Timothy Stueve
This year, two films were released within weeks of each other that have intense political implications. One is The Apprentice, a film about a young Donald Trump and his relationship to Roy Cohn, one of the most prominent McCarthyites. The film is a depiction of East Coast cutthroat greed and its obvious implication is a critical reevaluation of Donald Trump’s career in light of his current run for office on a Republican bid. The other film is Reagan, a biopic of the former, controversial Republican President. That film presents Ronald Reagan as a morally righteous hero from California. The Apprentice received (somewhat predictably) positive reviews from liberal critics and journalists and was denounced by Trump and many supporters; Reagan received scathing reviews from liberal critics and had enthusiastic reactions from conservative media.
One could have guessed these reactions with a basic understanding of America’s current political landscape. Yet the story is more interesting if we look a bit deeper. Who funded The Apprentice? Nine different independent film studios from Canada, Denmark, Ireland, and the U.S. Compare this to Reagan‘s funding, which came from MJM Entertainment, a multimedia company run by Mark Joseph, a graduate of Biola University in Orange County (put a pin in this detail). It took 10 million less to produce The Apprentice than Reagan, and the Trump picture has been a flop while the Reagan biopic has made back more than its budget.
The Apprentice was directed by Ali Abbasi, an Iranian-Danish filmmaker and played at numerous prestigious film festival (including Cannes) but had numerous issues receiving distribution, eventually being released in the U.S. through Tom Ortenberg’s Briarcliff Entertainment. Ortenberg has called the rest of the industry’s reluctance to release the film “cowardice”. Although Reagan was also not picked up by a major distributor, it is the first film to be released by Showbiz Direct, a distributor founded by prestigious industry veterans Kevin Mitchell, Richie Fay and Scott Kennedy, who were previously powerful figures at Cinemark, AMC, Lionsgate and Miramax. The film was directed by Sean McNamara, raised Catholic in Southern California (another pin), previously known for his work on children’s television shows and movies, from Soul Surfer to That’s So Raven.
Many reacting against The Apprentice say that it is typical of Hollywood to politicize things. Meanwhile, some have reacted to Reagan‘s release, saying things like, “I can’t believe Hollywood made a film depicting Reagan positively!” Ronald’s own son, Michael Reagan, wrote a guest column for The Ironton Tribune with the assumption that the anti-conservative bias in the film industry is well-known, saying, “Tinsel Town’s knee-jerk bias against my father and his politics is alive and well.” But why should we be so surprised? Reagan is, after all, a positive depiction of one of Hollywood’s own.
But this is not revealing to us a conflict between liberal Hollywood and conservative Hollywood. I believe that the force that made Hollywood reluctant to distribute The Apprentice is itself another force of Hollywood conservatism, one that has developed since the beginning of Hollywood’s studio system. It is a conservatism that values assimilationism and is reluctant to address issues surrounding subjects such as antisemitism. This conservatism has, times, been in conflict with a different type of conservatism and, at times, has collaborated with it. In will now outline these two forces of conservatism at work in and around Los Angeles: Beverly Hills conservatism and Orange conservatism.
Briefly consider three of the most important films for Hollywood pre-WW2: Birth of a Nation (1911), The Jazz Singer (1927), and Gone With the Wind (1939). All three of these films were technically innovative, high-budget spectacles. Yet all three are representative of different ways into American conservative politics. Birth of a Nation is a defense of far-right racially motivated violence and was made by D.W. Griffith, who had little in common with the studio system that would proceed him, yet Birth of a Nation was the fortune upon which this film industry was built. The Jazz Singer is an interesting case, as it is one of the only films of its time to directly depict the Jewish identity shared by many of the industry’s executives. As I have written about previously, the film’s racial politics promote assimilation to American, namely white culture, at the expense of appropriating and exploiting black culture, as evinced in its famous blackface-laden finale. Gone With the Wind is famous for its romantic depiction of Southern culture. But for what possible reasons would the Jewish-born David O. Selznick be interested in romanticizing a famously racist culture?
To see how the development of a certain conservative-minded archetype of the Hollywood executive developed, we have to acknowledge the cultural and geographical origins of many of these figures. This is what I will be referring to as Beverly Hills conservatism. Carl Laemmle, Adolph Zukor, William Fox, Louis B. Mayer, and Benjamin Warner were all Eastern Europe-born Jewish immigrants, with childhood’s in New York City’s Jewish ghettoes. Their movement westward was doubly motivated: California offered the perfect conditions to build up a movie industry and its comparatively recent incorporation into the country promised a less developed racial hierarchy. These young, enterprising Jewish men saw an opportunity to not only join but practically invent a highly profitable industry, offering opportunities for social mobility that would have been hitherto unknown to their families.
