Mitt Oudt Soundt

Why the Hollywood Left Ain't the Hollywood Right:
(up dated) If you missed "Cinema's Exiles: From Hitler to Hollywood,'' a documentary by Karen Thomas which showed on PBS Monday night, you missed a hell of a show. The German influence on Hollywood movies has always been a subject of more than casual interest if for no other reason than that the German talent that fled Germany between 1929 and 1940 became a Who's Who of the Hollywood movie business. How big was their influence? My first job in movies contained more than just a few silent takes of scenery and action. When the first scene was slated it contained the acronym "MOS", something I was mystified by. I asked an old guy on the set what it meant since all silent takes contained this lettering identification. He told me it meant "mitt oudt sount" which is how the German directors with unshakable accents identified "without sound" takes. MOS apparently spread around town in thirty seconds and last I heard it is still used to identify takes without sound. German exiles were everywhere. They were in every craft, guild, and executive suite meaning that many of them essentially made German movies with an American slant. The now trendy identification of 1930s gangster movies as "film noir" is bullshit; the black and white style of movies with acres of dark in almost every frame came directly from the German film makers of the late 19020s. Historians have observed that if it weren't for Hitler and the Nazis in Germany causing the extraordinary talent pool in Berlin to flee for their lives there would have been no Hollywood domination of the world movie business. This show also explained to me why Hollywood is so liberal and left wing. The avalanche of mostly German emigres to our shores overwhelmed the Hollywood hiring halls, leaving at least half the immigrants on the unemployment lines. Those lucky enough to find work taxed themselves one percent of their paychecks which they put into a fund so their fellow movie refugees could have enough money to tide them over til they found work. This created a bond between all the essentially "progressive" (and Hitler hating) movie people that entered the Hollywood work force during the decade. This sudden appearance of skilled labor was not welcomed by the existing unions (SAG, DGA, and most crafts) which barred all foreigners from membership, at least for a time. So the actual majority of talent outside of the unions bonded with those that had jobs and all stuck together through thick and thin; they shared a philosophy that was anti-business mostly due to the horrors of the Great Depression, an economic purgatory which most blamed on banks and big business. This POV was shared by most blue collar Americans who were adrift on a sea of near hopeless poverty and unemployment. This assignment of business to the villain role in drama combined with state and local government corruption created the Gangster Movies, a genre in which criminals from outside the system infiltrated the system, corrupted the cops who were usually partners with the corrupt businessmen and the gangsters got their way by shooting up everyone inside the system who tried to challenge them. These movies expressed a view that was widely held by poor Americans, especially the hostility toward the banks that had seized their farms. Many Americans had turned to extremes as solutions to the economic problems in the country, but the German-Jews in Hollywood were already experienced with the evils of fascism and especially Hitler, so since only Russia seemed to stand in the way of Nazi takeovers everywhere communism seemed cool. The communist party simply grew in pre-fertilized soil of share and share alike, anti Hitler to the extent they would actually die in places like Spain to express their opposition to him, and thus the philosophy took hold. The straight jacket of communist party orthodoxy that imprisoned many artists after WWII is another story. Much easier to blame Hitler. BTW, for a who's who of actors on the lam take another look at Casablanca. With the exceptions of Bogart, Bergman (actually from Sweden), Dooley Wilson, Greenstreet, (Britain), and Raines (from Britain too), every minor role was played by a refugee from Germany or somewhere else in Nazi threatened Eastern Europe. It is said that even the camels came from the zoo in Berlin.