Word: hollywoodized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...death could it offer the fascination of the forbidden. If men could not have it and men could much less forget it, then it could still be had in dream and fantasy. In a grandeur of escapism might Gatsby's dream be borne back from the past. Yes, Hollywood could do as much...
Consider the Hollywood spectacular of the forties: where fireworks and fountains are settings for songs of love, whole armies in satin and silk top hats the choruses; where ending after ending applauding eternal love comes true; story after dreamy-eyed story where spectacle was half the thing and blissful love as life's reward the other half. As Gatsby dreamed of love and money, Hollywood made life out as all romance and pageantry. The picture of West Egg as a factory of pleasure could have been their fantasy factory's Model...
Gatsby might have given Hollywood its bonanza formula. And Hollywood would not for pennies or cigars fail to capitalize on it--love and money, love and money. All the masterminds of Hollywood, all its technical knowhow and commercial wizardry, its public relations genius and its statistician's calculations had divined the hungry nerve of the public and hooked it on the Gatsby formula. One could get giddy on the charm in the promise even as the very existence of Hollywood testified to its exhaustion...
...inevitably as the dream factories made Hollywood an economic empire, they made it a moral desert. The drug they advertized, then, the Hollywood magic formula, could be dangerous--as dangerous as any dream believed too much, even as dangerous as the course of Gatsby's dream. Then in Hollywood Gatsby's tragedy could be re-enacted...
...Hollywood was not unlike Gatsby's West Egg. It could grow as cocksure, as raunchy with all its wealth. It could make pictures with extravagance to rival Gatsby's parties. It could appear to outsiders as walled off and desirous a world, and to insiders it could offer a future as closed. Even further, just as Gatsby intrigued with gamblers and built a bootlegger's paradise, Hollywood's machinery worked more like a crap game than like clockwork. Few moguls were unlike, at least in the way they came by their fortunes, descendants of Gatsby...