Posted on 23-4-2003
Hollywood
Redux Of McCarthyism
By Andrew Gumbel, Independent UK, Monday
21 April 2003
Hollywood is often depicted in the US media as a hotbed of anti-government
dissent and left-wing politics but that is not how it feels
to Ed Gernon.
Mr Gernon was, until recently, a television producer at CBS
responsible for a four-part miniseries on Hitler's rise to power,
which will be shown next month. He thought the timing was apt,
and said so in an interview with TV Guide magazine. "It
basically boils down to an entire nation gripped by fear, who
ultimately chose to give up their civil rights and plunged the
whole nation into war," he said. "I can't think of
a better time to examine this history than now."
That was far too strong for Leslie Moonves, CBS's chief executive,
who promptly fired him. No reasons were given, although politics
and a strong desire not to fall foul of the Bush administration
apparently had plenty to do with it.
Another person who does not find Hollywood particularly liberal
these days is the comedian and actress Janeane Garofalo, whose
outspoken views on Iraq have made her the object of a vicious
e-mail and telephone campaign that has intimidated ABC into
pushing her new sitcom, Slice O'Life, into next year's mid-season.
Again, the network's fear of losing viewers and advertisers
seems rather stronger than its desire to defend one the freedom
of speech of its stars.
The clearly emerging pattern is that entertainment personalities
who speak out on touchy political subjects particularly Iraq
do so at their peril. The group intent on stringing up Ms Garofalo,
Citizens Against Celebrity Pundits, has campaigned energetically
against everyone from Martin Sheen, whose anti-war views led
to a credit card commercial of his being scrapped, to Susan
Sarandon, dropped as a speaker at a Florida branch of the umbrella
charity group United Way, to Sarandon's husband, Tim Robbins,
whose invitation to a 15th anniversary screening of the baseball
movie Bull Durham at the National Baseball Hall of Fame was
withdrawn because the Hall's president, a former Reagan administration
press secretary, felt his very presence might undermine the
efforts of American troops in Iraq.
Beyond the film world, powerful radio station chains with strong
political ties to the Bush White House have been orchestrating
boycotts and hate campaigns against several anti-war performers,
most notably the Dixie Chicks, the Texas country trio now fearing
for their safety not to mention their plummeting record sales
after their singer, Natalie Maines, said at a concert in London
last month that she was ashamed to hail from the same state
as the President. One radio chain, Cumulus Media, responded
by arranging for a tractor to crush Dixie Chicks CDs, tapes
and videos in an episode that carried uncomfortable echoes of
historical book-burnings and other cultural purges.
The venom behind these campaigns is disturbing enough but there
is a second strand to the story. And that is that Hollywood
might not be such a liberal place after all. As Robbins said
in a speech to the National Press Club in Washington last week:
"I am sick of hearing about Hollywood being against this
war. Hollywood's heavy hitters, the real power brokers and cover-of-the-
magazine stars, have been largely silent on this issue."
While several dozen prominent actors and musicians opposed to
military action in Iraq signed up for a celebrity-led group
called Artists United To Win Without War, recent experience
suggests that they are in the minority. Nowhere was this more
clearly illustrated than at the Oscars, when the most outspoken
of the evening's war critics, Michael Moore, was roundly booed,
and those who had suggested it might be distasteful to go ahead
with the shameless glitz of the Academy Awards with the bombs
falling on Baghdad were systematically ridiculed by the host,
Steve Martin.
The wife of a prominent Hollywood entertainment lawyer who attended
a high-powered pre-Oscar dinner party was shocked to find that
most of the assembled company was in fact heavily pro-war. "Here
they were, all these so-called Hollywood liberals, and they
were making jokes about peace activists and cheering on the
troops," she said.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with Hollywood actors or
executives being less liberal than their stereotype, but there
is something troubling in the way in which their public image
is manipulated, especially by the political spin doctors in
Washington.
Hollywood has long been a favourite target of conservatives,
who have repeatedly blamed the entertainment industry for gun
violence, or drugs, or sexual promiscuity. Now there is an attempt
to dismiss the anti-war celebrities in similar fashion as morally
irresponsible, overpaid know-nothings who would do better to
keep their mouths shut.
Mike Farrell, one-time star of Mash who is now one of the industry's
most prominent liberal activists, sees a distinct political
strategy at work. "The suggestion that Hollywood speaks
with one voice is of course silly," he said, "but
the perspective articulated consistently in the media, courtesy
of the right wing, is that celebrities are taking advantage
of their forum to spew left-wing views. What this is really
about is stifling dissent on a national scale. It does not matter
a whit whether we are celebrities or not. What galls them so
much is that we have access to the media."
The intimidation experienced by Ed Gernon, the CBS producer,
or the Dixie Chicks, is certainly having its effect. In his
speech to the National Press Club, Robbins cited an unnamed
"famous middle-aged rock-and-roller" who thanked him
for speaking out against the war but said he did not dare do
the same himself because of the power of Clear Channel, the
nation's largest radio station owner, which has an unabashed
pro-Bush agenda. "They promote our concert appearances,"
the rocker said. "They own most of the stations that play
our music. I can't come out against the war."
The Screen Actors Guild has likened the atmosphere to the McCarthy-era
anti-Communist witch-hunts of the 1950s. It issued a statement
saying that no performer should be denied work on the basis
of his or her political beliefs. "Even a hint of the blacklist
must never again be tolerated in this nation," it said.
Within three hours of that statement being posted, the guild
was inundated with the by now familiar deluge of hate mail.
Nevertheless, the statement remains steadfastly posted on the
guild's website.
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