Hollywood

Hollywood, 1938

Paul Robeson, actor and Vice Chair of the Steering Committee of Lincoln Films in New Afrika, slammed a copy of The Times of London at the desk of Daryl Zanuck, head of production at Olive Street.

“This is outrageous!” The front page was “WHITE AMERICAN PICTURE GONE WITH THE WIND BREAKS BOX OFFICE RECORDS”, accompanied by a photo of lines outside the theater.

“Big returns in London. Big returns in Paris. Berlin, Rome, Havana. This film is pure racist, fascist propaganda from the MacArthurist regime, demeaning our people, and valorizing the Old South, and it is now the biggest film in the world!”

“I do agree, Paul. If you could just sit down…”

“And what is our response? Rushmore’s review in the Los Angeles Times? Is that it?”

“I agree that we need a response.”

Zanuck had already attended several meetings with that consensus. He was just trying to find a good angle to do it with.

Robeson calmed down and sat in the chair.

“I did The Nat Turner Story over with Lincoln with Fritz Lang. I made sure that the film showed the horrors of slavery and the evil of the plantation system. It was the story of an incredibly brave man, who fought against bondage. A modern day Spartacus. Now, this picture with barely literate slaves loyally serving white mistresses becomes the biggest film in the world.”

“I understand. This injustice must be solved. I’ve already got a slate of pictures here and my counterparts at Culver Street and Melrose have also productions in the works.

Paul took some of the scripts and began to skim them.

“Our goal is to send these films out as “anti-Wind” productions. We want to send these out to the world both the prowess of socialist moviemaking, and combat the insidious propaganda being spewed by our old bosses.”

Zanuck meant it. His old boss Jack Warner was one of the producers of Gone with the Wind.

Robeson picked up one of the scripts.

“You’re adapting Babouk? ”

“Yes, with Endore writing. With Werewolf of Paris , he’s now in hot demand.”

“We considered making an adaptation a while ago over at Lincoln. Perhaps we could co-produce with you.”

Zanuck and Robeson discussed the screenplay for several minutes.

“Do you have a director in mind?”

“No, though we’re looking at few.”

“I may have an idea. I saw this theater production in New York, an all-Black MacBeth…”

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(The following piece was written by @Instant Sunrise way back when which was originally connected with her other piece shown in the first page of this thread. I added and modified passages to update it with current canon. I also imported a list of movie collectives from another one of her pieces here. I tried to keep the character of the piece. Anyway, special thanks to her for allowing me to modify her absolutely wonderful piece for the current iteration)

Excerpts from Revolution on the Silver Screen: How the Cultural Revolution Changed Hollywood. Thomas Doherty (1999, New York University of Columbia Press)

For many of the actors, writers and filmmakers working in Hollywood, the biggest change that happened with the First Cultural Revolution, was that were was no change. Indeed, Hollywood had long been a favored target of pre-revolution cultural critics and the pre-revolution Red scaremongers for “subversive content.” Within the infant industry, many filmmakers, writers and actors chafed under wartime censorship laws which only allowed films that supported the war to be made. This grumbling discontent would plant the first seeds of revolution in a city that had largely resisted the call of the union until then.

[…]

In a 1958 interview with a PBS 5 documentary team, silent era actress Mary Pickford described what the culture of Hollywood was like before the revolution:

“During the war, the studios all came down and gave us a big list of things we could and could not do. Of course, most of us had wanted nothing to do with the damned thing, but the guys upstairs wanted to be cheerleaders for Taft. The studio guys. they would basically buy you in a contract, and you could only act in their pictures. So even if you wanted to work with somebody you were friends with, if they were in a different studio’s stable, you were out of luck. The bosses from the studio had a huge list of demands for you since you were their face, they’d tell you what to wear, who to date, how to look, and so on. If you gained or lost even a kilo, they’d be down your throat in a second.”

In 1916, Charlie Chaplin, one of the earliest super-stars in Hollywood, made a film satirizing the war called “Shoulder Arms ,” because Chaplin was responsible for the production of his own films, simply handing a finished print in to the studio, the bosses had very little control over his work. As such, when the studio bosses got their first glimpse at the movie, the film was pulled from distribution, citing a shortage of nitrates due to the war effort.

