THIS INTERVIEW WITH THE SHOWRUNNER FOR ANDOR IS PRETTY INTERESTING:
The show is more political than anything Star Wars had done before. The villains are all participants in a dictatorship and the heroes are all independent people who become victims of that dictatorship in various ways. There weren’t a lot of 4th wall breaking clunkers of the kind you see in most politically minded shows these days. They aren’t beating you over the head with the message.
And yet, as I was watching it I kept having the same thought: This is a show about China that thinks it’s a show about America.
So I was interested to read this interview with showrunner Tony Gilroy because NY Times columnist Ross Douthat isn’t shy about a) saying he loved the show and b) framing it as a left-wing show. What’s interesting is that Gilroy seems genuinely not to like this framing, as if admitting his own politics would be a failure of some kind.
In a portion of the interview that John Sexton doesn’t quote at Hot Air, Gilroy rather simplifies the history of Hollywood:
Gilroy: I mean, the bar is higher. Seriously, man. This is a trickier conversation than most of the ones I have to have on this. I listened to the podcast that you did with the — I don’t know the gentleman’s name. The one who’s trying to revive the vibe shift into the ——
Douthat: Jonathan Keeperman.
Gilroy: Right wing. Yeah.
Douthat: Right-wing publisher. Yep.
Gilroy: You could say: Why has Hollywood for the last 100 years been progressive or been liberal? I think it’s much larger. I’ll go further and say: Why does almost all literature, why does almost all art that involves humans trend progressive?
Let’s stick with Hollywood. Making a living as an actor or as a writer or a director — without the higher degree of empathy that you have, the more aware you are of behavior and all kinds of behavior, the better you’re going to be at your job. We feed our families by being in an empathy business. It’s just baked in. You’re trying to pretend to be other people. The whole job is to pretend to be other, and what is it like to look from this? People may be less successful over time at portraying Nazis as humans, and that may be good writing or bad writing, and there may be people that have an ax to grind. But in general, empathy is how I feed my family. And the more finely tuned that is, the better I am at my job.
For the last 50 years, Hollywood has been “Progressive or liberal.” But prior to that, as Neil Gabler wrote in his 1988 book, An Empire of Their Own, the moguls who founded the industry were quite conservative, in their politics, their worldview, and in the product they released. Did the best of their movies have less “empathy” than today’s product? It wasn’t until 1960s as they aged and lost control over the institutions they founded, and the mostly leftist “Easy Riders-Raging Bulls” crowd of New Hollywood took over. In a 2009 interview with the late Andrew Breitbart, Peter Robinson asked, “How did Hollywood go from Republican David Selznick, who produced Gone with the Wind to liberal David Geffin. What happened?”
Andrew Breitbart: Well two things, the studio system ended and now the celebrities are in charge.
Peter: The studio system ended, what bearing did that have on the politics?
Andrew: Well, there were people, actors have always been held in low regard by society and the businessmen who ran the studios cleaned up after their messes around town. I mean that is sort of the LA Confidential movie, you know. That changed in the 1960s to a great extent, but I would attribute a majority of this to the cultural revolution in the late 1960s and at the end part of John Wayne’s career, he no longer had the swagger. He was 60 something years old, the movie were no longer original. They were doing the same hackneyed thing over and over and over and simultaneously you know, there is a youth revolution going on in the country. And while the left was never able to take over the White House while George McGovern was not able to be victorious, Hollywood was taken over by the left and they have never relinquished it. And in fact I would argue that the right has abrogated its place in Hollywood because they were told that you are not wanted here anymore and they never fought for it. So, I don’t know who I have more contempt for, the left for its totalitarian behavior of those that disagree with them or the right the conservative movement just for allowing it to happen and not to fight back.
In his new book, Suddenly Something Clicked: The Languages of Film Editing and Sound Design, Walter Murch, Francis Ford Coppola’s longtime editor and sound designer, recalls running into George Lucas in New York shortly after Star Wars debuted in 1977, and Lucas was stunned by the massive runaway hit he had created:
I reminded him of his pre-Star Wars attempts to get Apocalypse Now off the ground, and that what interested him about that story was that it grappled with the success of the ‘rebel’ Vietnamese against the overwhelming might of the American military empire.
George: ‘Star Wars is Apocalypse Now in a galaxy long ago and far away.”
Me: Ironic that millions of Americans are now cheering for the Rebels to defeat the overwhelming might of the Empire?
It’s difficult to picture old Hollywood greenlighting Apocalypse Now, and it was only by burying that same theme that Lucas was able to get funding for Star Wars.
John Sexton concludes that “At the end of the day, Andor was made for a mostly American audience by Hollywood progressives who think it’s a show about the American right wing in some sense. That’s how I see it, but of course your mileage may vary.”
But then, that was the theme of the original Star Wars, and Lucas began writing the first drafts of his script a half century ago. Maybe it’s time for the “progressives” of Hollywood to find some new ideas about the country they inhabit.
