Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust is one of those films that started in one place and ended up in another. When my colleagues Ellin Baumel, Susan Kim and I set out to make a film about Hollywood and the Holocaust, at the behest of AMC, we were stymied as to how to approach the subject in a way that would not seem to trivialize it. This was in the fall of 2001, just after Sept. 11, and we felt it would be a timely and valid to look at how an artistic community responded to an earlier atrocity.
As we started our research, we were immediately struck by footage of a 1945 trip taken by thirteen Hollywood moguls to the newly liberated concentration camps at the invitation of General Eisenhower. They toured the camps with the express purpose of bearing witness and educating the world through their films. But this didn't happen. The trip was followed by decades of silence from the studios.
We wondered, could we do a documentary about the silence, about why Hollywood chose not to make Holocaust films? Should there even be an expectation that Hollywood make films about any particular subject? Moreover, was it even appropriate for filmmakers to attempt a fictional film on the subject?
As the son of a refugee from Hitler's Germany, and the great-grandson of a victim of the Holocaust, it had been my core belief that any effort to shed light on those events, even if fictionalized, was worthwhile. But as I discovered, the issue of representing the Holocaust in any art, let alone Hollywood movies, was at the center of an emotionally charged and polarizing debate that has persisted for half a century. There were many times during our production when we felt that the film was undoable, that we would in essence be guilty of celebrating the very thing we were questioning-the trivializing effect of Hollywood.
After much debate, research, and the invaluable assistance of scholars Michael Berenbaum, Annette Insdorf, Neal Gabler and Thane Rosenbaum, we settled on a narrative that had as its focus the relationship of American culture to the Holocaust, and the evolution of that relationship as seen through film. The contradictions and ironies were fascinating. The story begins well before WWII and is intertwined with Hollywood money, Hollywood moguls and, the movies themselves. Ultimately, it was this broader view of the place of the Holocaust in our society that allowed us the distance to explore a little-known chapter in pre-WWII American history, and to consider the issues of filmmaker responsibility that are central to any discussion of the Holocaust on film.
HOLLYWOOD AND THE HOLOCAUST
A feature documentary film for broadcast on AMC
Introduction
On June 17, 1945, a group of American businessmen stepped off a small plane onto a tarmac in Germany. The war in Europe had been over for a little more than a month, and these 25 men, dressed in military attire, were clearly out of their element. Among them were the leaders of the major Hollywood studios including Warner Brothers, RKO, Columbia Pictures, Paramount, and Universal. Together they held the reins of the most powerful media operation in the world. They had been invited on this journey by the State Department, and would soon be taken to Buchenwald, Dachau, and other war-torn sites. For men who were professional purveyors of the imagination, they were about to witness the unimaginable.
Framed by the remarkable journey of these men, Hollywood and the Holocaust will cover the full range of Hollywood's extraordinary response to the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust. The film will travel back in time to look at the ambivalence of the 1930's as Hitler rose to power and most of Hollywood's Jewish moguls turned a blind eye. The film will also portray the engagement of the war years and then the decades of seeming denial that followed. Finally in the last act, when those most deeply affected by the events - the survivors themselves - began to speak, Hollywood's artistic community responded in profound ways.
In four acts, the film will reveal that Hollywood as a community reacted in very human terms to very tragic events.
There was humor mixed with outrage, confusion and ambivalence coupled with denial and doubt. This complex tapestry of emotional response will be revealed most potently through clips carefully selected from extraordinary -- and in some cases rarely-seen -- films, and from the stories of Hollywood's creative community told by those who lived it.
As Hollywood and the Holocaust ends, we go back to that trip in 1945, as the studio executives arrive in Auschwitz. There in Technicolor, shot by cameramen that accompanied them, are the filmed images that Hollywood could never duplicate. These images close the film as a wordless coda. This footage of the camps themselves will be saved for last, to drive home the point that Hollywood's task in representing these horrible events was a monumental one, perhaps one that ultimately is unachievable.
