The battle to save originality in Hollywood.

The so-called Golden Age of Hollywood was not a fountain of original thinking. When talkies got rolling, the studios quickly roared through the catalog of musty literary classics which had little to do with the realities of the modern world. By the 1950s America was conservative, Republican, stifling; Hollywood was out of ideas and under threat from the blacklist and the Code. The new threat of television impelled the studios to fight back with elephantine spectacles, fluffy musicals, historical showpieces and scenery-heavy westerns dominated by Victorian stereotypes. These films were ruled by old-school Republican manly men like John Wayne and Charlton Heston, and women knew their place, either singing or putting on a wedding dress.

There was some institutional inertia at play. Studios already had the infrastructure to keep doing what they were doing. Shoot a western? We got Main Street right there on the lot, and we can go back to shoot in Monument Valley like we always do. Another musical? We got the costumes, the orchestras, the dancers, singers.

?To give you an idea of how clunky and hamhanded the artistic decision-making ran back in the day, here’s a list of actors they shoved into musicals: Marlon Brando, Clint Eastwood, Rod Steiger, Lee Marvin, Oliver Reed, James Earl Jones, Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole, James Cagney, Omar Sharif, the tin-eared Rex Harrison.

During this era of dull storytelling, Citizen Kane stood out. Many people think Orson Welles invented modern cinema with Citizen Kane, but what he really did was catalog all the innovations that the Europeans and other creators had come up with, and load them all into one movie. He got the newsreel montage from the Russians, special effects and deep focus from the French, that little breakfast scene from Thornton Wilder, sound overlap and montage from old radio, the makeup from Maurice Siederman.??The Germans were the first ones moving the camera up and down to shoot the ceiling, using chiaroscuro lighting, experimenting with jump cuts. And he got flashbacks from Homer, the Odyssey.??Really all Welles did was to remind Hollywood of how far ahead of them the non-Code Europeans were, just as the Beatles reminded America of what they were missing by shunning black music, two decades later.

Two interesting movies came along around this time, to shake things up in a subtle way. In Big Country, Gregory Peck wanders into a stereotypical western of two old-school manly men leading their families into old-school western feuds, and Peck makes clear that he finds the whole thing ridiculous. He refuses to indulge in public rituals of manhood – riding an untamable stallion, indulging in a fistfight – until his feelings for a girl force him to engage in an old-fashioned duel. Even then he makes a joke of the duel by firing into the dirt and sparing the life of his laughable he-man rival. He tries to stop the pointless feud, a miniature model of the Cold War, by promising that both families can use his land to water their stock.?

Peck’s character is noted for his refusal to strut. Around Peck, a gaggle of absurd he-men strut and bellow and flare their nostrils at each other like a rough draft for a Sergio Leone movie: the two family patriarchs, a vile Chuck Connors and a predictably wooden-headed Charlton Heston who didn’t realize that the movie itself was making fun of him. One of the patriarchs, staying in character, even got into an off-screen brawl with the director.

The one perfect aspect of the film is that Peck and Jean Simmons ignored the unimaginative Hollywood blueprint for onscreen romance. The pair get through the entire film scarcely saying a single nice thing to each other, until at a pivotal moment their feelings for each other become blindingly obvious. No breathless protestations of love, no pecky little Code kisses, nada. This romance would be worthy of Murnau, the master of wordless storytelling from the silent era. Peck and Simmons brought the McCarthy era something it rarely had: subtlety. And a bit of female empowerment: Carroll Baker was allowed to travel and find a husband, and Simmons was a powerful rancher who controlled the local water supply. President Eisenhower, ruler over the decade which the movie was making fun of, loved it.

Then came the even more subversive Spartacus. Like the Big Country project, the Spartacus shoot was marred by disorganized directing and rewrites which drove the actors insane. But both sparkle with great cinematography and music, the things Hollywood was still good at; in this case it enabled Kubrick to persuade you that you’re watching a very traditional sword and sandal piece – at first.

