Not surprising Hurt Locker has a lock on Academy voters

By P. J. Stratton

Hurt Locker heroes

HOLLYWOOD, CA (Hollywood Today) 3/7/10 — If you’re a history and war film buff, then it’s certainly no secret how much Hollywood loves to crank out movies about war and the heroes who fight them.  In fact, ticket sales for war films have proven to be box office bounty for the movie moguls.

By yanking on heartstrings and patriotism, the movie studios competed with each other since the early 1900′s to see who could have the largest movie grosses.  Heroes and villains battling it out on the big screen with a love interest in the background seems to be the screenwriter’s delight.

Let’s take a stroll down memory lane and see the war movies who won Oscar for Best Picture.

Best Picture of 1986: “Platoon”

Best Picture of 1993: “Schindler’s List”

Best Picture of 1978: “The Deer Hunter”

Best Picture of 1970: “Patton”

Best Picture of 1962: “Lawrence of Arabia”

Best Picture of 1957: “The Bridge on the River Kwai”

Best Picture of 1959: “Ben-Hur”

Best Picture of 1954: “On the Waterfront”

Best Picture of 1953: “From Here to Eternity”

Best Picture of 1946: “The Best Years of Our Lives”

Best Picture of 1939: “Gone with the Wind”

Best Picture of 1929/1930: “All Quiet on the Western Front”

Best Picture of 1927/1928: “Wings”

‘Gone With The Wind’ was a surprise win as it was competing with several other films the major studios had produced.  The film was up against The Wizard of Oz, Dark Victory, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Love Affair, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, Nonotchka, Of Mice and Men, Stagecoach, and Wuthering Heights.  It was a battle of the studios…Warner Brothers, RKO, MGM, United Artists and Columbia.

It had taken Producer David O. Selznick 5 years to bring his Southern classic to the screen.  It tells a story of the Civil War and its aftermath from a white Southern viewpoint. It received ten Academy Awards, (8 competitive, 2 honorary), a record that stood for twenty years.

Every starlet in Hollywood and New York had heard about the casting call for the role of Scarlett.  Vivian Leigh, a British actress, threw her hat in the ring in 1938, but Selznick said no.  Too British sounding.

Leigh followed her future husband Sir Lawrence Olivier to America. Olivier traveled to Hollywood to begin filming ‘Wuthering Heights’ as Heathcliff.  Leigh followed soon after, partly to be with him, but also to pursue her dream of playing Scarlett.  She met David O. Selznick and the screen tests ensued.  Vivian won the coveted role and the rest is movie making history.  Leigh won the Oscar for Best Actress 1939 which upset the other nominees who felt they deserved to win, not an outsider like Leigh.

In 1998, the American Film Institute ranked the film Number 4 on it’s ’100 Greatest Movies’ list.  The movie has made millions of dollars at the box office since 1939.

Surprisingly enough the movies which did great box office, but didn’t win the statuette were ˜The Thin Red Line.’, Saving Private Ryan, Apocalypse Now, Casablanca, Destination Over Tokyo,  A Bridge Too Far, and Full Metal Jacket.

The simple fact about Hollywood:  the good guys win and the villain’s lose.  But screenwriter’s often leave out the established facts about war history they make famous on the big screen when it comes to the ‘close up’.  Many embellishments get thrown in all for the sake of  making the ‘blockbuster’.

Remember, many World War II combat films showed the other side of war and the soldiers who fought them.  Of course, there’s always a love story to keep things cozy while the war is going on.  Bombs can be going off in the background while the hero smooches his love interest.  It’s all in the storytelling.

Platoon is a film written and directed by Oliver Stone and starred Tom Berenger, Willem Dafoe and Charlie Sheen.  It’s the first of Stone’s Vietnam trilogy followed by 1989′s Born on the Fourth of July and 1993′s Heaven and Earth.

