Robert Evans and Daniel Van Kirk expose how Hollywood appeased Nazi Germany in the 1930s, altering films like "Gabriel Over the White House" to promote the "Führer principle" while studios like MGM laundered profits via German armament firms. Despite bans on titles such as "Scarface" and self-censorship of Jewish references, major studios prioritized market access until 1940, when "The Mortal Storm" finally challenged fascism. The episode concludes by questioning if modern Hollywood would similarly silence human rights abuses today due to financial dependence, suggesting a troubling continuity in corporate cowardice. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:04:05
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If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
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Right, it wouldn't be that.
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In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
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Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
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And we're back.
I'm Robert Evans, and this is Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history.
And today, this is the second part of a two-part episode on the Nazis in Hollywood.
My guest today is Daniel Van Kirk, and we are both, a fan suggested Tapatillo Doritos to us.
They're amazing.
We're eating them right now.
Really, really good.
Yeah.
I did not want this in my life, and now I'm never going to be able to get rid of it.
I'm going to take these to parties.
Oh, they're amazing.
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Like, I want to get through the rest of this episode as quickly as possible so I can binge eat the rest of these delicious tapatillo Doritos.
Mouth is wanting more and on fire.
Again, we have not received a cent from the Doritos company.
This is all just free enthusiasm over their products.
So, Daniel, you should probably plug your stuff for the four listeners who aren't going to listen to part one and are going to jump into part two and say, like, fuck part one.
So, that is an approach.
I want to let everybody know that they can listen to me on the Dumb People Tom podcast, which is a show that I host and the Sklar brothers do as well.
And then I have another podcast called Pen Pals.
And that is Rory Scoville and myself reading people's letters.
You send us anything you want.
We write you back audibly.
We say it's your podcast.
We just talk about it.
And then I have a show called Hindsight where I have creators, comedians, producers, directors, writers.
They bring through photos from any chapter of their life, and we just talk about the context of their life when each photo was taken.
Hollywood Appeased Nazis00:14:50
Speaking of context, let's talk about the context of the 1930s.
Now, in the first episode, we talked about how the early German censors basically threatened Hollywood with cutting them off, cutting Germany off from the movies entirely unless they made certain changes to the movies in order to make them more palatable for Germans.
And, you know, this led to Hollywood not attacking the Nazis directly and really not even really mentioning Judaism much.
Yeah, because the Nazis ramped up their control and they ramped up the profitability for Hollywood at the same time.
And it was a gradual thing where they'd ask for one thing and then a little bit later they'd ask for another.
That's how they do it, man.
Yeah.
And we also talked about The House of Rothschild, the movie made to be a rebuke of anti-Semitism that also kind of wound up being a little bit anti-Semitic, too.
Which all credit to Zanuck.
He's the only guy so far who's done the right thing.
Yeah, he could be like, tell me who did it worse than me?
Because I'm the only one at this point in your life.
Yeah, is this better than nothing?
You prefer this to nothing?
Right.
So it's important to note, like, again, one of the big questions here is were the studios collaborating directly with the Nazis or were they just appeasing the Nazis in the same way that everybody was appeasing the Nazis in the 30s?
And in order to sort of answer that question, one of the things that's important to note is that the U.S. has always had and still has a pretty violent fascist movement.
We've been seeing a lot more of that in the last year or so, but it was particularly prominent in the 1930s.
And even in Hollywood, there were a lot of fascist sympathizers.
This was made very evident by the production of a movie called Gabriel Over the White House.
It was probably the first explicitly fascist fictional movie of all time.
The basic premise is that a president suffers a terrible car accident and undergoes a personality change.
He goes in front of Congress, castigates them for wasting America's money, and then demands them to declare a national emergency and vote him absolute power.
While he's chastising Congress for fucking up the country, somebody calls him a dictator and he snaps back, I believe in democracy as Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln believed in democracy.
And if what I plan to do in the name of the people makes me a dictator, then it is a dictator based on Jefferson's definition of democracy, a government for the greatest good of the greatest number.
So none of this is a satire, although some people have tried to say that since this is not presented as a bad thing either.
He's the hero.
Really?
The president who takes dictatorial control of the country to fix its problems is the hero.
But see, it's so crazy because he says that thing where he says, what did he say, Jefferson's definition?
Yeah, yeah, the greatest good for the greatest number of people.
Yeah, but the ending to that, the rebuttal to that is the greatest good for the greatest number of people without their choice.
Yeah, without them having any sort of say in the matter.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That doesn't come up in the movie.
So the film or the movie was based off of a book.
And the book had been written by a British man during a long boat ride who basically wondered to himself.
A British man during a long boat ride.
Yeah, wondered, wouldn't it be great if America became fascist?
That was basically his.
Nope.
Yeah.
I mean, he thought it would be.
No, he'd never ever been to America when he wrote this book.
He's got a lot of horseback.
Never need to go to America to write a book about it.
Yeah.
So he writes this book, and William Randolph Hearst loves it.
And William Randolph Hearst is like, this motherfucker's got to be a movie.
So Hearst is the dude who decides to make this into a movie.
No shit.
The guy who wants to run everything?
Yeah.
Okay.
So Hayes, the chief censor, was also actually the only person who raised any objection to the contents of Gabriel over the White House.
He worried that people might, quote, regard it as a direct indictment of the plurillity and fallibility of today's government machinery and personnel, and that only by a blow in the head of the president and its consequent acts of a deranged man is enough righteousness and wisdom put into the executive branch of the government to lead.
So that's his problem, is that like it's saying, well, you're saying the government's so fucked that the president needs a head injury to be good at being the president.
So Hayes complains and changes are made to the film.
They don't make the film any less fascistic.
Instead, they make it clear to the viewer that rather than being addled in his accent, the president has been taken over by God, who is using him as a conduit to save the nation.
Lines that emphasized his supernatural power were added.
This is one of the people who knows the president of this movie talking about it.
So what if he, what if it wasn't so much about him getting injured, but just spiritually woke in the name of Jesus Christ?
Yeah, what if he's a vessel for God that takes over the country and turns it into a dictatorship?
That's a better idea.
I'm William Hayes, censor.
So here's a line of someone talking about the president in the movie that was added as a result of Hayes' suggestions.
Quote, there's something about him, something new and terribly strange, which deprives you of volition or of any capacity to act and think for yourself.
It is easier to give way than to continue fighting for your ego.
You become content to serve, to serve and wait his pleasure.
Again, this is not portrayed as horrifying.
It's a good thing.
It's good that the president's godly aura has taken over your mind.
Yeah, yeah.
So Gabriel over the White House was unique at the time because it was the first big Hollywood production to actually address the Great Depression.
For the first couple of years of the Depression, Hollywood had avoided commenting on the issues of the day in any of their movies, thinking it would be a bad idea if they were seen as trying to wade into politics or social issues.
I wasn't even thinking about that.
The Depression's going on, too.
And this was the first major studio movie to address the country's economic problems, posits fascism as a solution.
But see, isn't that kind of the vacuum that was also happening in the 1920s in Germany?
Yeah, I mean, yeah.
There's like this vacuum here for like a need of like, pick us up.
Yeah, and it's evidence that the same trends that put Hitler into power could have easily put a fascist into power in the United States.
Because clearly people are thinking along those lines.
Wouldn't it be great if some strong guy could just come along and fix it?
With the answers.
Yeah, it's always a threat.
Germany wasn't the only country that had that current running through it.
So Gabriel over the White House premiered in Berlin in February of 1934.
Obviously, it passed the censors.
The Nazis loved this movie.
Yeah, this is great.
It played for 15 consecutive days in its first run.
Ironically, Hayes' changes actually put the movie more in line with a key Nazi concept, Fuhrer Princip, or the leader principle.
This was sort of the core of Nazism, like one of the core kernels of Nazi ideology is the Führer principle.
