Screening the Sixties

Home , Andrew Hunt (historian), Eric Roth, Waldo Salt

Oliver Gruner Screening the Sixties

Hollywood Cinema and the Politics of Memory Oliver Gruner University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, United Kingdom

ISBN 978-1-137-49632-4 ISBN 978-1-137-49633-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-49633-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016941775.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identifi ed as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfi lms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.

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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Macmillan publishers Ltd. London ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Firstly, my thanks to everyone at Palgrave Macmillan, and especially Chris Penfold and Harry Fanshawe, for their faith in the project, assistance and advice throughout the writing of this book. Many thanks also to the anonymous reviewer and clearance reader who provided helpful comments and suggestions on the proposal and fi nal draft. My interest in fi lm representations of the Sixties originated during my undergraduate years, developed as I undertook an MA and PhD and has continued to preoccupy me ever since. For more than ten years, I, like the proverbial ex-hippie, have not shut up about the Sixties. In the process I have accumulated many debts to those who have offered advice, constructive criticisms, helpful comments and inspiration (or simply tolerated my retro outbursts). At the University of Liverpool, Julia Hallam sparked my interest in fi lm studies and supervised my undergraduate dissertation on American cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, planting the seeds of my long obsession. When I embarked on postgraduate studies at the University of East Anglia, I was lucky enough to have Peter Krämer as a teacher and, subsequently, as a PhD supervisor. Then and ever since, Peter has been a source of advice, support and encouragement as well as a great mentor and friend. I would particularly like to thank him for his close reading of, and commentary on, this manuscript. Thanks are also due to Mark Jancovich, Yvonne Tasker, Sharon Monteith, Keith Johnston, Rayna Denison and Melanie Williams, who all provided insightful comments, ideas and suggestions on various drafts of my PhD

v vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS thesis. And to the postgraduate community at UEA’s School of Film and Television Studies circa 2010—another big thank you. In particular, Richard Nowell read and advised on fi lm analysis after fi lm analysis; his helpful criticisms and knowledge of 1980s cinema were much appreciated. This stage of my research could not have been completed without a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I am immensely grateful to Seb Manley for his close readings and editorial input over numerous drafts. Seb’s comments, thoughts and suggestions have helped me sharpen, clarify, and crystallise my arguments. Screening the Sixties is, however, only partially informed by my PhD thesis. The book as it appears now started to take shape around the time I moved to Portsmouth. Many thanks to all colleagues and students at the University of Portsmouth, who have made the university such a vibrant and intellectually stimulating a place to research, write and teach. In particular I am grateful to Lincoln Geraghty, who provided much advice and encouragement on my book proposal and various draft chapters, and Eva Balogh for her detailed comments on later drafts. Many thanks also to Simon Hobbs and Dan McCabe for their helpful comments on the Introduction. The university’s conference support fund enabled me to present related work at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Seattle. My thanks to those who gave useful feedback on this work. Jonny Davis at the British Film Institute, Joanne Lammers at the Writers Guild Foundation, Jenny Romero at the Margaret Herrick Library and Julie Graham at UCLA Special Collections, as well as all staff at these excellent libraries, were ceaselessly supportive in answering questions, assisting with script requests and helping to retrieve materials. Much of my later research took place at these venues, and I am grateful for their invaluable assistance. My huge thanks to my parents Peter and Maggie Gruner, who not only read and commented on draft after draft and provided encouragement and support during its writing, but also provided a fountain of Sixties reminiscences. And fi nally to Deborah, for her love and support over these past years, without which I would not have been able to start, let alone fi nish, this book. Not long before I completed this manuscript baby Aileen arrived. I’d like to dedicate this book to her. CONTENTS

1 Mourning the Age of Aquarius 1

2 Bringing Them All Back Home 43

3 Go Away and Find Yourself 95

4 Something’s Happening Here 133

5 Come Together 173

6 A Change Has Come 225

7 More Funk In The Trunk 261

Bibliography 269

Index 283

vii

LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 1.1 ‘Let the Sunshine In’: Hair’s celebratory conclusion 28 Fig. 1.2 Death of an icon: The Rose 36 Fig. 2.1 ‘Fire and Rain’: dancing to James Taylor in Running on Empty 70 Fig. 2.2 Celebrations in Sneakers 84 Fig. 3.1 Watching Swayze: Dirty Dancing 108 Fig. 3.2 The Kennedys arrive: Love Field 121 Fig. 4.1 Jim Morrison (Val Kilmer) on display in The Doors 150 Fig. 5.1 Hippies and Vietnam collide in Bobby 212 Fig. 5.2 The counterculture in Across the Universe 214 Fig. 6.1 Lunch counter sit-ins: The Butler 251

INTROD UCTION

WELCOME TO THE SIXTIES ‘It’s changing out there’, says Tracy Turnblad. ‘People who are different, their time is coming.’ A television screen fl ickers to the soulful harmo- nies of a black girl group as Tracy coaxes her mother, Edna, out into the Baltimore night. The sidewalks are bathed in neon, storefronts light up like jukeboxes, kids cruise by in a convertible, pregnant women sporting oversize coiffures drink, smoke and chat in a nearby bar, teenagers and adults dance in the road—all accompanied by the repeated refrain: ‘Hey mama, welcome to the Sixties!’ It is all a little too much for Tracy’s mother to bear; she has been confi ned to her house for years and, initially at least, begs to go ‘somewhere stuffi er’. But a new dress and haircut soon cast off those cobwebs and have her quickstepping to a Sixties groove. She’s ‘let go of the past’, she’s ‘hip’, she’s ‘in’, and as a hail of fi reworks explode all around, she and Tracy stand at the threshold of a new epoch. A garish, celebratory, ‘fabulous’ ringing in of the 1960s, this sequence from the musical Hairspray (2007) announces with familiar brio that the times they are a changing. If its visual excess and caricatures lend it a certain tongue-in-cheek tone, it is nevertheless a particularly jubilant demonstration of the magnitude with which American cinema has long invested the Sixties. Indeed, Tracy (Nikki Blonsky) and Edna (played by a cross-dressing John Travolta) are but two in a long line of cinematic protagonists to be swept up in the era’s tumult and transformation. In Hollywood, as in American public life more generally, the Sixties is nothing if not a show stealer. ‘Americans cannot seem to let the sixties go

