"It could be that today's conservative movement remains in thrall to the same narrative that has defined its attitude toward film and the arts for decades. Inspired by feelings of exclusion after Hollywood and the popular culture turned leftward in the '60s and '70s, this narrative has defined the film industry as an irredeemably liberal institution toward which conservatives can only act in oppositionānever engagement. Ironically, this narrative ignores the actual history of Hollywood, in which conservatives had a strong presence from the industry's founding in the early 20th century up through the '40s, '50s and into the mid-'60s. The conservative Hollywood community at that time included such leading directors as Howard Hawks, Frank Capra, and Cecil B. DeMille, and major stars like John Wayne, Clark Gable, and Charlton Heston. These talents often worked side by side with notable Hollywood liberals like directors Billy Wilder, William Wyler, and John Huston, and stars like Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Spencer Tracy. The richness of classic Hollywood cinema is widely regarded as a testament to the ability of these two communities to work together, regardless of political differences. As the younger, more left-leaning "New Hollywood" generation swept into the industry in the late '60s and '70s, this older group of Hollywood conservatives faded away, never to be replaced. Except for a brief period in the '80s when the Reagan Presidency led to a conservative reengagement with filmāwith popular stars like Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone, and Arnold Schwarzenegger making macho, patriotic action filmsāconservatives appeared to abandon popular culture altogether. In the wake of this retreat, conservative failure to engage with Hollywood now appears to have been recast by today's East Coast conservative establishment into a generalized opposition toward film and popular culture itself. In the early '90s, conservative film critic Michael Medved codified this oppositional feeling toward Hollywood in his best-selling book Hollywood vs. America."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Govindini Murty, āHey, Conservatives: It's Safe to Go to the Movies Againā, The Atlantic, (Oct. 12, 2011).
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/1970s
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
1970s
31 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by 1970s ā
Related Quotes
"Then came the seventies, and the major new musical trends were (1) disco, which consisted of one single song approximā¦"
"Who ever decided that Americans were so bad off in the seventies anyway? From the right-wing revisionist propaganda tā¦"
"Since the mid-1970s, neoliberal economic policies have increasingly pervaded rich democracies. A list of such policieā¦"
"Did it have to come to this? The paradox is that when Europe was less united, it was in many ways more independent. Tā¦"
"In the 1930s, the crisis of the capitalist model had helped produce a new authoritarianism, notably in Germany, but aā¦"
"For a period of roughly 35 years, Keynesian theory provided a central paradigm for macroeconomists, and considerable ā¦"
"The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us. For the first time in the history of our countrā¦"
"the free-lovin' seventies, when reading and travels opened our imagination"
"Neoliberalism designates a particular strategy of class domination that uses the state to promote certain competitiveā¦"
"I remember vividly in 1974 being in the mass of people, descending the streets in my native Lisbon, in Portugal, celeā¦"