I emailed Dracula’s people because I was heading to Romania, for a global democracy forum that I help lead.

While I’m in Bucharest, I asked, could I take the train up to Transylvania and spend a day chopping it up with the Count? After all, he’s been around for 600 years and has seen many, many dark times for governance and democracy.

In reply, I got a cryptic text telling me to arrive by midnight at an address in Beachwood Canyon, high in the Hollywood Hills above L.A. The place was invisible from the street, and so dark I had to turn on my iPhone flashlight to find the door.

But then, at my knock, the world’s most famous vampire opened the door. He ushered me to a chair in a room lit only by fireplace.

Dracula: Welcome to my castle in the air. Now, can my servant Renfield get you something to drink? Want to join me for a pint of O-negative?

Me: Thanks, but I’m fine, Count.

Dracula: Please, call me Vlad. And suit yourself (pouring blood into a glass). I need a drink from a stiff before discussing democracy these days.

Me: I hoped we’d be meeting in Eastern Europe and talking about June’s European elections and rising authoritarianism there. What are you doing in L.A.?

Dracula: Romania will always be home, but many decades ago, I realized that Hollywood would never stop calling. I used to stay with my friend Bela Lugosi, right down the street, but he got tired of the LAPD knocking on the door asking for me every time some teenage girl got a hickey. So, I had this place built. It’s small for a castle, but I never went and had a family like Gomez Addams.

It’s more than paid for itself. To date, more than 80 films have been made about me. Yes, those Netflix execs—who suck more blood in a half-hour pitch meeting than I have in my whole existence—don’t pay well. But it’s amazing how much work my fellow vampires at CAA can get me for uncredited script doctoring and story consulting.

I advised the cast during the New Orleans shoot of Renfield, a 2023 comedy with Nicholas Cage playing me. Nick and I hit it off. I’m not saying he’s a vampire—I respect his privacy—but I will say he didn’t have to do much to get into character.

Me: Do you see the story of Dracula having an impact on how the world runs?

D: Sometimes I worry I have too much impact. Porphyria—which they call the vampire disease, because you have trouble with sunlight and sometimes must retreat into darkness—used to be considered rare. Now, with everyone up half the night on their screens, people are becoming more like me.

Despair has its own calms, I suppose. And I enjoy a long night. But the fact that we’re so atomized makes democracy and self-government quite difficult.

Me: Vlad, you’ve been around longer than anyone living. In human form, you lived as the ruthless ruler of Wallachia in the 1400s, famous for your cruelty toward your enemies. Then, vampires became an obsession in the 1700s, and you emerged publicly in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula, and have been famous ever since. In all that time, what has changed the most in how humans govern themselves?

D: What’s changing the most is the very nature of what it means to be human. And that’s changed self-government and everything else.

We not only live longer, but we never go away. I died in 1476, yet I’m still around, sort of human. AI means that humans can stay alive digitally long after our human bodies are dust. We are all vampires now.

Which means that humans need to take a much longer view and build more flexible institutions. Because humans and vampires alike are changing so fast. Look at me. I started as this figure of fear—of violence, of disease. I was the bad, undead guy. But now in popular culture, I’m the cool Gothic mainstay, an outsider. Just look at how I’m portrayed by younger, better-looking actors.

The secret of my success is flexibility: I don’t fit into categories or labels. I’m good and I’m bad, real and unreal, dead and alive. And this makes me emblematic of what the British literary historian Nick Groom, in The Vampire: A New History, calls our “vampirocene era… in which the human race has the transformed the world, but in doing so has also lost its primacy.”

Me: Vampirocene? So, you’re saying the world is getting better?

D: It’s definitely more open, inclusive and democratic. I know that sounds strange—Dracula, optimist. But that’s only because so many people are still thinking too short-term.

Look at Romania. Just two generations ago, we were ruled by a far crueler villain than I ever was, Nicolae Ceaușescu, a communist dictator who built a society nearly as totalitarian as North Korea. But we learn from failure, not from success. Now Romania is in the European Union and the eurozone, and we have a real democracy, despite the pressures coming from that other Vlad, who impaled far more people than I ever did, running Russia.

Me: Aren’t you worried about potential right-wing gains in June’s European elections?

D: Sure. The world seems full of good men—but there are monsters in it.

There are always people trying to scapegoat democracy for our problems. There are always tyrants trying to kill off democracy.

Just like there are always people who hate vampires. Some hate us so much that, like that Buffy chick, they seek to slay us.

But no matter how hard they try to kill us, we vampires keep coming back, because people want us. Take Interview with the Vampire—it was a book, then a movie, and now it’s a TV show, all huge hits!  The same thing is true of democracy. Look at Turkey—its national government goes theocratic and authoritarian, and yet its cities respond by becoming more democratic.

Democracy and vampires have a lot in common.

Me: Do you really think that vampires can inspire a more democratic world?

D:  If an undead guy with a story as ugly and bloody as mine can still bring magic into the universe, then I’m quite sure that the living can collectively recognize that knowledge is stronger than memory, and conquer Earth’s scariest problems together.

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The new film Civil War is a historic cinematic achievement. British director Alex Garland has made a movie that might be worse than a real American civil war.

Perhaps that was Garland’s intention. His film is a series of horrifying set pieces—Abu Ghraib-style torture by gas station attendants, government aerial bombings of civilians, summary execution of journalists, a massive California and Texas invasion of Washington, D.C.—that seem to add up to a warning. If we don’t steer away from our current path of polarization and political conflict, Garland suggests, this could be the end of the United States.

There’s established logic in this message. Early in the film, I kept thinking of the late, great Romanian philosopher E.M. Cioran, who wrote in his anti-existentialist 1973 masterpiece The Trouble With Being Born: “When we perceive the end in the beginning, we move faster than time. Illumination, that lightning disappointment, affords certitude which transforms disillusion into deliverance.”

But Civil War never provides the illumination or certitude that inspires action. It’s too Hollywood, which is to say that it’s too unoriginal and too violent, with too many guns.

Indeed, the film is so over-the-top that it feels uncomfortably, well, Putinist. These days, the Russian and Chinese governments, and their media organs, routinely promote the idea that the U.S. is headed for, in the words of former Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev, a “bloody civil war which [will] cost thousands upon thousands of lives.” Civil War brings that propagandist vision to cinematic life.

If the U.S. does see another civil war, it will almost certainly not involve the new film’s vision of warring armies advancing to a final shootout at the White House. Nor is it likely to involve fights between groups of states, like the California–Texas alliance the film depicts. Those visions—like much of this film, where the internet rarely enters the story and the main characters are traditional still photographers—are anachronisms, owing more to the 1860s Civil War than to 21st-century realities.

Indeed, the real challenge of the next American civil war will be perceiving whether it is a war at all. Such a conflict won’t separate soldiers from civilians. It will be fought with cyberattacks, misinformation and disinformation, and psychological warfare. The battlegrounds will be political and legal, with warring factions seeking to cancel each other’s rights and prerogatives. It will also be diplomatic, because an American civil war would be, by definition, a world war. Our enemies will fund and fuel our conflict, while our allies will send emissaries to intervene and negotiate peace.

The fighting will not be between states, because the conflicts in our society are not primarily geographic. Our most bitter fault lines are around ideology, race, gender, age, class, education, and immigrant status. A civil war will map those divides within our metro regions, within our cities, even within our neighborhoods.