It evolved out of the social Darwinist theories of a guy named Hermann Grof Taserling, who felt that certain individuals were, quote, born to rule.
The book Darker Legacies of the Law in Europe cites the work of a guy named Huber who gives a good explanation of the Führer principle.
So I'm going to quote that.
In the Führer, the essential laws of the Volk, which is the people, come into manifestation.
By allowing these essential laws to emerge, he sets up the great common objectives that have to be realized.
The Führer embodies the overall will of the people as an objective historical quantity.
So the idea of the Führer principle is that the will of the people can become manifest in a man, and it's almost a supernatural thing.
And he's chosen by destiny to embody the people's will, which is exactly what Hayes' changes had made it from, like the president gets hurt in the head, and it makes him more decisive to God chooses the president to be the vessel of American people.
From the viewpoint of the people, not only is he of us, he is us.
Yeah, he is us.
We speak through him.
Exactly.
So Hayes had inadvertently made Gabriel over the White House even better Nazi propaganda as a result of his censorship.
Which hopefully was an accident.
Yeah, I think it was an accident.
Yeah, we'll give him a mulligan on that.
Yeah, we'll give him a mulligan on accidentally making Nazi propaganda.
Who hasn't?
You know, we all.
Rothschild accidentally was.
Yep.
So a Nazi newspaper, Der Engrief, which means the attack, led a man named Brandt.
It's so aggressive.
Yeah, it's the Nazis.
The attack and the story.
Like somebody in the writer's room for Nazis should have been a little on the nose.
We're calling ourselves the best.
A little on the nose.
They love that shit.
So a Nazi reviewer reviewed Gabriel over the White House and concluded that the movie was proof that the Fuhrer principle was deeply embedded in the human soul, that German fascism was emblematic of a greater human truth, because even America's democratic traditions hadn't been able to destroy this.
So like the Nazis watch this movie and they're like, oh, the Americans are fascists like us.
They just haven't overthrown their decadent government.
But they feel it too.
But they feel it too.
That's a saying that's in all of us, no matter where you are.
Even if you try to do the opposite, you're going to end up being like, well, you know what feels right though?
Fascism.
Yeah.
Fuck it.
Maybe they're right.
Yeah.
So here's a quote from that German movie reviewer.
At first, the smiling, somewhat complacent parliamentary politician, then the completely transformed figure of a man possessed by a holy fanaticism, one who sees himself as above all party authority, as leader and as patron of the interests of his entire people and all of humanity.
So again, they see this as clearly like, oh, this is just like America being like, what if we had our own Hitler?
Right.
They love it.
So movie president fascist even got to commit a mass murder of his own.
Really?
That's part of the movie.
Gabriel does this shit over the White House?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But because it's the 30s, the people he massacres are gangsters.
They deserve it.
Organized criminals.
Yeah.
Well, he describes these people as.
Like the running man.
Like the running man.
As long as these people are like prisoners in jail, who cares if they watch them.
If they've committed a crime, it's okay to kill anybody.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
The movie president describes these organized criminals as, quote, a malignant, cancerous growth eating at the spiritual health of the American people.
The only way to deal with gangsters is to eliminate them so that our citizen pursuing his peaceful way will no longer be forced to conduct his business in the shadow of extortion and debt.
At one point, again, meant to be a heroic moment, the president gets the head gangster and his men into a court-martial and sentences them all to die.
You're the last of the racketeers, he said.
And why?
Because we have in the White House a man who has enabled us to cut the red tape of legal procedures and get back to first principles.
An eye for an eye, Nick Diamond, who's the head of the gangsters.
A tooth for a tooth, a life for a life.
So president movie fascist sets up a concentration camp on Ellis Island and personally oversees the execution of all the gangsters.
Yeah.
Now, had concentration camps already begun.
Oh, they've been happening for decades and decades.
In Germany?
All over the world.
In Nazi Germany?
In Nazi Germany, it happens as soon as the Nazis are in power.
First, they have what are called like open-air concentration camps.
Yeah.
But they're building camps this whole period of time.
But also, concentration camps had started.
We did a whole episode on this, but they were very well established at this point.
So he lines up all the gangsters because you're corrupt people.
And he's stealing money.
And I'm going to kill you all.
And then the Nazis beasts.
And then the Nazis watch this and go, now bear with me.
What if think gangster?
But let's write J E W. W.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
So the Nazis loved this movie, but high-ranking Nazis like Joseph Goebbels are actually very frustrated by it.
Really?
He liked the movie, but he hated how much better American studios were at making fascist propaganda.
He felt that actual Nazi filmmakers were often absolutely atrocious.
Hitler, for his part, didn't like propaganda entertainment.
Hitler's feeling was that, quote, it makes me sick when I see political propaganda hiding under the guise of art.
Let it be either art or politics.
Give me King Kong or give me a newsreel.
Yeah, don't give me both.
Which is why the most famous Nazi propaganda film is Triumph of the Will, the famous Lenny Riefenstahl movie.
If you've seen clips of German Nazis marching in Hitler's beat, it's probably from Triumph of the Will.
It's like the most famous explicitly propaganda film of all time.
But it was not overwhelmingly popular.
In fact, in Nazi Germany, in the year that Triumph of the Will was released, 1935, in that year, nine American films outperformed it at the box office.
So per last episode, when I said, well, they'll all go see it if it's American film, that's not necessarily true.
No, well, they won't go see a German fascist propaganda movie, but they will all go see American movies that are regarded as being fat because the American movies are entertaining.
Oh, so Gabriel over the White House performed the best?
It performed well.
Oh, I thought you said there was nine movies that performed better.
No, better than Triumph of the Will.
Oh, sorry.
Triumph of the Will actually isn't in the top 10 most popular movies in Germany the year it was released.
Yeah.
It was not because it's great if you want to scare people about how powerful New Germany is.
But nobody watched that movie and got convinced of anything.
Right.
Right?
Gotcha.
Gotcha.
Okay.
So I'm going to read a quote from the collaboration, which is talking about sort of how the Nazis' propaganda movies were not particularly successful in Nazi Germany.
In a sense, the most successful Nazi propaganda film of the 1930s was not Triumph of the Will, commissioned by Hitler, but The Lives of a Bingle Lancer, produced by Paramount.
Now, The Lives of a Bingle Lancer was a very popular movie at the time.
In the United States, it was nominated for seven Academy Awards.
It focused around a unit of British cavalrymen defending their headquarters in Bengal from a local Indian uprising.
Gary Cooper played a leading role.
The bad guy, Muhammad Khan, was probably the first character in history to use the line, we have ways to make men talk, in a torture scene.
So that's where that came.
You've heard different variations of it, but that's where that originated from.
The Nazis loved this movie because it yet again provided a perfect depiction of the Führer principle at work.
The colonel in charge of the British cavalry unit is depicted as infallible.
He's not even willing to negotiate with the enemy when they capture his own son.
One of the colonel's soldiers criticizes him for this and gets harangued by a major who basically outlines Nazi racial theory in a few words.
Man, you are blind.
Have you never thought how for generation after generation here, a handful of men have ordered the lives of 300 million people?
It's because he's here and a few more like him.
Men of his breed have made British India.
Men who put their jobs above everything.
He wouldn't let death move him from it and he won't let love move him from it.
When his breed of man dies out, that's the end, and it's a better breed of man than any of us will ever make.
And it's worth noting, as Erland does, that in the German version of this movie, the major says, a handful of white men protect 300 Indians from chaos.
So the movie was actually edited by Hollywood to make it more racist for the Nazis.
Tarzan and Nazi Propaganda00:08:36
Yeah.
Watching this movie gave Joseph Goebbels the insight that in effective propaganda, a hero does not always speak heroically, but he acts heroically.
In other words, it's more effective to make a propaganda movie that doesn't say what it's propagandizing for.
Shows it.
That shows it.
Exactly.
The Lives of a Bingo Lancer became one of Hitler's favorite movies of all time.
