In the Parents` Best Interests
by Matthew Alford and Robbie Graham
Tom Cruise – “the world’s most powerful celebrity” according to Forbes
Magazine – was unceremoniously sacked in 2006. His dismissal was
particularly shocking for the fact that it was carried out not by his
immediate employer, Paramount Studios, but rather by Paramount’s parent
company, Viacom. Viacom’s notoriously irascible CEO Sumner Redstone –
who owns a long list of media companies including CBS, Nickelodeon,
MTV, and VH1 – said that Cruise had committed “creative suicide”
following a spate of manic public activity. It was a sacking worthy of
an episode of The Apprentice.[i]
The
Cruise case points to the overlooked notion that the internal
mechanisms of Hollywood are not determined entirely by audience
desires, as one might expect, nor are they geared to respond solely to
the decisions of studio creatives, or even those of the studio heads
themselves. In 2000, The Hollywood Reporter released a top 100 list of
the most powerful figures in the industry over the past 70 years.
Rupert Murdoch, chief of News Corporation, which owns Twentieth Century
Fox, was the most powerful living figure. With the exception of
director Steven Spielberg (no. 3), no artists appeared in the top 10.
Each
of the dominant Hollywood studios (“the majors”) is now a subsidiary of
a much larger corporation, and therefore is not so much a separate or
independent business, but rather just one of a great many sources of
revenue in its parent company’s wider financial empire. The majors and
their parents are: Twentieth Century Fox (News Corp), Paramount
Pictures (Viacom), Universal (General Electric/Vivendi), Disney (The
Walt Disney Company), Columbia TriStar (Sony), and Warner Brothers
(Time Warner). These parent companies are amongst the largest and most
powerful in the world, typically run by lawyers and investment bankers.[ii]
Their economic interests are also sometimes closely tied to politicised
areas such as the armaments industry, and they are frequently inclined
to cozy-up to the government of the day because it decides on financial
regulation.
As Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Professor Ben
Bagdikian puts it, whereas once the men and women who owned the media
could fit in a “modest hotel ballroom,” the same owners (all male)
could now fit into a “generous phone booth.” He could have added that,
whilst a phone box may not exactly be the chosen venue for the likes of
Rupert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone, these individuals do indeed meet at
plush venues such as Idaho’s Sun Valley to identify and forge their
collective interests.
Of course, the content of a studio’s
films is not, as a rule, determined entirely by the political and
economic interests of its parent company. Studio CEOs typically have
considerable leeway to make the pictures they want to make without
direct interference from their ultimate masters. At the very least,
however, the content of Hollywood studios broadly reflects their wider
corporate interests, and, at times, the parent companies behind the
studios take a conscious and deliberate interest in certain movies.
There is a battle between “top down” and “bottom up” forces, but
mainstream media and academia have traditionally focused on the latter,
rather than the former.
Consider last year’s blockbuster
Australia, the epic from Baz Luhrmann. Two of the film’s most salient
aspects were that, firstly, it glossed-over the history of Aboriginal
people, and, secondly, it made Australia look like a fantastic place to
go on holiday. This should come as no surprise – Twentieth Century
Fox’s parent company (Rupert Murdoch's News Corp) – worked hand-in-hand
with the Australian government throughout the film’s production for
mutual interests. The government benefited from Luhrmann’s huge tourist
campaign, which included not just the feature film itself but also a
series of extravagant tie-in advertisements (all in apparent support of
its ham-fisted Aborigine “reconciliation” programme). In turn, the
government gave its favourite son tens of millions of dollars in tax
rebates. The West Australian newspaper even alleged that Murdoch had
his "journalistic foot soldiers" ensure that every aspect of his media
empire awarded Australia glowing reviews, an assessment nicely
illustrated by The Sun, which enjoyed the “rare piece of good old
fashioned entertainment" so much that its reviewer was "tempted to nip
down to the travel agent."
There are historical precedents for
such interference. In 1969 Haskell Wexler –cinematographer on One Flew
over the Cuckoo’s Nest – had considerable trouble releasing his classic
Medium Cool, which riffed on the anti-war protests at the Democrat
Convention the previous year. Wexler claims he has Freedom of
Information documents revealing that on the eve of the film’s release,
Chicago’s Mayor Richard J. Daley and high sources in the Democratic
Party let it be known to Gulf and Western (then the parent company of
Paramount) that if Medium Cool was released, certain tax benefits and
other perks in Gulf and Western’s favor wouldn’t happen. “A stiff prick
has no conscience,” Wexler told us angrily, referring to Hollywood’s
business leaders, “and they have no conscience.”