xi xii INTRODUCTION

gently into the night,’ observed historian David Farber in 1994. 1 Fourteen years later and a campaign advertisement for Democrat presidential candi- date Barack Obama would demand to know why ‘with all our problems’ his Republican rival John McCain was still ‘talking about the 60s’. 2 The answer, according to political scientist Bernard Von Bothmer, is simple: ‘Because it works, that’s why.’ 3 As books such as Von Bothmer’s Framing the Sixties , Philip Jenkins’ Decade of Nightmares , Daniel Marcus’ Happy Days and Wonder Years and Meta Mendel-Reyes’ Reclaiming Democracy demonstrate, the Sixties has become intrinsic to public debates over the past 40 years, with arbiters of various outlooks seeking to shape public memory in line with their own agendas. 4 Whether events and phenomena such as the Vietnam War, the counterculture and the women’s liberation movement have been attacked or defended, ‘political momentum has been gained’, writes Marcus, ‘by those who have been able to use the past to explain the present, and to legitimate their vision of the future’. 5 At the same time as politicians have debated the legacy of the Sixties, Hollywood too has offered a sustained engagement with the era. References to the Sixties mark the contemporary cinematic landscape. Serving as historical backdrop to a range of war fi lms, biopics and dramas, or appearing as fl eeting moments of nostalgia—documentary montages, iconic photographs and commemorative dialogue—it has by turns been examined, mythologised and deconstructed. When in baseball-themed melodrama Field of Dreams (1989) former political activist and author Terence Mann (James Earl Jones) declares with mock astonishment, ‘Oh My God, you’re from the Sixties!’, he is speaking for a 1980s culture already loaded with recollections of the period. ‘There’s no place for you here in the future!’ he screams at his visitor, Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner). And yet it seems that there was. And there is. Ten years later, Terry Valentine (Peter Fonda), the ageing hippie villain of revenge thriller The Limey (1998), would wax lyrical about a ‘place that maybe only exists in your imagina- tion. Some place far away, half-remembered when you wake up.’ That, Valentine informs us, ‘was the Sixties’. Echoes of the civil rights movement pervade Mississippi Burning (1988) and Ghosts of Mississippi (1996), just as they do The Help (2011) and Lee Daniels ’ The Butler (henceforth referred to as The Butler , 2013). Battles over the legacy of Vietnam are ever present in fi lms such as Platoon (1986), The Big Lebowski (1998) and We Were Soldiers (2002), while Hair (1979), Across the Universe (2007) and Taking Woodstock (2009) revisit the counterculture. ‘Making sense of the Sixties’, as Barry Langford informs us, has been a ‘problem’ bedevilling Hollywood throughout the 1980s, 1990s and beyond. 6 Even superheroes struggle INTRODUCTION xiii against the era’s iconic might: the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 threatens to upstage the antics of Professor X (James McAvoy) and his comrades in X-Men : First Class (2011); Bob Dylan’s anthem to political and social transformation ‘The Times They Are A-Changin” provides an eerie primer to the heroes of Watchmen (2009). From Selma to Vietnam, from the counterculture to the Kennedy assassination, Hollywood has imagined and reimagined the era, making meaning out of traces of the recent past. This book examines American cinema’s ‘framing’ of the Sixties. Analysing a series of fi lms released since the late 1970s, I explore the ways in which a group of fi lmmakers developed politically resonant narratives designed to contribute to broader public memory of the era. Through a close examination of draft scripts, production documents and the fi nished releases, I discuss the emergence of the Sixties as a commemorative trope in 1970s fi lm; cinema’s contribution to heated culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s; and how contemporary Hollywood has sought new, alternative narratives in the twenty-fi rst century, a time when much public discussion evinces an increasing familiarity—for some boredom—with all things Sixties. While this book is by no means a comprehensive survey of every fi lm to ever reference the Sixties, it is a wide-ranging account of evolving perspectives on a period that continues to exert a powerful force on the American public sphere. Screening the Sixties locates Hollywood within broader public memory of the recent American past. Appearing in political debates, fi lms, television programmes, popular songs, monuments or artworks, public memory has been discussed as a fl uid phenomenon that contributes to, reinforces, or at times challenges, ideological discourses in circulation. Marita Sturken describes memory as a ‘fi eld of negotiation’ or an ‘active, engaging process of making meaning’. 7 Scholars such as Sturken, George Lipsitz and Daniel Marcus stress memory’s dialogic nature. Writing on popular music, Lipsitz emphasises that every cultural artefact should be considered ‘part of collective historical memory and continuing social dialogue’. 8 They do not elicit homogeneous memories but, rather, serve as a nexus between producers, consumers and other commentators. Their meanings are discussed and negotiated. Interpretation is, however, never infi nite; there are certain factors upon which it is contingent. Marcus observes how ‘the ability of a group to establish its memory as a widely held “public memory” is a key act of social power’. 9 Individuals, organisations and institutions fi ght to legitimate or discredit particular memories. As Sturken puts it, ‘the process of cultural memory is bound up in complex political stakes and meanings’. 10 In this respect, and as the above-noted issues and events may indicate, this book is less about a neatly defi ned decade—the 1960s—than about a xiv INTRODUCTION conceptual category, ‘the Sixties’. The Vietnam War, the counterculture, the civil rights and anti-war movements and the emergence of second-wave feminism: phenomena such as these, according to many historians, took shape in the 1940s and 1950s and/or spilled over into the 1970s. 11 It has thus become customary to delineate a ‘long Sixties’ which can encapsulate everything from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. One could spend many pages debating the respective merits of a narrative that covers the years 1955–74 (‘Elvis to the Fall of Richard Nixon’, as Mark Hamilton Lytle would have it), or 1958–74 (offered by Arthur Marwick in his account of the era as experienced in the USA, the UK, France and Italy), or 1963–74 (the Kennedy-assassination-to-Watergate ‘decade of shocks’ discussed by Tom Shactman). 12 Each timeframe is clearly justifi ed and offers a valid way of organising historical events. But, clearly, the accent one wishes to place on specifi c issues will govern the story one tells. I am interested in how popular cinema has contributed to wider public debates in which ‘the Sixties’ has manifested itself in public memory as a ‘heuristic rubric’, to borrow Cornel West’s phrase, that ‘renders noteworthy historical pro- cesses and events intelligible’. 13 Rhetorically shaped and reshaped over the past 40 years, the Sixties has proven a remarkably durable motif in confl icts over everything from US foreign policy, welfare expenditure and minority and women’s rights to artistic freedoms and lifestyle choices. In order to avoid ending up, however, with a swollen, somewhat unspecifi c corpus of fi lms covering the full sweep of post-World War II history, some parameters have been set. The fi lms examined here either locate a sizable proportion of their action during the years 1960–74 or (as with fi lms such as Field of Dreams ) refer back to events associated with this temporal period. As Von Bothmer observes, these years encapsulate what in popular remembrance would become ideologically freighted concepts of a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Sixties. The former, spanning the years 1960–63, is often celebrated (by liberal and conservative commentators alike) as a period of optimism and idealism, symbolised powerfully through the iconic image of President John F. Kennedy. The ‘bad’ Sixties, approximately 1964–74, covers the era’s most contested issues—the Vietnam War, women’s liberation, abor- tion rights and the fragmenting of the New Left into radical factions such as the Black Panthers and Weather Underground, for instance. 14 As this book progresses, we will see an emphasis on, and interplay between, these two epochs in public debates and popular cinema. Indeed, such periodisation is intrinsic to Hollywood’s political engagement with the Sixties. From despairing accounts of the counterculture’s implosion in the 1970s, discussions of the Reagan administration’s policies towards to INTRODUCTION xv the Soviet Union in the 1980s, and the Clinton government’s allusions to JFK in the 1990s to, more recently, discussions of the second Iraq War and Obama’s presidency, the Sixties, as Stephen Miller puts it, ‘ripples into the present’. 15 Interpretations are so diverse and contradictory as to make identifying distinct political outlooks complex. However, broadly speaking, one can peg the Sixties to a wider ‘culture war’ taking place in the US public sphere, which had gained traction in the 1960s and rose to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s. Coined by James Davison Hunter in 1991, the term ‘culture war’ defi ned what he saw as a noisy public confl ict between conservative (orthodox) and liberal (progressive) commentators. Appearing in political rhetoric, criticism and scholarly monographs, the culture war was a debate ‘over fundamentally different conceptions of moral authority, over different ideas and beliefs about truth, the good, obligation to one another, the nature of community’. It was ‘expressed as a clash over national life itself’. 