Chapter Two - Hollywood & the Media: Beginnings
Chapter Two
The main premise of Wag The Dog (creating a war in the press) is not as unusual as one might think. Nor is its second premise, that Washington would hire Hollywood to do it. Publisher William Randolph Hearst created the Spanish-American War partly for public consumption.
"You supply the photographs, I'll supply the war," he told his reporters when he headlined the rumor of the Spanish sabotage of an American ship in the Havana harbor. That rumor launched a war that netted the U.S. the Philippines and made America a world power; it also helped elect Teddy Roosevelt president.
The line between news and propaganda has always been a thin one. During World War I, the U.S. government hired director D.W. Griffith to "document" the war. The only filmmaker allowed on the front lines, Griffith staged and filmed several battle sequences that he brought back as newsreels to help the war effort.
During the Bolshevik Revolution, Russian filmmakers including Eisenstein and Vertov worked with Editor Esther Schub to create attacks on imperialist culture by re-editing Western newsreels with footage shot of the Czars at leisure. The filmmakers inverted the meaning of the original footage to create their own political broadsides.
In World War II, Frank Capra headed a team of prominent Hollywood directors employed by the government to produce newsreels. Using Russian techniques, Capra reedited German and Japanese propaganda footage to create pro-Allies newsreels for his "Why We Fight" series.
But filmmaking about the war produced a new awareness of fact versus fiction. One of the most brilliant films to come out of the war was director John Huston's documentary The Battle Of San Pietro, which Huston Internationally begins with the title card "Shot at the Front Lines." Aware that audiences were becoming suspicious of staged footage, Huston took the stance that actual footage would have affected morale no less than manufactured propaganda.
It was Hitler and Goebbels who realized the important role propaganda would play in wartime. They understood early that by combining staged events with a charged narration; audiences could be swayed beyond reason through their emotions. By manufacturing documentaries of enormous Pro-Nazi rallies, by the now legendary German director Leni Reifenstahl, they turned German people into a mass of common visionaries who would, as Goebbels put it, "obey a law they did not even know but which they could recite in their dreams."
The main premise of Wag The Dog (creating a war in the press) is not as unusual as one might think. Nor is its second premise, that Washington would hire Hollywood to do it. Publisher William Randolph Hearst created the Spanish-American War partly for public consumption.
"You supply the photographs, I'll supply the war," he told his reporters when he headlined the rumor of the Spanish sabotage of an American ship in the Havana harbor. That rumor launched a war that netted the U.S. the Philippines and made America a world power; it also helped elect Teddy Roosevelt president.
The line between news and propaganda has always been a thin one. During World War I, the U.S. government hired director D.W. Griffith to "document" the war. The only filmmaker allowed on the front lines, Griffith staged and filmed several battle sequences that he brought back as newsreels to help the war effort.
During the Bolshevik Revolution, Russian filmmakers including Eisenstein and Vertov worked with Editor Esther Schub to create attacks on imperialist culture by re-editing Western newsreels with footage shot of the Czars at leisure. The filmmakers inverted the meaning of the original footage to create their own political broadsides.
In World War II, Frank Capra headed a team of prominent Hollywood directors employed by the government to produce newsreels. Using Russian techniques, Capra reedited German and Japanese propaganda footage to create pro-Allies newsreels for his "Why We Fight" series.
But filmmaking about the war produced a new awareness of fact versus fiction. One of the most brilliant films to come out of the war was director John Huston's documentary The Battle Of San Pietro, which Huston Internationally begins with the title card "Shot at the Front Lines." Aware that audiences were becoming suspicious of staged footage, Huston took the stance that actual footage would have affected morale no less than manufactured propaganda.
It was Hitler and Goebbels who realized the important role propaganda would play in wartime. They understood early that by combining staged events with a charged narration; audiences could be swayed beyond reason through their emotions. By manufacturing documentaries of enormous Pro-Nazi rallies, by the now legendary German director Leni Reifenstahl, they turned German people into a mass of common visionaries who would, as Goebbels put it, "obey a law they did not even know but which they could recite in their dreams."
posted by Xavier Casto | 03:30
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