For these reasons, it’s time to retire the idea of California “secession,” even for those of us who are sympathetic to making California independent by peaceful means. Let’s face facts: The Golden State is never going to break away and fire on Camp Pendleton, like South Carolina fired on Fort Sumter in 1861. And we certainly aren’t going to send troops to march on Washington. We have no military, and no offensive warfare beyond Gov. Newsom’s Fox News appearances.

No—if California ever becomes an independent nation, the more likely path will be through a U.S. government meltdown.

Unfortunately, that scenario now seems possible. It is easy to imagine a fascist president, with a compliant Supreme Court and a cowed Congress, using his military to punish cities and communities whose actions he doesn’t like. It’s also possible to imagine such a president invoking executive powers to shut down Congress (as Donald Trump attempted on January 6) or government agencies that won’t bend to his command.

In such a circumstance, California, without representation in Congress, will have little choice but to take on national duties. Behaving more like countries, California and other unrepresented states might drift naturally to formal breakup, the current republic ending not with war but with written agreements between states and a disintegrated federal government.

To make a believable movie about such a real American civil war would require a filmmaker with the virtuosity of the late Akira Kurosawa, whose 1950 film Rashomon famously tells one story from multiple, contradictory perspectives. Perhaps the San Fernando Valley auteur Paul Thomas Anderson could pull off such a film (he used a similar technique in Magnolia). Maybe Drew Goddard, writer-director of the Lake Tahoe noir Bad Times at the El Royale, could manage it.

Garland’s film never comes close. We never get to know the civil war’s combatants, some of whom seem like cartoon villains. Instead, the director tells his story through the narrow perspectives of four journalists driving from New York to Washington. All but the main character, played by Kirsten Dunst, come off as callous, selfish, or vaguely ridiculous.

As the president is about to be executed, one journalist asks the soldiers to wait a second because “I need a quote.”

The film feels unimaginative because the idea of another American civil war is actually an old one. For example, Marvel made a much smarter film in 2016 about what drives us to war when feuding superheroes devoted to Captain America and Iron Man turned on each other in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War.

But watching this Civil War, I found myself thinking of the 1997 satire The Second American Civil War. That cable TV movie, with scenes filmed at Los Angeles City Hall and the State Capitol in Sacramento, envisioned a future that looks too much like our present, with Idaho sparking a civil war in a country badly divided by race, immigration, politics, and media nonsense.

Like Garland’s film, it hid from the harder questions by putting journalists at center stage. But for all its goofiness, that 27-year-old film was the wiser, more relevant, and more responsible movie.

“The country is falling apart,” says a TV producer in the satire. “We don’t need exclamation marks.”

The post A Movie That Might Be Worse Than Civil War appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Rideshare driving can be the right job for the right person, but you should also know the drawbacks.

On and off for nearly 10 years I have been a rideshare driver for both Uber and Lyft here in Hollywood. I’ve worked early mornings, late nights, and around concert venues. I’ve even driven passengers around Coachella a couple of times.

I have seen many changes from both companies in that time, along with new laws that have drastically changed what picking up passengers in one’s personal vehicle is all about.

For example, it wasn’t long ago that drivers had no idea where the trip was going until the passenger was in the car and we started the ride on our app. Not only that, but canceling rides and declining rides frequently could get you tossed off the platform.

Today, the driver has more control. You can see where the trip is headed before you even accept a ride, and you can decline as many as you want with no blowback.

This is not because the companies took drivers’ needs into consideration. It’s because, in their quest to prove to regulators that drivers are not their employees, they were forced to stop acting like employers. If we’re independent contractors, that means they can’t punish us for when or where we work.

Never think for a minute that the giants care all that much about drivers, our safety, or our financial well-being. As drivers’ earnings continue to decline while earnings for the companies go up—as noted in a recent Forbes article—neither of the rideshare giants have shown much concern for drivers. Keep in mind that both companies have aggressively and publicly been working on ways to use robot cars to replace humans.

Most drivers last 90 days or fewer. It has been like that for years, and neither company seems interested in improving that churn because every day new drivers sign up. But that shouldn’t deter you.

One of the top reasons drivers love the gig is because you have the freedom to work when you want, and the ability to drive where you want to go.

Let’s say you’re a driver and you want to go up to Santa Barbara this weekend. Conceivably you could only accept trips heading north and get paid for the journey. Obviously, it will take longer to get to Santa Barbara than if you were driving just yourself. But the rides will more than cover the gas you’ll use, and you might even have some good conversations. Usually, passengers are wonderful.

Of the numerous tips I have for driver colleagues, the first is to be prepared. Have water and snacks for yourself. Have a phone charger that works on multiple devices—not just iPhones—for passengers. Have $20 in ones and fives in case someone wants to tip you in cash because you’re incredible and won them over.

Store a towel, barf bags, and a warm jacket in your clean trunk. Keep your gas tank at least half full, because you never know when someone might want to go far, quickly, in an offer you can’t refuse.

In over 8,000 trips I’ve driven, I’ve only had to stop for gas once. It wasn’t just embarrassing because it made me look unprofessional in front of the passenger. I learned that if you stop the car for more than a few minutes, Uber will call and text both you and your passenger to make sure neither of you are being assaulted. That’s well-intentioned, but annoying for everyone.

Avoid picking up people at bars or big parties. One of the worst things that can happen is that a drunk passenger gets sick. There are plenty of folks who need rides in your city and more than enough drivers. Choose wisely. If they come stumbling down the driveway needing assistance to stand upright, do not feel guilty jetting off before they get too close to the car.

Have a dash cam. Sometimes driving is wonderful and funny, but sometimes it’s scary and unsafe. Yes, these companies know where you and your passenger are, but in the heat of the moment you are nevertheless alone. Even if the dash cam only has a minute of video and audio, it will help if you need evidence that you did nothing wrong.

Meanwhile, you don’t really know the identity of that person in the back seat. Neither Uber nor Lyft require passengers to use their real names as their display names on the app, and “J” or “Baby” or “Junior” won’t be much help if you need to talk to the authorities after an altercation and they ask you the passenger’s name.

Watch informative YouTube channels like “The Rideshare Guy” and be sure to check out “Show Me The Money Club” videos where two experts discuss strategies and changes each week.

Take notes at the end of each day, and take a photo of your odometer/trip meter so at the end of the month you can write down how many miles you drove in a little journal for your taxes. You can write off a lot of things while driving (like your cellphone, music streaming subscriptions you play for the passengers, and water you might provide) but you definitely want proof, especially for mileage.

Another important tip is, ironically, to forget about tips. Passengers do not tip often, well, reliably, or in a predictable manner. Over the years, Uber has gone from encouraging passengers not to tip and pretending the tip was included to reluctantly adding a tip button to the screen.

It is so clear that if they are not getting a cut of something, they have zero desire to encourage it even if it means rewarding their best drivers. Uber and Lyft arrange billions of trips a year, but they have yet to show they care about the quality of those trips.

But you can still care. Have a clean car: Go to a car wash frequently and take a vacuum to the carpets, seats, and trunk. Have hand sanitizer for both you and your passengers.

Another thing to do is confirm with the passenger where the trip is going. You can do it casually as part of the conversation, but you need this info because it also confirms that the correct person is in your car. Yours might not be the only white Prius outside the Hollywood Bowl, and you don’t want the wrong person to put in their ear pods and fall asleep, only to leave you both very sad when you discover a half-hour later that you are far from where they wanted to be.

Final tip: I don’t talk about politics, sex, religion, tips, or drugs. Most trips are less than 30 minutes long. If they want to talk, let them do most of it. Talking about oneself is most people’s favorite thing to do. You’ll be shocked and delighted by what these strangers will tell you if you let them.