16 Thus a conservative is recognised as somebody who reacts negatively to such issues as abor- tion, gay rights and women’s rights, and the role of federal government with regard to social spending, while championing American militarism abroad and ‘traditional’ Christian family values. Broadly speaking, a liberal appears to offer the opposite perspective. With so many key political developments understood to have originated in the Sixties, it is unsurprising that the era has ‘been buffeted about on [this] sea of culture wars […] and its legacy continues to be debated’. 17 Conservative commentators are known for attacking the Sixties—by which they tend to mean the late 1960s and early 1970s—as a catastrophic rupture in the national narrative. Prominent fi gures like President Ronald Reagan and his allies touted the ‘Fifties’ (within which could be included the early 1960s) as America’s last golden age. According to conservatives, the Sixties changed everything; suddenly the nation fell apart. The growth of radicalised groups such as the anti-war and feminist movements infected America with an ‘un-American’ mindset. The counterculture’s promotion of free love destroyed the nation’s moral fabric and eroded traditional Fifties values. 18 Liberal commentators, while not necessarily supportive of every political and cultural transformation, offer a more sympathetic perspective on the battles against prejudice and fi ght for personal freedoms associated with the period. Within these two factions, however, are many nuances. To suggest that the Sixties had its problems is not necessarily to provide a conservative reading; nor is an unbridled celebration inherently liberal. In order to make sense of what is being said, one must position the debates within their specifi c historical contexts. Thus, rather than provide xvi INTRODUCTION a defi nitive overview here, I allow these debates to unravel through the book, offering a contribution to scholarly work that seeks to ‘historicize collective memory of the Sixties’. 19 Each chapter proceeds chronologically, from the 1970s to the 2000s. Through a close analysis of script development, I demonstrate how fi lm content, themes and narratives were shaped and reshaped so as to provide a meaningful engagement with the recent past. In this regard, I contribute to a body of academic literature concerned with historical representation in fi lm. Recent years have seen a range of scholarly work lead a reappraisal of biopics, war fi lms, period dramas and other examples of what Robert Rosenstone terms ‘history fi lms’ that avoids simple charges of distortion or disingenuousness. 20 Instead, such work offers thoughtful analyses of the ways that certain fi lms and fi lmmakers can contribute to broader discussions on the past. The fi lms examined in this book form part of a wider project on the part of Hollywood to, as Robert Burgoyne puts it, ‘rearticulate the cultural narratives that defi ne the American nation’. Burgoyne’s detailed study of a series of historical fi lms produced during the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s argues them to be a ‘privileged discursive site in which anxiety, ambivalence, and expectation about the nation, its history, and its future are played out in narrative form’. 21 Although some of the examples discussed in the following chapters would not be considered ‘historical fi lms’ in the traditional sense (and this is discussed below), I argue that they have been central to the articulation of popular national historical narratives and contributed to broader discursive currents in which America’s past and future loom large. The above-noted scholars’ analyses are important for the very reason that they invest fi lmmakers with some agency in terms of their historical representations, and demand a specifi c set of critical tools in their analysis. Rosenstone’s discussion of formal and stylistic conventions—the tendency (at least in what he terms ‘mainstream dramas’) to compress historical discourse into a brief narrative, to condense several historical players into composite characters, to emotionalise history, to focus upon individual stories as opposed to large populations, and to convey masses of information visually rather than through words—is valuable, offering, as it does, a taxonomy of analytical considerations. 22 For Rosenstone, historians, whether working with words or images, are ‘people who confront the traces of the past […] and use them to tell stories that make meaning for us in the present’. 23 The Sixties, as represented in Hollywood cinema, is an agglomeration of narrative, character, cinematography, music and INTRODUCTION xvii dialogue. In order to explore its history and politics, it is necessary to pay attention to the ways in which fi lms construct their worlds and invest the past with meaning. I regard all of the fi lmmakers explored in this book as ‘artists for whom history matters’. 24 Though I am aware that some of the aforementioned scholars may be more concerned with what cinema can add to debates among professional historians than it can to contemporaneous popular discourses, their insights nevertheless underpin this book’s approach. My own focus on production history and script development builds on, and adds something new to, existing academic work on Hollywood’s historical representations. George Custen, J.E. Smyth, Marnie Hughes-Warrington and Jonathan Stubbs have examined extra-textual materials surrounding Hollywood historical fi lms—promotion, reception, DVD extras, scripts and so forth—and, in doing so, comment on the ways in which they are developed and/or circulated in the public sphere. 25 Smyth’s work in particular has been an infl uence. Her book, Reconstructing American Historical Cinema , not only draws on an extensive array of documentary materials so as to provide insight into the production process, but also offers striking re-readings of fi lms not previously considered ‘historical’. Westerns such as Cimarron (1930) and Stagecoach (1939), gangster fi lms Little Caesar (1931) and Scarface (1932)—so often understood to be manifestations of American ‘myths’ and/or ahistorical genre pictures—are revealed to have been written and produced by people with an investment in history. Screening the Sixties similarly covers a wide range of representations, some of which may not be immediately presumed to be serious historical accounts. The musicals Hair and Across the Universe (2007), for instance, are rarely added to the pantheon. And yet, I argue that a focus on their production context and textual content reveals them to be an attempt to offer a complex engagement with the Sixties legacy. Furthermore, I agree with Smyth’s assertion that the screenplay provides an important foundation upon which historical portrayals are constructed. 26 This does not necessitate a dismissal of the fi lm’s visual and aural content. As Stephen Maras notes, scripts are often being written and rewritten during a fi lm’s production and it is diffi cult to clearly separate the screenwriting phase from the shooting and post-production. 27 And, as we will see, other creative practitioners involved in the projects— directors, actors and sound designers—often made signifi cant contributions to historical content. Rather, by situating script development within a wider context, we can get a sense of the choices being made by fi lmmakers xviii INTRODUCTION involved. To recall Rosenstone’s words, one can build up a picture of the ‘traces of the past’ with which fi lmmakers began their projects, their decisions to add or omit certain content, and the resonance such decisions had with regard to broader historical discourses. Some of the fi lms discussed in this book have been subjected to detailed academic analysis; others have fallen under the radar. Several essays and articles address high-profi le representations such as Coming Home (1978), Dirty Dancing (1987), The Doors (1991) and Forrest Gump (1994). 28 Certain fi lms analysed in Chapter 2 — The Big Chill (1983) and Running on Empty (1988), for instance—appear in academic work devoted to the Sixties. 29 More generally, this book contributes to scholarship on fi lmic representations of events and issues such as the Vietnam War, the counterculture and the civil rights movement. 30 These studies have, however, tended to focus on a selection of high-profi le releases of the 1980s and 1990s. This book expands these critical horizons, exploring genres usually overlooked by historical fi lm and memory studies, providing new perspectives on familiar fi lmic texts, and examining the continued production of ideologically resonant narratives throughout the 2000s. ‘Our basic intention’, wrote the screenwriter Waldo Salt in 1975 to his fellow collaborators on the drama Coming Home (eventually released in 1978), ‘is to present a retrospective glance at the home front of the Viet Nam War in the late sixties.’ He continued with a statement that could well refer to many of the fi lms examined in this book. ‘As the nation moves on to other more or less critical challenges, we can look back with compassionate perspective […] toward that quite remarkable time.’ 31 In fact, it seems to me that the bulk of screenwriters, directors, actors and other creative practitioners involved in producing the fi lms under examination intended to offer a similarly ‘compassionate’ take on the Sixties. Many were directly involved in the era’s political and cultural transformations or experienced them as young men and women. Those born during the interwar years—such as Coming Home team Jane Fonda (b. 1937), Hal Ashby (b. 1929) and Jon Voight (b. 1938); Hair ’s Miloš Forman (b. 1932); those involved in The Rose (1979), such as Bo Goldman (b. 1932) and Mark Rydell (b. 1928); and Running on Empty director Sidney Lumet (b. 1924)—had in the Sixties been associated with a politically liberal, countercultural Hollywood vanguard through their work as writers, directors, actors and/or prominent political activists. Looking at interviews, production documents and draft scripts (discussed throughout the book), one gets the sense that these individuals used their fi lms to refl ect on their own and their peers’ roles in the era’s upheavals. INTRODUCTION xix

