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August 2004

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DC and Hollywood: Half-time Report

By John Zavesky
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A s the nation celebrates its 228th birthday we can all heave a collective sigh of relief. The DC/Hollywood connection is going full bore like a Humvee in overdrive on an Iraqi highway. The Bush administration continues to roam the Middle East doing as they please. Forget about CIA-directed Iraqi prison atrocities. We’ve got more pressing matters to deal with back home. On the domestic front we had to deal with Janet Jackson’s right breast, Mel Gibson’s Passion, and the Donald. To complicate matters even more we will now have to survive without Friends —and we are only seven months into the year. 

Our economy might be falling faster than a watermelon tossed from the top of the Empire State building, but droves of us tuned in to see the Donald say two words each week. Witnessing a guy with a very bad haircut say, “You’re fired,” gave couch potatoes a vicarious thrill. There’s nothing more satisfying after coming home from yet another fruitless day of job hunting than to see some poor schmuck get handed a pink slip in front of millions. Ironically, the winner was already a successful entrepreneur who ended up getting the six-figure position that could have gone to an unemployed American whose job had been outsourced to Bombay, but that would have made reality TV a bit too real. 

Friends has faded into the sunset; that’s all right, they weren’t my friends. Even with sex, marriage, and coffee the show couldn’t drum up enough viewers for the final episode to knock MASH off its first-place pedestal. Frasier has also left the building, ostensibly to look for that tossed salad and scrambled eggs. While Fraiser certainly hit some potholes over its 11-year run, the program generally required a certain level of knowledge to understand the jokes. One didn’t have to be a member of Mensa to watch Fraiser , but being well read did give the viewer the ability to differentiate between de jour and The Donald. 

For those who want tough TV without having to deal with scatter bombs, house demolitions, and fuel shortages, HBO has cornered the market with hard-hitting series like The Sopranos, The Wire , and their latest entry Deadwood . While it may seem a bit incongruous at first to hear cowboy characters shouting lines like, “Saddle up you c_ _ _ suckers,” it is nice to see that the western is not dead. What HBO has done is make soap operas for guys. This savvy move was never more evident than on their now defunct series Oz , a program centering on life in the pen whose conflict was based almost entirely on which character would be raped, knifed, or OD that week.  

While this may seem a bit brutal, it did make for much better drama than wading through those boring and talky Congressional hearings on 9/11. For the most part members of Capitol Hill aren’t as photogenic as some hunk on Survivor or the “bimbos” on Simple Life . 

If television is the media wasteland then this years crop of films would indicate that the local cineplex is the place where revenge is served best like cold cuts, as Tony Soprano would say. Denzel was the Man On Fire, The Punisher did exactly that to its audiences, and the Alamo was revisited for the umpteenth time. The bride was back for more payback in Kill Bill , Vol. 2 —the film’s only significant plot point was learning that her name was Beatrice. Nearly everyone weighed in on Mel Gibson and his passion for violence, but those same folks kvetching about a film seem to have turned a blind eye to Ariel Sharon’s scorched earth policies for the Palestinians, which is real. The sad thing about The Passion was the focus on brutality while omitting the words of the man on the cross. But then people in the U.S. can’t seem to get enough of violence and payback when it comes to their entertainment. If a film doesn’t have dozens of dead brown and black people in it, it just isn’t art, as far as we’re concerned. 

Art is nothing more than a reflection of society. If that maxim is true, then what is coming out on the big screen this summer is pretty scary. Troy is the perfect movie metaphor for the Bush administration’s Middle East war. The film has jettisoned the gods, who played a very big part in the original, in favor of a simple revenge tale. Like the president and his generals in Iraq, the Greeks and Trojans talk about the deities, but never seem to follow their teachings. Also like Bush, King Agamemnon goes to war on a false pretext. Instead of bringing democracy to a downtrodden people, this king’s lie is saving a “kidnapped” Greek woman, but the realities for waging the war are the similar ignoble traits of control and power. The filmmakers even scaled back the Trojan conflict from its original ten years to just over two weeks. After all, who wants to deal with a war that drags on forever and untold numbers are sacrificed in the name of truth and justice? All that was lacking in this filmic parallel was a scene with Agamemnon standing on the deck of a ship giving his troops a “thumbs up” and saying, “mission accom- plished.” 

