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Hollywood and the Culture Elite
How the Movies Became American
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by Peter Decherney
Columbia University Press
Due/Published
May 2005, 272 pages,
cloth
ISBN
0231133766
As Americans flocked to the movies during the first half of the the twentieth, the guardians of American culture grew worried about their diminishing influence on American art, education, and the American identity itself. At the same time, Hollywood studio heads were eager to stabilize their industry, solidify their place in society, and expand their new and tenuous hold on American popular culture. Peter Decherney reveals how these anxities led to the development of a symbiotic and unlikely relationship between the film industry and America's stewards of high culture. Formed during Hollywoods Golden Age (1915-1960), this unlikely partnership ultimately insured prominent places in American culture for both the movies and elite cultural institutions.
As the book delves into the ties between Hollywood and various cultural institutions, an intriguing cast of characters emerges, including the poet Vachel Lindsay, Hollywood producer Adolph Zukor, Hollywood flak and censor extraordinaire Will Hays, philanthropist-turned-politician Nelson Rockefeller, and the Museum of Modern Arts film curator Iris Barry. Decherney considers how Columbia University's film studies program helped integrate Jewish students into American culture while also professionalizing screenwriting. Other chapters examine how MOMAs film department fought fascism and communism, the promotion of movie connoisseurship at Harvard and other universities, and the National Endowment for the Arts' support of Hollywood film.
Amid ethnic diversity, the rise of mass entertainment, world war, and the global spread of American culture, Hollywood and cultural institutions worked together to provide a coherent, though shifting, American identity. "In this original, deeply researched, clearly written, and utterly fascinating book, Peter Decherney has illuminated the complex and often unexpected connections between Hollywood films and the Museum of Modern Art, Harvard, and Columbia. The book not only enriches our understanding of the place of Hollywood in American culture, but it also informs us about the roles some of our most elite cultural institutions played in the history of film as a form of popular art and as a high art form. It is an outstanding and invaluable work of cultural history" -- Thomas Bender, director, International Center for Advanced Studies, New York University, author of The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea "Hollywood and the Culture Eliteprovides a major contribution to our understanding of the role of movies in American culture. Carefully researched and engagingly written, it uncovers, for the first time, the many links between movie moguls and the leaders of American cultural institutions that have made Hollywood essential to the definition and circulation of American identity. This is required reading for anyone interested in the history of American film." -- Douglas Gomery, University of Maryland, author of The Hollywood Studio System: A History |
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