Hollywood vs. America

Why does our popular culture seem so consistently hostile to the values that most Americans hold dear? Why does the entertainment industry attack religion, glorify brutality, undermine the family, and deride patriotism?

In this explosive book, one of the nation's best known film critics examines how Hollywood has broken faith with its public, creating movies, television, and popular music that exacerbate every serious social problem we face, from teenage pregnancies to violence in the streets.

Michael Medved powerfully argues that the entertainment business follows its own dark obsessions, rather than giving the public what it wants: In fact, the audience for feature films and network television has demonstrated its profound disillusionment in recent years, with disastrous consequences for many entertainment companies. Meanwhile, overwhelming numbers of our fellow citizens complain about the wretched quality of our popular culture--describing the offerings of the mass media as the worst ever. Medved asserts that Hollywood ignores--and assaults--the values of ordinary American families, pursuing a self-destructive and alienated ideological agenda that is harmful to the nation at large and to the industry's own interests.

In hard-hitting chapters on "The Attack on Religion," "The Addiction to Violence," "Promoting Promiscuity," "The Infatuation with Foul Language," "Kids Know Best," "Motivations for Madness," and other subjects, Medved outlines the underlying themes that turn up again and again in our popular culture. He also offers conclusive evidence of the frightening real-world impact of these messages on our society and our children.

Finally, Medved shows where and how Hollywood took a disastrous wrong turn toward its current crisis, and he outlines promising efforts both in and outside the industry to restore a measure of sanity and restraint to our media of mass entertainment.

Sure to elicit strong response, whether it takes the form of cheers of support or howls of enraged dissent, Hollywood vs. America confronts head-on one of the most significant issues of our times.

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

This must be a good book because it's a good book. The author even admits it., 2008-07-10
Hollywood vs. America is extremely insulting to anyone who thinks Americans actually think. Medved places the blame of violent films of which he is opposed ideologically on film producers when it should be obvious for anyone who has common sense that no one is making anyone see Hollywood films. These films are popular because audiences like them. No one would sit for 120 minutes staring at a screen unless they enjoyed it. Does Medved think Americans are like 'good Germans'? Au contraire, Medved, an orthodox Jew, has defended Mel Gibson's anti-semitic films and anti semitic rants since at least Gibson is a good "Christian" and not a Muslim, which means, according to Medved, that one follows in inherently inferior religion. If it makes you feel good to read opinions that are in line with your own, don't let me stop you. But if you have the desire to develop some prowess at being able to think critically, think about this: Medved provides no empirical evidence for any of his accusations. Medved is utterly naive in his belief that left wing "Hollywood" controls people's thinking (who has been president for the past 8 years); and Medved seems to have no idea of the concept of entertainment. When you lack the ability to define your terms, you lose my respect in opining. Let's face it, if two hour films showing Dick Cheney hunting ducks would fill movie theatre seats with lots of butts, Hollywood would be producing them. Maybe Medved is afraid people will make up their own minds about what to think of the information that gets put into them. But Medved proves to be a poor gatekeeper.


0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

Looney-Tunes, 2008-07-04
That Michael Medved can actually make money with his insane tirades is unbelievable. This man is a psychopath, that is all anyone needs to know. Blaming "Hollywood" for the supposed demise of American culture may suit those who have no critical thinking skills, but for anyone with a modicum of intelligence, his views will be merely laughable.


2 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

Oh Now I have heard everything....., 2007-06-16
If Michael Medved (and other conservatives) had their way. We would be watching the 700 Club on all Tv stations. The Sound of Music would be made into all these new versions, and almost all so-called "Family Films" would be rated by the smallest number of people who said that they have our best intentions at heart.

Where in the world do these people get these ideas? I have no idea. But I will tell you this. There is much to complain about Hollywood, but at the end of the day, I prefer the world of the movie studios and film making, rather then the world of dumb politics that this book is full of. Then again, this is what Washington DC is also.


4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

still the best book on what the media is doing to the American mind, 2007-04-15
"Although the quality of craftsmanship in today's motion pictures is hugely variable, their underlying attitudes are not." (p. xx). The year this book was published, movie attendance had plunged to "its lowest level ever in terms of percentage of our population." (p. xviii). Similar results applied for movie rentals.

Thus Medved sets the stage for his detailed presentation of the relentlessly anti-American attitudes of movies and TV, and the fact that these products are not selling, and the fact that the producers of them don't care! Foreign sales of American movies are increasing, where these movies feed the anti-American sentiment being fostered by so many other elements around the world. Hollywood now gets over half its income from foreign sales.

A friend warned Medved that if he published this book, "you're going to become the most hated man in Hollywood." (p. 17). Luckily for us, Medved refused to be intimidated.

Movies have not gotten any better in the years since this book was published. Medved claims that the movies are out of touch with Americans, but there are a great many Americans whom the movies are not out of touch with: the academics, the news industry people, the schoolteachers, the Islamists, the Reconquistadores, and the like. The movies are part of the attempt to "transform" America into something very different. If you want to know what this transformation is and how it works, read While America Sleeps: How Islam, Immigration and Indoctrination Are Destroying America From Within. It will keep you awake at night, but you need to know it.



