Hide in Plain Sight by Paul Buhle & Dave Wagner

Author:Paul Buhle & Dave Wagner [Buhle, Paul & Wagner, Dave]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2015-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

REBOUND

The studios, as suggested above, had mostly survived the winding down of the 1950s and the initial challenge from television (a few of them buoyed from shrewd investments in TV production). The most inventive of the major studios, the comparatively small United Artists (UA), deftly divested itself of physical holdings and converted its operations almost exclusively into finance and distribution, sinking corporate investments into such hot prospects as the James Bond films, the Pink Panther series with Peter Sellers, spaghetti westerns and Beatles films. Like Roy Huggins and the strictly exploitation-oriented film independents such as American International, the execs as UA had figured out the youth market, forecasting the need for film innovators to plug further into rebellious themes. But UA was no major player, and the bigger studios continued to bank on big-screen spectaculars from musicals to war action films and westerns, with somewhat stronger sexual suggestion.10 Not much more could be claimed.

For the moment, stars like Rock Hudson and Doris Day, or living remnants of another time like Cary Grant and John Wayne, commanded larger salaries and percentage shares than ever before.11 The industry that in a few decades was to become allergic to anyone over 35 was still, in the 1960s, at its top levels pretty close to the opposite: run by those who had collected salaries and survived various setbacks since the catastrophic decline in filmgoing. Despite the steady addition of drive-ins to make up for the erosion of urban theaters, attendance hit an all-time low of 15.8 million in 1971, roughly an 80 percent drop-off from the figures a quarter-century earlier. More than a few saw the end at hand.12

Two would-be auteurs named Stanley, each powerfully connected with a Left that they never themselves joined, played key roles in the revival. The elder one was Stanley Kramer (1913–2001), a Manhattan-born film editor who spent his military years in the Signal Corps, not coincidentally with many left-wing veterans. Heading for Hollywood, he soon formed an independent production company known for its “message” pictures until forced under economic discipline to reorganize as a unit of Columbia—an artistic straitjacket that Kramer escaped by going independent in the middle 1950s. Carl Foreman had been his best writer (Champion, The Men, and Cyrano De Bergerac), and left-wingers were clearly pained when Kramer ordered the writer off the set of their best collaboration, High Noon.13

A few years later, Kramer took what must have been a considerable chance in hiring “Nathan Douglas” (Nedrick Young, working under a pseudonym, as Kramer must certainly have known, since Young made a brief appearance in the film) to co-script The Defiant Ones (1958). It was not Kramer’s artistic best, but certainly his most influential liberal picture and Hollywood’s most determined statement on race to date. The anti-nuke On the Beach (1959), scripted by the Left’s old friend and frequent collaborator, John Paxton (perhaps with some unacknowledged assistance), was followed quickly by the treatment of the Scopes “Monkey Trial,” Inherit the Wind (1960), once more co-scripted by Ned Young.

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