Medved’s views get a fierce thumbs down from Jack Valenti, longtime president of the Motion Picture Association of America, a trade group. Valenti told Los Angeles Magazine that Medved is “a singularly uninformed individual who leaps from soggy premises to stupid conclusions” and “a failed screenwriter who became a critic because … he couldn’t get his scripts produced.” Medved fires back: “Jack Valenti is the leading apologist for the motion-picture industry … He’s the only human being in this nation who can declare with a straight face that movies today are better than ever.” In an interview with NEWSWEEK’S Lynda Wright, Medved expanded on some of his ideas about movies.
These are people with very blue-chip educations and blue-chip backgrounds, a disproportionate number of whom are children of people with some connection to the entertainment industry … In the old days, there was also a fairly insular Hollywood community, but most of those people came from bluecollar backgrounds … They were children of immigrants, people who understood the mass of urban America and respected the mass of rural Americans of the time … Today look at the background of the people who are making movies. Sigourney Weaver, Meryl Streep, Oliver Stone and Jodie Foster are all my fellow Yalies. When you look at the executive suites, it’s even more dramatic. You have very few blue-collar guys who are wielding creative power in Hollywood … I’m not saying that everyone who went to Ivy League schools is an effete snob. I’m saying that once upon a time there was a check on the natural insularity of the entertainment community and the check was often provided at the very top levels.
They are working for the approval of their peers. Ask yourself who is respected and lionized within the Hollywood community. It tends not to be the people who create the biggest blockbusters. It is directors like Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Gus Van Sant, David Lynch-who are considered enormously influential and never created a top-10 box-office hit.
They want to play homeless people, prostitutes and twitching veterans because that’s the stuff that wins Oscars. Four of the five Best Actor nominees for this year were playing psychotic characters. That shows a great dispensation on the part of the Academy to honor people in roles that show the dark side of society.
It’s true that Astaire and Rogers were gliding over polished marble at the height of the Great Depression. But in the good old days, when Hollywood distorted reality, it created a fantasy that was more glamorous, larger, better than what most people experienced. To an extraordinary extent, particularly in those films that we’re meant to take seriously, that are made for Oscar consideration, the opposite has come into play. They’re creating a world that’s worse than the world in which most of us live.
The fact that people are talking about the whole question is enormously helpful. It may be for the very first time people in Hollywood are getting the message that many Americans are disillusioned… I wish with all my heart Dan Quayle had not waded into this arena. It’s not a liberal/conservative issue. Liberals and conservatives both are concerned about the values that popular culture transfers to their children. I know many liberals who are very concerned about our popular culture, particularly popular music but also motion pictures and to some extent TV, which seems to encourage violence against women and violence as a solution.
Popular culture seeps into every corner of our lives … The great Joe Louis said it very well: you can run but you can’t hide.
It’s a proposed cure that would probably be far worse than the disease. And it always surprises me when you find thoughtful conservatives who seem to understand that government makes a mess of almost everything it does yet somehow magically believe that a government, program, which is what censorship is, can instantly raise the level of our popular culture.
It’s going to take an aroused public engaged in long-term struggle using boycotts occasionally, public shaming, stockholder meetings, using every kind of legal free enterprise-marketplace guerrilla warfare.
