Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.
Hollywood has given the world treasures from James Cameron's The Aviator, about Amelia Earhart, to Ryan O'Neal Saying "Oh, Man! Oh, God!" On a Beach. Yet the Taliban and even some like-minded Americans detest Hollywood because of its sinfulness and liberalism, which real Americans understand are the same thing.
A pioneer of photoplay hatin', Studies in Crap favorite Dan Gilbert preached in 1945 of evils that still get denounced to this day. In his furious tract Hell Over Hollywood, he accuses Hollywood of leading "a revolution against fundamental Americanism."
He calls movies Marxist, hedonistic, and youth-corrupting, and he belches up artless wonders like this:
"The pagans of ancient Greece and Rome lacked the Satan-inspired imagination and zeal in depravity to carry the lust for sexuality and the greed for gold to the dizzy heights of excess and extravagance attained in Hollywood."
Gilbert also:
complains that Edward G. Robinson is more popular than Herbert Hoover.
denounces popular music: "Jitterbuggery is an expression of perverted sexuality."
claims movies "instill the propaganda of alien isms" and "glorify brutality and immorality according to the Nazi pattern."
For all his distaste for Nazis, Gilbert seems uncertain about Jews. He never specifically calls the out, but after listing the names of powerful moguls, he concludes, "Some of the few names which do not have a foreign sound are, of course, assumed. For instance, Melvyn Douglas's real name is Melvyn Hesselman."
As with anyone who makes a racket of crusading for morality, Gilbert purports that his biggest concern is the children. Through interviews with teen "sex delinquent"s, both white and "Negro," he demonstrates the threat to decency that flickers in America's moviehouses. One kid says:
"When you see those hot love pictures, it makes you feel like going out and having sexual relations."
And another:
"I like to see them kiss, love, drink, smoke and lead up to sex relations . . . . After I see them I go out out and love and have sexual relations."
Some don't even leave the theater! Here, a 23 year-old boy describes seeing movies with a date:
"She'd begin to get aroused and if it would happen to be during the early part of the afternoon and not many people were within the show, I would have sexual relations with her on the floor between the last two rows of seats."
Writing in 1945, Gilbert must have been aware of the countless picture-show orgies inspired by the previous year's top-grossing films: Meet Me in St. Louis and the filthy Going My Way.
Indoctrination! Hitler, too, taught children to hate mules and swine.
While many of Gilbert's beefs are still voiced today by media professionals who make a living denouncing media professionals, his most interesting complaint has dated. "Life in Hollywood is evaluated in terms of the free spending of money and sexual indulgence," he writes a couple pages before including this list of movie star salaries:
It's hard to imagine Joel Osteen finding this a problem. Still, Gilbert rages at the way Hollywood communists spend their money:
"Norma Shearer purchased $1,000 worth of handkerchiefs for Christmas presents."
"A complete theatrical company was taken from New York to Chicago to entertain the friends of a movie magnate, and a complete orchestra was engaged to serenade a new-born infant."
As one last case study shows, exposure to this "Hollywood lifestyle" rots away kids' values.
White, 18, sexual delinquent: "The movies make me wish I had a car and lots of money . . . They tell me how to get it. Most always I get mine through sex."
Poor thing. If she had been born just a couple decades later, she would have understood that all Christian women are now rich because of the prosperity gospel.
Shocking Detail:
Highlight:
Wait, how come the guy who calls Hollywood Marxist is complaining about movie-star wealth? Turns out, Gilber doesn't view the Soviet revolution as having anything to do with economics. Instead,
"The goal of Marxism is to bring humanity down to the level of animalism. Human beings would live like animals. Society would be reconstructed on the plane of the pigsty and the barnyard. This is precisely what has happened in Hollywood."
A barnyard?
George Orwell published Animal Farm in England the same year that Hell Over Hollywood came out. Nine years later, in 1954, Hollywood released an animated adaptation of Orwell's fable.
Whatever American kids managed to get through the movie without making sweet love almost certainly turned to whoring to purchase the livestock it made them crave.
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Norma Shearer bought all those handkerchiefs to cry on when she realized how much of a burn this was.
Alan,
I truly enjoy reading your articles. I find them funny and an interesting comment on cultural slipage ... or ... not. Thanks for doing such an entertaining job.
Good stuff this week. LOL @ the "complete orchestra" for the baby. That beats showing some shitty Disney movie in the back of the minivan I guess.
You've been neglecting crazy preachers lately. Thank you for rectifying this omission.
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