The fact that the Jewish identity of many Hollywood executives has become associated with antisemitic conspiracy theories is highly ironic—because the Jewish men running these studios did not want to spread Jewish culture or identity; in fact, they wanted to suppress their own. The Hollywood notion of American identity (or “Hollywoodism”) became robustly developed through the cultural machine of the studio system. The last thing these executives wanted was to stick out due to their Jewish identity, and so very few films would even mention the Jewish identities of characters even if it were implied, and it largely remained this way for half of the 20th century. The moguls were eager to demonstrate their patriotism and willingness to embrace American identity, even before World War II. One of the most prominent examples of this overzealous patriotism was Louis B. Mayer’s adopting the 4th of July as his birthday (he insisted he could not remember on what day he was born, back in Russia) and the extravagant, patriotic parties he threw.
The book An Empire of Their Own and its corresponding documentary Hollywoodism explore how the Jewish identity was expressed through the producer’s films and convincingly suggests that many tropes associated with Hollywood’s storytelling (the triumph of the little guy, the disapproving father and the caring mother, the struggle to fit into society) find their origins in the lives of these “Hollywood Jews.” Yet the Jewish identity of those working in Hollywood came to be associated with not conservatism or patriotism but Marxism and Soviet conspiracy, which found its culmination in the infamous Red Scare HUAC trials.
How did such a reversal happen? It began with the WW2 effort to rally American media around the antifascist cause. When America and the Soviet Union became allies, the American government correspondingly encouraged the creation of pro-Soviet propaganda films, such as “Mission to Moscow” or “Gentle Comrade”. While only a few such films were made, there was an abundance of films made by Jews and Gentiles alike arguing for the righteousness of fighting back against the antisemitic forces of fascist Germany and Italy. Yet even the antifascist films made during the known persecution of Jews did not address Jewish identity. in fact, one of the only films of its era to address antisemitism, Crossfire (1947), did not involve any Jews in its production—there were even many attempts to halt its production. This is a piece of the puzzle that makes up the unique Beverly Hills conservative ideology. It is a conservatism that emphasizes assimilationism, nationalism, and the free market.
It is important to acknowledge the strong presence of Catholic Americans among this group as well, a group with a similar but not equivalent experience of being marginalized on the East Coast and finding the opportunity for social mobility on the West Coast. In fact, several Jewish Hollywood executives converted to Catholicism themselves. Louis B. Mayer, in his later years, took religious instruction from Fulton J. Sheen, one of the leading Catholic popularizers of the time.
After the end of WWII, the interest of the American government shifted from antifascism to anticommunism, from one enemy to another. Subsequently, the films which were made in sympathy with the Soviet cause were cast under a highly suspicious light. But those under trial were not the ones in power in Hollywood, the executives, but the writers, which was perhaps among the least powerful roles in the studio system. The HUAC trials are interesting in their own regard and would require many more words to begin to address, but suffice to say, it was during this period that another flavor of Hollywoodist conservatism, Orange conservatism, was able to collude with the Beverly Hills conservatives.
The Orange conservatism is one that emphasizes rugged individualism, that romanticized cowboys, that welcomed big business spectacle. Orange County was the land of “wine and horses,” a wealthy county full of film industry and industry-adjacent elites. It is perhaps epitomized by several landmarks of the city, from the gigantic statue of John Wayne in its airport to its large masses of land devoted to Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm. In fact, Knott and Disney both play an important part in the development of post-war conservatism. While Disney stood out from other Hollywood moguls as he was a gentile, his film productions embraced and bolstered the patriotic vision of America that Hollywood was fostering as a whole, and the creation of Disneyland, of course, is an extreme example of American idealism.
Knott played a large role in Nixon’s campaign, as Donald Critchlow notes: “Walter Knott opened his Knott’s Berry Farm in heavily Republican Orange County for a huge Nixon rally, ‘Picnic with Dick.’ Ninety-seven Republican movie stars appeared at rallies such as this to bring out the crowds.”. Knott became such a fixture of Republican politics that Ronald Reagan spoke at Knott’s 60th wedding anniversary in 1971. Walter Knott was a known member of the John Birch Society. In fact, Orange County was home to a large number of John Birch Society members, with over 38 chapters. It was a society that proposed a conspiracy theory: that the American government was under the control from the inside, by the communist party. The John Birchers tended to have similar ideas about who ran Hollywood. The so-called “orange curtain” divided the politics between the Los Angeles and Orange Counties as Orange became a republican stronghold. But it cannot be overemphasized: the Republicanism that found its sturdy base in Orange County was a new type of conservatism; it was there that the Republican Party had shifted right from the “moderate Republicanism” of Eisenhower to the “ultimate victory and takeover of a far more conservative variety—a trend that has run its course locally [in Orange County], but has [now] gone national” (La Tour).
