How The Movie Industry Changed

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      Editor’s Note: On Nov. 14, 2005, Variety published the following interview with Mort Sahl. The revolutionary comedian, who died
  on Oct. 26, provided an unfiltered view on the entertainment industry,
  from Depression-era cinema and the Hollywood blacklist to how current 
 films tackle race, politics and culture.

  For half of the 
last century and on into the next one, Mort Sahl, 78,  has been the 
comedic conscience of America. Since 1968, when he debuted  at San 
Francisco’s legendary Hungry i nightclub, he’s been walking  onstage in 
his trademark V-neck sweater, a newspaper tucked under his  arm, serving
 notice to every pundit and politician from Eisenhower  through Bush 
that there was nowhere to hide.

   He was the original 
truth-teller, pioneering a new kind of stand-up —  barbed bipartisan 
political humor — paving the way for everyone from  Lenny Bruce to Woody
 Allen to Chris Rock.

  In 1958, he co-hosted the Oscars. In 1960, Time
 magazine put  him on the cover, calling him the most notable American 
political  satirist since Will Rogers and “the patriarch of a new school
 of  comedians.”
  Woody Allen, speaking in Robert Weide’s PBS American Masters documentary, Mort Sahl: The Loyal Opposition, said his own training as a stand-up comic “came largely from watching Mort Sahl.”

  In Allen’s view, Sahl “made the country listen to jokes that required 
 them to think. He was the best thing I ever saw. He was like Charlie  
Parker in jazz. There was a need for a revolution, everybody was ready  
for a revolution, but some guy had to come along who could perform the  
revolution and be great. Mort was the one.”
  What follows is Sahl’s 
stock-in-trade lacerating humor with a  twist—instead of simply 
critiquing our society and our political  leaders, Sahl has turned his 
attention to the entertainment business and  Hollywood, the place he’s 
lived and worked and tried to believe in for  most of his life.
  The Depression — optimism vs. reality

  The movies were all cotton candy. Shirley Temple and everything like  
that. Then, somehow, we went from the saccharine to the profane without 
 crossing home plate. That’s what’s wrong now; now it’s hopeless. During
  the Depression, there was still hope. There was still optimism. Sure, 
we  saw a lot of formulaic junk that wasn’t true. But we had a place to 
 hang our hopes.
  WWII— heroic dreams
  World War II was 
the last time I was in the majority, and I’ll tell  you what, I liked 
it, I really liked it. I volunteered for the service, I  wanted to be a 
hero. I wanted girls to admire me for it. We were gonna  make a great 
trade-off. We were gonna be brave because the brave win the  fair, and 
the fair, their reward is to be loved. And I believed all  that because I
 saw it in the movies. In other words, the movies dreamed  well back 
then. I’ll tell you how well they dreamed — I was in the ABC  movie Inside the Third Reich,
 the Albert Speer story, and I  remember when we were doing research for
 it we found out that Hitler was  watching Astaire and Rogers every 
night.

   Holocaust and the movies
  Well, Hollywood
 has never really stopped talking about the Holocaust.  But that’s the 
easy way out. It’s easier to be a good Jew that way than  it is to have 
what your grandfather told you was a real Jewish  conscience. A 
conscience would mean standing up to the threat now, not  40 years ago.
  Remember Mephisto?
 That picture shows you what happens to  guys who cooperate with the 
devil. It lets you know that it’s tempting,  but they get you in the 
end.
  There’s another movie called Birgit Haas Must Be Killed,
  made by Laurent Heynemann. In that picture, Philippe Noiret and Jean  
Rochefort not only show you what the Secret Service does to move world  
politics and public opinion, but they show what it costs — that a man  
who loves has a better life than a man who kills and doesn’t love.
  I
 don’t know what happened here. Everybody keeps saying, “Well,  
everything changed when the conglomerates bought the studios,” but  
really I don’t remember them (the studios) being all that wonderful  
before.

   McCarthy and the Blacklist
  We went from making really honest and heroic movies like The Best Years of Our Lives and then four years later we got the blacklist, which was the defining moment in Hollywood. Suddenly, Goldwyn is making I Want You and Dorothy McGuire is telling Farley Granger he can’t eat at the table ’cause he doesn’t want to go to Korea.