6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

It's not science, but it's good criticism!, 2007-03-02
Having done my own research on film content, which just happened to include a survey of 1991 releases (which constitute many of the examples used in this book), it was perhaps inevitable that I would eventually read this book.
As a social scientist, I noted numerous parts of the book that contained inaccuracies, exaggerations, and reasoning that was far from air-tight. However, at the same time, I was impressed that, although these elements could (and should) be tightened and corrected, I find most of Medved's arguments to be laudable and generally defensible. Certainly there are many persons who should read this book and evaluate their media consumption habits!
Some of the biggest shortcomings of the book include:
1. Frequent presumptions that general box-office patterns are to be attributed primarily to specific elements of film content (even though other parts of the book are more careful and sophisticated about such things), [**NOTE** new passage added a month after original review:] Since I originally posted my 4 star rating, I have discovered evidence that flatly contradicts one of Medved's claims!!! The nature of this error is so serious that it would cause me to lower my rating from 4 stars down to 3 stars, but Amazon provides no option to allow me to do that. The flaw is Medved's claim that box office dropped dramatically between 1965 and 1966, due to the new permissiveness that was allowed in film with the Valenti-revisions of the the production code and the addition of the SMA ("suggested for mature audience") label. Having looked at the box office figures, I now see no basis whatsoever for Medved's claim! There was a decline, yes, just as there had been and would continue to be for many years before and afterward. There is no way to attribute one year out of that to a shift in the production code, as Medved does. Therefore, this must be considered another case where his claims are exaggerated and overstated, despite my aesthetic and moral basis for agreeing with many of his arguments, and my general support for the kind of criticism that Medved attempts (and the industry's need to consider it). [end of added passage]
2. Poor proofreading, some errors, and a number of passages that are exaggerated. (The proofreading suggests that the book used an early word processor to produce, the errors that I caught are generally minor and don't tend to negate the points he's trying to make, the exaggerations tend to occur when Medved is clearly exhibiting an emotional involvement in the topic.)
These are perhaps regrettable weaknesses, but can be overlooked.
3. Some errors of reasoning can be found in various parts of the book, but again, while these are regrettable in that they will cause some readers to be unconvinced, Medved's failure to make all his arguments logically air-tight doesn't mean that most of the core ideas he relates are unsound. On the contrary, having come to his book years after doing my own research and arrived at *some* very similar conclusions, I know where he's coming from and the kinds of patterns and relationships he's trying to describe, in language that is accessible and convincing to general readers.

Now, for some of the positive features of the book:
1. Medved succeeds in refuting the claim that Hollywood product is simply "giving the public what it wants and demands."
2. Medved succeeds in pointing to some of the patterns in which questionable content has come to pervade most mass media products, even when unnecessary for the effectiveness of the work and when it offends some or most of its potential audience.
3. Medved demonstrates an understanding of some of the debates in aesthetics and criticism, and does a very good job questioning the nature of contemporary criticism, and pointing to some ways in which it (and film critics) falls short and risks becoming totally irrelevant.
4. Medved's exploration of the motivations underlying contemporary standards for film production, film criticisms, and industry awards is probably one of the better ones that has appeared in a widely-available forum in recent years.
5. Medved's introduction and conclusion sections should probably be required reading for anyone who wishes to judge the nature of this book. He is careful to draw a distinction between judgements about artistic merits and a moral evaluation of film content. He also tends to avoid simplistic fallacies that so often pervade this sort of writing, and he also concisely addresses the topic of film censorship that is frequently brought in to cloud the issue of film content. His discussion at no time can be simplified to the advocacy of censorship (as all industry defenders and apologists keep trying to do) and he insightfully cuts through many of the fallacies used by industry apologists in their public statements on these issues.
6. Medved's understanding of the harmful effects of violent (and immoral) media is adequate, and I was impressed that he actually hired a consultant to interpret data at at least one point during the writing of the book, rather than claim expertise of his own in data analysis. I believe that Medved did as capable a job as he could, but he is no social scientist. The results, however, hold up surprisingly well to scrutiny, despite various fallacies that creep into some of his more elaborate efforts to explore and evaluate patterns and trends.
7. Medved's suggestions for filmmakers are good ones! He describes well such issues as the different perceptions of critics when compared to general audiences, includes useful information to suggest differences between the artistic/industry communities and the broader public at large, examines various motivations (historical, political, artistic/personal etc.) that shape film products in ways that are often unappreciated by industry outsiders.

All in all, this book was surprisingly good. It isn't flawless, and there are times when Medved's emotions are not held completely in check, but he usually manages to avoid the sorts of errors that are otherwise pervasive about this sort of subject, and even when he makes mistakes in reasoning and in reporting the data/observations about the media, these mistakes fortunately tend not to contradict the merit of most of his arguments. While most popular authors on this subject may may one or more bold claims and then run with them, Medved is fortunately much more careful. Therefore, when he does stumble, not much of the load he was carrying gets spilled. Unfortunately, the current edition has a Rush Limbaugh blurb on its front cover. This should be removed, even though Medved is apparently not a conservative commentator, because Medved is also correct when he states in this book that the issue of media content is not simply a conservative/liberal political issue. It instead concerns anyone who has a sense of ethics that shouldn't be needlessly contradicted by questionable filmmaking choices and the sort poor aesthetic standards that are common today.

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