The Hitler youth screened it for tens of thousands of young Nazis.
Gert Eckert, their leader, noted ruefully, it is shameful that our filmmakers lack the courage to make a movie like The Lives of a Bingle Lancer.
So when we think of Nazi propaganda, we think of Triumph of the Will.
When Nazis thought about effective Nazi propaganda, they thought of Gary Cooper.
They thought of Gary fucking Cooper.
Shit.
Thanks, Paramount.
Yeah, these are not the only pro-fascist movies made by Hollywood in this time.
There was another film called Our Daily Bread that was a great example of fascism in Hollywood in the 30s.
On its surface, the film was about a bunch of unemployed men who start a farm together.
At one point, all the men sit down to try to decide how to organize their new society, right?
One guy suggests basically anarchy where everybody's equal.
One guy suggests a democracy where everybody votes.
And then one dude's like, what if we make the protagonist of the movie, what if he's just in charge of us and we all blindly follow whatever he says?
And then everybody cheers and immediately realizes that this is the best way to organize.
But would they tell you in Hollywood that this also is a response to the depression?
Yeah.
Of like, these people don't have anything, so they set out to go and make it on their own and farm their own land and not have to rely on the government falling out from under them.
Yes, but when they have to pick a leader for their group, everything is all the different political styles are suggested and they go with one guy as just an absolute ruler.
Yeah.
And they cheer that.
Like that, like the Nazis loved our Daily Bread played for 55 weeks in Nazi Germany.
Wow.
Like more than a year.
Yeah.
Ernst Korel, production chief for UFA, the German film production company, actually wrote a report on the movie and basically said that it was such perfect fascist propaganda that it seemed like it had been made under orders from the propaganda ministry.
Like that he was like, this is such a perfect movie.
I feel like Joseph Goebbels outlined the plot for them to follow.
So the Nazis also loved Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and said that it was, quote, excellent propaganda that ridicules corruption and parliamentarianism in Washington.
Jimmy Stewart doesn't like that.
No, well, I mean, Jimmy Stewart bombed the Nazis in World War II.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But they looked at it and saw, well, here's a movie about how shitty democracy is and how one guy with a vision has to come in and fix this corrupt town.
You see that.
Like that's that's the key.
I mean, you want to say that they're retrofitting it, right?
But it's all, but it's also there.
It's there.
And this is one of the things that's scary because this is still the way movies work.
Where it's just, if you're telling a story, you got 90 minutes.
You're trying to get a lot of, it's easier to have one person.
You know, in history, it's usually big groups of people who make things happen.
It's way easier to pick one protagonist.
But that also, these stories that are easy to follow also kind of reinforce these attitudes that like get behind one man.
Get behind one man.
And so a lot of it is not that there's even direct collaboration going on.
It's just that the way movies work as entertainment really wound up reinforcing Nazi beliefs about how the university is.
Is that the Matrix a fascist film?
Kind of, right?
A little bit.
I mean, if you want to view it that way.
You could.
If The Matrix had come out in 1936, I think the Germans would have loved it.
And also would have seen the one Smith as a Jewish standard.
Yeah, very racist.
But yeah, the one.
The one.
The one.
We need him.
Yeah.
He is the savior.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it's you think too much about it and you start to get kind of hopeless about the nature of storytelling because there is an aspect of it where it's like, well, how do you tell a story without reinforcing these things?
But also.
That's what I'm saying.
On some level, there has to be some retrofitting.
Exactly.
But then that's why you get into the book, The Collaboration, where you're like, how much was retrofitting?
How much retrofitting?
And we do know that lions were at it.
And like, yeah, and we know that Joseph Goebbels was, he was very frustrated by all this because he loved Hollywood movies, but he could not get German filmmakers, Nazi filmmakers, to make anything that compared to what Hollywood was making.
He lamented that German writers have seldom expressed national socialist ideas in the relaxed, lively way that we see in the examples I have just given.
He was talking about the movies we've just talked about.
Our German writers have been able to find the form to depict nationalist and to some degree national socialist ideas in film, but they have not yet mustered up the freedom to shape their work in the way I have described.
Naturally, we will continue making films about our own history, but something new, entirely new, something like our daily bread, would considerably expand our propagandistic abilities.
So, like, what Goebbels is stating that all of the movies that German filmmakers tried to make to embody this Führer principle were based on actual figures from history.
Right.
Like, they would pick a guy like Otto von Bismarck, and they would make a movie about him to try to, like, but that, Americans seemed to be the only people who had the ability to just imagine. a fascist leader and make a movie about him.
For whatever reason, the Germans could only go back to their history to make propaganda, and Americans possessed at the time the seemingly unique ability to realistically imagine a dictator.
Which brings the question, do you have to have freedom in order to make truly excellent fascist propaganda?
Because the Nazis couldn't.
It's weird.
So Hollywood Studios sold, as I said, 65 movies to Germany in 1933.
This would be their high watermark.
The tide turned against them on March 2nd, 1934, when Hollywood had the unmitigated gall to produce Tarzan the Ape Man.
The movie had actually been out for more than a year when the Nazis suddenly banned it.
Article 15 had recently been changed, adding that films could be banned if they, quote, harmed national socialist ethical or artistic sensibilities.
The banning process for Tarzan had started when Dr. Ernst Seeger, the chief censor of Germany, had actually objected to the film for a reason I think will surprise everybody.
So I'm going to read his objections to Tarzan the Ape Man.
Long hair.
No.
No, it's not what you'd guess at all.
It's nothing racist.
Did that Tarzan even have long hair?
I don't know.
In that movie?
I don't know.
I feel like probably not.
I'm a hack and a fraud, so I didn't know.
You are not.
I did not research that part.
But here's Dr. Ernst Seeger expressing his issues with Tarzan the Ape Man.
This film is one of those Africa pictures that would aim to awaken the thrill of sadistic stinks in the spectator by deliberately and subtly emphasizing the atrocities in the struggle between humans and animals, as well as that between animals of different kinds.
Its immoral and bestializing effect is illuminated in the fact that the audience laughs at the mortal danger of a nice little monkey who lets out atrocious death screams while clumsily running from a roaring panther, and furthermore titters with pleasure when a herd of elephants stampedes through a Negro village, and when an elephant hurls a pygmy through the air onto the ground where the unfortunate soul perishes, writhing in pitiable death convulsions and shrieks.
The cruelty to animals that occurred in the making of this picture is a cultural disgrace, which has been barred from taking place in the new Germany because of the animal protection law we have instituted.
The film law should spare no means in preventing foreign pictures of this type from reaching the screen in Germany, for the producers of these pictures are breaking the fundamental precepts of humanity in their pure obsession with profit.
Not what you'd have called, right?
He cared about animals.
And he cared about African people being shown.
Well, I don't think that...
Yeah, but...
Wait, he cared about the African people?
Yeah, he cared about...
He hated a scene where a Negro, what he called a Negro village, was destroyed.
Oh, yeah.
And where a pig was killed.
He was horrified by all this.
So this...
Isn't that crazy that some of the worst people in history also were early on that tip of like, yeah, be nice to animals.
They were the first people to put through really modern animal rights laws.
It's hard for me sometimes to watch a really old movie, even with the horses, where you're like, they just don't give a shit.
I don't care what happens.
They didn't really care about people either because they got a lot of extras killed in those days.
So we're going to get into more about Tarzan the Ape Man and what the Nazis did with that because the problems wrinkle out from here.
So Seeger's not the only person with objections to this movie.
He's just the only person with not racist objections to the movie.
But first, it is time for some ads.
Old Movies Ignored Racism00:03:46
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
play stupid games you get stupid prizes and rule two never mess with her friends either we always say trust your girlfriends i'm anna sinfield and in this new season of the girlfriends oh my god this is the same man a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist i felt like i got hit by a truck i thought how could this happen to me the cops didn't seem to care so they take matters into their own hands I said,
oh hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's gonna get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
Studios Tricked the Nazis00:11:50
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And we're back.
