By DOUG SAUNDERS Saturday, November 23, 2002 – Page F3

LOS ANGELES -- Here among the German cars and the Vietnamese bubble-drink shops of Sunset Boulevard, it's always easy to believe that you're in some country other than the United States.

But now it feels literally true -- as the election shock recedes and war approaches, I've noticed Hollywood's isolationism taking on a harder edge.

At gatherings of screenwriters and producers and directors, I hear the kind of casual anti-American remarks that would be commonplace in Paris or Toronto. People talk about Washington like it was an occupying army. These tropes weren't a big part of the rhetoric before, especially in the months after last September, but now they're everywhere.

Kevin Spacey's much-reprinted words against an Iraq war are received in this community not with the kind of eye-rolling dismissal that actors' rants usually get, but as a welcome statement of something everyone had wanted to say. Peter Bart, the patrician editor of the trade newspaper Variety, says Hollywood's ideological isolation from Washington, with a couple of individual exceptions (arch-conservatives Harrison Ford and Arnold Schwarzenegger, for instance), is almost total.

Mr. Bart says it is all his mogul friends want to talk about, and it accounts for most of the e-mail he receives. America's cultural centre has no understanding of its political centre; they speak entirely different languages.

So it's worth asking whether Hollywood is even part of the United States any more.

Through force of habit, we still call its songs and movies and shows "American." When Will Smith's inscrutable smirk towers above the marquees of Kuala Lumpur and Mexico City and Montreal, we talk of the Americanization of culture. But is it American at all?

Once upon a time, you could safely assume that Hollywood was producing American culture. The rest of the world certainly did. Modern Islamic extremism saw its moment of birth, according to almost every history of the subject, in 1952, when an Egyptian writer named Sayid Qtub was studying in Greeley, Mont. He was attending a church dance when the pastor dimmed the lights and put on the jazzy seduction number Baby, It's Cold Outside,a tune that had become a hit in the MGM film Neptune's Daughter.

"The room became a confusion of feet and legs: arms twisted around hips; lips met lips; chests pressed together," Mr. Qtub famously wrote. He hated it, and vowed to devote his life to Islamic fundamentalism. He was almost single-handedly responsible, according to most historians, for the ideology behind both Hezbollah and al-Qaeda. He probably was listening to the Johnny Mercer-Margaret Whiting version; if he had stuck around a couple years to hear the racier Louis Armstrong-Ella Fitzgerald version, the jihad might have begun much earlier.

Today, most people in the world are able to distinguish between America and Hollywood. John Zogby's comprehensive opinion survey of citizens of Arab nations this year showed that even people with rabidly anti-American views are able to embrace Hollywood's output. The 6,500 people interviewed were almost universally unhappy with U.S. foreign policy, and almost universally happy with movies, music and sports -- more so than Europeans. Most of them don't see it as American.

This may be because Hollywood increasingly doesn't see itself as American. For one thing, it's hardly an American industry any more. The studios are owned by the French, the Germans and the Japanese; the record labels by a complex web of international powers. The people who work here are drawn from around the world.

I was given another argument when I dropped in on Martin Kaplan, the Cambridge-educated player who spent 12 years running Disney and another four making up policy for the Jimmy Carter administration. Now, he's quite fittingly the head of the Norman Lear Center, a sort of think tank for Hollywood liberals.

"Over the last few years, the focus of the entertainment industry has moved away from the United States, as it's become increasingly globalized," he said. "I don't think it's been important to be attuned to the United States for a while."

As a result, Mr. Kaplan said, the TV networks have stopped making comedies because they don't sell well overseas, and the movie studios are making action films whose villains are ethnically neutral. Just as important, the studios no longer need to make their profits from the American heartland. As the Arab youths know, this stuff isn't America. It's just Hollywood.

Unfortunately, much of our popular understanding of the world is still built around the notion of a Hollywood and a Washington that are inextricably linked, like Kremlin and Pravda. Things are much more subtle and varied, but we don't tend to notice. The current bestseller Why Do People Hate America? -- a question to which its British authors provide the tautological answer: Because it's detestable -- offers a typical summation: "American-led globalization uses pop music, television and style products to transform the identity of young people in the developing world into a commodity."

Does it? Those young people in the developing world, who seem to have forged some very non-homogenous, non-American identities while watching Jean-Claude Van Damme movies, would probably argue otherwise.

And so would those old guys in Washington, who have never liked the liberal messages that permeate the films and TV shows and pop songs coming out of this strange neighbourhood. Whatever they're doing here, nobody's happy with it: too left for Washington, too right for Britain and France, just right for Amman. It's not foreign, it's not American. It's just Hollywood.