Wexler
explained how this corporate plot was enacted so as to minimize
attention: “Paramount called me and said I needed releases from all the
[protestors] in the park, which was impossible to provide. They said if
people went to see that movie and left the theatre and did a violent
act, then the offices of Paramount could be prosecuted.” Although
Paramount was obliged to release the film they successfully pushed for
an X rating, advertised it feebly, and forbade Wexler from taking it to
film festivals. Hardly the way to make a profit on a movie, but
certainly an effective way to protect the broader interests of the
parent.
Then there’s the more famous case of Fahrenheit 9/11
(2004), the Michael Moore blockbuster which the Walt Disney Company
tried to scupper despite it “testing through the roof” with sample
audiences. Disney’s subsidiary Miramax insisted that its parent had no
right to block it from releasing the film since its budget was well
below the level requiring Disney’s approval. Disney representatives
retorted that they could veto any Miramax film if it appeared that its
distribution would be counterproductive to their interests. Moore’s
agent Ari Emanuel alleged that Disney’s boss Michael Eisner had told
him he wanted to back out of the deal due to concerns about political
fallout from conservative politicians, especially regarding tax breaks
given to Disney properties in Florida like Walt Disney World (where the
governor was the then US President’s brother, Jeb Bush). Disney also
had ties to the Saudi Royal family, which was unfavourably represented
in the film: a powerful member of the family, Al-Walid bin Talal, owns
a major stake in Eurodisney and had been instrumental in bailing out
the financially troubled amusement park. Disney denied any such high
political ball game, explaining they were worried about being "dragged
into a highly charged partisan political battle," which it said would
alienate customers.
Disney has consistently spread
pro-establishment messages in its films, particularly under subsidiary
banners such as Hollywood Pictures and Touchstone Pictures (although
Oliver Stone’s 1995 Nixon biopic is a notable exception). Several
received generous assistance from the US government: the
Pentagon-backed In the Army Now (1994), Crimson Tide (1995), and
Armageddon (1998), as well as the CIA-vetted Bad Company (2002) and The
Recruit (2003). In 2006, Disney released the TV movie The Path to 9/11,
which was heavily skewed to exonerate the Bush administration and blame
the Clinton administration for the terrorist attacks, provoking
outraged letters of complaint from former Secretary of State Madeline
Albright and former Clinton National Security Advisor Sandy Berger.
The
nature of Disney’s output makes sense when we consider the interests of
the higher echelons of the corporation. Historically, Disney has had
close ties with the US defense department, and Walt himself was a
virulent anti-communist (though reports about him being a secret FBI
informant or even a fascist are rather more speculative). In the 1950s,
corporate and government sponsors helped Disney make films promoting
President Eisenhower's “Atoms for Peace” policy as well as the infamous
Duck and Cover documentary that suggested to schoolchildren that they
could survive an atomic attack by hiding under their desks. Even now, a
longtime Directors Board member of Disney is John E. Bryson who is also
a director of The Boeing Company, one of the world’s largest aerospace
and defence contractors. Boeing received $16.6bn in Pentagon contracts
in the aftermath of the US invasion of Afghanistan[iii].
This would have been no small incentive for Disney to avoid
commissioning films critical of Bush’s foreign policy, such as
Fahrenheit 9/11.
It is hardly surprising that when Disney
released Pearl Harbor (2001) – a simplistic mega-budget movie made with
full cooperation from the Pentagon, and which celebrated the American
nationalist resurgence following that “day of infamy”– it was widely
received with cynicism. Yet, despite lamentable reviews, Disney
unexpectedly decided in August 2001 to extend the film’s nationwide
release window from the standard two-to-four months to a staggering
seven months, meaning that this ‘summer’ blockbuster would now be
screening until December. In addition, Disney expanded the number of
theatres in which the film was showing, from 116 to 1,036. For the
corporations due to profit from the aftermath of 9/11, Pearl Harbor
provided grimly convenient mood music.
