
that don't seem to be consciously ideological

833
01:30:00.020 --> 01:30:03.020
and that are really clever to observe that, for example,

834
01:30:03.020 --> 01:30:07.020
a quiz show has a kind of built-in ideology to it

835
01:30:07.020 --> 01:30:23.020
Didn't Adorno write a great deal on modern Schoenbrenner?

836
01:30:37.020 --> 01:30:40.020
and be a positive composer. Yes?

837
01:30:40.020 --> 01:30:45.020
Early on, you said that the market is showing how the news are that the academics are really slow to come along.

838
01:30:45.020 --> 01:30:55.020
I guess my question is do you really think that the academics were slow to come along because they didn't know how to embrace movies.

839
01:30:55.020 --> 01:31:04.020
Or do you think academics are slow to come along because they're usually typically supposed to come along in terms of technology?

840
01:31:04.020 --> 01:31:09.860
I think it's a combination of things. Generally, academics are slow to get the message.

841
01:31:09.860 --> 01:31:18.260
I think, you know, so many times when I talk about Gilligan Unbound or my other writers on television,

842
01:31:18.260 --> 01:31:28.100
you know, what I hear from them, oh, well, I don't own a TV, you know, like, oh, you, so, but, you know,

843
01:31:28.100 --> 01:31:35.380
I think academics tend to be invested in whatever the last big thing was.

844
01:31:35.380 --> 01:31:38.580
They have been studying it in some cases for centuries.

845
01:31:38.580 --> 01:31:40.540
They know the vocabulary.

846
01:31:40.540 --> 01:31:45.940
It's very interesting that, for example, the first commentary on films tended to apply

847
01:31:45.940 --> 01:31:54.060
the standards of drama to it and say this film lacks some characteristic that a stage

848
01:31:54.060 --> 01:31:55.980
drama should have.

849
01:31:55.980 --> 01:32:00.860
academics get very good at talking about what's been in front of their eyes for a long time

850
01:32:00.860 --> 01:32:05.460
and in some ways they balk at a new medium because it requires them to retool.

851
01:32:05.460 --> 01:32:09.620
I'm not really, you know, I was trained to discuss literature.

852
01:32:09.620 --> 01:32:13.420
I know that my talk about film and television suffers.

853
01:32:13.420 --> 01:32:15.020
I don't have the right vocabulary.

854
01:32:15.020 --> 01:32:21.380
I've been told this by people in film studies and so on and I just have to live with that.

855
01:32:21.380 --> 01:32:28.380
But it's typical that academics get invested in a certain mode and they really don't want new modes to come along.

856
01:32:28.380 --> 01:32:39.380
Hegel's the great example of this. Hegel, these great lectures on aesthetics, you know, Hegel takes you brilliantly from the origins of art down to his present day.

857
01:32:39.380 --> 01:32:47.380
And, you know, Hegel creates the idea of the end of history. He just wishes art could end there so there'd never be anything else to say about it and he'd said it all.

858
01:32:47.380 --> 01:32:53.100
at all. So there's nothing on motion pictures in Hegel's Aesthetics. He barely acknowledges

859
01:32:53.100 --> 01:32:57.300
the novel, although he's writing already in the 19th century, because, you know, what

860
01:32:57.300 --> 01:33:05.300
you want is to be able to tell the whole story. And academics take that view. Other questions?

861
01:33:05.300 --> 01:33:24.300
I know being a member of the Hollywood Society out in Los Angeles, across the Los Angeles area, one of the things that you were really struggling with is the tax structure within the business industry and actually leaving the country more and more.

862
01:33:24.300 --> 01:33:38.300
I'm interested to almost shift more of our transfer approach to if the government is becoming more involved in it, then why are we changing and they don't seem to really have much of an impact on it?

863
01:33:54.300 --> 01:33:58.780
in Hollywood. I mean, for example, the single, in some ways the single most important event

864
01:33:58.780 --> 01:34:04.140
in the 20th century was when the federal government decided to break up the studio system. The

865
01:34:04.140 --> 01:34:10.380
movie industry used to be vertically integrated and the movie studios owned movie theaters

866
01:34:10.380 --> 01:34:17.100
and they could see their product all the way through the screen. The federal government

867
01:34:17.100 --> 01:34:22.100
decided this was a matter for antitrust action, that they had to break the power of the studios.

868
01:34:22.100 --> 01:34:31.600
They spent years in court and millions of dollars to do what television was about to accomplish on its own in breaking up the power of the studios.

869
01:34:31.600 --> 01:34:38.600
Many people have said that movies have never recovered from the breaking up of the vertical integration of the industry.

870
01:34:38.600 --> 01:34:49.100
I don't know enough about the economics of this to comment on that, but it does seem to me the government had no business breaking down a system that the free market had developed.

871
01:34:49.100 --> 01:35:00.100
If I were sure this was purely the result of free market developments, I'd say that more confidently, but I don't know if any sort of government regulations helped keep the integrity of the studio system.

872
01:35:00.100 --> 01:35:10.100
But I mean, just abstractly, what business of it was the federal government to decide whether studios could own theaters or not?

873
01:35:10.100 --> 01:35:17.100
And the consequence of that has been monumental. It basically destroyed the classic studio system.

874
01:35:17.100 --> 01:35:23.100
Many people have said that at least the average quality of movies has never been as good as it was in the 30s and 40s.

875
01:35:23.100 --> 01:35:28.100
So yes, that's a whole other question that libertarians would want to talk about.

876
01:35:28.100 --> 01:35:34.100
To what extent is the structure of the movie industry determined by government intervention?

877
01:35:34.100 --> 01:35:44.100
And tax laws chiefly involving issues like depreciation and all the accounting practices that are basically dictated by the federal government

878
01:35:44.100 --> 01:35:50.700
have a huge impact on how films are financed and therefore on their qualities.

879
01:35:50.700 --> 01:35:54.700
I'm not enough an expert to discuss that stuff, but you're absolutely right.

880
01:35:54.700 --> 01:36:03.900
Talking about the economics of the film industry, you cannot ignore federal regulation and intervention in so many areas.

881
01:36:03.900 --> 01:36:10.400
But fundamentally, the outsourcing of Hollywood production is a consequence of labor unions.

882
01:36:10.400 --> 01:36:16.200
and the fact that so many American television shows are produced in Canada now, follow from that.

883
01:36:16.200 --> 01:36:21.200
Is that all? I think we'll bring it to a close now. Yeah. Okay. That's all.

884
01:36:21.200 --> 01:36:24.200
Thanks.