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High Noon

The clash of Old and New Hollywood, Part Four.

Nov 27, 2006, Vol. 12, No. 11 • By BRIAN C. ANDERSON
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This year's Oscars reinforced for many Americans the view of Hollywood as the land of obdurate limousine liberalism. Four of the five best picture nominees were self-consciously "progressive" films: Good Night, and Good Luck (on fighting McCarthyism); eventual winner Crash (on how everyone is racist); Munich (on how fighting terror militarily just unleashes greater terror); and Brokeback Mountain (celebrating gay cowboys in love). Off screen, of course, Hollywood's elite has campaigned nonstop against the Iraq War and the Bush administration.

Yet Hollywood hasn't always been a left-wing encampment, as Scott Eyman's recent, superb biography of Louis B. Mayer showed (Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer). The mogul's mogul and a lifelong Republican, Mayer reigned over Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)--the biggest and best of the studios that built Hollywood--from its inception in 1924 until a boardroom coup forced him out in 1951. Under his direction, MGM released a steady stream of hit movies, making stars out of Clark Gable, Katharine Hepburn, and many others, and helping to create Hollywood's Golden Age of the 1930s and '40s, when as much as two-thirds of the U.S. population went to the movies weekly.

Central to MGM's success, Mayer believed, was "clean, wholesome entertainment." "Our pictures," he observed, "must show religion--love of flag and home--respect for father and mother. There are too many who look at these themes as 'unsophisticated' and lacking the 'realism' of actual life." At a time when the movies had unmatched influence over the American imagination, Mayer's MGM celebrated traditional verities. The other big studios followed its lead.

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