
- #Propaganda nostalgia memes movie#
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John Wayne is the best example of this, but he’s not the only one. You’ve got these personalities who thought of themselves as kind of political figures. The fact that the studios were divested from the theaters had something to do with it, and there was the rise of agents and stars, and the decline of the studios. In the ’60s, the system began to break down. The government didn’t tell them to do it, but they were good enough business people to do that. So anxious producers began making anti-communist movies, and a certain kind of patriotic movies, and so on. There was this period of a brief civil war between the right and the left, and the right prevailed. So you could say that Hollywood was mobilized for the first time during World War II, and after the war it remained mobilized. And they had a lot of help, because there were a lot of people in Hollywood who were very involved in the war effort and were glad to make these kinds of movies. But it was certainly a way of steering the ideology of movies. It wasn’t censorship per se, though Hollywood had their own version of censorship with the Production Code. They determined what movies could be shown overseas, and so on. The Office of War Information looked at everything. It’s important to remember that during World War II, Hollywood was very close to being an unofficial arm of the government. But in your book you point to Reagan’s administration as a point at which the Hollywood ethos itself melds with politics. There are lots of interesting connections between the US government and Hollywood - in how the military interacts with Hollywood, for instance. I wondered, could he have seen this movie? Because it’s a handy way to describe Hollywood’s function in America.

So I was intrigued by this movie, which I think I saw probably before Reagan became president. In the movie, the idea is that the Depression can be cured by Hollywood, and the name they give it is the Department of Amusement. Shirley Temple, Scotty Beckett, Mary Jane Carey, Lorena Carr, and Madge Evans in Stand Up and Cheer! Fox Film But it also has Shirley Temple, so that’s how I got to see it, I’m sure, on TV. It’s rarely shown, even on television, in part because it has Stepin Fetchit, and so they’d have to cut a tremendous amount out of it.
#Propaganda nostalgia memes movie#
The Department of Amusement comes from a movie - not a great movie, but a very interesting one - called Stand Up and Cheer! Alissa Wilkinson You start the book with an interesting metaphor: Hollywood as the country’s “Department of Amusement.” Can you explain a little more about what that means and where that came from? J. Our conversation has been lightly edited.

I recently sat down with Hoberman at Lincoln Center for a conversation about the dramatic arc of Reagan’s presidency, the ways Hollywood became the de facto “Department of Amusement” for America in the 20th century, and how Donald Trump is - and is not - an heir to Reagan.
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And to commemorate the publication of Make My Day, a series of films discussed in the book, with commentary by Hoberman, is running at New York’s Lincoln Center through Labor Day. Now, he regularly writes for the New York Times, Film Comment, and other publications. He spent many years at the Voice, eventually becoming the senior film editor, a position he held until 2012. Hoberman is one of America’s most influential film critics, having started his career at the Village Voice in the 1970s, where he was the second-string reviewer to Andrew Sarris. And at its helm was Reagan, who began his career playing good guys on the silver screen. From The King of Comedy to Gremlins, Ghostbusters to The Last Temptation of Christ, Hoberman explores how films of the decade reflected an America that was newly fond of nostalgia cinema, still reeling from the blow to its self-image that was Vietnam, and largely allergic to the more subversive filmmaking of the decades that came before. The first two books focus on the ’ 60s and ’ 70s, respectively Make My Day focuses on the ’80s, and in it, Hoberman shows how Hollywood provided a build-up to Ronald Reagan’s presidency, then captured America’s desires and anxieties during his administration.

Make My Day is the final installment of Hoberman’s trilogy on Hollywood during the Cold War.
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Hoberman makes brilliantly and lucidly in his new book Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan. But he’s hardly the first entertainer to ride that wave into the White House - a case that writer J.
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Much has been made of the way Donald Trump, on the brink of failure as a businessman, parlayed a stint on reality TV into both a revitalized public image and the American presidency.