No matter where you are driving, you have a great opportunity to get paid to see parts of your city that you’ve never seen and to hear stories from the mouths of beautiful human beings who, collectively, have traveled the globe and have ended up with you. Let them sing their songs.

Which has been known to happen—literally—on some of the best rides I’ve had.

The post Tips and Tricks From an Uber Driver appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Ninety years ago, Columbia Pictures released a film that transformed the trajectory of American screen comedy.

Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night tells the story of spoiled Park Avenue heiress Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert), who meets newspaper reporter Peter Warne (Clark Gable) on a Greyhound bus in Miami. Ellie has just run away from her overbearing father, who disapproves of her recent elopement. Peter recognizes Ellie from the headlines and makes her an offer: He’ll help her return to New York to reunite with her husband if she gives him an exclusive scoop he can sell to his editor. Ellie accepts, and along the way home, they fall madly in love.

The movie, a tale of romantic yearning within a battle of the sexes dynamic, became one of the first screwball comedies, a genre born out of evolving socioeconomic and industrial strife that shaped Hollywood filmmaking in the 1930s and early 1940s. Screwball comedy depicted a world full of fast-talking dames, madcap antics, and romance, all set against the backdrop of economic upheaval. During its heyday, it drew in audiences who loved the genre’s unique blend of escapist romance and pointed social commentary. Today, it functions as a kind of time capsule, holding up a mirror to its era’s socioeconomic woes, capturing the bubbling cynicism that pervaded the American psyche in the mid-1930s. It also, paradoxically, continues to demonstrate a timeless appeal, having influenced generations of romantic comedies from 1972’s What’s Up, Doc? to 1999’s Notting Hill all the way up to recent releases like Anyone But You and Rye Lane. That’s because though the characters and settings may have evolved, the relationships featured in these screwy stories still have much to teach us about the universality of the human experience.

Screwball comedy emerged as the United States grappled with the Great Depression. In 1934, when It Happened One Night premiered, unemployment was still hovering at over 20%, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program could not help the populace fast enough. Hollywood wasn’t spared. America’s film industry had enjoyed some 20 years of unencumbered prosperity, capped by a late-1920s attendance boom fueled by the novelty of sound film technology. But during the Depression, dwindling audiences and falling ticket prices forced some major studios into receivership and others to sell valuable assets, like their theaters, to stay afloat. With the industry reporting a collective loss of nearly $250 million between 1930 and 1933, it’s no surprise that uneasiness took hold in the cultural zeitgeist.

The Depression rears its ugly head throughout the screwball genre, thematically puncturing some of its most jubilant moments. In a scene from It Happened One Night, Peter, Ellie, and the other bus passengers break out into a chorus of “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze.” Capra captures class solidarity with immense warmth and grace, but that joyful camaraderie falls back down to Earth with the fearful scream of a young boy whose mother has fainted from hunger. In Mitchell Leisen’s Easy Living (1937), protagonist Mary Smith grudgingly breaks her piggy bank to scrimp together enough money to cover her $7 per week rent. And in Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey (1936)—perhaps the most socially engaged film of the classical screwball era—forgotten men become collectible objects in a scavenger hunt for Manhattan’s upper class.

In spite of the genre’s political grounding, screwball comedy didn’t aim to offer practical solutions to socioeconomic precarity. Philosopher Stanley Cavell once mused that screwball comedies were “fairytales for the Depression”—where else but screwball could a $58,000 sable fur coat fall on a working-class woman’s head and turn her life upside down? In the screwball fairyland, the Depression’s omnipresence is counterbalanced with kookiness and absurdity.

Screwball’s proclivity for the fantastic is also reflected in the genre’s approach to romance, which it navigated amid the constraints of the 1934 Motion Picture Production Code, informally known as the Hays Code. To stave off the looming threat of federal censorship laws, in July 1934, Hollywood studios uniformly implemented this series of guidelines. The Hays Code regulated everything from how scripts could approach topics such as crime, adultery, and sex. And it dictated that all movies must communicate redeeming social mores.

Cavell later dubbed screwball comedy the “re-marriage” genre because it included so many storylines about couples that reconcile after a period of separation. This recurring narrative arc was a direct response to the Code’s moral mandate; the head of its enforcement body, Joseph Breen, a staunch Catholic, believed that marriage was the foundation of a healthy society, and that American films should uphold traditional family values.

One of the genre’s most popular movies—Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth (1937)—begins with duplicitous shenanigans that lead Jerry (Cary Grant) and Lucy Warriner (Irene Dunne) to divorce. The couple realize their undeniable compatibility only after they date other people, and, as in a fairytale, reunite—just before the stroke of midnight, on the eve before their divorce is finalized. In the screwball world, divorce inspires metamorphosis and growth: Characters learn about themselves and their capacity for love. “For better or for worse” is the ultimate awful truth, and Jerry and Lucy’s separation reminds them why they fell in love with each other in the first place.

The classical screwball era lasted until the onset of World War II, when the spread of fascism and the horrors of war made the genre’s domestic politics quaint. Despite its brief window of production, the genre made an outsized impact on the film industry. Nearly a century has passed now since the birth of the genre, and it continues to prove timeless in what it can say about life and love, especially amid hard times. Screwball comedy celebrates silliness, even as it magnifies the razor-sharp line between luck and misfortune. It indulges our childlike impulses and celebrates the joy and whimsy of fun, particularly in moments of grief and uncertainty. In defiance of reality, it imagines up worlds of charming romantic entanglements, pratfalls, and play, where leopards roam free, bears ride motorcycles, and an anti-aging elixir opens up the wealth spring of youth. Most importantly, it speaks to camaraderie and the resilience of the human spirit.

Near the end of My Man Godfrey, the titular Godfrey Parke—a former upper-class playboy who’s disguised himself for much of the film as a forgotten man—returns to the garbage dump he had called home with a friend from his socialite days. After Godfrey introduces him to the people living there, he says triumphantly, “the only difference between a derelict and a man is a job.” Godfrey’s observation is fundamentally that we are stronger when we come together. And regardless of our circumstances, we all strive for love, compassion, and community.

This sentiment is why the screwball comedy and their rom-com successors are often considered comforting “feel-good” movies. Whether they’re screened at a Depression-era movie theater or viewed at home alone with a pint of ice cream, we love to watch them because, at their best, they tap into the universal ideas that bind us.

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It was October 5, 1945. The Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), a union representing craft laborers in Los Angeles, including painters, carpenters, set designers, cartoonists, and others, was seven months into a major strike that was causing Hollywood studio moguls to panic. Although major studios, including Columbia, RKO, and Universal, had over 100 unreleased films in the can, ready to be released, the CSU’s strike actions, as well as movie theater boycotts, were an effective blow against the post-war studio system.

Now, the strikers gathered at the Warner Bros. employee entrance to protest.

The violent standoff that followed, in which strikebreakers, armed with chains, hammers, pipes, and other weapons, descended upon the workers, with county police forces closely behind, would become known in Hollywood as “Black Friday.”

With moguls, Los Angeles Police, private police forces, and organized crime on one side and striking trade unionists on the other, the episode fanned the flames of anti-communism in Hollywood, and led directly to the union’s downfall the following year. In the years to come, the strike would be used as a cudgel against progressive trade unionism inside and outside of the film industry, leading to the blunting of it in Hollywood—and in the United States, more generally.

The strike of 1945 started after the CSU became embroiled in a dispute with a rival union, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE). The conflict centered on 77 set decorators who had broken away from IATSE, and established their own group, the Society of Motion Picture Interior Decorators, in 1937. The CSU initially represented these breakaway set decorators during their independent contract negotiations with some studios. Eventually, IATSE began to dispute CSU’s jurisdiction, and after studio producers sided with IATSE—contradicting an arbiter appointed by the War Labor Board—the CSU went on strike.