Spartacus was shockingly out of place even at the tail end of the McCarthy era: a female slave demanding respect, a black hero, men sacrificing their lives rather than betray slave leaders or cooperate with enemies lists, great dialogue, witty venal characters played by Peter Ustinov and Charles Laughton, and blacklisted artists participating, to include the screenwriter.

The scene that defied the era most was the homoerotic bath scene. Laurence Olivier and Tony Curtis, nude and oiled, muse about whether it was immoral to have a preference for eating snails and oysters, to the accompaniment of truly weird music on period instruments. The restoration project made it more surreal by bringing in Anthony Hopkins to redub the deceased Olivier, using his best liver-eating Hannibal Lecter voice.

And again, there’s Jean Simmons, another strong woman who stands up for herself, another beautiful romance with the doomed hero.

The driving force behind the film, Kirk Douglas, declared open warfare against the blacklist and the Hays Code and survived, even got Simmons almost-naked. When the film was released, hard-core Commie hunters John Wayne and Hedda Hopper screeched about the use of blacklisted artists; Douglas told them to go fornicate with themselves.

Just as Ike defended Big Country, Kennedy saved Spartacus by crossing a picket line to see it.

When Hollywood tried to reach out for realism more explicitly than Peck and Douglas, the results were uneven. The protectors of the Code and the blacklisters generally kept serious storytelling from breaking out. Hollywood noir films fell into a pit of Code cliché: bad guys had to die, bad girls had to come to ruin, myths about morality had to be protected. The few directors who broke through the wall faced outrage: when The Apartment discussed adultery, one of the actors was attacked in the street by a little old lady with a purse.

The hated Hollywood Production Code finally came down like the walls of Jericho in the 1960s, letting directors tell vibrant, original stories – for about a decade.

The ice finally broke because of a combination of factors. By the time television drove film producers into a panic, the Hollywood studio system was already in trouble.

First, they lost control of the talent. Olivia de Havilland won her fight to get out of her Warner’s contract, and by the 1950s the big-name actors realized that they were pulling in the big piles of foreign-market money and demanded more money and clout. The collapse of the blacklist opened the door to dangerous artists and dangerous art. From 1948 to 1957 the Supreme Court made censorship more difficult, and controlling content got a lot harder when Otto Preminger arrived and audiences saw Some Like It Hot.

Meanwhile the studios were losing their economic power. They lost their cinema chains in 1948. Studios fought television in the 1950s with schlock that was big but not great: big westerns, big musicals, big spectacles, but by the 1960s audiences were sick of them. Cleopatra almost killed Fox, and MGM’s addiction to old-school blockbusters killed the studio.

And new artistic styles were shoving the old stuff aside. Europeans were sending over modern, low-budget realism, Method actors were changing the industry, and then the youth market and American counterculture demanded their say.

The proto-iconoclast for Hollywood was Stanley Kramer, who acquired a reputation for movies with social messages which were not really as edgy as Kramer though they were. After directing Inherit the Wind, Judgment at Nuremburg and the Defiant Ones, he pushed forward with Ship of Fools and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. But a number of people were rushing past him: they weren’t just challenging America’s worst flaws, they were challenging the blue chip institutions.

After thirty years in which studios were not allowed to tell stories that shook the pillars of our society, artists began showing uncomfortable images of America in MASH, Sounder, Nashville, In the Heat of the Night; twisted versions of American masculinity in Deliverance, the French Connection, Patton, Dirty Harry. Even American Graffiti, which portrayed an idyllic past that never existed, tells us at the end how the dream died.

The ban on glorifying criminals was broken in Cool Hand Luke, Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy, Clockwork Orange and the Sting; outcasts were worshipped in Five Easy Pieces, Cuckoo’s Nest, a Thousand Clowns, and Taxi Driver.

It became possible to move beyond simply-drawn happy-ending and sad-ending movies, into films where neither people nor issues were black and white, taboo topics were suddenly the rage, resolution was not guaranteed, and ambiguous endings dangled like shirt tails.