Those were some great ads.
I agree.
Fantastic.
People should take your advice on those.
Yes.
Please buy these products and or services.
Now, we just talked about Seeger's surprising objections to Tarzan the Ape Man.
Well, it wasn't surprising he objected.
Yeah, but surprising that he objected because it was cruel to animals and to people rather than...
Is he a Nazi?
I think so.
He must, I think at this point, he would have had to have been a member of the party.
I don't know if he, like, most people who joined the party.
I've just never thought of a Nazi and also simultaneously thought, good call.
Yeah.
It's weird, right?
Yeah.
I mean, even the Nazi clock is right once a day.
There you go.
There you go.
So everything we just talked about is why Seeger thought the movie needed to be banned, but he wasn't sure of his own judgment, and so he sent the film off to the propaganda ministry to basically get their input on the matter.
And once they reviewed it, they concluded that, quote, this film must be censored, must be considered dangerous.
The Nazi state has been tirelessly trying to awaken in public opinion the highest sense of responsibility in the selection of a husband.
It has also put a great deal of effort into freeing the ideas of marriage, womanhood, and motherhood from the superficial distortion of the past epoch, which was completely aimed at sexuality and making them honorable again.
A film that puts pure libido in the foreground that tends to imply that a jungle man, virtually an ape, is capable of the noblest impulses of the soul and is a worthy marriage partner, certainly runs against the tendencies of national socialism with regards to population politics.
So there's your Nazi.
So to them, marriage is not just between a man and a woman.
It's between a distinguished man and a woman.
And you can't show a man who's basically an ape winning the affections of a noble German woman.
Because they, yeah, because they aren't of German caliber.
Yeah.
Essentially.
Exactly.
They're not us.
Yeah.
So this, the propaganda ministry's problem with this is what you'd expect from the Nazis.
Right.
I've just weirded out that Seeger's.
Anyway, so this sort of opened the dam from the Nazis banning movies.
Seeger had only banned two or three titles a year previously, but after this, he went kind of ban happy because now the precedent had been set that not only are we going to stop movies that are explicitly anti-German, but we will ban German ideals.
Yeah, exactly.
We'll ban movies if we think they will harm our racial instincts.
We'll ban movies just because we think they present.
If in any way it infringes on what we're trying to do as a people, not who we are, not just our political motives and what we are as a country, but just our moral code.
Yeah.
To go all the way back to me.
Well, no, that's not how anybody should behave.
Yeah, exactly.
Not how a German would act or behave or view things.
Exactly.
So Seeger starts going ban happy after this.
He cans a movie called Blonde Venus for being a lax depiction of marriage and morality that contradicts the nation's current emphasis on the importance of family.
He bans Scarface, not the first Scarface, for making criminality look appealing.
Do we know anything, though, about like, you know how in our country back in the early 1900s, we had the independents, the people who saw that on their own to do it, who were like, fuck your, your rules on what it has to be or whatever.
Was there that in Germany of just these like Nazis were in charge?
Really?
I mean, any of the artists who...
Or people who were like, I got a copy of Scarface and we're going to watch it.
There may have been.
Not in a documented sense that it felt like any sort of movement or collective of people.
Not that I have any sort of information about.
Because number one, you know, you're talking about having a copy of a film.
You have like a reel at this point.
So it's like a sizable thing.
But also, like, the first couple of years the Nazis are in power, if you're an artist who could be making good movies, you're either out of Germany at this point or you're in a camp.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, that's what happened.
So yeah, Seeger bans Scarface, as I said, for making it look appealing to be a criminal.
He bans all horror movies for being immoral and exciting people's base instincts.
The Germans were not alone in this, or not alone in banning movies.
The Fox film Caravan was banned in France for depicting a gypsy and a white man making love.
How dare they?
How dare they?
And we'll get into Caravan a little bit because that's not even what was going on.
But like everybody's racist back then.
The Nazis are just a couple of steps racister.
Yeah.
They're so much more efficient.
They're super efficient at it.
So by 1936, the situation had gotten very dark for the Hollywood studios.
Dozens of films had been rejected for import, costing the studios millions of dollars.
The only studios who could even afford to stay in Germany by this point were MGM, Paramount, and 20th Century Fox.
The situation was so dire that Douglas Miller, the American trade commissioner in Berlin, wrote a warning letter back to DC.
He said, it would be unfortunate for German-American relations if our motion picture companies no longer feel they have any possibility of selling films in Germany or any further interest in considering the German point of view.
He also noted that if our film ties with Germany are severed, American film companies will jump at the chance of using stories which will portray Germany and the Germans in an unfavorable light, not because they desire to injure Germany, but because they are hungry for villains and desire a relief from the monotony of always using Americans or unnamed foreigners in this connection.
So the government saw it as a bad thing if Hollywood was going to start making anti-Nazi movies.
And that's another important U.S. government, yeah.
Because they didn't want war with Germany.
At this point, there was still a big we don't want war movement in the United States.
And so there was a real worry that exactly.
And if Hollywood gets kicked out of Germany, they're going to start making anti-Nazi films, and that's going to push us closer to war.
So this is another factor.
It's just important to keep all of this in mind when we're thinking about the decisions being made by these people.
So rather than pack up, the remaining studios decided to lean into the Nazis.
In 1937, Paramount picked a manager for their Berlin branch who was a strong Nazi party member.
Fritz Steingold, who was the Gentile manager of MGM Germany, divorced his Jewish wife.
She was later sent to a concentration camp.
No shit.
Yeah.
Wait, so this is Paramount?
That was MGM Germany.
MGM.
And yeah, Paramount's the one who picked a Nazi branch.
Yeah, they had him manage their Berlin branch.
And MGM's branch manager divorces his Jewish wife to please the Nazis.
And she gets sent off.
Yeah, she winds up in a concentration camp.
And probably dies there.
Yeah, I don't know exactly what happened here, but probably not a good story.
Yeah.
What the fuck, dude?
Yeah.
For what?
Money.
Yeah.
So studios, it is important to note that studios also tricked the Nazis sometimes.
Didn't a Jew run MGM?
Yeah.
And I don't mean that.
That sounded worse than I meant it to say.
A Jewish person ran MGM.
Jewish people still ran back in Hollywood.
And they hired a Nazi.
Yeah, in Germany for their German branch because he would help them with the Nazis.
Dude.
It's messed up.
I was almost saying that to that person's ghost.
Yeah, like, dude.
So there were also, it's important to note, there were some ways in which Hollywood kind of stuck their fingers at the Nazis.
Like, the Nazis were hesitant to accept any movies and increasingly in the late 30s just stopped accepting movies with Jewish actors in them.
So they would lie about, they would just change the name on the credits so that the Nazis wouldn't notice that they'd snuck Jewish people into their movies.
So there's a little bit of that going on.
It's not all one.
Okay.
Yeah, but you also hired a guy and said, like, divorce your wife.
Yeah.
I don't know how good you feel about this marriage vis-a-vis your job.
Yeah.
But.
We'd like to make some more money.
Yeah.
So, and you could send her off wherever you want.
Oh, no, no, no, I got the spot.
I know where to go.
I know where she should go.
Yeah.
That's horrible.
Oh, it's terrible.
So for a while, 37, profits came back up.
The film industry recovered.
There was more money coming in.
No, no shit.
You're hiring Nazis.
Yeah, you're hiring Nazis.
It worked out for a little while, but then on November 9th and 10th, 1938, Kristallnacht happened.
This was followed by a corresponding surge in official German anti-Semitism.
Wait, what happened?
Kristallnacht.
I don't know what that is.
The Night of Broken Glass?
I'm sorry.
It was basically a night where sort of the Nazis, it was the first big, massive public all-across Germany, like pogrom against the Jews, where synagogues were burnt, Jewish businesses were like, it's called the Night of Broken Glass because so many Jewish businesses had their windows shattered that it was just glass everywhere.