As a force for progressive change, Hollywood cinema was considered to be a lost cause, the studio oligarchies beneath contempt. “Is it possible to create proletariate cinema in America?” asked Harry Alan Potamkin, the film critic for the communist months, the New Masses. Not likely, given the resistance by “the monopoly invested in Hollywood, Breen, and Wall Street.” Subversion of the capitalist model was the only viable alternative.

In an attempt to subvert and combat this model, a group of artists, including Chaplin, Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and DW Griffith, formed United Artists in 1919, with the express purpose of ensuring that actors and directors had control over their own films and weren’t bound by restrictive contracts. While still a commercial company, through the radical associations of Chaplin and Pickford, United Artists became involved with the burgeoning Workers’ Party during the so-called “Roaring Twenties”, and they would produce a stable of films sympathetic to either workers or the young Soviet Union.

While the United States had no form of a national censor board, most states had their own censor board that would review movies for obscene content. As a result, as a film would travel around the country, each state would make their own edits to a movie, until the resulting film was a “barely watchable, disjointed mess.” (Murch, 1986)

The Hollywood studio oligarchs would have been happy to allow for the status quo of ignoring the reactionary outrage regarding their films’ content. However, the switch from silent films to the “talkies” with the release of 1927’s The Jazz Singer had forced the studios to spend tons of money on upgrading theaters to handle sound. This massive outlay had already placed the studios in a precarious financial positions.

Not helping were scandals involving major stars of the period, adding to the image of Hollywood as a “modern Sodom and Gomorrah”. Major comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle would suffer a nationwide scandal when he was accused of raping Virginia Rappe at a party. While he was acquitted in court, he was ostracized and his fame faded. Noted sex symbol Rudolph Valentino would lead a very salacious public life (in addition to becoming an Uranian icon), before his death in 1926.

With the Stock Market Crash of 1930 hitting the movie industry, and bowing to pressure from reactionary groups like the National Legion of Decency in part because of these scandals, the studio oligarchy banded together in 1930 to form the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA). Because each of the studios owned the entire production chain, from when the script was first written to the theaters showing the movie, the MPPDA held a strict control over what could or could not be filmed. Appointing Joseph I. Breen to run the censor board, the MPPDA put together an exhaustive list of “thou shall nots” for Hollywood films.

Under the Breen Code, “No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, armed rebellion, wrongdoing, evil or sin.” The statement forbidding the depiction of “armed rebellion” was very quickly interpreted to mean anything which supported the W(C)PA or any kind of union sympathy. Other prohibitions included “Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation.” Specific prohibitions in the Breen code called for the prohibition of “Sex perversion [used exclusively here to mean homosexuality],” “Miscegenation (sex relationships between the white and black races)” and “Excessive and lustful kissing, lustful embraces, suggestive postures and gestures.” [2]

Actors, writers and directors were aggravated by these restrictions, feeling that films made under the Breen Code would not accurately reflect the reality of American life at the time. In a time where only 32 percent of women born after 1910 were virgins at marriage, and 1 in 7 marriages ended in divorce,[3] the Breen Code was viewed as hopelessly reactionary and antiquated. Tod Browning and James Whale, director of Universal’s horror adaptations Dracula and Frankenstein , lambasted the Code for censorship of their respective films.

One of the side effects of the Breen Code was that studios immediately became wary of producing any kind of political film, citing that “Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation.” While most studios had avoided making political pictures to begin with, MGM’s Samuel Goldwyn famously saying “If you want to send a message, call Western Union.” [4]

Already, studios had attempted to stem the rise of the WPA and unions in Hollywood. Jack Warner, Harry Cohn, and Louis B. Mayer all testified in front of the House Internal Security Committee (aka the “Fish Committee” for its chairman Hamilton Fish II) in 1929, each trying to diminish the power of Hollywood unions and communist organizers. Mayer himself would form the “Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1927 to undercut the power of actors unions. (The awards given out by the Academy, “The Oscars” would become famous.) In 1932, the New York Times revealed the existence of several “Blacklists” that studios and the MPPDA had circulated which listed several individuals that were regarded as too “radical” or “communist sympathetic” to work in Hollywood.