STYLE
Hollywood & the Holocaust covers an extended period of time - more than 60 years - but will do so through a relatively small number of films produced in that period. The film's driving force is not a historical chronology, but rather a progression of responses. There will be four acts: I. Ambivalence: 1933-1941 II. Engagement: 1941-1945 III. Denial and Metaphor: 1945-1978 and IV. The Survivors Speak: 1978-2001. The film covers a difficult and an obviously somber subject, but we intend tell our story in a compelling, engaging way.
There are two categories of people who will be interviewed:
1. VOICES OF HOLLYWOOD TODAY: Very present in this look back on the Hollywood of yesterday, will be the faces of the Hollywood of today - Steven Spielberg, Meryl Streep, Susan Sarandon, Richard Dreyfus, Harvey Weinstein of Miramax, Tom Hanks, Robin Williams, Mel Brooks. No one will be asked to speak to something about which they can't speak with authority. But some of today's leading directors and actors can talk very poignantly about their responsibilities in the portrayal of difficult issues on film and also about the struggles between creating meaningful "art" and the reality of the box office. And of course several of those named above have worked on Holocaust-themed movies and can speak from the heart about those experiences.
2. FAMILIAR FACES: The films to be featured offer a startling array of performances from some of Hollywood's greatest stars, including some of the earliest work of Humphrey Bogart, Spencer Tracy, Montgomery Clift, Jimmy Stewart, James Mason, Jessica Tandy, and Hume Cronyn.
3. WITNESSES - Several key players in the story of Hollywood and its response to Nazism and the Holocaust are still living and will give a very real sense of the frustration, anxiety, and fear that those making the films often faced. These include cartoonist Chuck Jones, Harry and Jack Warner's daughters, relatives of Carl Laemmle, Jill Robinson, a writer and the daughter of MGM head Dory Schary. Many actors still living can talk about their roles in some of the earliest films, including Dean Stockwell, Rod Steiger, Shelly Winters and others. Hollywood legends, like Lauren Bacall, can speak to Hollywood during the war years. Writer Elia Kazan, Sidney Lumet and others tell the story of the post-war years. The son of William Wyler and possibly Billy Wilder himself can talk about the directors who were engaged to shoot documentary film evidence of wartime atrocities. George Steven's Jr., who was the associate producer for his father's film The Diary of Anne Frank, will tell us not only about the struggle to bring that story to the screen, but also his father's journey to Dachau and the footage he shot there. Abby Mann, writer of Judgement at Nuremberg tells about the difficulty of making the film first for television and then again as a feature film. Meryl Streep, James Woods, and many others can speak about the NBC miniseries Holocaust. Lastly, Steven Spielberg and producer Branko Lustig will describe the issues surrounding the making of Schindler's List.
REVEALING HISTORY THROUGH FILM
Hollywood and the Holocaust will include the handful of important, better-known movies that directly address themes of the Holocaust including Schindler's List, Sophie's Choice, Diary of Anne Frank, and Judgement at Nuremberg. But our film will also feature little known early films like The Black Legion, Confessions of a Nazi Spy, Mortal Storm, Hitler's Children, The Master Race, The Search, and Crossfire. While these films sometimes have indirect reference to Nazism and the Holocaust, they are clear and obvious efforts to respond to what was happening.
Some of these early attempts to portray the threat of Hitler and Nazism show in stark terms a dangerous naivete and an obvious avoidance of Jewish themes. For example, in a scene from the early, critically acclaimed film, The Black Legion, a young Humphrey Bogart joins what is unmistakably an anti-Semitic neo-nazi underground group, yet the crucial Jewish character who sets the plot in motion is never referred to as Jewish, but only as a foreigner with a brief mention of the size of his nose.
The stories behind the films are revealing as well as fascinating. When The Black Legion opened in 1937, for example, it was widely picketed. The film itself reflects the efforts of a few in Hollywood to speak out, but the reception the film received reflects the larger reality that most Americans were isolationists and did not support the war before the attack on Pearl harbor. Likewise, when Confessions of a Nazi Spy opened, theaters were burned down and filmmaker's lives were threatened. Incredibly, movies critical of the Nazis in those early years faced pressure from our own national political figures in ways that were sometimes blatantly anti-Semitic such as the radio broadcasts of Father Coughlin or the speeches of Charles Lindbergh.