Stone wrote the story based upon his experiences as a U.S. Infantryman in Vietnam, as a counter to the vision of the war portrayed in ‘The Green Beret’s starring John Wayne.  British Television voted Platoon the 6^th greatest war film every made.

In 1957, ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’ won 7 Oscars including one for Sir Alec Guinness and also starred William Holden.

The soldiers in the Thin Red Line appear as army pawns easily consumable and replaceable.  Platoon is a film which shows a group of frightened men fighting for survival and counting the days until they can go home.

Apocalypse Now is another interesting take on war and was showed blurred lines between what is right, good and what is expected of soldiers.

Of the many kinds of films that Hollywood produced during World War II to rally the public behind the war effort, perhaps the most distinctive was the combat film. Films like Air Force, Destination Tokyo, Flying Tigers, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo and Wake Island gave viewers on the home front a vicarious sense of participating in the war.

Life and death missions focused on an small group of men struggling behind enemy lines. By focusing on a single isolated group, Hollywood was able to reveal the human meaning of war to individuals that the audience could identify with. Yes, pulling on heartstrings to garner political power is nothing new.

In Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, the story of Jimmy Doolittle’s bombing raid, each man played a critically important role, whether he was a mechanic, a navigator, a bombardier, a pilot. Individualism and cooperation both were necessary, according to these films, to preserve American freedoms.

In the past 40 years, only three war films have won the top Oscar — 1970′s “Patton,”, 1978′s “The Deer Hunter”,  and 1986′s “Platoon.”

“Patton” grossed $306 million, “Platoon” $282.9 million and “The Deer Hunter” $162.6 million. If “The Hurt Locker” wins best picture, it may be the lowest-grossing winner having made $12.7 million in the U.S. so far.

Why are war films largely overlooked at Oscar night? George C. Scott’s Patton really captured the relentless, patriotic spirit of yesteryear. Platoon and Deerhunter seemed to have captured hearts and minds with their intimate portrayals of innocence lost.

Regardless of your movie preferences, you can count on the Hollywood movies studios cranking out tearjerkers with a political twist and thrown in with sometimes a comic yarn.  You can bet one thing, the movie studio moguls don’t like the ‘independent’ movie makers encroaching on their historical territory and showing them up.

In 1911, the Nestor Company opened Hollywood’s first film studio in an old tavern on the corner of Sunset and Gower.  Not long thereafter Cecil B. DeMille and D.W. Griffith began making movies in the area drawn to the community for its open space and moderate climate.

Although “movie mogul”and “film mogul” are now loosely applied to just about anyone who has made more than two or three movies, from the late 1920s to the late 1940s it was usually limited to the most powerful producers. These included the heads of the “Big 5″ studios (MGM, Warner Bros., Paramount, RKO, and 20th Century Fox), the heads of the “Little Three” studios (Universal, Columbia, and United Artists), and two most important independent producers, Samuel Goldwyn and David O. Selznick.

But, throughout much of the 1930s and 1940s, it was the leaders of the “Big Five” studios who were in possession of absolute power and financial resources necessary to make them unquestioned rulers of their movie empires.  The most legendary of these moguls were Louis B. Mayer at MGM, Jack Warner at Warner Bros., Adolph Zukor at Paramount, and Darryl F. Zanuck at 20th Century Fox.

These men were paternalistic autocrats who exercised complete control over careers and even lives of the people who worked in their studios, especially the stars. They also professed to have the intuitive insight to know what stories and personalities the public wanted to see.

These, and a few others, were the flawed geniuses who presided over what we’ve come to know as Hollywood’s “Golden Age”. While they might not have been the first or the last, these were without doubt the most prominent, influential and, perhaps, even the greatest of Hollywood’s “movie moguls”!

Since the demise of the big studios , there’s a different game and different players in Hollywoodland, but it’s still all about the money trail.  The blockbuster grosses mean more than the subject matter.

However, if ‘The Hurt Locker’ wins the Best Picture Oscar tomorrow night, it will be the first war film to earn the Academy’s top honor in 25 years.  Let the upset begin!