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Introduction: Michael Medved's Hollywood vs. America
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20027 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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12 / 1992 |
248 Words |
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Film critic Michael Medved argues in Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values, excerpted in the following pages, that there is excessive violence, sex, and profanity in today's Hollywood product--what he calls a preference for the perverse. The root cause, he says, is the cultural chasm between mainstream American values and those promoted by Tinseltown. But the media moguls just don't get it: Witness the fact that ticket sales have declined in recent years--for example, film attendance in 1991 was the worst in fifteen years.
Furthermore, film studios influence the public in other ways: Their corporate empires control television, book publishing, records, and theme parks, which frequently promote the same hothouse mentality.
Following the excerpt are commentaries on Hollywood vs. America. Todd Gitlin, professor of sociology and director of the mass communications program at University of California, Berkeley, agrees with Medved that Hollywood "degrades the human spirit" but offers a different viewpoint on the hows and whys. He says producers are not artists defying the bourgeoisie, but rather, for the most part, tailors of shoddy goods. Stanley Rothman, coauthor of The Media Elite: America's New Powder Brokers, is more pessimistic than Medved--he feels that the degraded state of our culture inhibits our finding effective solutions. Finally, Ben Stein, well-known social commentator and author of The View from Sunset Boulevard, offers his unique insight into the minds of movie makers and why Hollywood gives us the type of fare it does.
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