The rules of art were challenged in the Exorcist and Last Tango; old movie making was ridiculed, to include almost everything by Mel Brooks. The British joined in the icon-breaking in Darling, Alfie, Monty Python, Rocky Horror. Troublemakers also came from the stage: Mike Nichols did the Graduate and Virginia Woolf, and Fosse followed him with Cabaret and Lenny.

The epicenter of all this disruption was arguably the film Serpico. It offered a new image of non-conformist loner masculinity destined to adorn a million dorm walls, counterpoised against a crooked institution. It involved two titans of the new era: Sidney Lumet, who gave us the Pawnbroker, Murder on the Orient Express, Dog Day Afternoon, Network, Equus, Death Trap and the Verdict, and Robert Evans, who pushed the envelope with Rosemary’s Baby, Save the Tiger, the Great Gatsby, Chinatown, the Conversation, and the Godfather movies.?

Inevitably there was push-back on hot-button issues. Midnight Cowboy and Clockwork Orange were rated X; Taxi Driver, Cabaret and the Exorcist almost got X’s as well. The notion that Clyde Barrow was bisexual never made it to the final script of Bonnie and Clyde. The attempt to use MASH as a commentary on Vietnam was sabotaged by the studio.

While this artistic tug of war was going on, there were also squabbles over money. The studios were struggling financially: making profitable movies requires that leaders know both the movie half and the business half of the movie business, but control of the town was a Jets-and-Sharks dance between movie guys who didn’t understand profit and corporate suits who didn’t understand art.

Howard Hughes had bought RKO and interfered a lot; they made flops and sank. Universal shut down but was rescued by MCA. Jack Warner, his studio sagging, had to hand his studio over to?the Kinney firm, which specialized in parking garages and window washers. Fox almost sank after Cleopatra but was rescued by Fraulein Maria; they almost foundered again under the weight of?Star, Hello Dolly and Doctor Doolittle, but bounced back again with?Planet of the Apes and later Star Wars. Columbia’s flops almost sank the studio but they hired new managers and stayed afloat on television revenue. MGM insisted on gambling on a big blockbuster each year, with frightening results, until Kirk Kerkorian arrived and downsized the shop. Paramount combined the Columbia strategy and the MGM approach, cutting production and betting on television, until Robert Evans brought in Chinatown, Love Story, Rosemary’s Baby and the Godfather, and then was swallowed up by legal and marital problems.

Later UA drove away its in-house talent, who stomped off to form Orion; the new bosses wrecked the studio with Heaven’s Gate and they were forced to merge with MGM, and eventually to become a plaything for Tom Cruise. The big winner of course was Disney, which continued dabbling in live action, scored massive animations hits like the Lion King, Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast, and then scooped up Pixar, the Marvel universe, and Star Wars.

So just as the talkie crisis and the economic crisis of the late 1920s brought businessmen into Hollywood to stabilize finances and pay for the conversion to sound, the tidal wave of change in 1960s Hollywood brought in a new generation of money boys who knew money better than they knew storytelling.

In the 1960s studios began to realize the potential of releasing simplistic crowd-pleasers in the summer when kids were out of school.?In 1975 the first warning sign appeared, signaling the end of an era: Jaws showed the studios that they could regain control of the industry with a business model centered around the summer blockbusters. Then in 1977 Star Wars showed the money boys that they could not only make tons of money on the actual blockbuster films, they could scoop up even more with merchandising; they made a massive mistake in letting George Lucas keep the merchandising rights for Star Wars, an error they never made again.

And soon blockbusters gave birth to blockbuster franchises: Jaws, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Star Trek, Die Hard, Rocky, Batman, Potter, Jurassic Park, Pirates of the Caribbean, Mission Impossible, Toy Story, blah blah blah.

It’s been downhill ever since. Hollywood’s brief flirtation with originality was essentially over.

Jack is a writer with 29 feature screenplays and a series completed, almost all of them with female leads, three under option. Check them out on this site and let’s get one filmed! https://threewibbes.wordpress.com/