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EDITORIAL IThe Current State of Studio Political FIlms sn’t it curious that this fraught political era in America hasn’t produced another film with the cautionary potency of such Hollywood classics as All the King’s Men (1949), A Face in the Crowd (1957), Seven Days in May (1964), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), or Bob Roberts (1992)? Where are the metaphorical stand-ins for Donald Trump, that charlatan Lonesome Rhodes made frighteningly real today? Understandably, still recovering from the box office slump during the pandemic and two lengthy strikes by the actors’ and writers’ unions, the major studios had become increasingly wary of alienating any potential customers in a polarized nation before the November election. Even though Trump’s litigious nature has become routine, his vows of retribution can still elicit fear in corporate boardrooms. A case in point is the fate of The Apprentice, director Ali Abbasi and screenwriter Gabriel Sherman’s dramatization of the young Trump’s tutelage by the notoriously ruthless New York lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn. The film would seem as timely as they come, but—under threat of a cease-anddesist order from Trump’s attorney—no studio or major independent would touch it for U.S. distribution following its Cannes Film Festival premiere in May, where the film received largely positive reviews and secured many foreign distribution deals. After a months-long struggle to find a willing American distributor, Briarcliff Entertainment, an independent distribution company that had previously released several political documentaries, acquired The Apprentice and released it on October 11, less than a month before the November election. Case in point number two is the timidity of one of the summer’s blockbusters, Warner Bros./Universal Pictures’ Twisters. This sequel to the 1996 hit Twister literally doubles down on the original’s depiction of destructive tornados in Oklahoma and the daredevil scientists who chase them. Since the first film’s release, the number of stubborn climate-change deniers has shrunk dramatically as scientific evidence of the climate crisis has increased exponentially. Despite the sequel’s elaborate explanations of the science of tornado research, the root cause—the manmade causes of climate change—is never once referenced. Director Lee Isaac Chung says he took pains to avoid “preaching a message.” No doubt the studio was in full agreement not to offend those Red State holdouts who nevertheless pay a terrible price for their denialism. If climate change remains problematic as a studio-movie topic, what hope is there for a big production addressing other controversial issues? One would think the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon of summer 2023 might have inspired more social commentary in Hollywood. But those two blockbusters are apparently the exception that proves the rule. Barbie was so enthusiastically embraced by the female audience that most critics of its facile feminist message would look as foolish as the male Mattel executives depicted in the movie. The brainier and more nuanced Oppenheimer was also on safe ground, since only the most extreme military hawks would argue for more nuclear weapons. The New Republic’s summer 2023 list of the “100 Most Significant Political Films of All Time” includes only five studio films from the twenty-first century: Syriana (2005), Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Lincoln (2012), Selma (2014), and (with a caveat about its depiction of the Iraq War) American Sniper (2014). The past decade has seen a few films that deal with our racial legacy—and are therefore unlikely to be screened in any Florida classroom—Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman (2018), that same year’s more ingratiating Oscar rival, Green Book, as well as Harriet (2019) (about abolitionist Harriet Tubman), and Judas and the Black Messiah (2021), about the murder of Black Panther Fred Hampton) Arguably the most provocative recent studio movie about race, Jordan Peele’s Oscar-winning Get Out (2017) embedded its message in a highly entertaining sci-fi/horror package. Peele, in the tradition of John Carpenter, has become a popular brand by blending genre with sociopolitical messages—perhaps the only strategy guaranteed to get a studio green light. Ominously, this April brought the news of the shuttering of Participant, the co-producer or co-financier of films devoted to social justice—a company behind many of the highprofile politically oriented features of the past two decades. Meanwhile, Hollywood has taken note of the box-office success of 2023’s Sound of Freedom, a QAnon-conspiracy-theory-inspired drama about the fight against Colombian child–sex traffickers whose reallife protagonist Tim Ballard and actor (erstwhile Passion of the Christ star) Jim Caviezel are both proud QAnon supporters. For moviegoers of a certain age, this state of affairs makes us nostalgic for what is considered one of cinema’s great decades, the 1970s, when the Hollywood studio system was in chaos and a new generation of directors and producers filled the void with political dramas such as The Candidate (1972) and All the President’s Men (1976) and Watergate-inspired paranoid thrillers like The Parallax View (1974) and Three Days of the Condor (1975). That decade led to 1981’s Reds, Warren Beatty’s 195-minute Oscar-winning epic about radical journalist John Reed. Who would finance that gamble today? In a recent CBS News segment, author and Columbia University professor Annette Insdorf noted, “The relationship between Hollywood and Washington is not a static one. It swings back and forth.” Will the pendulum swing back? Now, with the shocking re-election of Trump to the White House, that likelihood seems remote, with dark days ahead not only for socially concerned filmmakers but also for the survival of American democracy.—The Editors Founder and Editor-in-Chief GARY CROWDUS Editorial Board ROBERT CASHILL KEVIN LALLY Contributing Editors ROY GRUNDMANN CYNTHIA LUCIA RICHARD PORTON LEONARD QUART DENNIS WEST Assistant Editors JANET C. BURKE WILL DiGRAVIO DIANA DRUMM CYNTHIA ROWELL Associates PAUL CRONIN THOMAS DOHERTY JEAN-MICHEL FRODON GRAHAM FULLER JOHN HILL STUART LIEBMAN ADRIAN MARTIN LOUIS MENASHE IMOGEN SARA SMITH DEBORAH YOUNG Contributing Writers Adam Bingham, Mary F. Corey, Megan Feeney, Robert Koehler, Jonathan Kirshner, Jonathan Murray, Darragh O’Donoghue, Catherine Russell, Michael Sandlin, Christopher Sharrett, Michael Sicinski, David Sterritt Production Assistance KEVIN GAOR Web Director JESSICA Y LEE Technology Consultant VI CONCEPTS, INC. Advertising Information TELEPHONE (212) 209-3856 EMAIL cineaste@cineaste.com Manufactured and Printed in the United States of America Cineaste (ISSN 0009-7004) is published quarterly at 733 Third Avenue, 16th Floor, New York, NY, 10017, phone (212) 209-3856, Website www.cineaste.com, email cineaste@cineaste.com. All articles represent views of their authors and not necessarily those of the editors. Copyright © 2024 by Cineaste, Inc. For permission to photocopy material published in Cineaste for business or academic purposes, contact the Copyright Clearance Center, info@copyright.com, www.copyright.com. Cineaste is available in full-text elec tronic format, on a subscription or individual article download basis, from several vendors, including ProQuest, JSTOR, EBSCO, Flipster and Exact Editions (see Digital Editions on our Website). This issue pub lished in December 2024. Cineaste is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation. CINEASTE, Winter 2024 1

