Cinema: Curious Native Customs

After a year’s safari into darkest Hollywood, Anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker has emerged with a published account of her findings, Hollywood, The Dream Factory (Little, Brown; $3.50). On the basis of previous research among backward Melanesian natives, Dr. Powdermaker concluded that the denizens of Hollywood are even more primitive, more superstitious, more beset by anxieties than Stone Age tribesmen.

She was surprised to discover that the movie people generally lived, not on palatial estates, but in tidy suburbs resembling Baltimore’s Roland Park and Cleveland’s Shaker Heights. They proved excellent interviewees because “the level of frustration was high, and frustrated people love to talk.” The anonymous case histories indicate that Hollywoodians are frustrated because 1) they make more money than other people in the U.S., and 2) are constantly worried about being fired.

Suicide & Sex. Most of Hollywood’s taboos center around the self-imposed Industry Production Code. Just as Melanesians have elaborate taboos against incest (punishable by death), so does Hollywood have an equally important taboo against “any reference to the biological nature of man or other animals.” Violators are not killed, but are refused the Code’s seal of approval, “a form of business suicide.” Moviemakers continually revolve in a vicious circle with the Code office minutely censoring “dialogue for suggestions of sex while the studios continue to accent the sexiness of their stars.”

Dr. Powdermaker also explodes the myth that “a young actress can get ahead by sleeping with the right men.” The trouble with this formula, she says, is that Hollywood sexual behavior “is so often limited to the instinctual biological act” that the man the young girl “thinks she is using for her own purposes is frequently through with her after the episode.”

Men, Women & Actors. Of all the frustrated groups in Hollywood—executives, producers, directors, writers—the class Anthropologist Powdermaker seems to feel most sympathy for is the actors. Their fellow workers regard them with “pitying condescension . . . contempt, hostility and hatred.” Says she: “No one respects them. The cliche that there are three kinds of people—men, women and actors—is heard over and over again.”

Among other Hollywood phenomena, Dr. Powdermaker found strong elements of totalitarianism: “the concept of people as property and as objects to be manipulated, highly concentrated and personalized power for power’s sake; an amorality, and an atmosphere of breaks, continuous anxiety and crises . . .” The end result is “business inefficiency, deep frustration . . . and a high number of unentertaining second-and third-rate movies.”