Hollywood, the world's movie capital, offered the American—and British—public escape from the war and at the same time tried to build a popular consensus behind the war effort. The war suffused cinemas, from government promotional films, to newsreels (which, before television, were the public's primary visual source of news), and features. Average weekly attendance in the USA soared to 100 million people—three-quarters of the population—and profits reached record levels.

Films attracted government regulation of their content that was unprecedented, before or since, in American media. The Office of War Information (OWI) closely monitored the studios' output. It issued a lengthy manual for the studios (‘Will this picture help win the war?’ was the ultimate question by which to judge a movie) and tried to steer producers to the war themes it favoured. OWI officials read the screenplays of most major pictures as production went forward, offered suggestions (sometimes gratefully received and sometimes angrily rejected), on occasion went so far as to write dialogue, and reviewed finished films. Although lacking censorship power, OWI achieved considerable influence through patriotic persuasion and through its liaison with the Office of Censorship, which held Hollywood's vital foreign market by the throat.

The studios tried to remould attitudes about enemies and allies to fit the war's political viewpoint. A top priority was revising the image of the USSR, most strikingly in Warner Brother's Mission to Moscow, based on the memoirs of Joseph E. Davies, the American ambassador to Moscow from 1936 to 1938. Converting the USSR into a worthy democratic ally, Mission to Moscow invented a pleasant land of plenty, cast the dreaded secret police as harmless comic gumshoes, reverently portrayed Stalin as an ominiscient world statesman, and even endorsed the discredited Kremlin line that the massive purges of the 1930s had been necessary to root out fifth columnists. Controversial politics and dull entertainment, Mission to Moscow became a Cold War embarrassment.

China and the UK were easier to bend to propaganda needs, although the results often proved misleading. Allies became Americans with quaint customs and mildly different looks. Representations of China followed Hollywood's well-worn formula of warm-hearted, condescending exoticization. Dragon Seed starred Katharine Hepburn, made up with slanted eyes. China had to be shown as a modern, unified nation. At OWI's insistence peasants' mud huts were transformed into neat little brick houses ‘with a considerable feeling of civilization about them’. Holly wood's Chinese were likeable, loyal fighters, but always overshadowed by the Americans.

The British excited American admiration. The White Cliffs of Dover, based on Alice Duer Miller's mawkish and hugely popular poem of the same title, perpetuated a sentimental identification with Britain. The biggest hit about the British was Mrs Miniver ( 1942), which reassured audiences that the UK had the will to win and was democratizing the class system, which rankled with many Americans.

The USA, too, was painted in warmly idealized tones. Hollywood and the OWI collaborated to show a unified nation, happily mobilized for victory to its smallest details. A woman who hoarded 127 tubes of lipstick was shamed by her housemates in Tender Comrade. Screeching tyres were slashed from Preston Sturges's screwball comedy Hail the Conquering Hero so as not to undermine rubber conservation drives. Industrial disputes gave way to labour–management co-operation for the war effort in King Vidor's paean to capitalist industry, An American Romance. Racial discrimination, the biggest blot on American democracy in a war for the Four Freedoms, was harder to cure: OWI settled for occasional positive roles for blacks in films such as The Ox-Bow Incident and Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat. Blacks sometimes got a better break on the screen than in real life; Bataan featured a racially integrated combat unit when none existed in the real army for democracy (see also African Americans at war).

The ultimate expression of the home front, David O. Selznick's lavish Since You Went Away, invoked every wartime cliché. A husband leaves for war, his nervous wife takes a job as a welder in a bomber factory, her daughter postpones college to work as a nurse, the black maid works overtime for no pay, a wimpish young man attains manhood and dies valiantly in battle, and dad returns to the cosy home in the suburbs on a snowy Christmas Eve. Selznick reassured Americans that they could cope with death, domestic disorder, and changing sex roles, and everything would be put back to normal after the war.

Combat movies offered the irresistible combination of vivid action, exotic locations, and clearly defined heroes and villains. Early combat films made the battle front seem scarcely more deadly than a football game. Only towards the end of the war did Hollywood begin to come to terms with reality, most notably in The Story of G.I. Joe, based on dispatches by the war correspondent Ernie Pyle. The Story of G.I. Joe avoided the false heroics of most combat pictures. Death was a lottery and another firefight loomed up the road. Hollywood typically reassured audiences that the war was rational and that military service promised upward mobility after the war.

The enemies wore black hats, but with important differences. OWI insisted that the war was with Hitler and the Nazis, not the entire German people. Hollywood's Nazis were appropriately ruthless, though the movie-makers, like most of the public, could not allow themselves to contemplate the Nazis' utter depravity. Even in serious treatments of Nazism such as The Hitler Ganganti-Semitism was barely acknowledged. But the distinction between good (if duped) Germans and bad Germans was an uneasy one. Howls of protest greeted the inclusion of a sympathetic young German army lieutenant in The Moon is Down.

Hollywood granted the Japanese no sympathetic individuals; they were always a mass, fanatically devoted to the war-mongering emperor. They were ‘prints off the same negative’, according to Frank Capra's Why We Fight films for the army. While the Germans fought a recognizable war, the Japanese were depicted as little better than jungle animals.