Films continued to show life in America as though the depression and stock market crash had never happened. Even Warner Brothers, who’s bread and butter were films about organized crime and “gangster pictures” made pictures that ignored the effects of the Great Depression.

Exceptions did exist. United Artists would produce films like early talkie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Chaplin’s Little Tramp films, which, while still entertainment, also dealt with the economic devastation of capitalism and the Great Depression.
[…]

Formed in 1931, the W(C)PA-backed Workers Film and Photo League envisioned “a great counter-offensive to vicious and nauseating Hollywood productions” by “bringing revolutionary films to workers organizations throughout the country.” The group produced its own newsreels, taught seminars on working-class film criticism, organized protests against reactionary pictures, and screened Soviet films to cadres of radical cineastes.

Finding a commonality with the Marxist WFPL, Many actors, writers, directors, and producers joined the membership rolls of the league, unhappy with the restrictions that the Breen Code placed on them. The WFPL turned themselves into an alternative to the studio system, producing newsreels and sending them to party meetings and union events. One of the first documentary films produced was a film called A Martyr to His Cause, a documentary about the trial of the MacNamara brothers, and the role that the now-disgraced Gompers and Darrow had played.

[…]

As the Red Army troops marched through the streets of Los Angeles, Hollywood stood with bated breath to find out how this revolution would affect them. Most of the executive class would find friendlier climes to resettle. Following the deaths of Harry and Albert in battles outside Los Angeles, Jack Warner would take Warner Bros with MacArthur to Havana. Harry Cohn (an admirer of Benito Mussolini and MacArthur defender) joined shortly after. Adolph Zukor and Samuel Goldwyn would reestablish themselves in Canada. Louis B. Mayer would find a new home in Britain, where he and MGM would form a lucrative partnership with local producer Alexander Korda.

One notable exception was LA Times publisher, and son-in-law of the infamous Harrison Gray Otis, Harry Chandler. Chandler had holed up inside the LA Times building, which had been designed like a fortress in case of another attack.[5]

Hollywood’s studio were collectivized by the writers, actors, and directors to serve their interests rather than the studio bosses. As a final insult to the studio bosses who had controlled every aspect of film production, the studio founders had their names stripped from their former studio lots, leading to many of the collectives simply adopting the name of the street that they were located on.:

• Workers Film and Photo League: Continues its pre-Revolutionary function of producing documentaries and newsreels for distribution to theaters to educate and inform the public.
• Olive Avenue Motion Picture Collective: Located on the former Warner Brothers lot, this collective had focused on crime and gangster films before the Revolution, and after the revolution began producing propaganda films. Under the Chairmanship of former Warner exec Daryl Zanuck.
• Termite Terrace Animated Pictures Collective: Located on the same lot as the Olive Avenue Collective, this animated collective produces animated comedies, ranging from the slapstick socialist Bugs Bunny to the Commander Columbia short films.
• Hyperion Animation: Located on Hyperion Avenue, prior to the Revolution, it was a leading animation studio, with cartoon stars like Mortimer “Morty” Mouse and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit becoming icons. Led by Walt Disney.
• United Artists Collective: Successfully transitioned to a collective under its original founders. Unlike the other collectives, they have only a single small lot in West Hollywood on the corner of Melrose and Formosa, and instead will share space with other collectives when needed.
• Radford Avenue Collective: This collective, formed out of the former Mack Sennett studios mainly produced live-action comedy shorts before the revolution, afterwards they transitioned into producing serials that would be played in theaters for younger audiences on saturday mornings.
• The Gower Street Collective: Created by the workers of a bunch of the different “poverty row” studios, this collective tended to focus on lower budget films, but had some success with Frank Capra’s “The Greatest Gift”
• Lankershim Motion Picture Collective: Formerly Universal, they mainly produced horror and monster films, most notably the Lankershim Monsters. Notably they were one of the first movie collectives to start offering the public guided tours so that visitors could see the sets, props and costumes used in making their films, something that the other studios would also follow.
• Pico Boulevard Motion Picture Collective: Formerly known as Fox Films, this collective became known for their racy subject matter and willingness to push the cultural and social boundaries in their films. Chaired by Fox’s founder William Fox.
• Melrose Avenue Collective: Formerly Paramount Pictures, this collective was known for their personality-based promotion of films, emphasizing their members as stars. After the revolution, they became known for their historical epics such as Spartacus (1952).
• Culver City Collective: Formerly MGM and RKO, they focused on large and expansive musicals. Most notably a continuous early adopter of new filmmaking technology, they expanded after the war into producing spy movies about glamorous State Sec agents.

