Artists in Times of War by Howard Zinn

Author:Howard Zinn [Zinn, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-60980-167-0
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2011-01-03T16:00:00+00:00

Stories Hollywood Never Tells

An edited version of a talk given at the Taos Film Festival, Taos, New Mexico, April 17, 1999.

When I began reading history and studying history and teaching history and writing history, I kept coming across incidents and events and people that led me to think, “Wow, what a movie this would make.” However hateful they may have been sometimes, I have always loved the movies. When I would read about things in history, I would then look to see if a movie had been made about it. But it was never there. It took me a while to realize that Hollywood isn’t going to make movies like the ones I’d been thinking about. Hollywood isn’t going to make movies that have the effect of making people more class conscious, or more antiwar, or more conscious of the need for racial equality or sexual equality. No, they’re not going to make movies like this.

I wondered about this. It seemed to me that it wasn’t really an accident. You could say it was just an oversight on the part of Hollywood that they have not made a film about the Ludlow massacre in Colorado—just an accident, like the accidents you hear about if you turn on the television, as I turned it on this morning. They were explaining the “accident” that happened when NATO forces bombed a column of refugees from Kosovo. These things are always accidents. Now you might say, “They’re not really deliberate. They did not really mean to do this.” But they are rarely accidents.

That is, the people in Hollywood didn’t all get together in a room and decide, “We’re going to do just this kind of film and not the other kind of film.” Nobody in NATO headquarters or the U.S. government had to get together and say, “We are going to bomb civilians.” They don’t have to do that, and yet it’s not an accident. Somebody at one point used an expression to describe events that are not accidents, not planned deliberately, but something in between. He called it “the natural selection of accidents,” in which, if there’s a certain structure to a situation, then these things will inevitably happen, whether anyone plans them or not. The structure of war is such that innocent people are going to killed. I heard President Clinton say, “Well we didn’t mean this, but civilian casualties are inevitable when you carry on war.” He was absolutely right, which then leads you to two conclusions: either you just have to accept civilian casualties, or you have to do away with war. Of course, you know, the second is unthinkable.

It seems that the structure of war is such, and the structure of Hollywood is such, that it will not produce the kinds of films that I imagined when I read and began to write history. There is a structure that you can describe simply as “based on the need to make lots of money”; a structure where money and profit are absolutely the first consideration before art, before aesthetics, before human values.

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