The largest proportion of fi lmmakers examined here come from the post-World War II ‘baby boom’. In its broadest sense, the baby boom lasted from 1945/46 to 1964. Some 78 million babies were born during these years, and, by the early 1990s, boomers accounted for 40 per cent of the adult population. 32 Steve Gillon breaks the demographic into two sections: ‘Boomers’ and ‘Shadow Boomers’. The former are those who were born between 1945 and 1957 and ‘grew up with rock and roll, the Mickey Mouse Club , prosperity […] the idealism of John F. Kennedy, and the social struggles of the 1960s’. 33 Writers, directors and actors such as Lawrence Kasdan (The Big Chill , b. 1949), Naomi Foner (Running on Empty , b. 1946), Phil Alden Robinson ( Field of Dreams and Sneakers , b. 1950), Oliver Stone (The Doors , b. 1946), Forrest Gump team Eric Roth (b. 1945), Robert Zemeckis (b. 1952), Sally Field (b. 1946) and Tom Hanks (b. 1956), Denzel Washington (Remember the Titans , b. 1954) and Julie Taymor (Across the Universe , b. 1952) revisited issues they had experienced as teenagers and young adults. Some were directly involved in major events of the period—Foner was prominent in the activist organisation Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Stone and Robinson served in Vietnam, and Taymor is an alumnus of the politicised cultural organisation the Bread and Puppet Theater, for example. According to Gillon, the ‘Shadow Boomers’, those born between 1958 and 1964, ‘confronted a world of oil embargos […] Watergate, sideburns and disco balls’. 34 Prominent creative fi gureheads such as Gregory Allen Howard (Remember the Titans , b. 1962), Lee Daniels (The Butler , b. 1959), Val Kilmer (The Doors , b. 1959), Michelle Pfeiffer (Love Field , b. 1958) and Forest Whitaker ( The Butler , b. 1961) may have been too young to directly involve themselves in events of the Sixties, but the era nevertheless informed their early years, and its legacy—as they would discuss in interviews—remained pressing during their youths. Howard Schuman and Jacqueline Scott demonstrate how events of the 1960s— the Vietnam War and the Kennedy assassination, for example—impacted heavily on baby boomers’ memories. 35 Furthermore, throughout the 1980s and 1990s baby boomers gained power in institutions such as the government and the media, providing them with a greater voice within the public sphere. 36 For Hollywood’s boomers, the Sixties was a chance to explore personal memories and to enter into a broader generational discourse on America’s recent past. These fi lmmakers have in common a desire to present the Sixties from a liberal perspective. At a time when public political debates were often xx INTRODUCTION dominated by right-wing analyses of the era, their fi lms were attempts to rescue the Sixties from conservative censure. This is not the same as saying that every fi lm can be interpreted as avowedly ‘liberal’ in its representation. As discussions of pictures such as Forrest Gump and Field of Dreams attest, there is much potential for a conservative reading in these texts. 37 Nor is there any point in declaring that all changes to scripts and fi lms were ideologically motivated. When during a story conference for Coming Home Jane Fonda suggested ‘cutting away from the atmosphere set pieces and concentrating much more on character development’, she was (as we will see in Chapter 1 ) arguing for the removal of some important historical content. 38 The pressures to create and condense stories and characters in a relatively short space of time will of course dictate to some degree the kinds of material that are added and/or omitted. There can be any number of reasons for a script change. Foner admitted altering certain aspects of her Running on Empty script at the behest of fi nancier Lorimar, which was worried about its controversial content (discussed in Chapter 2 ). 39 The drama Love Field (1992) initially contained an extensive opening segment introducing its black male lead, Paul Cater. This was when major star Denzel Washington was attached to the project. Washington quit just before shooting, which, it has been suggested, led to the cutting of this material. 40 On the one hand, this was done to strengthen the narrative of the central character Lurene (Michelle Pfeiffer). On the other, as discussed in Chapter 3 , content associated with civil rights and race relations was modifi ed and, to some extent, toned down. However, cuts and alterations do not mean that the fi lmmakers forsake all investment in politics. This book’s focus on the production stage provides evidence, rather, of how fi lmmakers who want to say something about the past, but who also want to maintain a prominent status within an industry where profi ts rule, balance and negotiate these confl icting imperatives. John Caldwell refers to the idea of the ‘industrial auteur’ and the ‘screenplay-as-business-plan’. 41 He takes to task the notion that there is any such thing as an ‘auteur’ in the traditional sense of the word (that is, as creative genius, or plucky maverick fi ghting the ‘establishment’). Instead, he explains how scripts are the product of careful negotiations between creative and executive personnel, where content is discussed in relation to production costs and potential revenues. Filmmakers in this account are artists, but artists aware of the controls exerted on their chosen profession. 42 INTRODUCTION xxi

