Endless Summer, 1940s Tinseltown, Homefront

Hollywood and Los Angeles after World War II: In the heyday of film noir, from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, the utopian aspirations that had driven the foundation and meteoric rise of the Hollywood studio system since World War I suddenly seemed fragile and liable to collapse. For the American Right, which had never much liked Hollywood on moral and political grounds, it came to appear as a Communist command post on American soil; for workers, it was a desperately insecure and often hostile place in which to try to make a living; and for the Hollywood moguls it was a dream they once had that was now threatened by industrial unrest, government regulation, and new technologies.

In a lengthy and spirited defense of the Hollywood film industry from its critics published in the New York Times on April 9, 1950, Dore Schary, then head of production at MGM, contended that many Americans viewed Hollywood as a “modern Babylon,” full of “white Rolls Royces,” “blonde secretaries,” and “houses full of bear rugs littered with unclad women.”

Americans loved Hollywood for its visions of stars on the silver screen but they understood the real place barely at all and viewed its inhabitants with mistrust. The apparent encircling of Hollywood by hostile voices stood in contrast to what seemed to be the continuing and unstoppable rise to greatness of Los Angeles, the city in which Hollywood was based but with which its relationship had always been ambivalent. Like Hollywood, Los Angeles emerged strongly from World War II, but unlike Hollywood, it seemed to progress onward and upward for the following twenty years as a result of prioritized investment by the federal government that had begun under the New Deal and continued with the expansion of the city’s vibrant defense, aircraft, and automobile industries, as well as its maritime trade. The postwar era was one of economic boom and relative political stability, characterized by Mike Davis as an “Endless Summer” in which the city consolidated its public image as a conservative, affluent, sunny, healthy, and reliable bastion of a certain kind of American comfort.

The key to the dramatic rise of Los Angeles and other Sunbelt cities in the postwar era was not only their identification of and innovation in new types of economic activity but the successful implantation of a new model of citizenship that was promoted by its advocates as a broadening of the benefits of capitalism to embrace the working class but that seemed to many the enforcement of a new political quiescence.

The historical record reveals that a remarkably straight line can be drawn between the determination of the Hollywood moguls to ensure the continuing profitability of their industry and the consolidation of a new rightist dispensation in American politics and society in the 1950s whose legacy remains with us today in many respects. Throughout the era, the Hollywood moguls and IATSE labor leaders in their pay used anti-Communist discourse to suppress the demands of workers and, in doing so, benefited from the fact that, as Ingrid Scobie has put it, “California led all other states in anti-subversive activity” both before and after World War II. This entailed encouraging investigations by the Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities of the California State Senate and by U.S. congressional committees such as the House Labor Committee and the House Un-American Activities Committee. This strategy in turn was a decisive influence on the formulation of the 1948 Taft-Hartley Act, which broke the power of militant labor in the United States as a whole and enforced a new vision of the worker as a shareholder in capitalism, which became a pillar of the postwar Pax Americana and the later rise of neoliberalism. -'A Regional Geography of Film Noir Urban Dystopias On & Offscreen' essay from "Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City" (2010) by Mark Shiel

-Tony Kirby (James Stewart): "It takes courage. You know everybody's afraid to live."

-Alice Sycamore (Jean Arthur): "You ought to hear Grandpa on that subject. You know he says most people nowadays are run by fear. Fear of what they eat, fear of what they drink, fear of their jobs, their future, fear of their health. They're scared to save money, and they're scared to spend it. You know what his pet aversion is? The people who commercialize on fear, you know they scare you to death so they can sell you something you don't need." -"You can't take it with you" (1938) directed by Frank Capra

Kyle Chandler says he would do his best to mimic these black-and-white heroes: "So, when I stepped into acting, it fit real well because I had played these characters already. Before my father died, but especially after, what do you do when you live on 22 acres and there aren't enough kids to play with?," he asks rhetorically. The answer was supplied by Ted Turner's first foray into broadcasting, a channel with a heavy Gable-Stewart-Cooper rotation. James Ponsoldt ("The Spectacular Now" director): "I feel like Kyle as Coach Taylor is sort of a throwback to a Gary Cooper, or a Henry Fonda, or a Jimmy Stewart: this profoundly decent bedrock of a great father and a great coach."

Peter Berg said to me one day, "Dude, how do you do it? You're constantly working, but no one knows who you are." I don't mind that too much. My biggest goals when I came out to Los Angeles were to be married and have a family, and be able to afford to live as an actor. That's what I do now. And little by little, I keep working with these people. This time it's J.J. Abrams and Steven Spielberg. I'm not going to question it. I don't know what I'm going to do next, and I don't care. Everything just keeps going. Like my pop used to say, "Just listen to your gut." That's what I do. In for the long haul; the rest is all just trappings. Source: www.aintitcool.com







"I gave them all up for you." -Jeff Metcalf telling Ginger she doesn't need to be jealous of all the women in his past: "Kids" episode from "Homefront" (starring Kyle Chandler and Tammy Lauren).