Other examples of the fear and anxiety surrounding the making of Holocaust films are more trivial, but no less telling. Writer Abby Mann, in talking about the battle to get Judgement at Nuremberg to the screen, will reveal that when it first aired on television, the broadcast was delayed by the network for one second so that they could bleep out the word "gas" in "gas chamber," so as not to offend the program's sponsor, The American Gas Association.
There are also a surprising number of comedies or attempts at humor among Holocaust films. The very first anti-Nazi efforts were the Warner Brothers cartoons parodying Hitler. A few years later, Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator was one of very few early films to refer directly to Hitler and the threat to Europe's Jewish community. That film includes quite a bit of drama, but its political points are most powerful in the moments of slapstick humor.
It is the use of such moments that will propel the narrative of Hollywood and the Holocaust. While historical documentaries about Hollywood always utilize film clips, this is a rare instance where the clips themselves can reveal more than a narrator or interviewee ever could. Clips will not be promotional trailers but carefully chosen relevant passages from each film. Much like the acclaimed Academy Award-winning The Celluloid Closet, our audience will be able to see and understand for themselves how the context of a moment in history shaped the visuals of a scene or the language of a screenplay.
PRODUCTION VALUE, COHERENCY, DRAMA
The film will have high production value, with a polished feel. Interviews will be shot on digibeta with a film look, and the film will have a through-composed original score that will help tie together the film's themes.
Hollywood and the Holocaust will utilize an abundance of archival footage, some from the National Archives' extensive collection of public domain material, and others from private collections or archives. Where possible the footage itself will tell the story, to avoid redundancy in the narration -- For example, we will excerpt footage of Harry Warner's speech where he implores his colleagues not to ignore Nazism. We will also utilize the rarely-seen footage of the moguls' trip to the camps, and the powerful Technicolor images of the camps themselves shot by director George Stevens.
The film will also appeal to a certain audience because of the inclusion of little-known stories of some well-known figures. Carl Laemmle and some of the other Moguls did in fact make an effort to rescue family and friends from abroad as the threat to the Jewish community in Europe became evident in the late 30's. The director of Giant and A Place in the Sun, George Stevens, was among the first to enter Dachau even before medical examiners, to document the scene on film for the Allies. Even Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder worked to create documentary films out of the footage shot of the liberation of the concentration camps.
Ultimately, the film will be compelling to today's audience because of the hard questions that resonate in our post-Sept. 11th world - How should Hollywood respond to tragic events? Should Hollywood take on the role of social activism? What is Hollywood's responsibility with regard to history and are they rightly or wrongly the preservers of the historical record? Hollywood and the Holocaust will be especially relevant as we better seek to understand the challenges faced by artists and their communities to process such tragic events responsibly, artistically, and humanely.
HOLLYWOOD AND THE HOLOCAUST
Treatment for 45 minute film (1 hour broadcast on AMC)
Prologue - 3:00
The film starts with the studio executives' trip to war-torn Europe. Rare archival footage depicts the trip, which was part press junket and part research trip for 25 of Hollywood's most powerful men. The voyage would take three weeks starting in London. After several days of fine dining in some of Europe's best restaurant, they took off for Poland.
The first voices in the film - relatives of those on the trip - describe who these men were. For the most part, they were immigrant Jews, born in the Shtetl who had mostly ignored their roots during their rise to prominence in America. Now they were coming to face the ruins of their former villages and towns and the reality of unimaginable horrors.
Variety reports that "The purpose of the junket is to tour European battlefields and visit concentration camps. Allied officials are hopeful that forthcoming American feature productions will be framed around the material obtained."
Interviews with the voices of Hollywood today (actors, directors, writers, studio heads -- Spielberg, Streep, Dreyfus, Weinstein) tease some themes of the film - What is Hollywood's responsibility with regard to history? Did Hollywood's early leaders realize the power of mass media to shape historical memory? How do creative artists react to crisis?