The HUAC trials affected the public perception of all involved, but it was significantly a moment leveraged by both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan to accrue political credo. As chronicled in When Hollywood Was Right, Nixon did not exploit the McCarthyist moment in a crude fashion; rather, he improved relations with many powerful people in Hollywood (he already had friendships with many of them) through his just-so framing of the situation, as Critchlow writes: “Nixon’s delicately balanced position in the Hollywood HUAC hearings had won him the favor of hardliners such as Adolphe Menjou and Hedda Hopper, while his defense of the industry as not being naïve apologists for the Soviet Union earned him the respect of studio heads.” By appealing to the powerful hardline conservatives in Hollywood while also insisting that Hollywood was not a colonial outpost of the Soviet Union, Nixon’s involvement with the trials boosted his popularity.
Reagan’s role in the HUAC trials and the red scare in Hollywood is far more well known—in fact, you may see a depiction of it in theaters right now. Reagan was then the president of the Screen Actors’ Guild and became convinced of communist infiltration and appeared alongside Disney as “friendly” witnesses. In the words of Reagan’s own Foundation Archives, “Reagan and Disney portrayed the labor struggles solely in terms of a battle between forces for and against Communism.” While Reagan’s ascendency to power followed a visible tide change in Hollywood, in which it became popular and acceptable to be liberal, especially in reaction to the Vietnam war, his voter base in California remained iron tight just south of Los Angeles, and he still had much support from figures in the entertainment industry, even if it wasn’t, as Critchlow writes, especially from those involved with the movies:
During the campaign, Reagan drew upon his Hollywood connections, but, by 1980, the right in Hollywood was nearly gone. Indicative of this was the fact that when the Reagan-Bush campaign set up the usual presidential Entertainment Committee, the decision was made not to attract celebrities but ‘individuals who represent commercial and creative agencies in the film and television industry.’
Interestingly, the home for post-war conservative media became the television. William F. Buckley’s television program, “Firing Line,” became the premiere media outlet for intellectual conservatism. It was an extension of the project Buckley had begun with National Review, an academic journal with the express goal of building a conservative party in the US that was further right that rejected the New Deal.
In many ways, radio and TV have remained the home for conservative media, and the source of many characterizations of the movie industry as a hotbed of leftism often comes from voices on these mediums. One of the deep ironies in this story is that much of the television industry is an extension of Hollywood and in a certain sense, this can be seen as a throughline from Reagan’s presidency to Trump’s. Although Trump is often characterized as the destroyer of Reaganite orthodoxy, it is interesting to note that both ascended to the political realm through the power of public personas they had created through audiovisual entertainment. But there is another important throughline we can find here, and it is the presence of Trump’s new type of conservatism. Although Reagan appeared as a friendly witness in the HUAC trials, his politics teetered gracefully the influences of the conservatism of Beverly Hills and Orange, much like Nixon.
Trump instead embraces the most radical notions of both the Beverly Hills and Orange conservative modes by embracing the rhetoric of the John Birchers and accusing his enemies of communism, all while embracing a vision of America largely influenced by the dream factory of Hollywood. When people ask a Trumpist conservative “when America was great” as a rebuttal, they seem to presume that this will suggest that his politics harkens back to the Antebellum South. But it doesn’t. The past “America” that Trump is appealing to is the world of John Wayne, wine and horses, a culture that demonized communism, of a multiracial coalition banding together to beat their ideological enemies… It is ironically and paradoxically the vision of America that was generated by entertainers and businessmen who embraced American patriotism first as a social necessity and then as a way to increase their profit margins.
The truth is that Hollywood has always been political. But the politics of Hollywood is always predetermined by what is most profitable. Right now, the most profitable political praxis for Hollywood is performative liberalism (literally enacted by performers) in the public eye, coinciding with the increasing size, power, and vertical integration of media conglomerates. No matter the current partisan talking points, the ultimate ideal of Hollywood’s politics is a corporate monopoly that makes anti-authoritarian propaganda.
