Screening the Sixties 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. 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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. Cover illustration: © Maksym Yemelyanov / Alamy Stock Photo Printed on acid-free paper 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 pres- ent 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 ix 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.