Act One: Ambivalence (1933-1941): 12:00
Footage: Showgirls form a complex, dancing pyramid in a Busby Berkeley dance number from Golddiggers of 1933... the heroines tearfully embrace in Little Women... Mae West gives a wink in She Done Him Wrong... King Kong clutches Fae Wray atop the Empire State Building.
In 1933, Hollywood was busy entertaining an America steeped in economic depression.
But Hollywood also had a large and profitable international business.
Footage: Al Jolson sings Mammy from The Jazz Singer dubbed in German.
In particular, Hollywood, even with its large community of Jews, relied greatly on Germany, which accounted for a full 10% of the foreign market.
As Hitler took power, Germany almost immediately began censoring imported movies, and demanded that American film offices fire their German-Jewish representatives. Shockingly, many in Hollywood obliged, despite evidence from the beginning that Jews in Germany were in grave danger. When MGM sent Irving Thalberg over to report on the situation, he reported that while "lots of Jews will die... Hitler and Hitlerism will pass, and the Jews will still be there."
This act introduces us via archival stills and footage to some of the studio heads: Carl Laemmle, Adolph Zukor, William Fox, Louis B. Mayer. In particular we focus on the Warner brothers, Harry and Jack. Polar opposites, Jack, the younger, was the fast-talking jokester and party animal. In contrast, Harry took after their religious father. A strict moralist, he loved giving advice. While Jack was a natural for show business, Harry was only drawn in since it was the family business -- only realizing later he could use it to serve his moralistic ends. A brief but finely drawn portrait of the two brothers will be brought to life by those who knew them, including Betty Scheinbaum Warner, Harry's daughter.
Most of the studio executives were Jews from Eastern Europe who loved their new home and its boundless possibilities. In a short bite from an interview with Neal Gabler, author of An Empire of Their Own, we will briefly define the Gabler thesis - the paradox that these immigrant Jews not only reinvented themselves as assimilated Americans, but also defined for the rest of the country what it meant to be American. These men seemed to readily agree to Hitler's terms.
Harry Warner was the exception. In 1933, he immediately pulled his studio's business in Germany, and then made it his mission to educate America about the evils of Nazism:
Footage: In a parody of "March of Time" newsreels, Hitler is depicted as a lederhosen-clad buffoon, chasing a cartoon Jimmy Durante with an axe. (from the 1933 Warner Brothers' cartoon, Bosko's Picture Show)
Warner Brothers' cartoons were the only openly anti-Nazi films to come out of Hollywood for years. To explain why, Act One will convey the mood of ambivalence and isolationism of the times, with footage and speeches from the conservative America First rallies. Act One will also feature anti-war arguments from men as diverse as Joe Breen of the Motion Picture Production Code (PCA), Joseph Kennedy, and Charles Lindbergh. It will depict the anti-Semitism espoused by such popular American Nazi groups as the Silver Shirts, Black Legion, and Bund. And it will show their opponents -- liberals who shared not only anti-fascist fervor, but European immigrant status, with many of the studio executives.
Act One will move quickly through historical context and early on begin to tell the stories of the films themselves. The first will be 1937's Black Legion. Initially rejected by the PCA for its anti-fascist content, the film sparked death threats at the studio, and lawsuits from the Black Legion and the Ku Klux Klan. Despite it all, the film received critical acclaim. But it was Germany who held the position of honor at the Venice Film Festival in 1937.
Archive footage: Josef Goebbels accepts the Best Picture Award.
The personal struggle and loss of writers, directors, actors and even the Hollywood moguls themselves plays no small part in the story. However, despite news from abroad, many felt they could not do anything. This period of real fear will be depicted by those who lived through it. We will also learn of some heroic exceptions, including Carl Laemmle who worked to save more than 250 people from the village where he grew up.
We will hear from Carl Laemmle's relatives, who describe how the mogul helped evacuate his German hometown. Some refugees made it to Hollywood, and found help there. The act will feature interviews with those who recall men like Louis B. Mayer and superagent Paul Kohner deliberately hiring refugees.