But whilst movies like
Australia and Pearl Harbor receive preferential treatment, challenging
and incendiary films are frequently cast into the cinematic memory
hole. Oliver Stone’s Salvador (1986) was a graphic expose of the
Salvadorian civil war; its narrative was broadly sympathetic towards
the left wing peasant revolutionaries and explicitly critical of U.S.
foreign policy, condemning the United States’ support of Salvador’s
right wing military and infamous death squads. Stone’s film was turned
down by every major Hollywood studio – with one describing it as a
“hateful piece of work” – though it received excellent reviews from
many critics. The film was eventually financed by British and Mexican
investors and achieved limited distribution. More recently
controversial documentaries such as Loose Change (2006/2007), which
argued that 9/11 was an "inside job," and Zeitgeist (2007), which
presents a frightening picture of global economics, have been viewed by
millions through the Internet when corporate media wouldn't touch them.[iv]
Universal
studios’ contemporary output has been less rigidly supportive of US
power, as films like Children of Men (2006), Jarhead (2005), and The
Good Shepherd (2006) indicate. Still, with movies like U-571 (2000) and
Charlie Wilson’s War (2007), it makes sense that Universal’s parent
company is General Electric, whose most lucrative interests relate to
weapons manufacturing and producing crucial components for high-tech
war planes, advanced surveillance technology, and essential hardware
for the global oil and gas industries, notably in post Saddam Iraq.
GE’s board of directors has strong ties to large liberal organizations
such as the Rockefeller Foundation. Whilst ‘liberal’ may sound like a
positive term after the unpopularity of Bush’s brand of conservatism,
liberal organizations are cemented firmly in the bedrock of US elites
and have frequently been architects of American interventionist foreign
policy, including against Vietnam. They are prepared to ally themselves
with conservatives over certain issues, particularly national security,
so it should come as no shock to find that GE was close to the Bush
Administration through both its former and current CEOs. Jack Welch
(CEO from 1981-2001) openly declares disdain for “protocol, diplomacy
and regulators” and was even accused by California Congressman Henry
Waxman of pressuring his NBC network to declare Bush the winner
prematurely in the 2000 “stolen election” when he turned up unannounced
in the newsroom during the poll count. Welch’s successor, the current
GE CEO Jeff Immelt, is a neoconservative and was a generous financial
contributor to the Bush re-election campaign.
Perhaps
GE/Universal’s most eyebrow-raising release was United 93 (2006),
billed as the “true account” of how heroic passengers on 9/11 “foiled
the terrorist plot” by forcing the plane to crash prematurely in rural
Pennsylvania. Although the film made a return on its relatively low
investment, it was greeted with a good deal of public apathy and
hostility prior to its nation-wide release. At the time, Bush’s
official 9/11 story was being seriously interrogated by America’s
independent news media: according to the results of a 2004 Zogby poll,
half of New Yorkers believed “US leaders had foreknowledge of impending
9/11 attacks and ‘consciously failed’ to act,” and, just one month
prior to the release of United 93, 83% of CNN viewers recorded their
belief “that the US government covered up the real events of the 9/11
attacks.” With the official narrative under heavy fire, the Bush
Administration welcomed the release of United 93 with open arms: the
film was a faithful audio-visual translation of the 9/11 Commission
Report, with “special thanks” to the Pentagon’s Hollywood liaison Phil
Strub tucked away discreetly in the end credits. Soon after the film’s
nationwide release date, in what might be interpreted as a cynical PR
move and as gesture of official approval, President Bush sat down with
some of the victims’ family members for a private screening at the
White House. [v]
GE/Universal’s
Munich (2005) – Steven Spielberg’s exploration of Israeli vengeance
following the Palestinian terrorist attack at the 1972 Olympics –
raises similar suspicions. Although the Zionist Organisation of
American called for a boycott of the film because they felt it equated
Israel with terrorists, such a reading is less than convincing. Indeed,
by the time Munich’s credits begin to roll its overriding messages have
been stamped indelibly into the brain by the film’s Israeli Special
Forces characters: “Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate
compromises with its own values,” “We kill for our future, we kill for
peace,” and “Don't f*ck with the Jews.” Predictably, Israel is one of
GE’s most loyal customers, buying Hellfire II laser missiles as well as
propulsion systems for the F-16 Falcon fighter, the F-4 Phantom
fighter, the AH-64 Apache attack helicopter, and the UH-60 Black Hawk
helicopter. In Munich’s 167 minute running time the voice of the
Palestinian cause is restricted to two and a half minutes of simplistic
dialogue. Rather than being an “evenhanded cry for peace,” as the Los
Angeles Times hailed it, General Electric’s Munich is more easily
interpreted as a subtle corporate endorsement of the policies of a
loyal customer.