On the other side of the country, with New Afrika formally established, filmmaker Oscar Micheux allied with actor and singer Paul Robeson to create the Lincoln Film Collective, with the express purpose of making films for African audiences. Previous marginalized actors would soon flock to New Afrika to build an African film industry within Lincoln’s studio in Atlanta. Lincoln would eventually expand to films dealing with other minorities. This would pay dividends when Chinese focused The Good Earth and its star Anna May Wong won awards at the Oscars in 1938.

[…]

Under Eastman’s orders, the Breen Code that had choked the film community for years was now counter-revolutionary. In its place was the Eisenstein Code. Conceived in a meeting between the respective movie collectives and the titular Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein, the Code was an explicit reaction to the Breen Code, while also acting more as a guideline than a strict ruleset to follow, else the film not be distributed.

All restrictions under the Breen code were repealed. Instead, a self-rating system was implemented to rate films for a certain audience. “A” for all ages, “G” for general audiences, and “M” for mature audience.[6] The biggest part of the new Code was a number of benefits (including tax breaks and promotion) for films that “advanced the workers’ cause and build up the communist cause”. This was an attempt to promote the making of films that had social or revolutionary themes without fear of repression or censorship.

Free of censorship and being guided towards making films that were anti-racist and anti-sexist, writers and actors reveled in their freedom.

Following the revolution, the film collectives produced films like “I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang,” which accurately portrayed the frightening brutality and racism of the southern chain gangs. “Cabin in the Cotton ,” a 1936 film adaption of the socialist realist novel by Harry Harrison Kroll, had the distinction of being the first American film to be released in the Soviet Union.

Other films were released that tackled issues that were besetting the American body politic, alcoholism (The Lost Weekend , 1936), antisemitism (Gentleman’s Agreement , 1939), racism (No Way Out , 1937) or even physical disabilities (The Men , 1946). Whatever the issue was, Hollywood had a film about how to solve it.

The 30’s saw new technological innovations for film. Audiences were wowed by the image of King Kong unraveling a naked Fay Wray. The Technicolor Hemingway adaptation A Farewell to Arms would usher a new era of film the way The Jazz Singer did a decade earlier. Science fiction films like Aelita would bring dazzling effects on screen. Animated films like Snow White and Warlord of Mars would push the medium forward.

Actors who had been sidelined and stereotypes because of their race suddenly found themselves swimming in work, as more and more anti-racism films were being churned out by Hollywood. In New York, Orson Welles staged a production of Macbeth that featured an all-black cast to a resounding success.

Actresses who were tired of playing the same roles in every picture now had a new lease on life and they were able to play all kinds of different roles with Eastman’s directive to make anti-sexist films. Films coming out of Hollywood went from portraying simple hints and teases of sexuality to being able to show scenes of intimacy.

One of the directives handed down by the Eisentein Code became known as “Eastman’s Law.” For any film to be approved for release, it had to feature:
1: At least two women
2: Who talk to each other
3: About something other than a man. [7]

Despite being a very low standard for producers to meet, almost every single pre-revolutionary film failed this test.

From a cynical perspective, the increased amount of titillation and sexuality was partially an attempt at getting audiences to watch “message films.” However, the increased amount of sexuality on film had the side-effect of normalizing sexuality for people. Suddenly, sex was no longer a taboo subject for people to talk about, and pre-marital sex had gone from being something that was commonly practiced, but never talked about, to something that was openly talked about. (Coontz 1992) Coinciding with this was an educational campaign in schools to teach teenagers about contraceptive use.

