ABSTRACT
The debate over how popular media interact with politics and society is not a new one and takes place in every venue from scholarly publications to talk shows. This chapter discusses the background and attitudes of the new Hollywood elite and how the members of that elite see these attitudes as manifest in their work, focuses on the statements of a number of well-known artists. It describes the statistical study of attitudes among the Hollywood elite, explaining some methods and the results. The authors compare the motion picture elite with other elites sampled as part of a major study of social change in the United States. Among critics who seek to draw connections between Hollywood filmmakers and the movies they make, a number have argued that after a brief flirtation with avant-garde filmmaking in the 1960s, Hollywood began again to uphold mainstream American culture in its movies, a culture that many of these critics find exploitive and immoral.
