Hollywood Under Siege: Recent Books on Hollywood and Censorship

Abstract

Reforming Hollywood: How American Protestants Fought for Freedom at the Movies, by William D. Romanowski. New York, Oxford University Press, 2012. xv, 298 pp. $31.95 US (cloth). J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies: The FBI and the Origins of Hollywood's Cold War, by John Sbardellati. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2012. viii, 256 pp. $27.95 US (cloth). The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler, by Ben Urwand. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2013. 327 pp. $26.95 (cloth). There are two popular narratives about the much-abused Hollywood studio system. On the one hand, scholars from David Bordwell to Thomas Schatz have looked at its remarkable durability from the 1920s through the 1960s. For over thirty years, film production remained stable with a range of popular genres and stars, individual studios developed house styles, and above- and below-the-line talent often worked for the same studio for decades. Today, many filmmakers in Hollywood sigh for the lost golden age, the punch cards, the studio commissary, and regular employment. Hollywood films got American audiences through the Great Depression and World War II, with everyone from Shirley Temple to Frank Capra pitching in to articulate how we survived and why we fought. Studio-era Hollywood may have had to coexist with a certain amount of censorship and flack about block-booking and breaking anti-trust laws, but the Production Code Administration (PCA) was an industry-generated organization and did not really get in the way of great filmmaking. It was the government, via antitrust suits and anticommunist witch hunts, which really broke the Hollywood studio system. This narrative points to the other tendency within Hollywood film histories covering the period from 1930 through the 1950s. This is a darker story of censorship, FBI spying, government inquiries, anti-Semitism, anti-communism, the breakup of the integrated production-distribution-exhibition business model, and the overall decline of Hollywood. This is a history of Hollywood under siege. This second narrative produces and sells far more academic and popular books than the first. Ben Urwand (The Collaboration, 2013), William D. Romanowski (Reforming Hollywood, 2012), and John Sbardellati (J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies, 2012) position themselves as revisionist film historians whose works are based on revelations from rarely explored archival collections. Urwand and Romanowski go further and argue that their books depart from the dominant discourse and historiography on their subjects, forcing a major reconsideration of how we think about questions of industry machinations and censorship. Yet these two monographs often fail to engage adequately with other scholarly research on their subjects. Sbardellati, by contrast, integrates archival finds in the FBI files with astute analysis of other critical contributions in film history. His work also intersects with wider studies of media censorship, Cold War historiography, and discourses of neoliberalism, power, and containment. After the media storm generated by Ben Urwand's The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler, I risk repeating what other reviewers have said at perhaps too great length. Urwand's first book dramatically departs from accepted histories of this period by arguing that the rosy picture of Harry Warner and Louis B. Mayer secretly raising American awareness of the dangers of Nazism through films like Black Legion (1937), Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), Escape (1940), and Sergeant York (1941) was whitewashing the awful truth. In fact, he argues, the studio heads willingly collaborated with German officials to cut (read censor) their pictures to suit Nazi agendas. Urwand also departed from the research practices of many established names in this field by going to the National Archives in Washington, and further afield to Germany, to trace the remaining paper trail of the studios' foreign distribution offices. …