Competing interests in Hollywood, from studio moguls like Cecil B. DeMille, to mobsters like John Roselli, saw the unions’ dispute as a threat. It wasn’t just about disrupting the flow of capital in and out of the film industry. They also understood that cinema served—and still serves—a vital role in shaping and massaging mass consciousness. Which is why, for moguls and organized crime organizations alike, combating the perceived infiltration of Moscow-backed Reds in Hollywood was as important as any financial concern.

Studio moguls widely alleged the strike of 1945 to be Communist-led—though the Communist Party was initially opposed to the strike. CSU president Herbert Sorrell personally faced accusations by Walt Disney, IATSE leadership, and others of being a Communist dupe. (Though when he was dragged before the California Legislature’s Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities a year later, there was scant evidence linking him to the Communist Party—his militant trade unionism was homegrown.)

Regardless of the facts, the anti-communist hysteria of studio moguls and state and federal investigators ultimately spelled the downfall of the CSU. The congressional investigations into the alleged infiltration of communism in Hollywood and trade unions like those in which Sorrell was interrogated, resulted in the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which sought to purge not only communists, but also class-conscious workers, from union leadership roles. The law severely limited the power of unions: It required union leadership to sign non-communist affidavits and outlawed jurisdictional strikes like the one enacted by the CSU.

Following on the heels of Taft-Hartley came the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, which culminated in the well-known Hollywood blacklist and the eventual jailing of the “Hollywood Ten,” film industry members who refused to testify. The notorious Smith Act trials between 1949 and 1958 saw the jailing and deportation of Communist leadership, including Benjamin Davis Jr. and Claudia Jones, across the United States. The rise of Sen. Joseph McCarthy saw the persecution of the gay and lesbian community under the Lavender Scare as well as the continued attack on Black radicalism. From the ashes of the destruction of the CSU also came the ascendency of former B-movie actor Ronald Wilson Reagan. Reagan, who had formerly served as the president of the Screen Actors Guild, would go on to administer a mighty blow against unions. In 1981, as U.S. president, he fired over 11,000 striking air traffic controllers, locking them out of federal employment for life, employing strikebreaking tactics he may have rehearsed during his anti-communist tenure in Hollywood. The knock-on effects from the Red Scare in Hollywood would resonate for decades to come, setting back progressive trade unionism in the United States for generations of workers.

Today, we are witnessing a similar parallel: In tandem with the labor actions in Hollywood and elsewhere across the country, there is a new Red Scare heralding a burgeoning neo-fascism in the United States. Ron DeSantis’s “Stop Woke” campaign, the banning of critical race theory in Florida, Arkansas, and elsewhere, the persecution of the African People’s Socialist Party, Rick Scott’s “travel ban” for socialists traveling to Florida, bipartisan hysteria over the economic rise of China and the BRICS nations, as well as antisemitic tropes like the threat of “cultural Marxism” all point in this direction.

In Hollywood, specifically, we can look to right-wing hysteria over so-called “woke” films such as Barbie and other “culture war” trends perpetrated by pundits who flirt with, if not outright endorse, anti-Blackness, anti-trans ideology, and antisemitism—often in the same breath. The perceived threat of “wokeism” and “identity politics” bear a striking resemblance to the Red Scare tactics of the 1940s and 1950s, insofar as they function as coded attempts to discredit individuals and collectives alike by coding progressive politics as adjacent with Marxism or communism—only today, instead of Moscow, Beijing has become the primary boogeyman.

But this time, the tables may be turning. When Screen Actors Guild president Fran Drescher gave a rip-roaring speech dripping with the authority of class struggle this summer, nobody accused her of being a communist for speaking out against labor conditions. Likewise, Bryan Cranston, who portrayed Trumbo in a biopic of the same name, wasn’t labeled a “Communist dupe” when he delivered a fiery, pro-union speech in July.

And in a year of unprecedented labor actions throughout the nation, the Writers Guild of America’s (WGA) months-long strike, which secured better contracts for writers in a radical victory for labor last month, and the tentative agreement the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) just reached after 118 days on the picket lines, have highlighted the efforts of the working-class members of the film industry.

The efforts go far beyond the entertainment studios, too. In August, thousands of Los Angeles city workers engaged in a one-day strike to put pressure on Mayor Karen Bass. In recent months there have also been a hotel workers strike and job actions by Los Angeles Unified School District teachers. That’s why to talk about those struggling against the citadel of capital, disproportionately cited in Southern California, it’s important to understand that what is happening in Hollywood is part of a broader labor movement.

That’s why, though some onlookers, even on the political left, have not taken the Hollywood strikes seriously, to be dismissive of the gravity of the labor movement in Hollywood is to commit a fundamental political blunder. Tinseltown has a rich, though too often unacknowledged, history of class struggle that is intimately connected with the kickoff of Red Scare politics in the 1940s and 1950s. The CSU strike provides a sober reminder of how the violent proliferation of Red Scare hysteria and anti-labor sentiment in Hollywood in the middle of the 20th century were connected, and of how far the capitalist class is willing to take its moral panics.

As we heed the lessons of this previous era, it allows us to understand why the labor actions this time around—Hollywood culture workers, United Auto Workers, the 75,000 striking Kaiser employees, graduate students, contingent faculty, and other teachers across the country, and the others too numerous to mention—portend good signs to come for labor in the United States.

The post How Hollywood’s Black Friday Strike Changed Labor Across America appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In September 1955, 67 TV critics got the opportunity of a lifetime: An all-expenses paid trip to London for a week, courtesy of Johnson & Johnson and Wildroot Cream Oil.

They were there to learn about a new TV program called The Adventures of Robin Hood. The series was the first British-American co-production, and one of the very first programs available in the UK’s then-fledgling commercial television landscape. The half-hour episodes starred Richard Greene as the title character and Bernadette O’Farrell as love interest Maid Marian. It filmed at England’s historic Nettlefold Studios, renamed Walton Studios.

The junket was something out of Mad Men. The critics boarded a martini-and-cigarette-laden charter out of Idlewild Airport, which would later become JFK Airport. They stayed at London’s new Westbury Hotel, and luxury buses shuttled them around to the usual tourist draws, including Nottingham and Sherwood Forest.

Then, there were parties on the actual set at Walton, where the entertainment journalists could mingle with the show’s producers, set designers, actors, and directors.

But not the writers.

The writers of Robin Hood would never be made available for interviews. And they would never be credited for their work on the program, at least not with their own names. Indeed, some of the writers of Robin Hood would not have been allowed to leave the United States.

That’s because they were among Hollywood’s blacklisted—media workers victimized by Sen. Joe McCarthy’s persecution of those accused of communist ties and banned from working.

Had the writers’ identities been discovered, the show couldn’t have proceeded. Johnson & Johnson and Wildroot would have immediately withdrawn their millions of dollars in investment. And this loss of investment would have led to the withdrawal of Official Films, the U.S.-based distribution company that sold the program to CBS-TV in America and the CBC in Canada. Naturally, the broadcasters themselves would have withdrawn their commitment to air it.

So why did the show use these writers despite those risks?

The answer to that question was Hannah Dorner Weinstein.

Weinstein developed the series with leftist writers Ring Lardner Jr., Ian McLellan Hunter, and others. She’d worked with many of them on FDR’s 1944 re-election campaign, as executive director of the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions (ICCASP), which she co-founded. They’d also worked together when she was a vice-chair and co-founder of Progressive Citizens of America.