They did like an at-home blitzkrieg.
Yeah, exactly.
On the German Jewish people.
And a lot of people were murdered during Kristallnacht.
It's one of those marks where things are very clearly bad.
So after this happens, there's a surge in official anti-Semitism.
Two weeks after Kristallnacht, Der Engriff, that Nazi newspaper, prints an article which is titled One-Third of Hollywood Stars Are Jews.
And it listed like dozens and dozens of Jewish film industry people.
One day after.
Did the attack listed that?
Yeah.
Okay.
And one day after the attack lists that, the German propaganda ministry publishes a blacklist with the names of 60 Hollywood stars on it.
They announced that if anyone on the list is in any American film, that film will not be allowed to enter Germany.
Not everyone on the list was Jewish.
Ernest Hemingway made it on there.
So did Bing Crosby.
So this is the list you want to be on.
So good for Bing Crosby and Ernest Hemingway.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I hear, I thought he was just on the list of beating the shit out of his kids.
He beat the shit out of his kids, and the Nazis didn't like him.
Okay.
So.
Well, win some, lose some, I guess.
You win some, you lose some.
Was he old Blue Eyes or is that someone else?
No, that is Mr. Santa.
You're right.
You're right.
What did they call Bing Crosby?
Please stop, Dad.
White Christmas is a fun film for the whole family.
Yeah.
Don't pay too much attention to the fact that none of the black actors have speaking roles.
There you go.
And pay attention to the treatment.
You watch that movie again as an adult and you notice some troubling things.
No, that sucks too because there's a lot of the movie that's beautiful.
Yeah, yeah.
All great, really fun musical scenes.
Yeah, yeah.
But man, those train scenes where it's like, oh, oh, right.
Jim Crow is still a thing.
Right.
Yeah.
Okay.
So we're hearing that Bing Crosby's nickname was Old Groaner, which I don't approve of.
The older.
The old groaner.
Well, right or wrong, I'm it.
Here's the bottom line on Bingham Crosby.
Everyone needs to go watch Will Farrell and John C. Riley's recreation of the David Bowie Crosby Christmas special.
It is perfect.
I've never even heard of this.
Well, you saw that.
You've seen the David Bowie Bing Crosby.
Oh, Christmas special.
Is that a real thing?
Yes, man.
What was happening in Hollywood at that point?
The seat is that Bing Crosby is in London visiting his cousin or something like that.
And there's a knock at the door and it's David Bowie.
And he says, oh, you must be the cousin from overseas.
He was like, well, right or wrong, I'm it.
And then he comes into his house and then they sing Drummer Boy together, which I'm sure you've either heard or from a Christmas special.
So shot for shot, moment for moment, Will Farrell and John C. Riley recreated that Christmas special.
What a weird thing to have happened in history.
Beautiful.
Okay.
Yeah.
This is a lot of information for me to take in right now.
I'm going to have to pack that one away for later.
Yeah, do that so we can finish this.
Technicolor vs Nazi Blacklist00:03:41
So the Nazis put together this blacklist of, you know, if any actor on this list is in a movie, it cannot come into Germany.
And they didn't say they were just Jews.
These are just people we don't like.
These are people we don't like.
Well, I think a lot of them are Jews, but obviously Ernest Hemingway is on there because he went to the Spanish-American War and was a big, not fan of fascists or himself, but, you know, right?
Now, another weird factor that complicates events was the fact that companies doing business in Germany couldn't take cash they made out of Germany.
Paramount in 20th Century Fox just invested the money they made in Germany in local cameramen and film stock and would record Nazi rallies and stuff and then would sell that footage to the rest of the world and that's how they made a profit.
They kind of laundered it.
Yeah, well, yeah, it was like to get it back out.
I'm saying, but like, yeah, you had to do something.
You couldn't take the money directly out of it, right?
MGM found a different tactic.
And I'm going to read another quote from the collaboration.
Here we go.
In December 1938, one month after Kristallnacht, MGM discovered a way to export its profits more effectively.
An American trade commissioner explained the process.
MGM first loaned the money to certain German firms where credit was badly needed.
MGM then received bonds in exchange for the loan and finally sold these bonds abroad at a loss of around 40%, which was a substantial improvement over previous losses.
There was just one catch.
Do you want to guess what the catch is?
You want to guess what these firms are doing?
Funding the Nazis?
I don't know.
The firms in question, the American Trade Commissioner said, are connected with the armament industry, especially in the Sudeten territory or Austria.
In other words, the largest American motion picture company helped to finance the German war machine.
Jesus.
That's how they're getting their money out of Germany.
Loaning money to the people making German guns.
That's not Hollywood.
Oh, man.
It's dark.
Do you remember Gamergate?
Yes.
Yeah.
I assume most people listening remember Gamergate.
If you spent a lot of time reading the complaints that supporters of that movement made, you ran into the idea that film criticism or that criticism of any kind was bad, that critics shouldn't point out problems in games or flaws or troubling trends that these are emblematic of, that they should instead just describe what happens in the game directly.
They would have agreed with Joseph Goebbels because at the end of 1936, he made film criticism illegal in Germany and mandated film description instead.
Here's an excerpt from one of those reviews.
Perfect.
The American film Honolulu is full of humorous ideas, refreshingly fast-paced, and contains dance sequences, catchy music, and gags about mistaken identity.
A very pleasant entertainment.
It is gratifying that it is able to bring harmless amusement to these serious times.
That sounds like one of my pitches when I'm out trying to sell something.
Yeah.
There are things that happen that people find funny.
There are mistaken identities in the movie.
Yeah.
Now, Technicolor presented an issue for the Nazis.
And this actually presented an issue for racists everywhere.
Because when Technicolor came out, Hollywood realized, like, white people look boring, so let's start casting people who aren't white in our movies because it's exciting.
Because now we can actually have people with different skin tones and it'll register.
And so people who are not white soar in representation in Hollywood when Technicolor becomes a thing.
And the Nazis do not like this.
So this is a big issue for the Nazis, that like Technicolor means that people who aren't white are increasingly characters.
Yeah, they want one tone.
They want one tone.
That's kind of the whole thing with the Nazis.
So we're going to get into how this has an impact on, you know, this supposed collaboration.
But first, ads.
You know, you all know the game.
It's ads.
Skin Tone Soared in Hollywood00:03:39
Listen.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield.
And in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
They said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
He related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Sherry stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Moda.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Hitler Liked The Road Back00:16:06
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And we're back and we're talking about Technicolor and the rash of non-white characters it brought to Hollywood, which was great for actors and movies and art as a concept in human history.
Not welcomed by Nazis.
Not welcomed by Nazis.
They were not a big fan of this.
A good example is the movie Ramona.
In this movie, an Indian chief named Alessandro rescues a white woman stuck in a tree.
They fall in love, but it's quickly revealed that Ramona's mom isn't her real mom and that her actual mom was an Indian squaw.
So it wasn't actually race mixing.
She was part Indian the whole time.
But even this was too much for the Nazis.
Dude, the idea.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, they banned.
They're not white people.
Yeah, exactly.
And they're in a movie.
That's what I'm saying.
Were they, though?
Was this one of those deals where Hollywood?
I'm sure it was, right?
Fucking 30 years later, John Wayne would play Genghis Kant.
Now, thanks to the German love of Karl May, particularly Hitler's love of Carl May, Ramona was allowed to play.
Carl May was a German.
He wrote books about the Wild West, that was Hitler's favorite thing in the world.
We have a whole episode about it.
But so this movie was allowed to play because the Nazis kind of had a thing about Native Americans.
But a movie they banned was The Gypsy Princess, which portrayed the love of a white man for a gypsy woman.
It was an explicitly anti-racist and pro-mixed marriage movie, which is pretty ballsy from the mid-30s.