Abortion restrictions, having only been passed in the 1890’s and 1910’s as part of a plan to keep white protestant women from being “out-bred” by Catholic immigrants, were removed,[8] Hollywood films would openly talk about women using birth control or having an abortion as part of a directed effort to de-stigmatize it.

One of the biggest bombshells of the Cultural Revolution was when actress Marlene Dietrich openly announced that she was ambisexual. Shortly afterwards several other actors and actresses had come out in solidarity with Dietrich as well. Suddenly, homosexuals weren’t a nebulous other, they were stars, they were people that Americans were familiar with, people they trusted.

[…]

With the revolution and early friendship with the USSR, Soviet films enjoyed a surge in popularity, particularly in Hollywood. Russian director Sergei Eisensten made a visit to the UASR, where he discovered that he was almost a celebrity among WFPL members, which by this time had included most of Hollywood. He would eventually become a fixture in Hollywood, making cameos and reviews. He would even use the Hollywood collectives to help make some of his later features

In 1935, Mosfilm opened its own branch on Sunset Boulevard specifically for new American co-productions. Soon, Soviet actors became big in Hollywood, and American actors would make appearances in Mosfilm movies. Famously, a young Marion Morrison would play Gavrilo Oleksich in Alexander Nevsky.

Soviet filmmaking innovations would also come to America, with an American version of “Cinema Newspapers,” and the social realist filmmaking of Vertove influencing American directors. A screening of an experimental Soviet film “The Kuleshov Experiment,” was able to dramatically demonstrate the effect that editing and the juxtaposition of images could have on an audience. In the film, a shot of a Russian actor was juxtaposed with a shot of a plate of soup, a girl in a coffin, and a woman on a divan. After the screening, the audience was asked to describe the performance of the actor in each scene.

In each scene, the audience read different things in the actor’s performance. Talking about the subtle differences in each scene. What the audience didn’t know, was that it was the same shot for all three scenes. The juxtaposition of images had caused the audience to read different things into the actors performance.

Following the screening, and the influence of Eisenstein and other Soviet filmmakers, Editors had gained much more respect in Hollywood. Initially seen as an assembly-line job, the editor became an important and respected part of the filmmaking process.

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The revitalized American film industry would face a test with the release of Gone with the Wind in 1938. The film starring Australian Errol Flynn as Rhett Butler and British Vivian Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara made a splash across Cuba and Europe, with an uproarious debut in Nazi Berlin.

Meanwhile, the American press (seeing the film in London and Paris) strongly criticized the film for its Lost Cause ideology and racist depiction of the slaves (portrayed by Afro-Cubans with a poor grasp of English and obvious accents). While Howard Rushmore’s evisceration in the Los Angeles Times would become famous, it was felt that a rapidfire response was needed, especially since smuggled copies of the film were being shown in meetings of the Sons of Liberty. Thus, under the direction Olive Street’s Daryl Zanuck and Lincoln’s Paul Robeson, a new slate of films was planned, showing the evils of the Old South and especially the horrors of slavery. Robeson’s own The Nat Turner Story , directed by Fritz Lang, was rereleased to an international market. Development began on Harper’s Ferry, an account of John Brown’s 1859 raid with Clark Gable as Brown and Hattie McDaniel as Harriet Tubman, and Babouk, a film to be directed by stage director Orson Welles, following his own dream project: A biography of former Vice-President William Randolph Hearst.

With a sometimes-heavy hand, the Cultural Revolution was able to revitalize an industry that was on the brink of collapse and transform cinema from an escapist and reactionary cocoon into a vital force for creating social progress.

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1: This is taken pretty much verbatim from OTL.

2: All of these were lifted directly from the Hays Code OTL, except for the prohibition of ‘armed rebellion.’

3: The actual statistics for this IOTL (see “Domestic Revolutions: A History of American Family Life”)

4: He actually said this IOTL

5: The LA Times building really was designed like a fortress IOTL.

6: In terms of MPAA ratings, “A” is G, “G” is “PG” to low “PG-13”, and “M” is R

7: Yes, this is the Bechdel Test

8: I keep saying this like a broken record, I didn’t make this up, this is literally why so many states banned abortion in that time period IOTL. *[WPA]: Works Progress Administration *[NBI]: National Bureau of Investigation