In a way, Black Legion was prescient. A year after its release, on the night of November 9th, 1938, "Kristallnacht", gangs of German Nazis systematically attacked Jewish neighborhoods in Germany. Many Jews died; thousands were arrested; and countless others fled to America, where their voices began to join those of other refugees. Newsreels show Germany's annexation of Austria, as it was getting harder and harder to ignore the growing threat to the Jews.
Act One will show anti-Semitism's recognizable influence in the frightening off-screen story of America's first openly anti-Nazi film, Confessions of a Nazi Spy, again a Warner Brothers film. The studio received numerous threats before shooting began, and was forced to maintain tight security during production. Even so, the director received anonymous death threats against himself and his family overseas. The film was publicly denounced by the Bund, and by anti-Semitic radio star, Father Coughlin. The set was closed and had to be guarded, and adjacent lots were shut down. And when the movie opened, there were boycotts of the movie across America. During one riot in Milwaukee, a theater was burned to the ground.
Act One will showcase clips from other memorable anti-Nazi films such as the powerful early Jimmy Stewart film The Mortal Storm, a film that dealt openly with the Nazi slaughter of Jews, yet did not once mention the word "Jew. Most remarkable perhaps is The Great Dictator, groundbreaking in its acknowledgement of the Holocaust as a crime against Jews and the Jewish community. Its humorous treatment revealed in stark ways how humor is Hollywood's rare tool to speak about the unspeakable. The segment also foreshadows later moments in the film's third act, during the period of the 60's, when direct efforts to portray these events were veiled in black humor (i.e. The Producers).
The act will end on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, marking the entrance of the United States into World War II and the abrupt end of the nation's -- and Hollywood's -- ambivalence.
ACT II: Engagement (1941-1945): 8:00
In Act Two, we will show how Hollywood, like the rest of the country, changed dramatically once America became actively engaged in the war. The studios now found they not only had free reign to make anti-Nazi films, they were being actively encouraged by the government to do just that.
At the same time, Act Two will explore the delicate line these wartime filmmakers had to walk. Interviews and film clips will reveal that while Hollywood was indeed encouraged to make crude, even lurid, propaganda movies about the Nazis, it was still not free to explore some of the war's more complex issues, such as anti-Semitism. This went with President Roosevelt's decision to underplay the fact that Jews were indeed being targeted, out of fear that the country wouldn't willingly fight "their" war.
Depicting an era that pre-dated television by years and the Internet by decades, Act Two will also raise questions about the dissemination of information to the public. Using interviews as well as clips from movies such as Hitler's Children, Act Two will show that despite the lack of proof, disturbing rumors about Nazi atrocities were already beginning to make their way across the ocean. Interviews will recreate some of this period's sense of growing dread, as people like Jill Robinson, daughter of Hollywood studio chief Dory Schary tell us: "(There was a) terrible fear that what was happening was really happening and a longing for denialÂ…"
Act Two will also showcase some of the fine anti-Nazi films that managed to come out of Hollywood at this time. 1944's The Seventh Cross is a thrilling and emotional drama, starring Spencer Tracy as the lone survivor of a group break-out of a concentration camp.
Equally as fascinating as these Hollywood films, is the fact that the government had begun to actively enlist Hollywood's best filmmakers -- George Stevens, Frank Capra, John Houston, Billy Wilder and William Wyler -- to cover the war as documentarians. Some rarely seen footage from their efforts will be shown. The irony becomes clearer as Hollywood, eager to show support, was on the front lines of the nation's PR effort.
Act Two nears its end, victory is declared in Europe. We revisit the Hollywood executives as they return from their 1945 trip. Archive footage and interviews reveal that the junket was a fact-finding mission, meant to provide the movie moguls with potential cinematic material. Jack Warner, before the war one of the least engaged and serious of the men, seems sobered by the experience.
Back home, Americans were seeing the events filtered through the lens of newsreel footage. But the film executives had seen the atrocities firsthand. What would they do with this experience in the decades to follow?