When has Hollywood ever been interested in good writing and sticking to the story? Films featuring well-developed characters facing complex conflicts are flukes for the most part. One has only to look at the studios’ summer line-up to the see this. Movies such as Catwoman, Princess Diaries 2 , and A Cinderella Story only confirm this observation. While the current Hollywood mindset might think it is cutting edge for Tom Cruise to trade in his Top Gun grin and play the heavy in Collateral , A-list actors like Lee Marvin, William Holden, and James Cagney did it on a regular basis a generation ago and without the CGI-laden effects that drive nearly every movie coming out these days. Bill Holden delivered more menace with his opening line in the Wild Bunch than any character in any Quentin Tarantino movie. Instead, Hollywood now gives us pretty boys with big guns or, in the case of Brad Pitt, shiny swords, who wouldn’t last an hour with Marvin on a deserted Pacific island. 

Hollywood purports to give us the true story about King Arthur later this summer. This claim is coming from the producer who gave us such silver screen classics as Flashdance and The Rock . The fact that King A r thur is being marketed as a true story should send up a flag like a scud missile exploding over Baghdad. T.H. White is generally credited as being the author who first put together the various King Arthur legends. King Arthur like Troy will undoubtedly be long on effects and short on sticking to the facts.  

George Orwell said it best when he wrote, “He who controls the past commands the future. He who controls the future controls the past.” What other reason than to dumb down Americans with yet another season of lame comedies and supercilious dramas? The answer is simple, other countries have revolutions, the U.S. doesn’t. As long as we have our six pack of beer, Paris Hilton on the tube, and Brad Pitt kicking butt on the silver screen, most won’t bother to ask why National Guardspeople are dying by the dozens each week in a foreign country that was as big a threat to us as Pia Zadora’s last recording. 

Ted Koppel spends a half hour reading a list of dead Americans and Sinclair Communications pulls the plug on his show with their affiliates. What is Sinclair’s agenda? The company owns 62 stations and is the largest broadcaster of its kind in the country. Sinclair has lobbied successfully in Washington to be allowed to grow even bigger. Many of Sinclair’s executives are big contributors to the Republican Party. Yet a Sinclair spokesperson accused Koppel of  “…doing nothing more than making a political statement.” There are reports that Sinclair and other broadcast behemoths required on-air talent to deliver statements that affirmed that company’s 100 percent support for President Bush and his policies. This is a broadcasters’ prerogative. These rights are protected by the Constitution. It is one thing though to speak one’s mind and something entirely different when you use that power to prevent others from presenting theirs. Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, and Ed Morrow used to give nightly editorials. Now the closest any television news program comes to presenting anything other than a lockstep opinion is Andy Rooney. 

If one thinks that the 1950s were conservative with witch-hunts or that the 1960s were unenlightened when it came to prosecuting a guy like Lenny Bruce, look again. The current climate in the White House and in Hollywood boardrooms makes one pine for such days. When was the last time an oldies station played Edwin Starr’s War ? A film like MASH wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting made today. Michael Moore had trouble finding a distributor for his latest film, Fahrenheit 9/11 . This is the person who won an Academy Award for the best documentary last year and the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival this year. Clear Channel has put together a list of songs that are banned from their radio stations. John Lennon’s Imagine is on that list. 

As long as the policymakers in Washington think they can do anything they like, in any country they like, without facing the repercussions and blow-back from such deeds, we are losers. As long as Hollywood thinks they can censor films and put out whatever mindless drivel they choose to, without any repercussions, we are losers.  

John Zavesky is a freelance writer based in California. 
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