  And I believe that the guilt people felt about letting their friends  
be hung out to dry has haunted them ever since. They never got past it. 
 The results are a Hollywood that wants to appear noble — so we’ve got  
people who adopt a Lithuanian child and go to see the Dalai Lama and  
wear a ribbon for AIDS. It’s all to take their minds off what they’ve  
really become.
  Kennedy, Garrison, Stone and Arnold
  I 
was an investigator in (New Orleans DA and Kennedy assassination  
investigator Jim) Garrison’s office for 10 years and afterwards tried to
  get a script going. I must have talked to 80 people and they all kept 
 telling me about Lee Harvey Oswald or that it was too tough to touch.  
And then Oliver Stone was big enough to do it. But he didn’t mention  
anything I was witness to. I’m still waiting for that movie.
  I’ll 
tell you how insane America is. The other night, I was at Cafe  Roma and
 I saw (California Governor Arnold) Schwarzenegger in the cigar  room. I
 was standing with Jim Garrison, talking about who killed  Kennedy, and 
those are Schwarzenegger’s in-laws, and now he’s running  for a second 
term as a Republican. The whole thing is maddening.
  Madison Ave. to Vietnam

  Well, the networks were doing the job of calling people to  
conscience. But the movies were a different story. We had a whole period
  of espionage films like Charade and Masquerade. A  bunch
 of those, where the guy would say: “I’m a CIA agent. No, I’m not.  I’m 
your uncle. No, I’m not.” They take another rubber mask off, and say  
“I’m your father.” They called it intrigue. But it wasn’t the truth of  
what was happening.
  The right had decided to play hardball. They 
killed the kids at Kent  State, they killed Bobby (Kennedy), they killed
 Martin Luther King, they  killed Jack (Kennedy). And as far as I’m 
concerned, they executed him  publicly as a lesson to anyone who was 
virtuous. The government was  using Madison Avenue focus-group, 
demographic techniques to brainwash  people. You could say the mind is a
 terrible thing to wash. So this was  all going on in the country, and 
it wasn’t documented. If you go to see  an Italian picture, the guy says
 “This is a fascist country” and he  makes a movie about it.
  We 
make a movie about Vietnam and the director says, “There’s no  doubt we 
made a terrible mistake going there, but we’re not fascists. We  just 
make mistakes.” Hollywood stopped believing in themselves, and  they 
forgot how to tell the truth.

   Nukes, Strangelove and Cheney
  Hollywood certainly didn’t do too well when Sidney Lumet made Fail Safe,
  in which the president, to show the Russians that he’s sincere, orders
 a  bomb dropped on New York while his wife is out shopping. Sincere? It
  showed that he was totally out of his head.
  I don’t think we did too good with Dr. Strangelove either, because Strangelove
  minimizes the risk of fascists. It’s like, “these guys are pretty  
ridiculous, and they’ll fall apart of their own weight.” Well, Dick  
Cheney hasn’t. He shows no indications of doing so either, at least not 
 in the near future.
  Reagan and his progeny
  You know, 
Gore Vidal wanted to be a senator from here. Gregory Peck  did. Norman 
Lear did. Robert Vaughn did. Paul Newman wanted to run in  Connecticut. 
So how come the dumbest guy, Ronald Reagan, got elected  twice, and 
nobody in this town even thought he was a good actor?
  Race and the Trump card

  The movies have dissolved the Black man as a political force. The  
Black man has become a guy who just wants to get his necklaces and his  
tennis shoes and run a record company, so he can be as good as Donald  
Trump. You know what Preston Sturges would have done with Trump? He  
would have been Rudy Vallee, and he would have been a joke. But look  
where it is now. A guy who’s in Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Atlantic City  
is telling people what it is to be a failure. And there’s nobody on the 
 air to satirize it.

   Give ’em hell, Harry
  Look back at the first “Dirty Harry“;
 it was written by  Harry Julian Fink, who was a real fascist, but he 
believed, in his  heart, that it took that to clean up the streets. By 
the time they make  the fifth one, sure Dirty Harry says, “Make my day,”
 but Harry’s as bad a  hoodlum as the guy he’s chasing. They turned it 
around. By that time,  they were in the money business.
  At least, 
in the ’70s, they were trying. Is there anybody like Jerome  Hellman or 
Hal Ashby today? Are there any guys that want to raise hell?
  We don’t need another Hollywood hero
  Critic Manohla Dargis in the New York Times the other day was talking about the movie Stealth. She says: “The heroes in Stealth continue the love affair Hollywood, that hotbed of liberalism, has long had with militarism.”
  Well, my heroes aren’t the guys in the Stealth plane. My heroes are the guys who went to Canada so they won’t have to do that.

