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The Moguls and the Dictators: Hollywood and the Coming of World War II David Welky. Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins Press, 2008.
This study attempts to explain how Hollywood studio heads and the films they released in the 1930s traveled from ignoring the rise of Hitler and Nazism, Mussolini, and Fascism, and other dictators to support for anti-Fascism, anti-Nazi movie themes and for intervention into World War II on behalf of the Allied cause.
There are four major themes stressed throughout the book. First is a detailed study of the relationship of Hollywood with the federal government and Congress. In the 1920s the film industry established the Movie Picture Producers Production Code Administration under the leadership of a former Republican official, Will Hays, largely to avoid regulation by local, state, and federal governments. Welky says during the 1920s most of the studio owners supported the Republican administrations, but during the New Deal they switched their allegiance to President Roosevelt, mainly for economic reasons. The studio's highest priority was to prevent the federal courts from intervening to separate studio ownership of theaters from production. Immediate success was achieved when the film industry agreed to a consent decree in 1940 to settle the dispute. However, later on, as the author points out, the US Supreme Court in 1948 ruled in US v. Paramount that studios had to separate production from film exhibition.
The second emphasis...