Word: hollywoodized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...wasn't the strawberry malt or the tight skirt or the high-heeled shoes or her all-American good looks. It was the bright red sweater 16-year-old Julia Jean Mildred Frances Turner was wearing-and amply filling-that attracted the attention of Hollywood Editor William Wilkerson in Hollywood's Top Hat Malt Shop 35 years ago. "How would you like to be in pictures?" he asked Julia Jean. Within a year she had been transformed into Sweater Girl Lana Turner, and the lowly, utilitarian sweater had been established as a basic part of the American female...
Kramer's formulae worked out pretty well throughout the 50's and 60's, both financially and critically. Taking a subject like nuclear warfare, he'd film it in a tendentious style, cohering to simplistic argument (e.g., the scale of nuclear warfare is a bad thing) and conventional Hollywood form ("human interest", sex and jokes). He walked off with plaudits from the press, and a fistful of Oscars. But few of the films he's directed himself stand up as more than the worst kind of "message movie...
...first inclination in such gatherings is to learn whatever possible, and run; to write Kramer and the "conference" off with a zero. But Kramer has had such a great influence on mass audiences in his heyday, and his films for so long epitomized Hollywood's "serous" award-winners, that it seemed a cop-out to let him off the hook, to go back to Cambrige and spout some brief sobering statements about old-time-movie decrepitude. I engaged Mr. Kramer myself, and asked him whether his films had political intentions, and whether he conceived his films in political terms...
Thus went Stanley Kramer. That night, he represented not only the ludicrous aspects of Hollywood deep-think, but the frame of mind needed to outjob mainstream Hollywood product. All his films have the built-in sentimentality evidenced by his one-man, one-"feeling" statements, and this negates any biting commentary he ever wishes to make. Most men are basically good, says Kramer's films; their political and social ills are shallow compared to the potential of their 'untapped depths of human understanding'; if you get a Negro and a cracker on the same side of a chase, they'll learn...
...work of art that manages to capture a sense of the immediate and face it with an intellectual conception of general import requires artistic skill, discipline and sensibility of the highest order. This doesn't happen often, but when it does we are reminded of what Hollywood seems never to have learned: that politics is not a stranger to art, but at the very center of man's struggle with himself and his society...