by Stephen Schochet
Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911 (2004) and Mel Gibson's The Passion Of
The Christ (2004) continued a long line of controversial films. In
1968 John Wayne decided to counter Vietnam War protests by turning
The Green Berets, a collection of short stories by author Robin Moore
about the superhero like exploits of the US Army Special Forces into
a movie. Eight years before the Cowboy Star had taken a financial
bath while producing The Alamo (1960), he considered The Green Berets
an appropriate freedom-fighting sequel. Wayne, who never served in
the military hated being called a hero by the press while young
soldiers he visited in Vietnam were accused of being murderers. The
production problems ranged from a lack of cooperation with the
Pentagon to battle scenes repeatedly being ruined when helicopter
blades blew the sixty-one year old actor's toupee off. It took all
of Wayne's persuasive abilities to get Jack Warner to distribute the
film. Upon its release many critics who opposed the war called The
Green Berets vile and boring, but to their great distress it a huge
box office success. Wayne publicly thanked the East coast reviewers
who hated the movie for bringing it more attention, and laughed all
the way to the bank.
Controversial movies have been around since the beginning of the
industry. In 1915, frustrated by his bosses unwillingness to let
him make a feature length film, Biograph Studios Director D.W.
Griffith decided to invest his own money to turn Thomas Dixon's novel
The Clansman into a two and half hour, sixty thousand dollar epic:
Birth Of A Nation. During filming some of the crew questioned their
leader's choices. They felt that many scenes such as the
assassination of President Lincoln or a white woman leaping to her
death to ward off the advances of a black man were over staged and
melodramatic. They were amazed at how the assembled footage
accompanied by a full orchestra turned out. One thrilling sequence
featured horses racing toward the camera making sophisticated
audiences duck down in their seats fearing the giant animals would
leap off the screen into their laps. President Wilson called the
Civil War Epic "History written with lightning." Press reports
exaggerated the stunning picture's costs at two million dollars, and
accurately or not Griffith was credited with inventing modern
cinematic techniques such as close-ups, panning and crosscutting.
For the first time movies were considered an art form. But because
the story featured clansmen as heroes and former black slaves as
murderous thugs, the Director was branded a racist and the film was
banned from major cities. Griffith, the son of a confederate soldier
from Kentucky, resented the charges of bigotry and went broke trying
to prove his detractors wrong by financing expensive follow-up films
such as Intolerance (1916). Historians later gave Birth Of A Nation
credit for increasing membership in the Ku Klux Klan.
Walt Disney was more sensitive towards how black characters in his
films would be received by the public. In 1946 he hired old time
radio actor James Baskett to play the wise, kindly Uncle Remus and
Oscar winner Hattie McDaniel to be Aunt Tempy in Song Of The South.
McDaniel, who had convinced Producer David O. Selznick not to use the
n-word in Gone With The Wind (1939), often suffered through long
bouts of unemployment and depression. Black activists complained to
her perspective employers that her maid-mammy portrayals reinforced
negative stereotypes. Walt Disney appealed to Walter White, the
head of the National Association Of Colored People to read an early
Song Of The South script and voice any objections to the story he
might have. Walt was not a racist, he simply wanted to present Joel
Chandler Harris' stories in the most tasteful way possible. White
refused to meet with Disney, waited till the movie came out then
blasted him without seeing the film for showing "happy slaves" on
screen. Despite doing fairly good business and James Baskett winning
a special Oscar, Song Of The South became a public relations
embarrassment for the Disney Company and still has not been released
on video or DVD in the USA. Ironically, the movie's story took
place after the civil war and the black characters were free laborers
not slaves.
The biggest lightning rod in cinema since Birth Of A Nation and
before Passion and Fahrenheit was Oliver Stone's JFK (1992). The
quasi-documentary film featured so many characters that Stone felt
the only way for an audience to keep track of them all was to have an
all-star recognizable cast. Critics pilloried the movie's
suggestion that Cubans, the Pentagon, President Johnson and a Gay
Mafia had conspired to kill John Kennedy using Lee Harvey Oswald as a
patsy, before they saw it. They pointed out that Stone misled
audiences on a number of issues including that Kennedy was planning
to pull out entirely out of Vietnam had he lived, the actual scheme
was a partial reduction of troops with the hope that the South
Vietnamese would strengthen themselves. It was complete fiction
that the film's primary villain Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones) had ever
visited the office of right wing FBI agent Guy Bannister (Ed Asner).
The gay prostitute convict Willie O'Keefe (Kevin Bacon) who first
reveals that there was a conspiracy to kill the President was a made-
up character for the film. New Orleans District Attorney Jim
Garrison (Kevin Costner) was remembered as a wild-eyed conspiracy
theorist that physically intimated witnesses, not the kindly, Jimmy
Stewart type he was portrayed as. Friends of the crazy pilot David
Ferrie (Joe Pesci) felt the film maligned his character, and so on.
Director Stone dismissed the criticism, pointing out that he was
creating a myth to counter the fabrication that the Warren Commission
had put out when they ruled that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone
assassin. Eighty percent of the film's viewers said they agreed with
Stone there was a conspiracy despite any evidence to the contrary.
Politics can make it difficult for Hollywood Studios to produce
controversial movies. In 1940, Twentieth Century Fox head Daryl
Zanuck assumed he would face internal difficulty adapting John
Steinbeck's The Grapes Of Wrath for the screen. The story of
Depression era farmers migrating to from Oklahoma to California in
unreliable jalopies to become fruit pickers was scathing in its
depiction of bankers and had been banned from many schools and
libraries. The most powerful shareholder at Twentieth Century Fox
was also the head of the Chase Manhattan Bank, Winthrop Aldrich.
Despite his personal anti-labor politics, Zanuck felt Grapes was a
great story and decided that making it into a picture was a hill he
was willing to die on. Aldrich could block the film and fire him;
the Producer was willing to go forward anyway. In a tense meeting
Aldrich questioned Zanuck if he really planned to make hot button
book into a movie, the determined Zanuck replied he was. The banker
smiled," You know my wife made me read that. It should make a
wonderful movie."
He turned out to be correct. The Grapes Of Wrath starring Henry
Fonda was the studio's biggest hit of 1940. A few years later it
was released in the Soviet Union as an intended piece of propaganda
with Communist leaders eager to show the hard life in the USA. But
it backfired when many Russian moviegoers came away with the
impression that America was great because everyone there owned a car!
Want to hear more stories? Stephen Schochet is the author and
narrator of the audiobooks "Fascinating Walt Disney" and "Tales Of
Hollywood". The Saint Louis Post Dispatch says," These two elaborate
productions are exceptionally entertaining." Hear RealAudio samples
at http://www.hollywoodstories.com.