Word: hollywood
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...define each decade by a catchphrase--the Roaring Twenties, the swingin' '60s, the Me decade '70s. Five years into the 21st century, we're in trouble. The current decade doesn't even have a nickname (the zeros? the aughts? the uh-ohs?), let alone a cultural personality. And Hollywood isn't helping. The film industry, especially in the four-month peak-viewing period called summer, rarely tries squarely addressing Zeitgeist anxieties. Instead it ransacks its attic for sequels, spin-offs and, this year, remakes. You don't look forward to many of the new season's blockbuster hopefuls. You look...
...boyhoods--Indy with the Young Indiana Jones TV series, Darth Vader with three Star Wars episodes. But the megamovie template for a coming-of-age fantasy saga is the 2002 Spider-Man, which earned $800 million worldwide and spawned its own robust franchise. If the strategy works, it feeds Hollywood's itch to be endlessly self-derivative. First comes the remake--or, in mogul-speak, the reimagining--then the sequels. If it doesn't work, the result is The Hulk or Catwoman, two pricey flops for which their studios should issue not sequels but apologies. Or the 1994 film...
...caught up in the Nation's financial success that parts of the book read like a Harvard Business School case study--which isn't surprising, since Navasky enrolled there part time after buying the magazine in 1994. Navasky, whose previous book, Naming Names, was an acclaimed history of the Hollywood blacklist, is far more effective and entertaining in chronicling the brawls "between liberals and radicals" during the cold war, when the magazine's writers would spar over the major issues of the day: race, sex and communism. In recent years, the Nation has drifted toward ideological orthodoxy, which has cheered...
...irony to which Van Peebles refers is the circumstance surrounding his expatriation to France. He initially endeavored to launch his cinematic career in the Hollywood system, but the only positions available for African-Americans were menial...
...went to Hollywood and asked to be a director, and they offered me a job as an elevator operator. I insisted that I wanted a job in production, and they eventually came back and offered me a job as a dancer,” recalls Van Peebles. “That wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, and so I ended up in France...