But of course, you know, the Nazi...
Well, actually, weirdly enough, this movie didn't make it into Germany and passed the censors at least for a while.
Like, they caught it after it had already been released.
Erlon thinks that this got through because the censors were basically, they had hit a point in censorship in Germany where they were just looking at the casts and scanning for mentions of the Nazi Party.
And if the cast was okay and there was no mention of the Nazi Party, a lot of stuff slipped through.
Really?
So that is important.
Some movies, because like this movie that's pro-mixed marriage runs in Nazi Germany for a little while.
So it's not a one-sided picture, although I don't think the people who made the Gypsy Princess, number one, that's a pretty racist title today.
You have to think of things in their timeline.
Sure.
Someone in the mid-30s making a movie that says mixed marriage is good.
That's brave at the time.
Yeah.
But I don't think they were explicitly trying to change opinions in Nazi Germany.
They were trying to change opinions in America.
And it just so happened that the movie slipped through.
A few movies did get into Germany that included racial things that the Nazis were against.
And there were even some moments in various movies where veiled critiques of Nazi policies made it past the censors.
This stuff, however, had a negligible impact on the German populace because it was easy to ignore.
This would not have been the case with a proposed movie based off of Sinclair Lewis' book, It Can't Happen Here, which you've definitely seen some quotes and selections from It Can't Happen Here spread on Twitter recently as a result of certain things in modern American politics.
It's a very famous book.
And it's worth noting that Sinclair's wife was a woman named Dorothy Thompson.
She is the female journalist who I end our episode on the non-Nazi bastards behind Hitler with one of her quotes.
She'd actually interviewed Hitler back in Berlin before he reached total power and had written very brutal things about him.
Now, in fairness, she didn't, she considered his political career doomed to failure.
She never thought he was going to become dictator.
But once he did, she dedicated herself to tearing him apart in the international press.
She was kicked out of Germany in 1934 and became one of Hitler's most strident pre-war critics.
The collaboration quotes one line in particular from her pre-dictator interview with Hitler, and I think it's worth reading out here.
So this is Dorothy Thompson talking about Hitler.
If you want to gauge the strength of the Hitler movement, imagine that in America, an orator with the tongue of the late Mr. Bryan, Williams Jennings Bryan, and the histrionic power of Aimee McPherson, who I don't know who that is, combined with the publicity gifts of Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee, should manage to unite all the farmers with all the white-collar unemployed, all the people with salaries under $3,000 a year who have lost their savings in bank collapses in the stock market and are being pressed for payments on the icebox and the radio, the louder evangelical preachers, the American Legion, the DAR,
the Ku Klux Klan, the WCTU, Matthew Wall, Senator Borah, and Henry Ford.
Imagine that, and you will have some idea of what the Hitler movement in Germany means.
So this is the kind of writer that Dorothy Thompson is, and she becomes quite famous as an anti-Hitler activist.
This drives her husband, Sinclair Lewis, crazy.
And he writes, It can't happen here so that he can be seen as a more prominent anti-Hitler voice than his wife.
I mean, that's one version of iron sharpening iron, I guess.
I mean, yeah, we got a good piece of anti-fascist literature out of it, so that's useful.
But it's like done in the vein of I'll show this broad the most misogynistic piece of anti-Nazi propaganda ever ever conceived.
What inspired you to write this?
Fuck my wife.
Can't allow a woman to be perceived as better than me.
My wife's too famous.
I'm Sinclair Lewis.
Yeah, so he wrote It Can't Happen Here, and it sold very well, but that was still just a couple of hundred thousand copies.
So when Hollywood starts talking about maybe adapting it to a film, he gets excited because this means his book's going to be shared to a way wider audience.
Millions of people might get these ideas.
And he does seem to genuinely want to try to warn Americans about the danger of fascism.
Now, the movie got a script that a lot of people think was a fantastic script.
Lewis didn't write it.
Somebody else adapted it, but it's apparently got a very good script.
And it includes lines like this from the main character, a guy named Doremus, who is a journalist who initially falls for the American fascist candidate and then later winds up fighting against him.
Quote, all us lazy-minded Doremuses are responsible.
I used to think that wars and depressions were brought on by diplomats and bankers.
They were brought on by us liberals because we did nothing to stop them.
So it's like, there's some fucking potent shit in screenplay, right?
The only thing worse than evil is the people who stand by and let it happen.
Exactly.
So this is set to be a pretty great anti-Nazi movie, pretty bold movie.
But it worries some people.
One of those people is a guy named William Finschreiber, who is the chair of the film committee for the Central Conference of American Rabbis.
He writes to mayor of MGM about why they shouldn't go through with producing this movie.
Quote, I have considered the problem at great length, and I am of the opinion that a film version of that story, howsoever interpreted and directed, will have anything but a beneficial effect upon the Jewish problem.
More and more, I am convinced that during these highly critical days for the Jewish people, here and elsewhere, we ought not to thrust the Jew and his problems too much into the limelight.
I am quite sure that any interpretation of the story made by your film will be forceful and certainly not seemingly detrimental to the Jewish cause.
But there are times when to say nothing is better than to say something favorable.
So this is not an ill-considered thing.
This guy is thinking about it.
And you can't, you know, you got to think about like what happened with that the Rothschild movie.
Right.
Like, this is what this guy is worried about.
And it's a legitimate worry.
Yeah.
I happen to think it would have been better for history if the movie had been made.
I would agree.
But it was not.
It was canceled on February 13th, 1936.
The day before Valentine's Day?
The day before Valentine's Day, yeah.
Real bummer.
That's no love.
Sinclair Lewis was not happy about this.
He said, How the hell am I supposed to beat this woman?
That's his quote.
You guys are really fucking my marriage here.
No, I gotta, I'm even angrier at my wife.
No, he actually said something poignant and profound given what we've been talking about today.
The world today is full of fascist propaganda, which it definitely was.
Let's cover that this episode.
The Germans are making one pro-fascist film after another designed to show that fascism is superior to liberal democracy.
But Mr. Hayes actually says that a film cannot be made showing the horrors of fascism and extolling the advantages of liberal democracy because Hitler and Mussolini might ban other Hollywood films from their countries if we were so rouch.
Yep.
Democracy is certainly on the defensive when two European dictators, without opening their mouths or knowing anything about the issue, can shut down an American film.
I wrote it can't happen here, but I begin to think it certainly does.
Wow.
Or it certainly can.
So good quote.
Yeah.
Good quote.
So he's saying it can be influenced here.
Yeah.
Hitler's not even saying cancel this movie.
We just know that it'll fuck things up.
So we're canceling it because we're scared.
Which, again, the people who attack Ben Irwan for saying this is a collaboration will say, well, the Nazis didn't even say anything about a movie like this.
Irwan's argument is that basically the Nazis had already trained Hollywood so well that they didn't need to actively censor.
Exactly.
The mouse had touched the cheese enough times.
Exactly.
Thank you for bringing mice into this again.
Always.
Yeah, it's important.
If they're not here, they're in that damn movie theater.
Mm-hmm.
Because the Nazis let them loose.
Right.
It always ties back to Nazis.
So, now the late 1930s in general seemed to show a real shift in how Hollywood censorship occurred.
Rather than having Gisling, who is the German censor who's in Los Angeles, rather than having him review movies and suggest changes, studio executives started cutting films as they made them simply because they knew what the Germans wouldn't accept.
And we want that money.
Damn rightly.
We want to then fund their war machine and then get our money back at a 40% loss, which is still pretty good.
Still pretty good.
Don't want to think too much about what that money's buying.
That's the Russians' problems.
Hey, is that your new wife?
Oh, boy.
Yeah, so a Warner Brothers movie about the Dreyfus affair.
Have you ever heard of the Dreyfus affair?
Is that Mr. Holland's Opus?
No.
It's one of the most famous moments in the history of anti-Semitism.
