"The Interview" isn't the first time Hollywood bowed to a dictator

The consequences of the arrangement were dire: The studios made no films about Hitler’s persecution of Jews at precisely the moment that this persecution was taking place. In 1933, Hollywood cancelled The Mad Dog of Europe, a film that predicted a future genocide, penned by Herman J. Mankiewicz, the screenwriter of Citizen Kane. And even films that did not directly address the Nazi regime were subject to suppression. In 1936, MGM cancelled It Can’t Happen Here, a film about fascism coming to America, based on the bestselling novel by Sinclair Lewis. At the time, Lewis quipped, “I wrote It Can’t Happen Here, but I begin to think it certainly can.”

In the 1930s, Lewis was an exceptional figure. Unfortunately, back then, very few dared to speak out against what the Nazis were doing in Hollywood, and it’s not hard to understand why. When Universal embarked on the sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front in 1937, the Nazi consul in Los Angeles sent threatening letters to 60 members of the cast and crew, including the wardrobe man. As a result of this intimidation, the film was edited so dramatically that the final product didn’t even make sense. The situation is very different today. In the face of violations of personal privacy and threats of terrorism, celebrities have spoken out. The statements that we have seen from Judd Apatow, Rob Lowe, Jimmy Kimmel, and others may not be surprising by contemporary standards, but they were simply not possible in the 1930s.

In fact, even Franklin D. Roosevelt found himself unable to voice his opinion publicly about Nazi intimidation in Hollywood. The president was aware of Charlie Chaplin’s production The Great Dictator, a satire of Adolf Hitler, and he supported it wholeheartedly. As Chaplin was told, “If the President of our country is interested in your making the picture, it certainly has merit.” But this was merely a private communication, not a public statement. The fact that President Obama is confronting the situation head-on speaks volumes about the distance we have come in the past 90 years.