By 1944 the cycle of war pictures had begun to wane. Like Europeans earlier in the war, Americans no longer wanted fictional re-enactments. Escape took the form of musicals, such as Going My Way with Bing Crosby, a story of two priests which swept the Oscars in 1944, and Judy Garland in Meet Me In St Louis, with its nostalgic return to 1904. ‘Elegant shockers’, such as Double Indemnity and Murder, My Sweet, put violence in a familiar domestic context. Religious pictures, such as Song of Bernadette, offered divine reassurance. In 1945 Darryl F. Zanuck campaigned for internationalism with Wilson, a tedious effort to sanctify Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), the US president from 1912 to 1920, as a prophet of world peace, but a public tired of war savoured what had always been Hollywood's preferred product: escape.

Clayton R. Koppes

Bibliography

Koppes, C. R., and and Black, G. D. , Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits, and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (New York, 1987).

HOLLYWOOD

HOLLYWOOD. An area of the city of Los Angeles famous primarily for its association with the film industry,

Hollywood was originally a small independent agricultural community. It merged with Los Angeles in 1910 in order to obtain an adequate water supply. At approximately the same time, the film industry began to locate in the region, seeking to take advantage of natural sunlight that allowed year-round filming and a diverse southern California landscape that provided cheap scenery. In 1914, the director Cecil B. DeMille decided to locate his studio in Hollywood permanently, and other companies followed. By the 1920s, Hollywood had beaten out rivals such as Culver City and Burbank as the place most associated with the film industry, although in fact movie lots were scattered throughout the Los Angeles area. The growing power and romance of film made Hollywood a cultural icon and a major tourist attraction. In the 1950s and 1960s, Hollywood also began to attract television studios and record companies. While still home to many entertainment-related companies and remaining a popular destination for starstruck visitors, the area's actual role in film production began to lag in the 1970s. Soaring production and living costs in Los Angeles led many companies to seek opportunities elsewhere, and Hollywood itself struggled with problems associated with urban blight.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Friedrich, Otto. City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s. New York: Harper and Row, 1986.

Starr, Kevin. Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Torrence, Bruce T. Hollywood: The First 100 Years. Hollywood, Calif.: Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, 1979.

Daniel J.Johnson

See alsoFilm ; Los Angeles .

Hollywood, district of Los Angeles, situated eight miles northeast of the city's downtown and long famous as the center of motion‐picture⧫ production for the world. Because of this association the area became synonymous with the flamboyance and glamour attached to the industry and its stars. Besides inspiring a great quantity of romantic fiction as well as serious sociological studies, the place has been the subject of much satirical treatment, e.g. Kaufman's plays, Once in a Lifetime and Stage Door, and such novels as H.L. Wilson's Merton of the Movies, Van Vechten's Spider Boy, Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon, Elmer Rice's A Voyage to Purilia, John O'Hara's Hope of Heaven, Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust, Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run?, and Bemelmans's Dirty Eddy. Among the dramatists and novelists who have spent time in Hollywood writing for films are Maxwell Anderson, Ray Bradbury, Bromfield, Joan Didion, Dreiser, John Gregory Dunne, Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Daniel Fuchs, Ben Hecht, Sidney Howard, George S. Kaufman, Jeremy Larner, Charles MacArthur, Thomas McGuane, David Mamet, Odets, Dorothy Parker, S.J. Perelman, Robert Sherwood, Phil Stong, and Nathanael West. In the post‐World War II era of vigorous anticommunism a group labeled the Hollywood Ten (including the writers Alvah Bessie, Ring Lardner, Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, and Dalton Trumbo) were indicted for refusing to testify before the Congressional Committee on Un‐American Activities and as a result were blacklisted by film studios for a long time.

Hollywood 1 Community within the city of Los Angeles, S Calif., on the slopes of the Santa Monica Mts.; inc. 1903, consolidated with Los Angeles 1910. Most major film and television studios and their executive offices, once located in Hollywood, have moved to nearby areas and suburbs. Although many films are shot on location in cities and countries throughout the world, Hollywood remains the symbolic center of the U.S. motion-picture industry. Since the first film was made there c.1911, the community has come to signify the film industry in general—its morals, manners, and characteristics. Hollywood attracts large numbers of tourists. Points of interest include Hollywood Blvd., Sunset Strip, Mann's (formerly Grauman's) Chinese Theatre, and the Kodak Theater (site of the Academy Awards). In surrounding hills are the Hollywood Bowl, Griffith Park (with an observatory and planetarium), and the homes of film celebrities. The iconic Hollywood sign overlooking the community was originally (1923) an advertisement for the Hollywoodland real estate firm but had it last four letters removed in 1949; it was redone in 1978. The Univ. of Judaism is in Hollywood.

2 City (1990 pop. 121,697), Broward co., SE Fla., on the Atlantic Ocean; inc. 1925. A popular retirement center and part of the Miami-Ft. Lauderdale metropolitan and resort area, Hollywood produces electronic equipment and building materials. Most of Port Everglades, the county's largest port with an extensive warehouse complex, is within the city limits. Gulf Stream Park racetrack and a U.S. navy ordnance laboratory are nearby.

Hollywood, Ireland, USA 1. USA (California): the first serious development was begun in 1887 by Horace Wilcox and his wife, who named it after a friend's home in Chicago. This probably meant simply ‘Holly Wood’.2. USA (Florida): laid out in 1921 and named after the district in California.

Hollywood Suburb of Los Angeles, California, USA. After 1911 it became the primary centre for film-making in the USA, and by the 1930s its studios dominated world cinema. From the 1950s, television became increasingly important.

Hollywood a district of Los Angeles, the principal centre of the American film industry; the American film industry and the lifestyles of the people associated with it.

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