Lardner and Hunter had both been targeted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and were unemployable as screenwriters. Their involvement in Robin Hood was known only by Weinstein and two or three others on the show who were sworn to secrecy.

In making Robin Hood, Weinstein followed a formula she developed two years earlier with two other blacklisted writers, Walter Bernstein and Abraham Polonsky. With the writers using pseudonyms, they’d created a single-season detective program called Colonel March of Scotland Yard. That series, featuring actor Boris Karloff (a friend of Weinstein’s), caught the attention of British mogul Lew Grade who decided to help Weinstein build her own studio. She did, and in 1954, Sapphire Films was created.

Still under surveillance by the FBI and the CIA for her own political activities back home in New York, the petite former journalist implemented a strict procedure for getting scripts and notes back and forth across the Atlantic. She did the same with getting the writers paid—no easy feat, considering they had to use pseudonyms for everything. Weinstein, 44 and a single mother of three, sweated mightily each time a journalist asked to speak to one or more of the show’s writers. She’d redirect the questioner to a trusted producer or assistant who would then find a way to deflect.

Weinstein’s choice of the legend of Robin Hood to challenge the cultural climate of the Cold War, and allegorize the contemporary geopolitical conflicts of the period was an apt one. As historian of blacklist-era entertainment Andrew Paul summarizes, Robin Hood “was an outlaw with a keen sense of social justice…His antagonistic attitude toward the authoritarian Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham had the potential to reflect midcentury antifascist sentiments. And his empathy toward the poorest of England’s inhabitants could reflect socialist and Popular Front positions on wealth distribution.”

For example, in one episode of the show, called “The Miser,” a lord collects double rents from his tenants to cover his own taxes. Robin tricks him into thinking that an alchemist can turn buttons into silver and returns the money to the villagers. In another episode, “A Year and a Day,” Robin assists a serf who has taught himself how to do surgery by helping the man gain his freedom so he can treat the poor for free.

Lardner and Hunter weren’t the only blacklisted writers involved. Episodes were written by Adrian Scott, John Howard Lawson—members of the Hollywood Ten along with Lardner— and Howard Koch, Waldo Salt, Gertrude Fass, Fred Rinaldo, and Robert Lees (creators of the Abbott & Costello franchise), Arnold Manoff, and Hyman Kraft. Lardner headed up a writing cadre in New York; Scott did the same for Los Angeles.

Weinstein’s productions gave blacklisted writers the ability to put food on their tables, while allowing those same writers to impart sociological subtext about fascism, persecution and, leadership (good and bad). She also allowed them to take aim at the injustices of the Hollywood blacklist.

In “The Vandals,” for example, the sheriff interrogates a village ironsmith to make the man confess that he has made arrow tips for Robin Hood.

“I know you are a decent citizen now,” the lawman goads him, mimicking the language used by Congressional inquisitors who baited former radicals into naming the names of communists and fellow travelers.

Above all, though, Robin Hood was entertaining. The series was a huge hit in the U.S., Britain, and Canada, often taking a spot among the top 20 programs. It was in production for four years and wound up with 143 half-hour episodes. Before its first season was half over, Official Films and sponsors commissioned more seasons of it—and of Sapphire-produced costumed dramas The Adventures of Sir Lancelot and The Buccaneers, featuring a very young Robert Shaw (1956) and then Sword of Freedom (1957).

Ironically, the popularity of these Sapphire programs made life even more difficult for its writers. Talent agents wanted to poach them, but could not find out who they were. The writers couldn’t be at the 1955 junket, and they weren’t ever available stateside, either. The job of deflecting chiefly fell to story editor and trusted lieutenant Albert Ruben, who ran interference between the production company and these types of requests from press or advertising executives.

What made it all work was that Weinstein and her writers trusted each other, perhaps because she faced the same risks that they did. In 1950, she had been fired from her job as a public relations executive for her leftist activity, and her appearance on McCarthy’s list of “concealed communists.” The listing was incorrect—she was not a communist. But, had she not left the country, it was likely she would have been subpoenaed by some arm of McCarthy or the House on Unamerican Activities Committee, or had her passport revoked, or both.

So it was that, in the mid-1950s, this woman who had been outspoken for decades made a shift and let her television productions be the face of her activism. “Meet Hannah [Weinstein],” a British, syndicated columnist wrote in 1959, “the Quiet Woman of television. You won’t have seen her on your screen. She rarely makes news in the papers, avoids interviews if she can. But the fabulously long-running Robin Hood, Sword of Freedom, and Sir Lancelot all owe their tele-creation to this petite American.”

Their writers quietly owed their livelihoods to her, and never forgot.

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It’s film awards season, which means movie lovers and Academy/Screen Actors Guild/Nickelodeon-watching kid voters alike have been busy sorting out the best films from last year.

Many of the most hyped-up contenders of this year’s (or any) film awards season are truly worthy of the honors they seek. Whether it’s because of their unique, high-concept plot, sublime acting performances, perfectly executed action thrills, or some other form of excellence, they deliver on their promises.

And then you have the other films up “for your consideration”—and those that really, really thought they would be. You know the ones I’m talking about. They’re tailor-made to give the appearance of depth, typically through shamelessly grandiose performances, clunky attempts to tackle Big Important Issues, or both. (And possibly a fat suit.) It’s these try-hards for whom the insult “Oscar bait” was first invented.

But in the midst of all this excellence, whether actual or ruthlessly engineered, it’s worth sparing a thought for the supposed lesser films and actors with no hope of taking home a tiny statue this year. These are the movies released on a random Friday in January—the film industry’s de facto “dump month”—or sent straight to streaming jail without even a half-hearted promotional campaign. Or better yet, made completely outside the Hollywood system by amateurs with little more than a camera and a handful of wacky ideas (and the results to show for it). Because if you’re willing to wade through the muck of these kinds of films, you may be pleasantly surprised by what they can teach us—not about badness, but instead about what passes for “good.”

For my money, there’s no better teacher than the cult film The Room, a 2003 cinematic catastrophe I find so fascinating that I edited a whole book of essays about it. Written, directed, starred in, financed, and produced by Tommy Wiseau, an untrained filmmaker of ambiguous Eastern European origins and means, The Room was supposed to be a deeply affecting story of a love triangle gone wrong. That was the intention, at least. The result, however, is a movie that is legendarily terrible: terribly shot, terribly written, and, most infamously, terribly, terribly acted.

Without even addressing the plot, or lack thereof, it’s easy to tick off the nearly infinite problems there are with The Room. Continuity is non-existent: one character announces, willy-nilly, that she has breast cancer, only for it to never be brought up again; another character disappears completely without explanation, only to be replaced by an entirely different character (also without explanation). Multiple gratuitous sex scenes (four!) go on for several minutes, in a movie that’s barely an hour and a half long. And, most memorably for fans, the dialogue ranges from utterly banal (“If a lot of people loved each other, the world would be a better place to live”) to strange (“Keep your stupid comments in your pocket!”) to downright nonsensical (“My Lisa’s great when I can get it”).

It’s easy—so, so easy—to dismiss The Room as nothing more than a perfect and hilarious example of something “so good it’s bad.” But if you let yourself dig below the (extremely rough) exterior, you’re left with a cultural artifact that reveals the deep-seated pretensions of the film industry. To wit: In its laughably transparent attempt to be taken seriously, it’s an accidental but deeply cutting parody of Oscar bait.