It would seem to me that with as hot a political topic as the Sixties, part of any related screenplay’s ‘business plan’ is to generate discussion of—and subsequent publicity for—the fi lm’s politics and historical representation. As I argue throughout the book, fi lmmakers do not baulk at incorporating political content; in fact, they often directly add it to the fi lm during development. On the one hand, this is achieved by invest- ing central protagonists with a personal narrative that serves to symbolise broader ideological issues (as it has been argued is often the case with historical fi lms). 43 On the other hand, there is a striving for what Stephen Prince has termed ‘ideological conglomeration’. 44 Scholars such as Prince and Richard Maltby argue that many fi lms are produced to be ‘ideologically diverse’ so as to maximise commercial success. Crossing the political spectrum is a way of economically hedging one’s bets, and avoids alienat- ing certain audiences. 45 In terms of Sixties representations, this strategy is in evidence from the late 1970s to the present. In softening more liberal content and/or offering the potential for a conservative reading of their fi lms, producers of everything from The Rose and Forrest Gump to Remember the Titans and Bobby (2006) opened their texts to a wider audience. Some of the most insightful readings of Hollywood Sixties fi lms have already revealed a duality in terms of their political content. For instance, Burgoyne argues that Oliver Stone’s Vietnam War drama Born on the Fourth of July (1989) offers ‘a searching critique of the relation between nationally sanctioned aggression and the construction of male identity’ (broadly liberal) while ultimately reverting to familiar patriarchal archetypes of the man as saviour and father of the nation (a conservative representation). 46 Similarly, JFK (1991) can be read as criticising the government’s foray into Vietnam, and even offering a self-conscious critique of ‘objective’ historiography itself. However, as Burgoyne notes, Stone nevertheless remains fi xated on retrieving some kind of unity or coherence from this bricolage of visual and narrative styles. JFK posits that the Kennedy years were the last moments of national unity before America fell apart. 47 And, as we will see, this intersects with conservative perspectives on the Sixties. Such diversity is central to Sixties fi lms beyond Oliver Stone (perhaps the most studied of all fi lmmakers involved in producing representations of the era). Following a group of fi lms through their production and release, I demonstrate the ways in which those involved mobilised similar thematic and narrative strategies in order to engage with, and contribute to, debates on this most contested of epochs. xxii INTRODUCTION