Alfred Dreyfus, I think Alfred was his first name.
Dreyfus was definitely his last name.
He was a Jewish-French military officer before World War I who was accused of selling military secrets, I think, to the Germans.
And he was likely innocent, but there was a big show trial about it.
It's a big, because like anti-Semitism, French anti-Semitism played a huge role in it.
And it was a very famous thing at this point in history because it was not all that distant.
Anyone on the street probably would have known the broad details.
And the amount of time that news stories would stay in our conscious back then.
So Warner Brothers makes a movie about the Dreyfus affair, which is, again, one of the most important moments in the history of anti-Semitism.
The movie does not contain the word Jew or any references to Judaism.
Not once.
Yeah.
They cut them all out.
Warner Brothers cut all.
Warner executives cut those out before they even showed it to the Germans because they knew.
Yeah.
They knew that wouldn't be okay.
The Nazis were very aware of how effective they had been.
And being Nazis, they pushed for even more control over Hollywood.
Gives them an inch.
That's what Nazis do.
On April 1st, 1937, April Fools!
But not actually, because Gisling just warned 60 people involved in a movie called The Road Back, which was a sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front, that if they were in that movie, if the movie got made, Germany would ban any future movies any member of the cast worked on in the future.
Like everyone in that cast would be blackballed from being in a movie.
That'd be on the Ben Crosby, Ernest Hemingway list.
Exactly, exactly.
So the studio made 21 cuts to The Road Back in a desperate attempt to please Gisling and the Germans.
Fuck.
Rather than the movie had originally criticized German militarism, and they changed the film to just criticize all militarism anywhere in the world.
It's not happening.
It's not one country more than anywhere.
Germans happy anyway.
No, and it did not.
Gisling banned Universal from working in Germany and they had to pull out of the country, even after they made 21 cuts to the film.
Right.
Yeah.
Now, there were several attempts in the late 30s to make The Mad Dog of Europe, which was that movie we talked about earlier and other Nazi movies, but they were all defeated.
F. Scott Fitzgerald actually helped write a script for a nihilistic movie about soldiers in post-war Germany titled Three Comrades.
It would have had one of its main characters murdered by Nazis.
At one point in the script, a character was supposed to shout, there's more to fight for, better than food, better than peace, democracy, freedom, a new Germany.
Isn't that worth fighting for?
But MGM executives deleted all references to Nazis and democracy from the final film.
I felt like that would have gotten taken out.
Cut democracy right out of that.
No, that's not going to sell.
Not in Germany.
Three Comrades also had included a scene where a sympathetic character identifies as Jewish and expresses a deep love of Germany and a faith that their home country will protect them.
MGM cut that too.
When they showed Gisling the film for the first time, he loved it.
How could he not?
The film had basically been made for his specific tastes.
Yeah.
And that's also the version they released here.
They didn't do like continental versions.
Yeah, I mean, they would do slightly different versions, but those things were cut out in the American version too.
Because again, they're cutting this stuff before they even send it to the censor.
As late as 1940, movies that were thought to inflame German sentiment were banned or heavily edited to remove all references to Hitler and Jews.
The first movie that might be described as anti-Nazi wasn't released until May 1939.
It was called Confessions of a Nazi Spy, and it was about an actual Nazi spying ring that had been busted in the East Coast of the United States not that long before.
Who did it?
Huh?
Nazis.
No, no, no, no.
I mean, who released it?
Do we know?
Oh, geez.
I don't think it was made by one of the studios that was involved in Germany at the time.
It just got made.
But it wasn't even a big deal because, number one, it was talking about an actual historic thing that had happened.
And number two, it still pulled all of its punches.
They removed any sort of references to Jewish people or Nazi hatred of Jewish people.
Like, none of that made it into the final cut.
And in fact, from what we can tell, the Nazis actually kind of liked this movie.
Joseph Goebbels, in particular, was thrilled to see an actor playing him in the film.
The Goebbels in the movie, Confessions of a Nazi spy, said this.
There is to be a slight change in our methods.
From now on, National Socialism in the United States must dress itself in the American flag.
It must appear to be a defense of Americanism.
But at the same time, our aim must always be to discredit conditions there in the United States and in this way make life in Germany admired and wished for.
In the ensuing chaos, we will be able to take control.
So that's Joseph Goebbels in the movie.
He only had two minutes on screen in this film, but he loved it.
Goebbels, the actual Goebbels, wrote in his diary, I myself play a main role and not even a particularly unpleasant one, but I do not consider the film dangerous otherwise.
It arouses fear in our enemies rather than anger and hate.
So the one movie pre-World War II that could almost be considered anti-Nazi, the Nazis think makes them look cool.
Yeah.
That's right, we will spy on your ass.
Yeah, you're damn right we will.
Yeah.
So as friendly as Hollywood seemed in 1939 to the Nazis, there was at least one major anti-Nazi production underway, the great dictator.
Charlie Chaplin had started production in 1938.
Now, Hitler knew about some of this, and he knew that there were continuing attempts to make anti-Nazi pictures.
He could kind of see the winds changing.
So on January 30th, 1939, he gave an infamous speech.
One quote from it is very well known to students of the Holocaust, as it's often seen as some of the first evidence that Hitler was planning genocide.
He said, quote, if international finance Jewry inside or outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.
What I didn't realize until I read Erland's book is that later in the same speech, Hitler also said this.
And the announcement of American film companies of their intention to produce anti-Nazi, i.e. anti-German films, will only lead our German producers creating anti-Semitic films in the future.
Which, you know, they did.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Hollywood Turned Anti-Nazi00:09:26
So MGM was the first of the big studios to actually make a straight-up anti-Nazi film.
It was called The Moral Storm, and it was great, but the Morales.
They also had the guy whose wife got sent off too.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They sure did.
And The Mortal Storm was released in mid-1940.
So that's the first actual anti-Nazi film that's made.
Yeah.
MGM was banned in Germany in August 1940.
Paramount followed one month later on September 12th, 1940.
And that is when this collaboration officially ends in September of 1940.
So up until that point, Hollywood is doing their damnedest to work with the Nazis.
Now, as I stated at the top of this podcast, the anti-Nazi films, newsreels, and cartoons from World War II are still famous today.
But the truth is that, collaboration or not, the American film industry did not turn on the Nazis until the war they brought to Europe created box office receipts.
The start of World War II reduced foreign revenue by half for Hollywood.
And in the end, that's what it took to make Hollywood sour on the Nazis.
Well, yeah, one, not Germany might be gone.
Yeah.
Right?
Nobody's there is watching movies.
But also, they control Europe now.
Right.
So none of our movies are allowed in any way.
So that's all in France, whatever.
Plus, we're fighting a war, so the people in our own country want to see movies where we're anti-Nazi.
Well, we weren't fighting as we get into it into the early 40s.
Yeah.
December 7th.
Was it 41?
Yeah, December 7th, 1941.
But it is important to note that, like, Germans, or like, sorry, that Hollywood, all the stuff they're famous for, the anti-fascist stuff they're famous for, happened after there was no chance of making another dime in Germany.
Right.
You know?
With the exception of one Charles motherfucking Chaplin.
So Charlie was not a fan of the Nazis.
Good.
And the Nazis hated Charlie Chaplin because they were sure he was Jewish, even though he absolutely was not.
One Nazi paper called...
I'm just telling you, the guy feels Jewish, man.
He feels it.
Look at him.
Look at him.
Come on.
He looks just like Hitler.
He's got to be Jewish.
I'm not watching this stuff.
One Nazi paper called him, quote, a disgusting Jewish acrobat, which acrobat.
Fuck off.
Okay.
Now, Chaplin had visited Berlin last in 1931 as part of a publicity tour for his movie City Lights, and the Nazi press had basically gone to war with him.
They'd branded him as a, quote, anti-German warmonger and also an American film Jew.
Hyphen.
Really?
Hyphen.