Take the performance of its star, Wiseau, playing the movie’s protagonist, Johnny. It isn’t merely big; it’s gigantic. “You are tearing me apart, Lisa!” Johnny wails during a mundane argument with his fiancée, gesticulating wildly for even greater melodramatic effect.

Minus the “Lisa,” this is an exact rip-off of a famous James Dean line in Rebel Without a Cause. Dean was one of Wiseau’s idols, and Wiseau’s performance can be seen as part homage to the Hollywood legend, part improvement attempt. Throughout the movie, Wiseau also channels his other idol, Marlon Brando, and his performance as the volatile Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, in particular.

Thanks to Wiseau’s unforgettable performance (and, to be fair, the performances of everyone else), The Room has become the biggest cult movie since The Rocky Horror Picture Show. That’s why fans flock to monthly screenings around the country and the world to gawk, smugly, at Johnny’s impassioned but utterly unconvincing cries. And yet, with The Room, Wiseau is doing, albeit very sloppily, what so much Oscar bait is accused of: trying really, really hard to convey pathos in an attempt to manipulate the viewer into feeling something.

Lacking even the most basic ability to develop plot and character, Wiseau goes all in with a brute force display of emotion. Like most shortcuts, the approach falls utterly flat. The louder Johnny shouts, the more he contorts his face to really show his heartache, the more the audience can’t help but laugh.

Unfortunately, the performances of Dean, Brando, and many recent, talented award nominees can’t just be mimicked for effect. There’s an alchemy to a truly moving performance that goes beyond good writing and acting skill (not that The Room remotely possessed either of those). The viewer usually knows when they’re being had.

It is exactly this Grand Canyon-sized gap between Wiseau’s intention (depicting a riveting domestic drama) and his execution (creating a surreal, seemingly incoherent work of possible outsider art) that makes the movie so “bad,” and thus so compelling. In this respect, The Room is like any other film that aimed so high but landed so low. Just much more so.

There is one important difference, though. Wiseau’s utter sincerity, no matter how absurd the final result, imbues The Room with a kind of authenticity that sets it apart. “You want to be fake? Not me. I hate fake stuff,” he told his crew during filming, according to The Disaster Artist, the 2013 memoir about the making of the film by The Room co-star Greg Sestero (and the inspiration for the 2017 film, also named The Disaster Artist). Indeed, Wiseau had so much faith in the emotional honesty of his work that when The Room was first released, he rented a Laemmle theater in the San Fernando Valley to show it for two weeks—the minimum run required for a movie to be considered for an Oscar.

If recent Oscar acceptance speeches are any gauge, more than a few actors (and directors, writers, and producers) believe they are creating something that transcends the mere label of “entertainment.” Some of them are. But more often than not, their goal is ultimately the same as Wiseau’s: to signal to the viewer that the movie they’re watching is important. Maybe even worthy of a top-flight award.

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Behind the rise of Ethiopian cinema is an even more remarkable tale of the women who—as writers, directors, producers, and scholars—were leaders in this transformation.

The prominent role of women in the industry may set Ethiopia apart from most other countries. Across the globe, from Hollywood to Bollywood, film and TV industries have been dominated by men. In the United States, the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University and the website Women and Hollywood have shown that only 12 percent of directors, 20 percent of writers, and 26 percent of producers are women, even though 51 percent of audiences are.

In Africa, the 1960s-era founding manifestoes of cinema institutions, such as the famous FESPACO festival in Burkina Faso, are committed to decolonization, racial equality and women’s empowerment; so, in principle, they are more progressive than the United States. Nevertheless, the history of African cinema is generally recounted as a succession of male directors, like kings inheriting the FESPACO throne: Ousmane Sembene. Souleymane Cissé. Idrissa Ouédraogo. Abderrahmane Sissako. The pattern has stuck despite proactive efforts, beginning in the 1990s, by festival organizers and institutions such as the Centre for the Study and Research of African Women in Cinema to empower African women to make movies.

So, what is different in Ethiopia?

On frequent visits in recent years, I’ve met with some of Ethiopia’s prominent filmmakers as well as professors of film and theater history at Addis Ababa University. They’re well aware of what the movie industries are like in other parts of the world and point out that Ethiopia, too, is no paradise for women. Sexism and gender disparities in financing and lending to entrepreneurs remain pervasive, despite the nation’s constitution prohibiting discrimination. And while no agency in Ethiopia has analyzed the issue of gender in the media industry, my own informal survey of the lists of films licensed by the Addis Ababa Bureau of Culture and Tourism indicates that the gender ratios are similar to the United States.

What’s different in Ethiopia is women’s influence and success in the movie business. In a highly competitive industry where many people never make more than one movie, women have consistently enjoyed more enduring success as writers, directors, and producers. Films made by women have tended to do better at the box office and have won many trophies at the nation’s annual Gumma film awards.

Quite a few of the “firsts” in Ethiopia’s cinema history were accomplished by innovative women. After the nation transitioned away from the Derg regime, under which film and television were financed and controlled by the government, the first person to risk privately financing an independent movie was Rukiya Ahmed, with Tsetzet (directed by Tesfaye Senke on U-matic in 1993) about a detective solving a murder case.

Arsema Worku. Courtesy of Steven W. Thomas.

Later, one of the first movies to make the switch from celluloid to video was Yeberedo Zemen (translated as Ice Age) by Helen Tadesse. She originally intended the movie as a situation comedy for Ethiopian TV, but, after a contract dispute, she decided to re-edit the episodes into a single movie. In 2002, it was the first Ethiopian movie shot on VHS to be exhibited in a theater, and it sparked a revolution in the nation’s movie industry.

With the switch from celluloid to VHS, and subsequently to digital filmmaking, local cinema culture blew up, with films growing in number and diversity. Many women seized on the new opportunities to follow Tadesse’s lead, and a number quickly became industry leaders.

One such leader is Arsema Worku, a member of the executive board for Ethiopia’s Film Producers Association, which lobbies on behalf of filmmakers. In addition to being an actress, Worku has written, directed, and produced movies for theater release. Her most recent feature is Emnet (2016), about a married woman who feels trapped managing the home and caring for her baby all day and dreams of an exciting career of her own.

One of Ethiopia’s most prolific and successful directors is Kidist Yilma. Her popular movie Rebuni (2015) won Ethiopia’s most prestigious award, the Gumma. It is about a young woman, Adey, who fights to protect her grandfather’s small farm from being taken over by a corporation. For all the success of Rebuni, she told me, when I met with her and her husband, actor Amanuel Habtamu, that the film that means the most to her is Meba, a movie that takes the audience inside the head of a schizophrenic patient in a mental hospital.

Kidist Yilma. Courtesy of Steven W. Thomas.

These films are local productions, with budgets that are relatively small compared to the international films that Americans and Europeans often watch in art-house theaters. But Ethiopia also has some multinational co-productions, the most internationally successful of which was Difret (2014), whose executive producer was American actress Angelina Jolie.

Based on a true story, Difret dramatizes the kidnapping of child brides in rural areas by focusing on the court case of a young girl who shot her would-be husband in self-defense. Four years after the film’s release, the real-life lawyer and women’s rights activist Meaza Ashenafi, who inspired the movie’s heroine, became the first woman to be appointed president of the Federal Supreme Court of Ethiopia.

The fame of both Jolie and Ashenafi may have overshadowed the fact that one of the producers and visionaries for the film was Dr. Mehret Mandefro, whose first movie, the documentary All of Us (2008), recounts her experience as a medical doctor treating HIV-AIDS both in New York and in Ethiopia. In that film, she comes to the important conclusion that, in New York City as in rural Ethiopia, poverty and the disempowerment of women have exacerbated the HIV-AIDS epidemic.