On the most liberal end of the spectrum for
movies in recent years has been Warner Bros. – JFK (1991), The Iron
Giant (1999), South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut (1999), Good Night
and Good Luck (2005), V for Vendetta (2005), A Scanner Darkly (2006),
Rendition (2007), and In the Valley of Elah (2007). It is indicative
that following complaints about racial stereotyping in Warner Bros.’
Pentagon-sponsored action adventure, Executive Decision (1996), the
studio took the unusual step of hiring the services of Jack Shaheen, an
on-set adviser on racial politics, resulting in what was critically
received as one of the best films of its genre in a generation, Three
Kings (1999).[vi]
It may be no coincidence that Warner Brothers’ parent company, Time
Warner, is less intimately tied to the arms industry or the
neoconservative clique.
But to have an idea of what happens to
movies when you remove multinational interests from the industry,
consider the independent distributor Lions Gate Films, which is still
very much a part of the capitalist system (formed in Canada by an
investment banker) but not beholden to a multibillion dollar parent
corporation with multifarious interests. Although Lions Gate has
generated a good deal of politically vague and blood ‘n’ guts products,
it has also been behind some of the most daring and original popular
political cinema of the past ten years, criticizing corporatism in
American Psycho (2000), US foreign policy in Hotel Rwanda (2004), the
arms trade in Lord of War (2005), the U.S. healthcare system in Michael
Moore’s Sicko (2007), and the U.S. establishment in general in The U.S.
vs. John Lennon (2006).
It hardly needs re-stating that
Hollywood is driven by the desire for dollars rather than artistic
integrity. As such, cinema is open to product placement in a variety of
forms, from toys, to cars, to cigarettes, and even state-of-the art
weaponry (hence the “special thanks” to Boeing in the credits of Iron
Man (2008)). Less obvious though – and less well investigated – is how
the interests of the studios’ parent companies themselves impact on
cinema – at both systemic and individual levels. We hope to see
critical attention shifted onto the ultimate producers of these films
to help explain their deradicalised content, and ultimately to assist
audiences in making informed decisions about what they consume. As we
peer up from our popcorn it is as well to remember that behind the
magic of the movies are the wizards of corporate PR.
Matthew Alford
is author of the forthcoming book “Projecting Power: American Foreign
Policy and the Hollywood Propaganda System.” Robbie Graham is Associate
Lecturer in Film at Stafford College. References available on request.
NOTES
[i] Most memorably, Cruise declared his love for Katie Holmes whilst bouncing up and down on Oprah (the chat show, not the woman).
[ii]
The 2008 Fortune Global 500 list placed General Electric at no. 12 with
revenue of $176bn. Sony was at 75, Time Warner at no. 150, The Walt
Disney Company at no. 207, and News Corp at no. 280. By way of
comparison, Coca Cola is at no. 403.
[iii]
Interestingly, Disney’s CEO Michael Eisner was personally involved when
it pulled Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect show after the host
committed the cardinal sin of saying that the US use of cruise missiles
was more cowardly than the 9/11 attacks, with Eisner “summoning Maher
into his office for a hiding” according to Mark Crispin Miller in the
Nation.
[iv]
A less convincing but nevertheless intriguing case can be made for high
political/economic influence over the distribution of John Carpenter's
satirical sci-fi They Live (1988), which depicted the world as being
run by an invading force of evil space aliens, allied with the US
establishment. The film was well received by critics (with the notable
exceptions of the NYT and Washington Post) and opened at number one in
the box office. It easily made its $4m investment back over the
weekend, and although by the second weekend it had dropped to fourth
place, it still made $2.7m. The distributing studio, Universal
Pictures, published an advertisement during its run that showed a
skeletal alien standing behind a podium in suit and tie, with a mop of
hair similar to that of Dan Quayle, the new US Vice-President-elect.
The Presidential election had been just a few days previous, on
November 8th. Co-star Keith David observed: “Not that anybody’s being
paranoid but… suddenly you couldn’t see it [They Live] anywhere – it
was, like, snatched”.
[v] We stated elsewhere that representatives from Universal attended the screening. This was erroneous.
[vi] Shaheen also later assisted on Warner Bros.’ Syriana (2005).
