Citizen Hollywood
How the Collaboration between LA and DC Revolutionized American Politics
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
To most Americans, Hollywood activism consists of self-obsessed movie stars promoting their pet causes, whether defending marijuana legalization or Second Amendment rights. There's some truth in that stereotype, and in this book you'll find the close personal friends of Fidel Castro, the wannabe cowboys, and the ever-ubiquitous Barbra Streisand. But Citizen Hollywood makes a far more serious case--that Hollywood's influence in Washington runs deeper and affects the country's government more than most of us imagine.
Celebrity activism exerts a subtle power over the American political process, and that pressure is nothing new. Through money, networking, and image making, the movie industry has shaped the way that politics works for nearly a century. It has helped to forge a culture that is obsessed with celebrity and spectacle.
In return, politicians have become part of the fabric of Hollywood society and cater to the wishes of their new-found friends and fund-raisers.
Using original archival research and exclusive interviews with stars, directors, producers, and politicians from both parties, Timothy Stanley's Citizen Hollywood shows that the only way to understand the image-obsessed, volatile politics of modern America is to understand the hidden history of Hollywood's influence on Washington.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this study of the nexus of Hollywood fame, political influence, and the huge amounts of cash that sustain both spheres, journalist Stanley (The Crusader) rarely passes up an opportunity to deploy blustering populist rhetoric. He asserts that Hollywood has dumbed-down politics and given the impression that "the presidency is far more powerful than it either is or constitutionally should be." But he makes his argument in scattered and confusing fashion, jumping from a description of an Obama administration fundraiser thrown after he announced his support for gay marriage (when "stars paid $40,000 each to shake his hand and call him brave") to the liberal 1960s, then WWII and the conservative 1950s, followed by the Nixon-Kennedy campaign and the harnessing of visual imagery in national politics. The cynical, cash-lubricated relationship between actors and politicians, and studios and political parties, is certainly troubling, but Stanley obscures his main objection until quite late, when it finally becomes clear that what most upsets him is Hollywood's "tendency to put style before substance." From a writer with a tenuous grasp on American politics and the movie business, this is a muddled polemic.