Men and women in the film and media industry have often worked together to tackle difficult and important subjects such as disease, domestic abuse, mental illness, and conflict between the rich and the poor. For example, a movie that won awards at international festivals was The Price of Love (2015), the third movie written and directed by Hermon Hailay. This brutally honest portrait of the life of a prostitute explores human trafficking and the dark underbelly of urban life. Before writing the script, Hermon researched her subject, spending weeks getting to know some of these women, which is perhaps why the movie feels so shockingly real.

Another major film, on the plight of migrant female workers from Ethiopia, is Sewnetwa (2019), written and produced by Eskedar Girmay with financial support from the International Labor Organization and the Ethiopian Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs. At its debut, the first woman to be president of Ethiopia, H.E. Sahle-Work Zewde, delivered the opening speech.

Ethiopia is a diverse country of more than 80 ethnic groups. Most filmmakers, whatever their mother-tongue may be, make their movies in Amharic, the national language taught in schools across the country. However, some also choose to make movies in their own language such as Tigrinya, Afan Oromo, or Somali.

Keyirat Yusuf. Courtesy of Steven W. Thomas.

The Oromo, who are one of the largest ethnic groups in Ethiopia, have experienced a cultural renaissance in recent years, revitalizing their indigenous form of democracy known as the “Gada system” that in 2016 was recognized by UNESCO as an intangible world heritage. Oromo filmmakers often draw upon Gada principles for their movie production, distribution, and consumption. A common theme in Oromo scripts by both male and female writers is how the indigenous traditions that empower women in their communities can be modernized and adapted to 21st-century life.

Some of the up-and-coming Oromo women making movies today are Seble Wada, producer of the movie Wada; Seenaa Solomon, director of Xiqii; and Hawi Hailu, director of Lafaaf Lafee. The most well-known is Keyirat Yusuf. She got her start as an actress in Dire Dawa before moving to Addis Ababa to join the first Oromo-language show on Ethiopian television, Dhanga. She eventually emigrated to Chicago, where she made her first movie Asaantii (2015) about adapting to life in America. Her second movie Siifan (2017) reflects upon the experience of refugee women who have endured sexual and physical abuse. Like many Ethiopian filmmakers, Keyirat is not only an actor and director, but also a writer and producer. In our conversations, she told me that one of the most important skills she learned was editing.

Women have shaped the industry in other ways as well. Until 2014, Ethiopia’s television stations tended to produce their own content—mostly news and a few serial dramas—and there was little connection between the movie industry and television. But an entrepreneur named Feven Tadesse envisioned a different way of doing things. She created the first show on Ethiopian television to not only broadcast new, locally made movies but also discuss them. Viewers can vote on their favorite movies via text message. Tadesse’s company, Maverick Films, has also produced two movies, including the Gumma award-winning Lomi Shita, which is a complex, multifaceted reflection upon Ethiopia’s history and its identity.

Feven Tadesse. Courtesy of Steven W. Thomas.

All of these filmmakers have had different experiences and offer different views on the position of women in the industry. Some consider themselves feminists, some do not. Some have had mostly positive experiences in the industry, but others feel unsupported. And some herald from diverse, international backgrounds, such as the New York-based Mexican Ethiopian filmmaker Jessica Beshir, whose documentary shorts offer poetic portraits of life. The reality on the ground is complicated, and it is changing.

Ethiopia’s various civic and academic venues contribute positively to the changes by fostering discussion of gender representation. For example, the Alatinos Filmmakers Association has provided a forum where aspiring filmmakers can meet, debate, and share work. Another organization called Sandscribe has hosted free film classes for the public. Addis Ababa University, which famously occupies the grounds of one of the former palaces of Ethiopia’s last emperor, Haile Selassie, started a new master’s degree film program in 2014.

A leading expert on the Ethiopian motion picture industry is Eyerusalem Kassahun, a theater arts professor at Addis Ababa University. In addition to teaching classes on stage directing and film history, she has also written, produced, and directed her own movie that was quite successful in the theaters, Traffic Cop (2013), a romantic comedy about a female officer who falls in love with a taxi driver.

Kassahun also wrote the first scholarly article on women’s contributions to Ethiopia’s movie industry for a book called Cine-Ethiopia: the History and Politics of Film in the Horn of Africa published by Michigan State University Press in 2018. Her chapter in that book was a breakthrough. Before she set the record straight, virtually every account of Ethiopia’s movie industry, from scholarly journals to local newspapers in Addis Ababa, had focused exclusively on a handful of prominent men such as Haile Gerima, Michel Papatakis, Solomon Bekele Weya, Birhanu Shibiru, Theodros Teshome, and Henok Ayele. Since her groundbreaking work, perception has begun to catch up with reality.

That book sets the record straight in other ways. Before its publication, the only Ethiopian filmmakers whom Americans knew much about were the two who lived in America: Gerima and Salem Mekuria. The book also shows that Ethiopia’s film industry has a complicated relationship to the various ancient traditions and religious practices of its many different ethnic groups. Point being, the artistic work of Ethiopian women does not fit neatly into any singular category.

International acknowledgments of women’s leadership role in Ethiopian film and TV remain rare. That’s everyone’s loss, because Ethiopian cinema challenges the stereotypes, common among Americans and Europeans, that Ethiopia is less progressive than they are and that Ethiopian women would find better opportunities if they left. Indeed, women’s successes in Ethiopia turns the stereotype on its head, and suggests that it is Hollywood that may need to try harder to keep up.

The women of Ethiopia’s growing movie industry are inspiring. In my conversations with them, they express a love for making movies and a deep appreciation for their colleagues in the industry, both male and female. They also represent a diversity of perspectives. Some make movies foregrounding the value of tradition, family, and community while others champion the aspiration of the individual in a changing world. Some feel quite connected to the centers of power in the movie industry, while others feel marginalized from it or even live in a state of exile from their homeland. Whatever their position, their multicultural contribution to our world is vital.

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The year is 1933. The studio is RKO. And the movie is King Kong.

Then as now, audiences made anxious by global upheaval hungered for escapism; and in March 1933, Kong delivered the financial rescue its makers prayed for. But the movie might have failed, depriving us of later RKO classics like Citizen Kane, if not for the ninth-inning involvement of one man: RKO’s 44-year-old music director, Max Steiner.

You may not know the name, but you do know his music. More than any other composer, the Vienna-born Steiner established the ground rules of writing movie music that are still in use today.

Pre-Steiner, orchestral underscore was rare in talking pictures, which replaced silent films in 1929. As King Kong neared completion, nervous RKO brass told Steiner not to waste additional dollars writing music for the film, after finding the ape’s stop-motion movement underwhelming.

But Kong’s visionary producer, Merian C. Cooper, knew better. As Steiner recalled, “Cooper said to me, ‘Maxie, go ahead and score the picture to the best of your ability. And don’t worry about the cost because I will pay for the orchestra.’”

Steiner’s epic score—a thrilling synthesis of Wagnerian opera, Stravinskian dissonance and Viennese romanticism—convinced audiences that Kong was both terrifying and ultimately tragic. Its DNA is still found in the sweeping scores of John Williams and countless others. (Star Wars’s original “temp track” of music, used during editing before its score was written, included music by Steiner.)

Max Steiner, circa 1936. Courtesy of L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Brigham Young University Library, Provo, Utah.

By the mid-1930s, Max’s trademarks were widely imitated if rarely equaled: separate, distinctive musical themes for characters, which he developed throughout a score to illuminate those characters’ thoughts and emotions; ingenious use of orchestral color to create atmosphere; and a gift for soaring lyricism that lifted dramas like Gone with the Wind and Now, Voyager into the realm of myth.

Best known for his work at Warner Bros. from 1936 to 1965, Steiner’s 300-plus credits include Casablanca, The Searchers, Mildred Pierce, The Big Sleep, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. He was nominated for 24 Academy Awards and won three.

While retracing Max’s steps to write his biography, I realized why Steiner—a diminutive, wisecracking, but deeply romantic figure—related so strongly to the characters in his best-known films. Scarlett O’Hara’s fight to rebuild a family dynasty … Rick Blaine’s cynical wit that covers a broken heart … Kong’s vulnerability to beauty. All of these were part of Steiner’s story.

His life had the jolting plot twists typical of the Warner Bros. biopics he scored. During a pampered youth in late 19th century Vienna, Max was the presumed inheritor of a theatrical empire. His grandfather Maximilian launched the craze for Viennese operetta in the 1870s, after convincing waltz king Johann Strauss, Jr., composer of “The Blue Danube,” to write for the theater. Die Fledermaus, the world’s most performed operetta, was one result.

Max’s father Gabor was also a showman, fascinated by new technology; his productions ranged from symphony concerts to DeMille-like stage spectacles. Family friends included Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler. Even Austria’s emperor was a fan, decorating Gabor with the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Franz Joseph.

Papa Steiner’s most ambitious creation was the amusement park “Venice in Vienna.” Sixty years before Disneyland, the multi-acre venue offered a re-creation of the Italian city, complete with canals and gondolas. Patrons could ride rollercoasters, listen to gramophone records (then a novelty), and watch silent movies just months after cinema’s invention. Most popular was the Riesenrad, a Ferris wheel that remains one of Vienna’s most iconic attractions. Max reveled in “Venice”’s potpourri of symphonies, jugglers, waltz concerts and water slides. That pop culture mix proved ideal training for Steiner, who spent his life writing sophisticated, yet accessible, music for the masses.

He did not arrive in Hollywood until the age of 41. Until then, his life mirrored the rise and fall of Gabor’s Ferris wheel: early success thwarted by family bankruptcy; itinerant music-making in Paris, Cairo, Johannesburg, and beyond; and, in 1914, a panicked escape from London to New York, after the outbreak of World War I changed Max’s status in Britain from successful conductor to enemy alien.

Europe’s loss was America’s gain. During the 1920s, Steiner thrived as a Broadway conductor. He oversaw shows by Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein, and George and Ira Gershwin—most notably the Gershwins’ trailblazing Lady, Be Good! starring Fred Astaire. Conducting theater orchestras during a time before microphones, Steiner learned how to make sure music didn’t overwhelm a performer’s speech.

An invite from RKO to join its fledgling music staff brought him west in 1929. Within months he was made the studio’s musical director. Max’s early attempts to blend underscoring and onscreen dialogue were usually thwarted, by literal-minded producers who asked: where was the music coming from? But with scores like 1932’s Symphony of Six Million and 1933’s King Kong, Steiner proved that audiences accepted the unreality of an unseen orchestra accompanying the drama.

An Oscar win in 1936, for John Ford’s The Informer, cemented his reputation as leader in his field.

Whether overseeing the silky arrangements of Irving Berlin’s songs for Top Hat (1935), or writing snarling musical noir for James Cagney in White Heat (1949), Steiner set speed records for composing that were nearly superhuman. He thrived under pressure, writing scores in as little as a week if required.

Max Steiner conducts his score for King Kong (1933). Courtesy of L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Brigham Young University Library, Provo, Utah.

His score pages are filled with handwritten quotes of the movie dialogue being spoken at that moment (“Here’s looking at you, kid.” “It was beauty killed the beast!”). And somehow he found time to scribble notes in the margins sharing studio gossip, lamentations about his love life (he married four times), and sardonic, sometimes lewd commentary on screen action. His audience for these remarks was a private one: the orchestrators, who, like Max, slogged through days with little sleep to convert score pages into separate instrumental parts.

His jokes usually served a serious purpose: to keep his cohort alert, and to communicate dramatic intention. “Heaven music!” he wrote on the final pages of his score for Dark Victory, as Bette Davis bravely succumbs to a brain tumor. “Make this such a beautiful Heaven that no [studio] supervisor can ever get there!” On a 1952 religious drama: “Harps and Pianos are going ‘mad’ on account of the picture being just so-so.” And often, a comparison to the style of a beloved concert work: “A la Ravel’s Bolero—only better!” To keep his music from competing with dialogue, Steiner wrote above or below the pitch of an actor’s voice, after determining where that voice would be on a musical scale. In his score for the Bette Davis Oscar-winner Jezebel, he jots down that in her Southern belle accent, Davis “says ‘Am ah?’ … between [the notes] E and F.”

Steiner shaped not only how composers write film music, but how much they are paid. It was Max who launched a 27-year battle for film composers to receive royalties. (Until his efforts, studios paid a flat fee, and the royalty collection organization ASCAP ignored film music.) Today’s composers—some of whom make millions as their work plays on TV, home video, and streaming—have Steiner partly to thank.

Unfortunately, Max was both an innovator and a spendthrift. He earned millions, but spent even more on gambling, alimonies, alcohol, cigars, and generous handouts to friends in need.

A workaholic with manic tendencies, he was happiest when composing. Guilt led him to lavish his wives and his only son with everything except what they wanted most: his time. And although at age 71 he hit a financial jackpot—1959’s “Theme from A Summer Place” became the best-selling instrumental of the rock era—his failure as a parent would end in a tragedy from which he never fully recovered.

Fortunately, the music that was his addiction, and his escape from pain, still surrounds us. Every day, somewhere, a viewer’s heartbeat quickens as Steiner intensifies a classic moment of cinema: White Heat gangster Cody Jarrett’s defiant “Made it, Ma—top of the world!” The Searchers’s Ethan Edwards, played by John Wayne, cradling his long-lost niece in his arms. Scarlett O’Hara’s “As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.” Or Rick and Ilsa’s farewell in a fog-shrouded airport in Casablanca.

It should be noted that Steiner did not write “As Time Goes By.” In fact, he hated the song, which was written by Herman Hupfeld in 1931, and had been largely forgotten. Entranced by Ingrid Bergman’s performance and her beauty, Max was eager to write an original love theme. But when ordered to weave Hupfeld’s tune into his score, Steiner created such heartbreaking variations that it’s hard to believe he didn’t love “As Time Goes By”— and compose it.

Typically, Max concluded his handwritten score for Casablanca with a joke to his orchestrator. “Dear Hugo: Thanks for everything! Yours, Herman Hupfeld.” It took him years to accept how effective that shotgun musical marriage had been. Without Steiner’s exquisite interpretations of Hupfeld’s melody—reimagined in the score as everything from a swooning waltz to a Puccini-esque lovers’ farewell—the song may not have attained its status as a pop standard.

Casablanca also demonstrates Steiner’s greatest strength as a composer: his gift for translating human emotion—grief, hope, romantic ecstasy—into music that still works its magic on 21st century viewers.

Just ask Steven Spielberg. In 2008, the filmmaker said of Casablanca’s score, “It just gets your heart. When you’re about ready to cry, Max Steiner comes in [and] those tears start to flow.”

Spielberg’s respect is also reflected in the nickname he uses for his favorite musical collaborator, John Williams. It’s also the name of Spielberg’s first son.

Max.

Listen to some of Max Steiner’s greatest scores:

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