By DOUG SAUNDERS Saturday, November 23, 2002 – Page F3

LOS ANGELES -- Here among the German cars and the Vietnamese bubble-drink shops of Sunset Boulevard, it's always easy to believe that you're in some country other than the United States.

But now it feels literally true -- as the election shock recedes and war approaches, I've noticed Hollywood's isolationism taking on a harder edge.

At gatherings of screenwriters and producers and directors, I hear the kind of casual anti-American remarks that would be commonplace in Paris or Toronto. People talk about Washington like it was an occupying army. These tropes weren't a big part of the rhetoric before, especially in the months after last September, but now they're everywhere.

Kevin Spacey's much-reprinted words against an Iraq war are received in this community not with the kind of eye-rolling dismissal that actors' rants usually get, but as a welcome statement of something everyone had wanted to say. Peter Bart, the patrician editor of the trade newspaper Variety, says Hollywood's ideological isolation from Washington, with a couple of individual exceptions (arch-conservatives Harrison Ford and Arnold Schwarzenegger, for instance), is almost total.

Mr. Bart says it is all his mogul friends want to talk about, and it accounts for most of the e-mail he receives. America's cultural centre has no understanding of its political centre; they speak entirely different languages.

So it's worth asking whether Hollywood is even part of the United States any more.

Through force of habit, we still call its songs and movies and shows "American." When Will Smith's inscrutable smirk towers above the marquees of Kuala Lumpur and Mexico City and Montreal, we talk of the Americanization of culture. But is it American at all?

Once upon a time, you could safely assume that Hollywood was producing American culture. The rest of the world certainly did. Modern Islamic extremism saw its moment of birth, according to almost every history of the subject, in 1952, when an Egyptian writer named Sayid Qtub was studying in Greeley, Mont. He was attending a church dance when the pastor dimmed the lights and put on the jazzy seduction number Baby, It's Cold Outside,a tune that had become a hit in the MGM film Neptune's Daughter.

"The room became a confusion of feet and legs: arms twisted around hips; lips met lips; chests pressed together," Mr. Qtub famously wrote. He hated it, and vowed to devote his life to Islamic fundamentalism. He was almost single-handedly responsible, according to most historians, for the ideology behind both Hezbollah and al-Qaeda. He probably was listening to the Johnny Mercer-Margaret Whiting version; if he had stuck around a couple years to hear the racier Louis Armstrong-Ella Fitzgerald version, the jihad might have begun much earlier.

Today, most people in the world are able to distinguish between America and Hollywood. John Zogby's comprehensive opinion survey of citizens of Arab nations this year showed that even people with rabidly anti-American views are able to embrace Hollywood's output. The 6,500 people interviewed were almost universally unhappy with U.S. foreign policy, and almost universally happy with movies, music and sports -- more so than Europeans. Most of them don't see it as American.

This may be because Hollywood increasingly doesn't see itself as American. For one thing, it's hardly an American industry any more. The studios are owned by the French, the Germans and the Japanese; the record labels by a complex web of international powers. The people who work here are drawn from around the world.

I was given another argument when I dropped in on Martin Kaplan, the Cambridge-educated player who spent 12 years running Disney and another four making up policy for the Jimmy Carter administration. Now, he's quite fittingly the head of the Norman Lear Center, a sort of think tank for Hollywood liberals.

"Over the last few years, the focus of the entertainment industry has moved away from the United States, as it's become increasingly globalized," he said. "I don't think it's been important to be attuned to the United States for a while."

As a result, Mr. Kaplan said, the TV networks have stopped making comedies because they don't sell well overseas, and the movie studios are making action films whose villains are ethnically neutral. Just as important, the studios no longer need to make their profits from the American heartland. As the Arab youths know, this stuff isn't America. It's just Hollywood.

Unfortunately, much of our popular understanding of the world is still built around the notion of a Hollywood and a Washington that are inextricably linked, like Kremlin and Pravda. Things are much more subtle and varied, but we don't tend to notice. The current bestseller Why Do People Hate America? -- a question to which its British authors provide the tautological answer: Because it's detestable -- offers a typical summation: "American-led globalization uses pop music, television and style products to transform the identity of young people in the developing world into a commodity."

Does it? Those young people in the developing world, who seem to have forged some very non-homogenous, non-American identities while watching Jean-Claude Van Damme movies, would probably argue otherwise.

And so would those old guys in Washington, who have never liked the liberal messages that permeate the films and TV shows and pop songs coming out of this strange neighbourhood. Whatever they're doing here, nobody's happy with it: too left for Washington, too right for Britain and France, just right for Amman. It's not foreign, it's not American. It's just Hollywood.

-- Anonymous, November 24, 2002