Hollywood: Politics and Society

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the U.S. film industry had overtaken aeronautics and car industries to become one of the highest exporters of American products. Mark Wheeler's important new book provides both a political history of Hollywood and a reflection on the relationship between cinema and politics in America, from 1900 to the present day. Wheeler considers the interplay between the movies studios, state and national government, and cultural policy and legislation, with case studies of the censorship that followed in the wake of the Hays Code of 1930 and the investigations of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in the 1950s that led to the notorious blacklisting of alleged or known Communist sympathizers.His history of political constituencies within Hollywood ranges from the conservative right to the liberal and the communist left, from trades unionists to movie moguls. This book concludes with a look at the politics of show business, addressing links between Hollywood and political activism, films such as "The Candidate" and "Bulworth" that have themselves engaged with the political process, and considering the irony that despite the fact that Hollywood is perceived as a bastion of liberalism the two most famous actors-turned-politicians have been Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger.