Hollywood

The Horrifying Hollywood Movie That Determined U.S. Nuclear Policy

Operation Ivy Provoked Such Controversy That Future Nuclear Test Films Were Kept Secret From the Public

The Horrifying Hollywood Movie About Thermonuclear War That Determined U.S. | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

On a hot June day in 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sat down in the cool confines of a White House screening room to watch a horrifying movie. Produced by government-backed Hollywood filmmakers, it recounted the recent test of an American thermonuclear bomb in the South Pacific. Part documentary, part disaster pic, Operation Ivy featured Hollywood actor Reed Hadley and footage of the complete annihilation of a Pacific island as large as Washington, D.C.

Eisenhower was stunned. But there was one thing he knew for sure after watching it: all …

by Kevin Hamilton and Ned O’Gorman |

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When Silent Films Were a Force for World Peace | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

When Silent Films Were a Force for World Peace

In the 1920s, Moguls Pitched the Technology as a ‘Universal Language’ That Was More Than Mere Entertainment

by Ryan Jay Friedman |

By the 1920s, the standard-bearers of the Hollywood film industry had taken to speaking about movies in the loftiest terms—as saviors of humanity. Leading star and producer Douglas Fairbanks declared, …

When San Francisco Kicked Hollywood to the Curb

Angered by Negative Depictions of Their City, in the Early 1970s Civic Leaders Regulated Filmmakers Out of Town

by Joshua Gleich |

Canada’s motion picture industry earned the nickname “Hollywood North” because the country so often serves as a center of location production for American films. But in the early 1970s, this …

How Jewish Was Stanley Kubrick?

The Director of 2001 and Eyes Wide Shut Had the ‘Aura of a Talmudic Scholar’ and Favored Plots Dealing With Cultural Outsiders

by Nathan Abrams |

Many people are surprised to discover that legendary director Stanley Kubrick—whose masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey is 50 years old this year—was Jewish. He rarely spoke of it, his films …

Television and Film Have a Role to Play in Repairing a Fractured America

Despite the Bitterness Splintering the Nation, History Shows We’re “All in the Family"

In American memory, if not always in reality, television and film once played a unifying role. During the Great Depression, decadent Hollywood productions delivered welcome diversion. At the dawn …

Los Angeles, Late 1980s

By Wendy C. Ortiz |

My knee-high lace-up moccasins made me
forget the nights my mother was lost in vodka.
I walked deep in the gunk of Hollywood.
The stretch of sidewalk glittered. Vendors
sold …


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