ACT III - Denial and Metaphor (1945-1978): 10:00
Act Three begins with the return of the Hollywood executives -- and the rest of the world -- to peacetime. Hollywood immediately stopped making wartime films and returned to business as usual. And other than filing a special report, the executives -- including Jack Warner -- were to never tell anyone what they had seen.
Like victims of post-traumatic stress syndrome, Hollywood, and the rest of America, seemed to be entering a period of shock, disblief... and denial.
Footage: montage of clips and famous faces from the hit movies of 1945: Bob Hope in The Paleface, Liz Taylor in National Velvet, Bing Crosby in Bells of St. Mary, Esther Williams performs a water ballet.
Yet Act Three will reveal that despite this seeming denial of the Holocaust, there was in fact an early post-war movement among some studios to explore previously taboo subjects -- among them, anti-Semitism. As Act Three will show through clips and interviews, films like Gentleman's Agreement and Crossfire, both of which came out in 1947, effectively dealt with different aspects of anti-Semitism, using different genres. Another subject also meriting filmic treatment was the plight of wartime refugees, as demonstrated by clips from 1948's The Search, a film that stands out in its staggering depiction of the effects of the concentration camp, shot against a backdrop of war-torn Berlin. Films like The Search show us that the "denial" was both in Hollywood's hesitance to create films about the Holocaust, but also its hesitance to publicize and distribute powerful films that were made.
After the war, Hollywood would in fact be years away from specifically addressing any of the hard facts of the Holocaust. Act Three will show that there were many reasons for this: Money, the studios didn't feel wartime atrocities made for viable commercial fare; Psychology: the newsreel images had been too shocking for anyone to process immediately; Politics: the United States was trying to help Germans build a new democracy, not to demonize them further.
Furthermore, in 1947 the House on Un-American Activities began its investigation into the motion picture industry, blacklisting many of Hollywood's most socially conscious directors and writers (Paul Jarrico, Edward Dmytryk, and hundreds of others) and severely hobbling their careers. Hollywood was paralyzed by the fear of Reds and Redbaiting among them. As a result, the Holocaust would remain shrouded -- at least in Hollywood -- for nearly a decade.
Act Three will show that the breakthrough Holocaust films came ten years after the war, and far from Hollywood, most notably in the form of a French documentary, 1955's Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog) which remains one of most vivid depictions of the Nazi concentration camps.
Four years later, in 1959, Hollywood was finally ready to begin dealing with Nazism and the Holocaust -- with a moving drama based on a hit play and the actual diary of a young girl. In an interview and through clips, director George Stevens' son, who served on the film as it's assistant director, will tell us behind-the-scenes stories of The Diary of Anne Frank. Several moments of the film prove remarkable - The figure of Anne herself is the beginning in a long line of heroes or heroines whose Jewishness was secondary, allowing an audience to identify with an appealing and non-political Jewish heroine. A scene in which the family celebrates Hanukah in secret, eerily mirrors what in fact Hollywood had been doing for years: hiding their Jewishness.
In 1959, Judgement at Nuremberg would take Hollywood a step further, becoming its first film to show actual images of the Holocaust. We will use footage and interviews to demonstrate that with the passage of time, a new figure was starting to emerge both in society and in Hollywood: the survivor. Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker came out in 1965, and was one of the first films to explore this subject.
Act Three will also show how Hollywood was beginning to take a different look at Hitler and the Holocaust. The Sound of Music (1965), offsets a love story and a Rodgers & Hammerstein "feel good" sensibility with the Nazi invasion of Austria. In 1968, with a nod to Chaplin's The Great Dictator, Mel Brooks uses the unspeakable evil of Nazism as the comic foundation of The Producers. Most fascinating, in this Act Three study of Hollywood denial, is Cabaret of 1972, in which Bob Fosse was able to make a self-referential juxtaposition of Nazism to the self-absorbed world of show business.
