Cultural illiteracy in Hollywood is nothing new. An old joke has a studio executive, upon hearing the plot of a William Faulkner novel, yelling, ”Well, let`s get this guy Faulkner! Is he available?”
It wouldn`t seem possible, but writer Catherine Seipp argues that things are actually worse these days in ”Kapow! Bam! Holy Pop Culture!” in the July Journal of the Writers Guild of America, West, the union that represents most Hollywood TV and feature film writers.
Seipp opens by noting that she was recently watching a 1930s Joan Crawford film in which a character declared, ”Barkis is willing,” which back then was the same thing as saying, ”See you later, alligator.”
What struck Seipp is that ”Barkis is willing” comes from Charles Dickens` ”David Copperfield,” meaning that 1930s filmgoers were assumed to understand such a reference. Clearly, such a literary reference wouldn`t work today.
”Books are so beyond the pale in Hollywood now that if a movie character displays an unexpected bit of knowledge, the most believable explanation is that he watched a lot of TV,” Seipp writes.
”Remember how the mermaid (played by Daryl Hannah) learned English in
`Splash`?” It was via TV, she notes, continuing: ”In `Encino Man,` a sort of dumbed-down `Wayne`s World,` the moronic Pauly Shore character announces authoritatively that a prehistoric relic is a `Mousterian bowl.` When his friend is skeptical, Shore asks witheringly, `Don`t you ever watch `Jeopardy?` ”
German film director Werner Herzog contends that, ”Film is not the art of scholars but of illiterates.” But do producers sell their audiences short? Seipp is drawn to the critique of Rob Long, co-executive producer of NBC`s megahit ”Cheers.” Long, 26, is a Yale University graduate who majored in English and is ”casually erudite in the manner of a 19th Century man of letters.”
”I think people in the United States are much smarter than people in Hollywood,” says Long, whose background would make him a likely Tinsel Town snob.
”Movies aren`t bad because people in Hollywood think they`re stupid,”
says Long. ”It`s true that most people don`t read anymore; the references are all to TV. A big laugh in `Wayne`s World` is the reference to the opening credits of `Laverne and Shirley.` Our collective memory only goes back to Lucy and Ricky.”
”I think it`s hard for people who make movies to face the truth,” says Long, ”which is that a great book is always better than a great movie. Yes, a good movie is better than a good TV show, but a good novel is better than both.”
Quickly: Remember how we used to grouse over those big, bad, government-financed Soviet sports teams? July 13 Business Week tells how the renamed Commonwealth of Independent States` Unified Team is groping to find the $3.5 million needed to get to Barcelona, including cutting deals for money with German sneaker-maker Adidas and Turner Broadcasting System, which kicked in $500,000. . . . July Cruising World gives sailors all they`ll need to know on discerning and dealing with stormy weather. . . . Gore Vidal is a bit screechy in a July 13 Nation essay on politics and monotheism (the notion that there`s only one god), arguing that a move is afoot by monotheists (the ”sky-godders”) to create a totalitarian state ”with the sky-godders as the cops, answerable only to God, who may have just sent us his Only Son, H. Ross Perot, as warden.” . . . In July 10 Entertainment Weekly, director Spike Lee shows scant respect for the intelligence of viewers of a new video on the Rodney King trial, assailing the video for being too neutral and thus leaving it ”up to the audience to decide” who was right and wrong. . . . July Progressive Farmer reports that University of Missouri researchers have succeeded in producing one-fourth more kernels per year by injecting a synthetic cytokinin into growing corn after pollination. . . . In spring-summer Salmagundi, critic Jed Perl argues that abstract art, which
encompasses a variety of forms and artists who include Miro, Klee, De Kooning and Pollock, has gone from ”epoch shattering to banal in 80 years,” but that`s partly because while it once was tradition-breaking, it has come to be part of tradition. . . . July 13 New Yorker offers a decent Raymond Bonner overview of the Sudan, a typically forgotten, forlorn African land whose Islamic fundamentalism, not its hideous poverty, worries the Bush
administration most, he says.