Yeah, American Film Jew.
Yeah.
Okay.
Video of Chaplin in Berlin was also used.
He's like American film Jew.
He's an American film Jew.
I don't care.
They might say he's not keeping kosher, but I'm telling you, American film, Jew.
Video of Chaplin in Berlin during this visit was also used in that propaganda flick, The Eternal Jew, which we talked about earlier.
The narrator in that scene says, it cannot be denied that one part of the German people enthusiastically applaud the foreign Jews who come to Germany, the deadly foes of their race, during a shot of a crowd cheering Chaplin, which again, Charlie Chaplin was not Jewish.
They never got that through their heads.
No.
Not once.
They didn't care.
Yeah.
When Chaplin decided to make the great dictator, he used his own money to film it because no studio would agree to make this movie.
He used his own production house, thus bypassing the studio's entire movie.
This is his apocalypse now, dude.
Yeah, exactly.
And Chaplin actually risked getting all of Hollywood films banned in Germany for doing this work because he started in 1938.
Now, unfortunately, the film wasn't finished until 1940 because Chaplin was a perfectionist.
Here's an excerpt from his autobiography where he talks about sort of how people's attitudes changed during the process of him trying to make this.
Halfway through making the great dictator, I began receiving alarming messages from United artists.
They had been advised by the Hayes office that I would run into censorship trouble.
Also, the English office was very concerned about an anti-Hitler picture and doubted whether it could be shown in Britain.
But I was determined to go ahead, for Hitler must be laughed at.
More worrying letters came from the New York office imploring me not to make the film, declaring that it would never be showed in England or America.
But I was determined to make it, even if I had to hire Halls myself to show it.
Before I had finished The Dictator, England declared war on the Nazis.
Then suddenly the Holocaust began.
The breakthrough in Belgium, the collapse of the Maginot Line, the stark and ghastly fact of Dunkirk, and France was occupied.
The news was growing gloomier.
England was fighting with her back to the wall.
Now our New York office was wiring frantically, hurry up with your film.
Everyone is waiting for it.
So...
It's a fucking tale of three acts in that one quote right there.
Yeah, yeah.
Unlike most of our episodes, this one ends with a hero.
The Great Dictator was not the first anti-Nazi movie to come out of Hollywood.
Was the second or the third, depending on your, but it was the first good anti-Nazi movie to come out of Hollywood.
And it was also singular among, it was the first movie to depict violence towards and the murder of Jews by the Nazis.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So thank you, Charlie Chaplin.
No shit, man.
Yeah.
Good guy.
Hell yeah.
Yeah.
And he had to do it all himself.
He was literally like, I'll create, produce, I'll pay for it.
I'll fucking movie myself.
I have to.
This has to be done.
And there is some evidence that he regretted it later.
Hitler must be laughed at.
Hitler must be laughed at, which he came to question that later in life just because of how horrible the Holocaust was.
He wondered, like, was it, should it be?
Right, but we need to demean this person.
That's what he thought before.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I don't think he was wrong.
Like, he and Zanuck are definitely the guys who are rightist in this.
Yeah.
They're the two people who fucking tried.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Everyone else, you know, you can either say whether or not you think it's a collaboration, but Hollywood certainly fell down on their job to sort of defend the ideals of the society that allowed them to exist.
Until the teat was gone, not them.
Yep.
Yep.
That's exactly right.
They sucked the teat until the teat was gone.
That's fucked up, man.
Yeah.
And just for money.
For money.
But also, and, you know, I'm not trying to put any sort of like you have to care because of who you are.
I mean, everybody's entitled to their own opinion and viewpoint, but it's just hard for me, and I'll say full disclosure, I'm not Jewish.
I'm fine with someday being an American film hyphen Jew.
But the idea that these companies, these production companies, these studios are being run by people who are Jewish.
And then they keep putting money over the persecution that they have a hard time believing they weren't aware of.
And it's, again, I tried to make sure I presented there.
There were legitimate reasons for the Jewish community to worry that addressing the issue at all would make things worse.
I get that.
But some of it doesn't, not all, not in every case we've gone over.
Yeah, you don't have to keep profiting from the Nazis.
Right.
You could not, you could decide we shouldn't make a movie right now because it'll inflame things, but we're not going to give them movies.
Yeah.
And nobody did that.
A principal moral stand could have been taken, and it was not, other than by Zanuck of the 20th century, and who also did business in Germany.
So he still made money off the Nazis.
And Chaplin, who legitimately did not try to, who was pretty stridently anti-Nazi from day zero.
Let me ask you this, and you can say pass.
We're not getting into that on this episode, Dan.
But how far are we from major Hollywood studios that directly attack our current government?
That's happened, right?
There's like a cartoon about.
But I mean like a big movie.
The Post tried.
Yeah.
The Post did it without doing it.
I don't think it can be that far, right?
I don't think so either.
Nor do I think that there's anybody who doesn't want to.
I'm not saying that that's a movement.
I don't think it would be a particularly brave thing to do in our current cultural climate because there's so much, so many people are making fun of the president right now.
What scares me more is China, which not to say, not to compare the Chinese government to the Nazi government because there's no comparing the modern Chinese government to the Nazis.
But you have a case where a government does have a troubling human rights record, is doing really bad things.
They won't even let Winnie the Pooh air there.
Exactly.
And they've locked a million Uyghur Muslims up in one of their areas, probably.
I don't know if there's really a million person concentration camp in China, but there's some evidence that that's being done.
Think about that.
And Eric Prince is involved.
But we do know that this is a government with a troubling history of human rights abuse, and Hollywood also is totally dependent upon China.
Like it is a huge deal.
So my question is, if something in the future happens where the Chinese government is caught doing something terrible, does Hollywood blacklist any mention from that out of the knowledge that it will cut out the Chinese market?
And also, would the Chinese government be willing to cut Hollywood entirely out of China in order to make that kind of statement?
We don't know what would happen, but I will say, based on this, I don't expect any more courage out of the modern studio heads in Hollywood than we got out of the ones in the 30s.
Yeah.
I don't either.
Yeah.
So.
Damn, dude.
And then the war started and everybody wanted to make their anti- Yeah, nothing.
Yeah.
And then Mickey Mouse is fighting Hitler as opposed to entertaining him.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Huh.
Yep.
This is crazy.
Hooray.
All right.
Daniel, you want to plug some pluggables?
Mickey Mouse Fights Hitler00:04:03
Sure.
I'd like to let everybody know if you go to danielvankirk.com or you follow me on any social media platform where I'm at Daniel Van Kirk.
I might be coming to your area.
The first leg of my together tour starts in Houston and then heads over to Austin, Dallas, Lafayette, and Baton Rouge.
So Texas and Louisiana.
And that's just the first leg.
I'm also going to be doing some more Southeast stuff than the Northeast and the Midwest and keep going around.
So check for those legs to be added.
You can do all that at Danielvankirk.com, or follow me at Daniel Vankirk and listen to the podcast.
If I do well, you say hello to my old hometown Dallas, for me, I will.
I, I don't go back there in the summer ever.
Uh, you don't want to swim through it?
No no, I don't.
No, that's why I moved to fucking Los Angeles so I don't have to live through another goddamn summer.
Thick yeah no, it's a hundred percent humidity.
Yeah, you're.
Yeah, swimming through it isn't right, it's, you're.
Everyone lives inside an armpit for seven months.
Yeah, so i'm Robert Evans.
You can find me on twitter at I write okay uh, just two letters.
You can find my book on Amazon, a brief history of Vice.
You can find this podcast and all the sources for this episode and, including Ben's wonderful book, the collaboration on our website behindthebastards.com.
You can also find us on twitter and instagram at at Bastardspod.
So like, subscribe and rate and, more than anything, just buy a bunch of t-shirts.
Buy a bunch of t-shirts from Tpublic.com.
Slash behind the bastards.
I love about 40 of you.
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