Public Politics/Personal Authenticity
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PUBLIC POLITICS/PERSONAL AUTHENTICITY: A TALE OF TWO SIXTIES IN HOLLYWOOD CINEMA, 1986- 1994 Oliver Gruner Thesis submitted for the degree of Ph.D. University of East Anglia School of Film and Television Studies August, 2010 ©This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that no quotation from the thesis, nor any information derived therefrom, may be published without the author’s prior, written consent. 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 5 Chapter One “The Enemy was in US”: Platoon and Sixties Commemoration 62 Platoon in Production, 1976-1982 65 Public Politics/Personal Authenticity: Platoon from Script to Screen 73 From Vietnam to the Sixties: Promotion and Reception 88 Conclusion 101 Chapter Two “There are a lot of things about me that aren’t what you thought”: Dirty Dancing and Women’s Liberation 103 Dirty Dancing in Production, 1980-1987 106 Public Politics/Personal Authenticity: Dirty Dancing from Script to Screen 114 “Have the Time of Your Life”: Promotion and Reception 131 Conclusion 144 Chapter Three Bad Sixties/ Good Sixties: JFK and the Sixties Generation 146 Lost Innocence/Lost Ignorance: Kennedy Commemoration and the Sixties 149 Innocence Lost: Adaptation and Script Development, 1988-1991 155 In Search of Authenticity: JFK ’s “Good Sixties” 164 Through the Looking Glass: Promotion and Reception 173 Conclusion 185 Chapter Four “Out of the Prison of Your Mind”: Framing Malcolm X 188 A Civil Rights Sixties 191 A Change is Gonna Come: Producing Malcolm X 200 “Getting the Word Out”: Promotion and Reception 214 Conclusion 227 Chapter Five “That’s all I’ve got to Say about that”: A Tale of Two Sixties in Forrest Gump 229 Suspicious Minds: The Sixties in 1992 231 For the Good Times: Scripting Clinton/Scripting Gump 235 Public Politics/Personal Authenticity: Forrest Gump , 1993-1994 242 The Sixties Has Left the Building: Promotion and Reception 259 Conclusion 270 Conclusion 272 Bibliography 293 2 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figures Pag e: 1.1 Taylor inducted into the world of the Heads; Platoon 79 1.2 Barnes and the Juicers in Platoon 80 1.3 Colour slowly drains back into Platoon 86 1.4 Full colour returns 86 1.5 Barnes’ execution 87 1.6 Platoon ’s promotional poster 90 1.7 Promotional poster for The Boys in Company C 91 1.8 Promotional poster for Coming Home 91 1.9 Promotional poster for The Deer Hunter 91 1.10 Promotional poster for Apocalypse Now 91 2.1 Baby Observes Max Kellerman in Dirty Dancing 123 2.2 Watching Swayze in Dirty Dancing 124 2.3 Dirty Dancing ’s promotional poster 133 2.4 Promotional poster for Peggy Sue Got Married 134 2.5 Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes singing “I’ve Had, the Time of My Life” 141 2.6. Baby and Johnny in the “Time of My Life” video 141 3.1 The Zapruder footage in JFK 158 3.2 The Zapruder footage II 159 3.3 JFK ’s Jim Garrison at work; Kennedy at work 170 3.4 JFK ’s promotional poster 177 4.1 Modernising, and paying homage to, an iconic image of Malcolm X 196 4.2 Malcolm X (Denzel Washington) at home and in public 209 4.3 Martin Luther King and Malcolm X 210 4.4 Malcolm X ’s promotional poster 216 5.1 Mr Clinton and Mr Gump go to Washington 238 5.2 Divisiveness: Four Friends and Born on the Fourth of July 245 5.3 Collective Action: Forrest Gump and 1969 246 5.4 Forrest and Jenny’s emotional connection 254 5.5 Forrest Gump ’s promotional poster 261 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS So many people have provided me with advice, encouragement, guidance and inspiration over the three years that I have spent researching and writing this thesis. First and foremost I want to express my enormous gratitude – more gratitude than can fit into these few words – to my primary supervisor Peter Krämer. Ever since I first took his course in Hollywood cinema in 2006, Peter has been a fantastic teacher, mentor and advisor. His comments, criticisms and suggestions helped me to crystallise my ideas and arguments, and his encouragements during the rough patches stopped me from going completely mad. Without this advice and encouragement, not to mention Peter’s generosity with his time and his enthusiasm (even when I made him read the same bit again and again and again), I would have never made it beyond page one. Secondly, I am extremely grateful to my secondary supervisor Mark Jancovich. Mark has also been a constant source of inspiration and guidance. After speaking with Mark on subjects related to my thesis, I always left his office with a new-found sense of purpose and a desire to improve my work. Peter and Mark have been the best