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EDITORIAL

IThe Current State of Studio Political FIlms sn’t it curious that this fraught political era in America hasn’t produced another film with the cautionary potency of such Hollywood classics as All the King’s Men (1949), A Face in the Crowd (1957), Seven Days in May (1964), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), or Bob Roberts (1992)? Where are the metaphorical stand-ins for Donald Trump, that charlatan Lonesome Rhodes made frighteningly real today? Understandably, still recovering from the box office slump during the pandemic and two lengthy strikes by the actors’ and writers’ unions, the major studios had become increasingly wary of alienating any potential customers in a polarized nation before the November election. Even though Trump’s litigious nature has become routine, his vows of retribution can still elicit fear in corporate boardrooms.

A case in point is the fate of The Apprentice, director Ali Abbasi and screenwriter Gabriel Sherman’s dramatization of the young Trump’s tutelage by the notoriously ruthless New York lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn. The film would seem as timely as they come, but—under threat of a cease-anddesist order from Trump’s attorney—no studio or major independent would touch it for U.S. distribution following its Cannes Film Festival premiere in May, where the film received largely positive reviews and secured many foreign distribution deals. After a months-long struggle to find a willing American distributor, Briarcliff Entertainment, an independent distribution company that had previously released several political documentaries, acquired The Apprentice and released it on October 11, less than a month before the November election.

Case in point number two is the timidity of one of the summer’s blockbusters, Warner Bros./Universal Pictures’ Twisters. This sequel to the 1996 hit Twister literally doubles down on the original’s depiction of destructive tornados in Oklahoma and the daredevil scientists who chase them. Since the first film’s release, the number of stubborn climate-change deniers has shrunk dramatically as scientific evidence of the climate crisis has increased exponentially. Despite the sequel’s elaborate explanations of the science of tornado research, the root cause—the manmade causes of climate change—is never once referenced. Director Lee Isaac Chung says he took pains to avoid “preaching a message.” No doubt the studio was in full agreement not to offend those Red State holdouts who nevertheless pay a terrible price for their denialism. If climate change remains problematic as a studio-movie topic, what hope is there for a big production addressing other controversial issues?