And Act Three will end with the most radical Holocaust film to come out of Hollywood. Ironically, it was a TV mini-series. Holocaust aired initially in 1978 -- becoming for hundreds of millions of viewers worldwide a dramatic introduction to the Nazi atrocities. Suddenly it became apparent that perhaps there was an audience for the subject. Never before was there a more salient example of how Hollywood held the key to the preservation of history. For better or worse, for an entire generation, not just in the U.S. but all over the world, an understanding of the Holocaust, an event unparalleled in the 20th century, would be shaped by the images and stories of a fictionalized Hollywood film.
ACT IV - The Survivors Speak (1978-2001): 12:00
Footage: A smitten young American, Stingo (Peter MacNichol) tells camp survivor, Sophie Zawistowska (Meryl Streep) that any child would be lucky to have her as a mother. Her expression shifts, and she says: "I'm going to tell you something. I'm going to tell you something I never told anybody... " (from Sophie's Choice)
By the 1970's it seemed as if the long silence surrounding the Holocaust was finally over. Survivors began to emerge, seemingly from the woodwork, to finally tell their stories.
Act Four will focus on the survivors: not only through their stories, but by their treatment in film.
1982's Sophie's Choice, a critical and popular success, used flashback and detailed re-enactment to dramatize the psychological trauma of a survivor. Based on a fictional book, this was one of the first dramatic major Hollywood movies to present vivid Holocaust images from the perspective of a survivor.
In the late 70's and early 80's a wave of documentary films about the Holocaust made their way into the public consciousness, led by French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann's ground-breaking Shoah. Exceptional in many ways, Shoah was deliberately made without narration or stock footage. Rather, Lanzmann allowed the entire story of the Holocaust to be told through first-hand accounts by his elderly subjects: camp survivors, witnesses, and ex-Nazis. To those who saw them, Shoah and other documentary films were powerful evidence that Holocaust stories were rich fodder for Hollywood films. In an unparalleled track record, almost every documentary that received an Academy Award over the next two decades was based on the Holocaust or it's aftermath.
The end of Act Four will focus on what remains for many one of the definitive films about the Holocaust and Nazism: 1993's Schindler's List. Hollywood and the Holocaust will interview not only director Steven Spielberg, but also key creative personnel to tell the behind-the-scenes story of the making of this film, initially deemed by the industry to be a non-commercial "vanity" project. Spielberg will tell not only of the logistical problems of shooting in black and white, without stars, and on location in Germany -- but of his personal odyssey as a filmmaker and a Jew, dealing with a subject that occurred before he was born.
Steven Spielberg: "The Schindler Jews were meant to survive to tell their stories. Because people didn't make Holocaust movies in Hollywood. They made WesternsÂ…
The film tells a powerful Jewish story through the eyes of a righteous gentile - an audience surrogate. The film represents many of the themes raised in the previous three acts of our film - the responsibility of filmmakers, in particular Jewish filmmakers, with regard to representing the Holocaust; the difficulty of navigating between commercialism and art; and the unique ways Hollywood, and indeed all human beings, deal with profoundly tragic events through ambivalence, denial, metaphor and humor.
Spielberg will tell us the connections he made between Schindler's List and the genocide in Bosnia. This idea, accompanied by relevant excerpts from the film, will hit home a crucial point: Perhaps historical films are as much about the time in which they are made as they are about the time depicted.
Coda
Archival Footage: the 1945 Hollywood executives' being driven in jeeps through bombed-out German towns. They drive past barbed-wire, fences, a sign reading "Auschwitz".
Filmmakers, like all artists, need years, if not a lifetime, in which to process information both intellectually and emotionally in order to create mature work. The path is not always straightforward, and there are often obstacles. The voyage is subject to bravery, curiosity, and above all, perseverance.
Those Hollywood executives set out on their mission of fact-finding and goodwill nearly sixty years ago... and came back silent. It has taken Hollywood that long to begin to unravel some of the humanity and horror of that period of world history. In some sense, the real journey began on their return, with the knowledge of what actually took place.
We are still on that journey.
MOS montage: Technicolor footage from the 1945 trip of the liberation of the death camps.
|
 |
|
