The last episode of TCM’s Moguls & Movie Stars, “Fade In, Fade Out,” (1960-1969) airing on Monday, Dec. 13, covers Hollywood during the Sixties. It is not a pretty sight.
The series, with more of the same Soviet and communist apologia of the last few episodes, gets it partly right that the 60s saw the rise of government power over Hollywood and America, though it isn’t put that way. Yet the facts are plain for anyone to see. Hollywood’s Golden Age was over, with moguls making way for upstarts tapping into cultural turmoil and going dark with horror movies like the zombie picture, Night of the Living Dead, an asinine exercise in nihilism which made $42 million in international box office, or Stanley Kubrick’s vacant 2001: A Space Odyssey or his satirical Dr. Strangelove, a favorite of the New Left. Somehow, movies with middle class appeal (the incisive In the Heat of the Night, the sexy and exciting James Bond pictures, the enthralling The Sound of Music starring series narrator Christopher Plummer) managed to get made. When they did, they usually made money.
Studio titans like Jack Warner were still around, hating hippies and wondering how Tinseltown went counterculture and it’s left to New Hollywood writer and director Robert Benton (Kramer Vs. Kramer), seeing movies as distinctly American, to recall the era’s confusion, noting that the studio system, which had been all but destroyed by the government, gave way to mediocrity, with the worst thrown at artists and audiences alike.
The most interesting business tale comes from Richard Zanuck, who at age 27 suggested himself to his Fox studio boss dad as the executive to save the struggling studio (though curiously there’s no mention of Fox’s 1968 hit Planet of the Apes). But this was the beginning of the dark times, with the rise of the Cannes Film Festival, and making money was out of fashion. Somebody mumbles that publicists handed out drug cigarettes at movie screenings and admits that many of the 1960s movies were made under the influence of drugs. Doris Day, Katharine Hepburn, and Cary Grant stepped aside for unwashed hippies and drug addicts and the sorry sight of Joan Crawford in a fright wig catfighting with Bette Davis or a Cro-Magnon man. This is what Hollywood, born of inventor Thomas Edison, bankers, Jews and capitalists, the most hated types in the modern world, powered by men like Laemmle, Zukor, Fox, DeMille, Disney and Warner came to. It was during the Sixties that anything remotely coherent, attractive and appealing was mocked, mutilated, or killed and anything larger than life barely stood a chance of getting made, let alone sold and seen. At least TCM host Robert Osborne reminds us that future filmmakers of quality made it through this awful decade.
The series’ closing episode will be presented with such films as the insightful Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (1967), horror film Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and The Magnificent Seven (1960) on Dec. 13, as well as the era’s dark, horror-themed pictures, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1969) and Easy Rider (1969) on Wednesday, Dec. 15. Don’t expect to feel the Christmas spirit by watching a batch of zombies and glorified murderers, drunks and drug addicts; those movies are devoid of peace, love and good will, but they do represent the 1960s and they coated the way with slime for today’s malevolent muck.
So it is fitting, in a way, that TCM ended its History of Hollywood in the Sixties, which marks an end to Hollywood’s beginning and, with nihilistic No Country for Old Men being considered Hollywood’s best picture, possibly a beginning of the end of a bright and innovative art form that was born of great creators over 100 years ago.