The fi lms analysed in detail here have been selected for their representativeness of broader trends pertaining to Sixties remembrance at different points in time. Other Hollywood productions—those not subjected to thorough examinations of script development—are also discussed throughout the book as context. Chapter 1 ’s title, ‘Mourning the Age of Aquarius’, alludes to negative accounts of the Sixties counterculture—and in particular hippie communities and lifestyles—which gained prevalence through the 1970s and became a conspicuous motif in early Sixties remembrance. The Vietnam War-themed drama Coming Home and the hippie musicals Hair and The Rose were produced at a time when discussions of the Sixties frequently reverted to pessimistic tales of ‘downfall’ and despair. These three fi lms’ production histories straddled the transition from the Sixties itself to a post-1974 explosion of commemorative discourse. Rewritten through 1975–78, they all engaged with a rising tide of what Philip Jenkins calls ‘anti-Sixties’ rhetoric in the public sphere. 48 Coming Home , Hair and The Rose offered resonant portrayals of the counterculture at a time when recalling the ‘Age of Aquarius’ was freighted with ideological import. Chapter 2 brings us into the 1980s with The Big Chill and three other releases that, though set in a 1980s present, refl ect in detail on the Sixties: Running on Empty , Field of Dreams and Sneakers (released in 1992, but largely written through the 1980s). These were part of a wider trend of the 1980s in which contemporary-set fi lms endeavoured to deal with the era’s legacy. With debates on the Sixties gaining urgency—thanks in part to Ronald Reagan and his political allies portraying the era as America’s catastrophic fall from grace—all four productions were written and released within a tumultuous public sphere where negative assess- ments reigned. They are notable for the similar manner in which they symbolically ‘rehabilitate’ the Sixties radical. Examining changes to the scripts—new characters added, political and historical content altered—I discuss their similar attempts to ‘package’ the Sixties sympathetically, but at the same time in a manner that chimed politically and economically with discourses of the 1980s present. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on fi lms released at a time argued to have seen the heating up of the culture wars. 49 The former looks at the portrayal of women’s liberation within broader debates on the impact of second-wave feminism. Given that a strong claim could be made for it having been one of the most successful of all Sixties movements in effecting signifi cant changes to social and moral mores, it is surprising that references to INTRODUCTION xxiii an organised feminist movement rarely appear in Hollywood fi lm. Or perhaps, given the historical context, this is not surprising. Female-centred fi lms such as Dirty Dancing and Love Field went into production when, it has been argued, a large-scale backlash against feminism was raging in the US public sphere (though not released until 1992, Love Field was actually completed in 1990, and was in production by the late 1980s). In what would become a prominent feature of Sixties fi lms about women’s liberation, both transpose issues of import to late 1960s/70s feminism onto a seemingly less controversial early 1960s canvas. Interestingly, both also began life with substantial content that explored 1960s race relations. However, during script development, such material was reshaped and/ or cut in favour of stressing feminist themes. An intersectional approach to feminism is somewhat compromised thanks to the fi lms’ adherence to familiar themes and motifs associated with early 1960s remembrance. Chapter 4 revisits the Sixties counterculture in fi lms produced during the late 1980s and early 1990s culture wars. I focus in detail on two examples: the Jim Morrison biopic The Doors (1991) and the comedy- drama Forrest Gump . An examination of The Doors ’ script development argues that a series of explicit links were made between Jim Morrison and President John F. Kennedy (perhaps less surprising given that writer- director Oliver Stone was concurrently working on his JFK project) and situates the fi lm within Stone’s broader oeuvre, which I argue to be ambiguous towards the counterculture. While, as noted above, Forrest Gump is often charged with outright conservatism, my discussion of the script development and fi nished fi lm argues that it was shaped as a liberal take on the Sixties. I suggest reasons as to why Gump was nevertheless appropriated by conservatives as a demonisation of the counterculture. Chapter 5 takes us through the late 1990s when culture war confl icts— though still apparent in some form—were on the decline in terms of prominence and visibility. In many ways, fi lms such as The Big Lebowski , Bulworth (1998) and American Beauty (1999) suggest a jadedness regarding Sixties commemoration, even satirising familiar themes and motifs associated with the era. However, as the analysis of Remember the Titans ’ script development in the late 1990s reveals, there were still fi lmmakers intent on seriously engaging the Sixties political legacy. Remember the Titans prefi gured a noticeable trend in Hollywood representations of the 2000s. This fi lm, along with the other two analysed in detail here, Across the Universe and Bobby , are signifi cant for their attempts to bring a new inclusiveness to representations of the era. With their ensemble, multi-gender, multi-ethnic casts, xxiv INTRODUCTION all four fi lms strive to portray the Sixties positively as a time of freedom, idealism and love—a time when people, to paraphrase the Beatles, came together. Offering a new spin on Hollywood representations of the civil rights struggle, and revisiting familiar issues and events—the assassination of Robert Kennedy, gay and lesbian relationships, the counterculture—they fi nd optimism in a late Sixties long associated with controversy. This is not to say, however, that the fi lms are unbridled in their celebration of all things Sixties. Exploring their script development and production, I argue, offers some insight into the issues that did remain touchy and/or controversial. Chapter 6 examines recent examples of what Sharon Monteith calls ‘civil rights cinema’. 50 The Help and The Butler are, in different ways, striking in the extent to which they seem to self-consciously allude to and critique previous Hollywood representations of civil rights themes. Interspersing their narratives with documentary footage, staged reconstructions and references to popular culture, the fi lms weave a complex tapestry from the strained cords of twentieth-century US race relations. An emphasis on inter- textuality and multiple points of view pervades both. The chapter situates both fi lms within a broader context of contemporary (2000s) Hollywood portrayals of the civil rights movement. I examine their respective adapta- tions from source material—Kathryn Stockett’s 2009 novel The Help and a lengthy article that fi rst appeared in the Washington Post that served as source material for The Butler —and discuss the ways in which the fi lmmakers involved sought to imbue their texts with a critical edge. In some ways, they suggest future directions for the Hollywood Sixties fi lm; in others they again revert to familiar themes and motifs, unable to escape all stereo- types and caricatures with which the era has become associated.

