{"id":7071,"date":"2018-02-08T07:54:10","date_gmt":"2018-02-08T12:54:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7071"},"modified":"2018-02-28T07:22:41","modified_gmt":"2018-02-28T12:22:41","slug":"hollywood-in-the-white-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7071","title":{"rendered":"Hollywood in the White House"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"LBJ

Woody Harrelson as LBJ (2017)<\/p><\/div>\n

Most of the time, Hollywood moguls and the pols inside the Washington Beltway hold each other \u201cin mutual contempt,\u201d said film historian Max Alvarez<\/a> in an entertaining talk this week at the Princeton library. Yet politicians need Hollywood\u2019s money and clout, and filmmakers need the government for such things as copyright and First Amendment protections and favorable trade regulations. And occasionally, they look to Washington\u2014and the White House\u2014for juicy story lines.<\/p>\n

Screenwriters don\u2019t overlook our Presidents who\u2019ve been tragic characters worthy of Shakespeare. Lincoln has been most often portrayed, with Nixon second-most. Alvarez showed three clips back-to-back from movies about our 37th President: Anthony Hopkins in Nixon<\/em>, Frank Langella in Frost\/Nixon<\/em>, and Kevin Spacey in the comedy Elvis and Nixon<\/em>. Hopkins was the smarmiest, Langella the most tightly wound, and Spacey (I know, I know)\u2014hilarious.<\/p>\n

At least until recently, films about presidents and the presidency mostly flopped at the box office, and early on, not many were made. There was a bit of a burst in World War II, in films that had a propaganda message. If a president did appear in these early films, he was an upstanding, respected figure. That\u2019s sure changed.<\/p>\n

Alvarez suggested that because Presidents Kennedy and Clinton were younger and \u201ccooler,\u201d the creative types in Hollywood were drawn to material that included a president or presidential candidate in the early 60s and again in the 90s. (Note that the industry insider\u2014Ronald Reagan\u2014did not spark such ideas.) Television contributed, too, with 156 episodes of The West Wing<\/em> from 1999 to 2006. Now we have Veep<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The movies have stopped treating presidents as paragons, with Wag the Dog, Primary Colors, Absolute Power, <\/em>and Clear and Present Danger <\/em>examples Alvarez cited. <\/em>Why the shift? A scene from the Netflix program The Crown<\/em> suggests an answer. In an episode set in 1957, Lord Altrincham, a small-time newspaper publisher, editorializes against Queen Elizabeth for being priggish and out of touch. In a meeting with her, he explains that the root of the problem is that, since the war, everything has changed, but the monarchy hasn\u2019t. \u201cWhat\u2019s changed?\u201d she asks, and he replies, \u201cDeference.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"House-of-Cards\"

Kevin Spacey’s bloody hands in House of Cards.<\/p><\/div>\n

Does exposure to charismatic, but dysfunctional characters on, say, House of Cards<\/em> (not to mention such shows as Dexter, Breaking Bad, <\/em>and Mad Men<\/em>) normalize dysfunctional behavior? Alvarez thinks it may. Not that we have to go to the cinema or watch tv for that.<\/p>\n

From the Department of Free Association . . .<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

. . . and so we have this recent Atlantic<\/em> article<\/a> about how continued exposure to the perfidies of the current administration is causing ‘outrage fatigue.’ Say it isn’t so.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Most of the time, Hollywood moguls and the pols inside the Washington Beltway hold each other \u201cin mutual contempt,\u201d said film historian Max Alvarez in an entertaining talk this week at the Princeton library. Yet politicians need Hollywood\u2019s money and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Hollywood in the White House - presidents on film used to be paragons, but now?","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[61,40,56,266,268,104],"tags":[218,649,781],"class_list":["post-7071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-character","category-fiction","category-film","category-history","category-politics","category-the-morgue","tag-hollywood","tag-washington-dc","tag-white-house"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1Q3","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7071"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7071\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7084,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7071\/revisions\/7084"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}