One would think the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon of summer 2023 might have inspired more social commentary in Hollywood. But those two blockbusters are apparently the exception that proves the rule. Barbie was so enthusiastically embraced by the female audience that most critics of its facile feminist message would look as foolish as the male Mattel executives depicted in the movie. The brainier and more nuanced Oppenheimer was also on safe ground, since only the most extreme military hawks would argue for more nuclear weapons.

The New Republic’s summer 2023 list of the “100 Most Significant Political Films of All Time” includes only five studio films from the twenty-first century: Syriana (2005), Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Lincoln (2012), Selma (2014), and (with a caveat about its depiction of the Iraq War) American Sniper (2014). The past decade has seen a few films that deal with our racial legacy—and are therefore unlikely to be screened in any Florida classroom—Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman (2018), that same year’s more ingratiating Oscar rival, Green Book, as well as Harriet (2019) (about abolitionist Harriet Tubman), and Judas and the Black Messiah (2021), about the murder of Black Panther Fred Hampton) Arguably the most provocative recent studio movie about race, Jordan Peele’s Oscar-winning Get Out (2017) embedded its message in a highly entertaining sci-fi/horror package. Peele, in the tradition of John Carpenter, has become a popular brand by blending genre with sociopolitical messages—perhaps the only strategy guaranteed to get a studio green light.

Ominously, this April brought the news of the shuttering of Participant, the co-producer or co-financier of films devoted to social justice—a company behind many of the highprofile politically oriented features of the past two decades. Meanwhile, Hollywood has taken note of the box-office success of 2023’s Sound of Freedom, a QAnon-conspiracy-theory-inspired drama about the fight against Colombian child–sex traffickers whose reallife protagonist Tim Ballard and actor (erstwhile Passion of the Christ star) Jim Caviezel are both proud QAnon supporters.

For moviegoers of a certain age, this state of affairs makes us nostalgic for what is considered one of cinema’s great decades, the 1970s, when the Hollywood studio system was in chaos and a new generation of directors and producers filled the void with political dramas such as The Candidate (1972) and All the President’s Men (1976) and Watergate-inspired paranoid thrillers like The Parallax View (1974) and Three Days of the Condor (1975). That decade led to 1981’s Reds, Warren Beatty’s 195-minute Oscar-winning epic about radical journalist John Reed. Who would finance that gamble today?

In a recent CBS News segment, author and Columbia University professor Annette Insdorf noted, “The relationship between Hollywood and Washington is not a static one. It swings back and forth.” Will the pendulum swing back? Now, with the shocking re-election of Trump to the White House, that likelihood seems remote, with dark days ahead not only for socially concerned filmmakers but also for the survival of American democracy.—The Editors

Founder and Editor-in-Chief

GARY CROWDUS

Editorial Board ROBERT CASHILL

KEVIN LALLY Contributing Editors ROY GRUNDMANN

CYNTHIA LUCIA RICHARD PORTON LEONARD QUART

DENNIS WEST Assistant Editors JANET C. BURKE WILL DiGRAVIO DIANA DRUMM CYNTHIA ROWELL

Associates PAUL CRONIN THOMAS DOHERTY JEAN-MICHEL FRODON

GRAHAM FULLER

JOHN HILL STUART LIEBMAN ADRIAN MARTIN LOUIS MENASHE IMOGEN SARA SMITH

DEBORAH YOUNG Contributing Writers Adam Bingham, Mary F. Corey, Megan Feeney, Robert Koehler, Jonathan Kirshner, Jonathan Murray, Darragh O’Donoghue, Catherine Russell, Michael Sandlin, Christopher Sharrett,

Michael Sicinski, David Sterritt

Production Assistance

KEVIN GAOR Web Director JESSICA Y LEE Technology Consultant

VI CONCEPTS, INC. Advertising Information TELEPHONE (212) 209-3856 EMAIL cineaste@cineaste.com

Manufactured and Printed in the United States of America Cineaste (ISSN 0009-7004) is published quarterly at 733 Third Avenue, 16th Floor, New York, NY, 10017, phone (212) 209-3856, Website www.cineaste.com, email cineaste@cineaste.com. All articles represent views of their authors and not necessarily those of the editors. Copyright © 2024 by Cineaste, Inc. For permission to photocopy material published in Cineaste for business or academic purposes, contact the Copyright Clearance Center, info@copyright.com, www.copyright.com. Cineaste is available in full-text elec tronic format, on a subscription or individual article download basis, from several vendors, including ProQuest, JSTOR, EBSCO, Flipster and Exact Editions (see Digital Editions on our Website). This issue pub lished in December 2024. Cineaste is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation.

CINEASTE, Winter 2024 1

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