Department of Art and Design Oliver Gruner University of Portsmouth Portsmouth, UK [email protected]

NOTES 1. David Farber, ‘Introduction’, in Farber (ed.), The Sixties: From Memory to History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), p. 1. 2. Quoted in Bernard Von Bothmer, Framing the Sixties: The Use and Abuse of a Decade from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), p. 2. INTRODUCTION xxv

3. Von Bothmer, Framing , p. 2. 4. Philip Jenkins, Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); 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); Von Bothmer, Framing . 5. Marcus, Happy Days , p. 204. 6. Barry Langford, Post-classical Hollywood: Film Industry, Style and Ideology since 1945 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), p. 227. 7. Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 259. 8. George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), p. 107. 9. Marcus, Happy Days , p. 4. 10. Sturken, Tangled Memories , p. 1. 11. See, for example, Farber (ed.), The Sixties ; Mark Hamilton Lytle, America’s Uncivil Wars: The Sixties Era from Elvis to the Fall of Richard Nixon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States , c. 1958 – c. 1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Tom Shactman, Decade of Shocks: Dallas to Watergate, 1963 – 1974 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983); Alice Echols, Shaky Ground: The Sixties and its Aftershocks (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). For an overview of 1960s historiography, see Andrew Hunt, ‘“When Did the Sixties Happen?”: Searching for New Directions’, Journal of Social History 33:1 (1999), 147–62. 12. Lytle, America’s Uncivil Wars ; Marwick, The Sixties ; Shactman, Decade of Shocks . 13. Cornel West, ‘The Paradox of the Afro-American Rebellion’, Social Text 9–10 (1984), 44. 14. Von Bothmer, Framing , pp. 45–59. 15. Stephen Paul Miller, The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 17. 16. James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Defi ne America (New York: Basic Books, 1991), pp. 49–50. 17. Sharon Monteith, American Culture in the 1960s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), p. 3. 18. Von Bothmer, Framing , pp. 45–59; Marwick, The Sixties , pp. 3–5. xxvi INTRODUCTION

