Corporations Corrupt Democracy
CORPORATIONS CORRUPT ART

From veteran Hollywood screenwriter and director Frank Pierson's commencement address to the 2003 USC film school graduating class (via AlterNet):

Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia, was a legendary bully, who admired Mussolini and had his office designed to resemble Mussolini's – with a long approach into blinding lights, and himself behind a desk, raised a foot above the floor, ranks of Oscars his studio had won behind him.

He said he made only pictures that he wanted to see, and once the public stopped wanting to see what he liked, he'd quit. Not for him delegating decisions to demographers, pollsters and marketing experts. Nobody knew what a demographer was in those days.

In the '60s, when the old glove salesmen and carnival touts who built the studios began to grow old and retire to play golf or try to gamble away their fortunes, their grip on the business loosened. For a while independent producers flourished. New companies, new writers and directors burst the bonds of studio imposed style and discarded the habits of the stage.

In this fluid and diversified atmosphere there was freedom and creativity, and a minimum of bureaucratic control. The '60s and the '70s produced movies now looked upon as a Golden Age: The Godfather, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Dr. Strangelove, The Taxi Driver, Chinatown, Clockwork Orange, Annie Hall, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Midnight Cowboy, Mash, All the Presidents' Men, Network, Bonnie & Clyde, and a couple I like, Dog Day Afternoon and Cool Hand Luck. Even Easy Rider a wild card that symbolized the anarchistic spirit of that drug ridden time was a Columbia Studio release.

Then, on Wall Street, it began to be noticed that a single blockbuster movie could make in a weekend what a substantial business made in a year.

Warner Brothers was bought by Seven Arts, Seven Arts was bought by Kinney Services, which consisted of a chain of mortuaries and liveries, and the whole mess now is owned by America Online/Time/Warner along with HBO, Warner Books, Turner networks and CNN. Viacom owns Paramount, CBS, Showtime Cable and the Blockbuster chain of video stores. Of the 100-odd primetime shows that will premiere on the four networks this fall and winter, more than 30 – including CBS newsmagazines – will be made by one or another company owned by Viacom. Another 25 or so will be made by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, which owns Fox network. That is almost 50 percent of the new shows controlled by two companies, one owned by a man notorious for his micro management, narrow right-wing political philosophy, and his willingness to use his ideological power.

As I've said before, the same people who have seized our government, who are ravaging our environment, who are devastating our economy while further enriching the wealthy, who have compelled us to wage bloody, endless wars in order to protect their investments abroad, are also the very same people who are destroying our culture, our art, our national identity with their plastic, trashy mass media products. Film has always been a business in the United States, but it has only been in the neo-liberal era that the corporate imperative has decimated the vast majority of Hollywood's traditional excellence while, at the same time, warping American values with both materialist propaganda and endless diversion that downplays important political realities. Corporations, as a force, are the enemy of the American people.

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