Even Better than the Real Thing

"Fourteen years ago, in my book 'Life: The Movie,' I wrote about a growing phenomenon in America in which life itself was being transformed into an entertainment medium, often usurping more traditional entertainment media. I attributed this to many things, perhaps chief of which was the extent to which we had lived so long in a nimbus of constant entertainment, where music, television, novels and especially movies had infiltrated our imaginations, that these became the matrices for our lives and the bars for the heights of our expectations.
"Whether it was a matter of us just becoming too jaded with our mundane reality or too hyped by fictions, we had come to demand more of life. We wanted reality to measure up. Maybe we even wanted reality to challenge the artifices of traditional entertainments—artifices like scripts and stars."

Neal Gabler in the Los Angeles Times explores how people fall for scandalous sports stars.

Valuation v. Value

"One might even say that America has been remade in Hollywood's image, not so much because it emulates movie glamour or behavior or language but because it emulates Hollywood's way of measuring the worth of things and teaches us to place the perception of value over value itself. Hollywood success is the new American paradigm."

 

Neal Gabler in the Los Angeles Times writes that movie studios have pioneered the market society.

"Television's Only Moralist"

"In a sense, then, the title of one of his series, 'Now,' was a misnomer. Moyers has never been about now. He has always been about something beyond the moment. Or put another way, while everyone else in the media has been exploring topography, Moyers has been exploring geology."

Neal Gabler offers an appreciation of Bill Moyers in the Los Angeles Times.

When I See an Elephant Fly

"Under his supervision, the Disney studio was inhospitable to minorities, few of whom were said to have worked there and they were virtually verboten on the screen, except to be ridiculed. Disney's was a white, Protestant, middle-class studio and fantasy. Minorities need not apply.
"How much of this portrait was the product of a smear campaign by Walt's enemies and how much a product of Walt's own unenlightened attitudes is difficult to determine."

Neal Gabler in the Los Angeles Times explores whether Walt Disney was a racist.

"Something Deep in the DNA"

"But there is another rendition of the story of modern conservatism, one that doesn't begin with Goldwater and doesn't celebrate his libertarian orientation. It is a less heroic story, and one that may go a much longer way toward really explaining the Republican Party's past electoral fortunes and its future."

Neal Gabler in the Los Angeles Times argues that the true father of current conservativism is Joseph McCarthy.

The Burning of Los Angeles

"But it is much more difficult to survive a change in consciousness than a change in taste or technology, and that is what the movies face now — a challenge to the basic psychological satisfactions that the movies have traditionally provided.
"Where the movies once supplied plots, there are alternative plots everywhere. Where the movies once supplied community, there is less hunger for it. And though we still love the frisson that stars provide, we like our own frisson too. How the movies cope with these threats will go some way toward determining whether they remain vital or will be usurped."

In the Los Angeles Times, Neal Gabler ponders the future of film.

"The George Washington of Popular Culture"

"Even more to the point, his films have probably been overshadowed by the theme parks, the passion of his later years, in which he and his corporate heirs came as close as anyone could to the odd but lucrative goal of perfecting ersatzness."

Bruce Handy reviews Neal Gabler's Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination in The New York Times.

And Neal Gabler in the Los Angeles Times contrasts Disney's public images.