19. Blake Slonecker, ‘We Are Marshall Bloom: Sexuality, Suicide and the Collective Memory of the Sixties’, The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture 3:2 (2011), 188. 20. See, for instance, Robert Burgoyne, Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History , revised edn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Natalie Zemon Davis, Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Leger Grindon, Shadows on the Past: Studies in the Historical Fiction Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); William Guynn, Writing History in Film (New York: Routledge, 2006); Robert A. Rosenstone, History on Film /Film on History , 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2012); James Russell, The Historical Epic and Contemporary Hollywood: From ‘Dances with Wolves ’ to ‘Gladiator ’ (New York: Continuum, 2007); J.E. Smyth, Reconstructing American Historical Cinema : From ‘Cimarron ’ to ‘Citizen Kane ’ (Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2006); Tom Brown and Belen Vidal (eds), The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture (London: Routledge, 2013); Robert Brent Toplin, Reel History: In Defense of Hollywood (Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2002). 21. Burgoyne, Film Nation , p. 11. 22. Rosenstone, History on Film , pp. 36–48. 23. Rosenstone, History on Film , p. 34. 24. Davis, Slaves , p. 15. 25. George Custen, Bio /Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992); Marnie Hughes- Warrington, History Goes to the Movies: Studying History on Film (London: Routledge, 2007); Smyth, Reconstructing ; Jonathan Stubbs, Historical Film: A Critical Introduction (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 28–35. 26. Smyth, Reconstructing , p. 15. 27. Stephen Maras, Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice (London: Wallfl ower, 2009), p. 22. 28. On Coming Home see, for example, Peter Krämer, ‘When “Hanoi Jane” Conquered Hollywood: Jane Fonda’s Films and Activism, 1977–1981’, in James Chapman, Mark Glancy and Sue Harper (eds), The New Film History: Sources, Methods, Approaches (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 104–15; Jerry Lembcke, The Spitting Image: Myth , Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York: New York University Press, 1998), pp. 144–82; Peter Lev, American Films of the 70s: Confl icting Visions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), pp. 157–60. On Forrest Gump see Burgoyne, Film Nation , pp. 104–19; Robert Burgoyne, ‘Memory, History and Digital Imagery in Contemporary Film’, in Paul Grainge (ed.), Memory and Popular Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 220–36; Paul Grainge, Monochrome Memories: Nostalgia and Style in Retro America (London: Praeger, 2002). INTRODUCTION xxvii

29. James Amos Burton’s PhD thesis offers a particularly insightful analysis of many late 1980s and early 1990s portrayals of the Sixties, especially in terms of their critical reception. See Burton, ‘Film, History and Cultural Memory: Cinematic Representations of Vietnam-Era America During the Culture Wars, 1987–1995’ (PhD thesis, University of Nottingham, 2007). Available at http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/10493/(accessed July 2015). 30. As well as the above-noted texts, see also Sharon Monteith, ‘The Movie- made Movement: Civil Rites of Passage’, in Grainge (ed.), Memory and Popular Film , pp. 120–43 for fi lms about the civil rights movement. See Sturken, Tangled Memories , pp. 96–121, and Michael Anderegg (ed.), Inventing Vietnam: The War in Film and Television (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991) for studies of the Vietnam War. For studies of Spike Lee’s eponymous biopic of civil rights leader Malcolm X , see Michael Eric Dyson, Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 129–44 and Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), pp. 197–204. Much has been written on Oliver Stone’s historical representations, including an entire volume devoted to this subject. See Robert Brent Toplin (ed.), Oliver Stone’s USA: Film, History and Controversy (Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2000). A fuller list of references is provided throughout the book. 31. Waldo Salt, ‘Going Home Outline Notes’, 13 June 1975, p. 1. Available in the Waldo Salt Papers at UCLA Library, Los Angeles. Box 14, Folder 4. 32. Cheryl Russell, The Master Trend: How the Baby Boom Generation is Remaking America (New York: Plenum Press, 1993), p. 8. 33. Steve Gillon, Boomer Nation: The Largest and Richest Generation Ever and How It Changed America (New York: Free Press, 2004), p. 14. 34. Gillon, Boomer Nation , p. 14. 35. Howard Schuman and Jacqueline Scott, ‘Generations and Collective Memories’, American Sociological Review 54:3 (1989), 359–81. 36. Gillon, Boomer Nation , p. 245. 37. For a discussion of Forrest Gump ’s appropriation by conservatives, see Burton, ‘Film, History’, pp. 223–36. For academic analyses of these fi lms’ conservatism see Thomas B. Byers, ‘History Re-membered: Forrest Gump , Postfeminist Masculinity, and the Burial of the Counterculture’, Modern Fiction Studies 42:2 (1996), 419–43; Grainge, Monochrome Memories , pp. 129–47; Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 142–56. 38. ‘Coming Home Story Conference’ transcript, 29 July 1976, Waldo Salt Papers, Tape 1, p. 2. Box 16. 39. Tom Stempel, ‘An Interview with Naomi Foner’, Creative Screenwriting 1:3 (1994), 8. xxviii INTRODUCTION

40. Kevin Lally, ‘Love Field Probes Race Relations in November ’63’, Film Journal , 1 December 1992, p. 14. 41. John Thornton Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Refl exivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 232. 42. Caldwell, Production Culture , pp. 232–9. 43. Davis, Slaves , p. 39; Grindon, Shadows , p. 190. 44. Stephen Prince, A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood Under the Electronic Rainbow, 1980 – 1989 , History of the American Cinema, Vol. 10 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 315. See also Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 379. 45. Stephen Prince, Visions of Empire: Political Imagery in Contemporary American Film (New York: Praeger, 1992), pp. 40–1; Maltby, Hollywood Cinema , p. 379. 46. Burgoyne, Film Nation , p. 69. 47. Burgoyne, Film Nation , pp. 88–103. 48. Jenkins, Decade , pp. 1–23. 49. Burton, ‘Film, History’. 50. Monteith, ‘Movie-made Movement’, p. 120.