  For instance, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez was at the UN  
recently. Listen to him. He doesn’t sound like anybody in an American  
movie. I saw that movie about him, The Revolution Will Be Televised.
  It was made by some BBC students. Pretty good documentary, with great 
 stuff. And, uh, they showed it at the Nuart, naturally. (Sahl laughs  
boisterously.)
  What happened to Butch?
  Gregory Peck and
 William Holden look fit on the bridge of a  battleship. Bedford does 
not look believable on a bridge, and Eastwood  doesn’t even look like an
 officer. He’s a sergeant, maybe — a buck  sergeant. There’s something 
that happened here. The most masculine actor  we have, Sean Connery, is 
not an American.
  Peckinpah was great. Get him together with (Steve)
 McQueen, he could  do no wrong. Sam’s films were violent because he 
thought that we were  hypocrites and that we were presenting another 
face to people than what  we saw in the mirror. And that’s the reason 
that in The Wild Bunch,  Bill Holden gets up at the prostitute, 
sees the baby crying and it’s  literally, “cut to suicide.” He’s had 
enough of himself. And you see it.  Most Westerns, most movies, don’t 
present that kind of complex hero.
  Sam was wild. He’d strike terror
 in people’s hearts. I brought him to  Newman. I brought him to 
Eastwood. They were plenty scared. He was a  great man. And he was nuts.
 And he had his own way of looking at things.  He went to shoot a 
picture in Vegas once and a guy from Variety said to him, “Do you gamble?” And he said, “Yes, I get up every day.”

  He was a real American. A real one, and with McQueen, it was the best 
 combination you could find. They got it down to the bare-bones truth.
  Musical chairs and the fountain of youth

  I don’t know the studio chieftains now. You know, they’re gone before 
 you get to know them. It’s been an amazing development. They don’t  
become institutions anymore, they become prisoners of an agent’s  
hysteria, too.
  I think that started with CAA packaging everything. 
That probably  started 30 years ago, with those guys that came out of 
the Morris  office. And the Morris office didn’t want to do anything. If
 you were on  The Andy Griffith Show, they wanted to let you die there.

  Now it’s all about the youth, the whole idea of youth. Only youth  
will support the movies. Well, they won’t support anything very long.  
They’re good and they’re generous, but they’re fickle. You drop off the 
 side of the mountain, the youth don’t come look for you. They don’t 
miss  you.
  Women in showbiz
  You open up a magazine and 
it says, “The new women who arc the new  story editors at the studios.” 
And they show a bunch of skinny chicks in  black pantsuits whose fathers
 were agents. And they’re all sort of  equine looking at a distance. 
There was a time when comedy would have  been savage enough to take that
 on, you know, not only The Sun Also Rises,  but the daughter 
also rises. Instead of that, they’re telling you it  was an even 
competition. I mean, did it help women for Sigourney Weaver  to be a 
spaceship commander in Alien?
  Activism and Arnold redux

  Politics in Hollywood has become about going to the Hollywood Bowl  
wearing those ribbons so that Norman Lear or somebody like him will see 
 that and know they’re a good person who deserves a job. Take  
Schwarzenegger. Who’s going to run against him? Meathead? Rob Reiner is 
 going to run against him? Warren? Who’s going to run against him? Those
  guys are good for about one dinner at the Beverly Hilton, but that’s 
it.
  Nets, the King of Pop and Baretta
  All three 
networks have gotten rid of any kind of foreign news  coverage. You 
don’t even have real honchos like (CBS founder Bill) Paley  anymore. I 
don’t think their shows are about anything. Now they’re  gonna make E-Ring. You don’t really believe Dennis Hopper thinks the Pentagon is virtuous.

  I just don’t know why more people don’t take a chance. Something that 
 would touch your heart instead of all three networks having a guy that 
 comes on at 11:30 and ridicules Michael Jackson and Robert Blake for a 
 year and a half. That’s some kind of town.

   “About” actors

  There are some very talented actors in this town. There’s Kevin Kline 
 and William Hurt and Laura Linney and some others, but look, if Jack  
Nicholson had made pictures like About Schmidt at the beginning of his career, he never would have been Jack Nicholson.
  Wesley and Moore

  Latin America has Che Guevara and we have Michael Moore. When Moore  
finally found a presidential candidate he approved and endorsed General 
 Wesley Clark, a guy whose greatest political statement was to advocate 
 the bombing of the bridges on the Danube, Moore’s political position  
became clean he’s on the left-side of the fascist wing,
  Belting the “bible”
  On my TV show years ago, Jack Riley walked on the set and saw me reading Variety.
  He said, “I’m surprised to see you reading that publication!” I asked 
 him why and he said, “Because I thought you had more of a world  
perspective than that.” I said, “If there’s no world news in Variety this week, that just means the president didn’t buy an ad.”
  Morality and action movies

  All you have to do is look at the movies and you can feel the  
bankruptcy. Instead of trying to change the world for the better,  
Americans are saying life is a bowl of mud. We went from a time when we 
 couldn’t address anything of substance to where we go to a movie now 
and  treachery is a given. Everybody’s shooting everybody. It seems 
we’ve  convinced the American public that truth is darkness. Once you 
buy into  that, then the war’s over.
  Hope against hope

Where have we come? Where the hell are we? I don’t expect young  people 
should have any hope, based on what they’ve seen, but I’m cursed.  I saw
 something better.

 https://variety.com/2021/film/news/m...od-1235098938/