《Taking Hollywood Seriously》.pdfVIP

Introduction Taking Hollywood Seriously he purpose of this study is to connect the historical develop- ment of Hollywood’s cinematic style with the social and politi- T cal history of the Hollywood community. Substantial elements of Hollywood classical cinema are the result of a political and esthetic negotiation engaging European anti-fascist refugees, radical urban American intellectuals, and studio executives from the early 1930s to the late 1940s. This negotiation was an integral part of the intellectual and political debates of the New Deal era, and it left a profound mark on some of the films Hollywood made in this period. An effort to contextualize Hollywood and its films plays a crucial role in this work. In the 1930s and 1940s, Hollywood 1 was not a “Baghdad by the sea” separated from the rest of the United States. Nor were its films a simple reflection of the commercial nature of the studio system. Rather, the Hollywood community was animated by many of the same debates that were the center of the political and intellectual discourse in New York. Like their colleagues back East, in fact, intellectuals in Hollywood were part of the leftist political culture of the 1930s, and they discussed the democratization of modernism, its politicization, and the formulation of a mass-marketed progressive culture capable of dealing with the political issues of the day. This study identifies, chronicles, and interprets the social, intellectual, and esthetic history of what I call Hollywood 1 2 Introduction democratic modernism. It examines its emergence, the transformations brought about by World War II, and its demise in the aftermath of the conflict. Hollywood democratic modernism often, though not always, took the form of social realism, and much of the present work deals with