supervisory team I could have hoped for. I am also grateful to Yvonne Tasker, who provided many comments and suggestions on my work during my upgrade panel. I would like to single out for special thanks my colleague, friend and housemate Richard Nowell. Richard, who in the last year of this thesis’ completion became virtually a tertiary supervisor, gave hours, days, weeks of his own time to read and comment upon my work. I will forever be grateful for his comments and suggestions on content and his immense editing skills at a time when I needed them most. I would also like to thank Richard and my other housemate Jindrinska Blahova for our discussions on film and politics that have provided consistent intellectual stimulation over the past three years and, especially, their comments on my Dirty Dancing chapter. I am enormously grateful to Seb Manley, Louise Fitzgerald and Maggie Gruner who also gave up their time to read portions of this thesis and to provide much help and advice on my grammar and sentence constructions. I have discovered during the writing of this thesis how ungrammatical and sloppy my writing can sometimes be. With that in mind, neither Richard, Seb, Louise or Maggie saw the last drafts of every chapter and all remaining mistakes and errors are entirely my own. Many others also gave me a great deal of advice and encouragement during the writing of this thesis. I would like to thank Antonella Palmieri, Helen Warner, Ting He, Nick Warr, Vincent Gaine, Derek Johnson, Liz Powell, Michael Ahmed, Rayna Denison, Melanie Williams and everyone else involved in the PhD seminars over the past years for their comments and suggestions on various papers I have presented in these seminars. I would also like to give a massive thanks to the AHRC, who provided me with the financial means to undertake this research and to go on a research trip to New York and Los Angeles. Finally, to Deborah who had to put up with me for the last few months leading up to the thesis’ submission, thank you for all your support, and for not killing me. And last but not least, my Mum and Dad, Maggie and Peter Gruner, who have had to put up with me for the last twenty eight years. For that reason, and for the constant support they have given me during the writing of this thesis, I would like to dedicate it to them. Oliver Gruner August, 2010 4 Introduction “There is a major time-warp going on here” declared filmmaker Oliver Stone in February 1991. “We all feel the 60’s are coming back.” 1 Published shortly before the theatrical release of his latest motion picture, The Doors , Stone’s comment certainly reflected his own interest in the 1960s. He had, up to this point, represented the 60s in three films: the Vietnam War dramas Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989) and, most recently, a biopic of rock and roll star Jim Morrison, The Doors (1991). He was also about to begin shooting a film exploring the “truth” behind President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, JFK (released in December 1991). Yet, as the above quotation shows, Stone was emboldened enough to shed the first-person singular pronoun. Not “ I feel the 60’s are coming back” but “we;” not even a specific we, but “we all.” The filmmaker was promoting himself and his films as harbingers of a 60s revival that he believed to be consuming late 20 th century American politics and culture. Stone’s claims were not unwarranted. As a number of cultural studies scholars and political scientists have noted, a heated public debate over the legacy of the 1960s, or “Sixties,” raged in the public sphere throughout the 1980s and 1990s. 2 The period receiving so much attention from politicians, journalists, musicians, filmmakers and television programmers was not defined by a strict 1960-69 timeframe. Rather, the Sixties in question was an “agglomeration … of cultural elements, political meanings, and other associations” retrospectively attached to this temporal period. 3 The Vietnam War, the civil rights movement and the emergence of second wave feminism, the counterculture: phenomena such as these, according to many historians, took shape in the 1940s and 50s and/or spilled over into the 1970s. 4 1 Paul Chutkow, “Oliver Stone and The Doors : Obsession Meets the Obsessed,” The New York Times , February 24, 1991, p. H1. 2 Daniel Marcus, Happy Days and Wonder Years: The Fifties and the Sixties in Contemporary Cultural Politics (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004); Meta Mendel-Reyes, Reclaiming Democracy: The Sixties in Politics and Memory (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 69- 103; Eleanor Townsley, “‘The Sixties’ Trope,” Theory, Culture & Society , vol.