- HOLLYWOOD is getting its
call-up papers. The recruiting sergeant, in the person of President Bush's
special adviser Karl Rove, arrives in Los Angeles tomorrow to meet the
film industry's most important studio chiefs.
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- The agenda is simple: how can Hollywood help to swing
the American people and the world's public behind the war on terrorism?
Films are the most popular American export and the President is keen to
ensure that Hollywood plays its part in purging the world of terrorists.
Those who have the final say over films will agree tomorrow to bolster
patriotism on the screen and to encourage actors and actresses to go on
the road to entertain troops.
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- Mr Rove asked Sherry Lansing, the Paramount Pictures
studio chief and one of the most influential women in Hollywood, to round
up other film and television studio heads for this weekend's meeting. Forty
senior Hollywood executives, the men and women who decide which films the
studios make, will get together with White House representatives over
brunch
at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills.
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- Jack Valenti, of the Motion Picture Association, who
with Jonathan Dolgen, the head of Viacom, and Ms Lansing is helping to
organise the event, described those invited as "a high-powered crowd,
top people from the top companies". Among those who have accepted
are Sumner Redstone of Viacom and Rupert Murdoch, chairman and chief
executive
of The News Corporation, parent company of The Times.
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- The invitation reads: "The anticipated outcome of
the meeting would be an initial plan encompassing several substantive ways
we can lend support to our nation's cause. We assure you that this will
be a private, confidential, working meeting of the most senior
administration
officials and entertainment industry principals only. No press or elected
officials will be present."
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- The gathering spans the political divide. Ms Lansing
and Mr Dolgen are prominent liberals but another main organiser is Gerald
Parsky, who ran President Bush's presidential campaign in
California.
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- Tomorrow's meeting will build on the sentiments expressed
in a similar forum in Hollywood last month, which concluded that the film
industry needed guidance from Washington about how to help. Last month's
meeting was attended by actors and writers as well as Hollywood executives.
Tomorrow's goes right to the top, bringing together a group of movie moguls
who can ensure that what is agreed will reach the screens.
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- The film-makers are careful not to use the word
propaganda
when talking about what may be expected of them, although the wording on
the invitation amounts to the same thing. It praises Hollywood's ability
"to communicate, educate and inspire" and asks how these talents
can best be used to combat terrorism.
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- Not since the Second World War has Hollywood been so
eager to play its part in the national interest. Even before America
entered
the war in 1941 the liberal film community was outraged by Hitler and
Mussolini
and used the screen to ridicule them.
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- The rest of America took some time to catch up. Charlie
Chaplin's anti-Nazi satire The Great Dictator (1940) and the March of Time
newsreel's Inside Nazi Germany were banned in Chicago in 1940 for
"political
bias".
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- After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the film studios were
quick to put their talents at the disposal of the war effort and the
production
of inspiring propaganda began in earnest. Among the best examples were
William Wyler's Mrs Miniver (1942), which celebrated British heroism in
the Blitz, John Ford's The Battle of Midway (1942), on the repulsion of
the Japanese menace, and The Memphis Belle (1944), describing a Flying
Fortress bombing mission over Germany.
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- Every star was recruited to the cause, even cartoon
characters.
Donald Duck appeared in Der F¸hrer's Face (1943) as an irreverent
German soldier. Bugs Bunny sold war bonds, dressed up as Emperor Hirohito
in Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips and disguised himself as Hitler to deceive
Hermann Gring in Herr Meets the Hare. Walt Disney threw himself behind
the war effort and set out to persuade the American public of the validity
of aerial bombing with a full-length animated feature Victory Through Air
Power (1943).
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- Frank Capra, the director of Mr Smith Goes to Washington
(1939), headed the film unit of the Office of War Information, recruiting
Ford, Wyler and John Huston to join him in making a series of propaganda
documentaries called Why We Fight.
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- The end of hostilities in 1945 did not mean the end of
propaganda films as America remained on a war footing for the Cold War.
Although many films were crude, there were exceptions, such as The
Manchurian
Candidate (1962) in which Laurence Harvey plays a returning prisoner of
the Korean War brainwashed to murder for a communist spy.
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- After the McCarthy witchhunts in the Fifties, when many
writers were blacklisted for being suspected of sympathy toward socialist
ideas, the film industry became increasingly reluctant to help.
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- With the advent of the liberal morality of the Sixties
propaganda films seemed naive and risible. This did not deter the
super-patriot
John Wayne, whose The Green Berets in 1968 attempted to glamorise the
American
effort to counter communist insurgency in Vietnam. It is almost the sole
example of pro-war propaganda during the Vietnam War.
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- Tomorrow's meeting will agree to make actors and
entertainers
available to follow Bob Hope's lead in running wartime tours to entertain
troops. Everyone from Marilyn Monroe to Chico Marx took part. In more
recent
military campaigns Steve Martin and Bette Midler have visited
troops.
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- Hollywood is already rescheduling war movies to exploit
the national mood. Two films based upon the recovery of American pilots
stranded behind enemy lines have been brought forward. Later this month
20th Century Fox will hurriedly release John Moore's Behind Enemy Lines,
about a downed pilot in Mogadishu, originally scheduled for release on
January 18. Sony is releasing Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down, about a
similar
event in Bosnia, next month.
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- On American network television tomorrow night, Steven
Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan will be screened in its entirety. Before
the war on terrorism, the ABC network had expected to cut parts of the
opening 30 minutes, which give a harrowing account of D-Day landings. Now,
with a change in public attitudes to war, viewers are being left to decide
whether to watch.
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