FILMS MEANT TO BRING ABOUT SOCIAL CHANGE

Although ABC set up 1-800 lines and distributed half a million "viewer's guides" as a way to help the Cold War-paranoid audience psychologically deal with the subject matter, even they couldn't prepare for how much of a social impact the film would have.

"The Day After" debuted on Nov. 20, 1983, to a maelstrom of publicity and controversy. Nearly 100 million viewers tuned in -- a record audience for a made-for-TV movie....

"Any movie that the President of the United States winds up saying changed his mind about the idea of a winnable nuclear war is not an insignificant achievement. The Reagan administration came in thinking about 'acceptable numbers' of nuclear casualties. (Reagan's memoirs reveal) what he had to say about the effects of what 'The Day After' had on his thinking.

"When he signed the Intermediate Range Weapons Agreement at Reykjavik (in 1986) with Gorbachev, I got a telegram from his administration that said, 'Don't think your movie didn't have any part of this, because it did.'"

Ken Kesey's 1962 book, and the film version released 13 years later, are both credited with irreparably tarnishing the image of electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT, and quickening its departure from mainstream mental health care....

Amid a minor revival in ECT in the early 1990s, The New York Times noted that thanks to the film's memorable images, "in the public mind 'shock therapy' has retained the tarnished image given it by Ken Kesey's novel: dangerous, inhumane and over-used".

Yet for many mental health professionals the book and film also had a negative effect. A 1983 study involving 146 university students found "considerable negative changes in attitude" towards people with mental health problems among those who had seen the film.

Disaster struck at 4 a.m. on March 28 when water-coolant pumps failed at the [Three Mile Island nuclear] plant’s new second reactor…. That led to the reactor’s overheating, with the temperature rising steadily after a stuck valve misled the operators into halting the flow of emergency cooling water. Half the core was later found to have melted....

[R]adiation was purposefully released into the air to relieve pressure within the system. That action fed apprehension beyond the plant’s concrete walls that the situation had spun out of control....

Contributing to the pervasive dread was a film that had just come out, “The China Syndrome,” a thriller about a safety crisis at a nuclear power plant in California....

No China syndrome took place at [Three Mile Island]. Nor were there immediate deaths or injuries.... The psychological toll, however, was immense. Even before the accident, America’s romance with nuclear power had begun to chill. Three Mile Island sent it into the deep freeze. Many years passed before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission got a chance to review an application to build a new power plant.

“Philadelphia,” from a script by Ron Nyswaner, starred Tom Hanks, as an ambitious lawyer who is fired from his prestigious firm when the partners learn he has H.I.V., and Denzel Washington, as the scrappy independent lawyer who represents him in a suit against the firm.

It was the first big-budget Hollywood film about AIDS, and with its forthright depiction of homosexuality, homophobia and the disease that was rampaging through gay communities, it was a turning point in the way mainstream movies treated gay men and lesbians, who had previously been handled with hush-hush delicacy or flamboyant caricature.

Deliberately, in fact, Dixon set out to create a master narrative of Southern history and race relations that would challenge and replace that associated with Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin. Whereas Mrs. Stowe had focused attention on the sufferings of black slaves at the hands of antebellum whites, Dixon depicted the "anguish" of Southern whites at the hands of free postwar blacks. The Ku Klux Klan (in which several members of Dixon's family had once been involved) provided the main heroes of his fiction. The cultural impact of Uncle Tom's Cabin had been greatly increased by its transformation into a play; Dixon set out to do the same by converting his novel The Clansman into a successful theatrical production [and, later, with D.W. Griffith, a film].

Griffith’s movie proved a boon for the KKK, which had practically disappeared by the 1870s, with the end of Reconstruction. However, in December 1915 it was revived in Georgia following the opening of the movie in Atlanta. Inspired by The Birth of a Nation, Col. William J. Simmons, a preacher and promoter of fraternal orders, led a cross burning on Stone Mountain that marked the beginning of a new era of KKK activity.

As the movie went on to become one of the most profitable films ever made, millions of Americans became partisans in a culture war over the meaning of the Reconstruction. That culture war is still with us....

Despite the many protests, “The Birth of a Nation” may have helped to permanently shape the views of the majority of those white moviegoers who could afford to see the film (the ticket price in Manhattan, for instance, was $2 — equivalent to about $50 today), confirming any predisposition they might have had to support white supremacy. Recent research by the cognitive psychologist Jeffrey Zacks has shown that “historical” movies can strongly persuade viewers with only vague ideas about what the historical record actually is.

To the extent that the movie was persuasive, it helped to popularize and entrench a view of Reconstruction that held sway well into the 1960s — namely, that it was a tragic era of terribly misguided (indeed vengeful) reform that resulted in corrupt “Negro rule” until justifiable white lawlessness restored and redeemed the South (and America).
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Dixon ardently hoped that the movie would in fact create a new “nation” — and he succeeded to a considerable extent.

The Ku Klux Klan had largely died out in America in the 1870s, but when Birth of a Nation arrived in Georgia, a local white supremacist, William Simmons, used it as a tool to recruit new members....
[T]he KKK continued to use it as a recruiting film until 1970.
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So has [Birth of a Nation] had a greater impact than any other film?

Yes, says [Frank Beaver, a professor of screen arts at the University of Michigan]. "There is no question. I can't think of another film that has had such a long political arm."

White Americans engaged in a new burst of racial violence during and immediately after [Woodrow] Wilson's presidency. The tone set by the administration was one cause. Another was the release of America's first epic motion picture.
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Dixon intended "to revolutionize northern sentiment by a presentation of history that would transform every man in my audience into a good Democrat!...And make no mistake about it—-we are doing just that." Dixon did not overstate by much. Spurred by Birth of a Nation, William Simmons of Georgia reestablished the Ku Klux Klan....

The KKK quickly became a national phenomenon. It grew to dominate the Democratic Party in many Southern state, as well as in Indiana, Oklahoma, and Oregon. Klan spectacles in the 1920s in towns from Montpelier, Vermont, to West Frankfort, Illinois, to Medford, Oregon, were the largest public gatherings in their history, before or since. During Wilson's second term, a wave of antiblack race riots swept the country. Whites lynched blacks as far north as Duluth [Iowa].

The racist seminal film “Birth of A Nation”, that glorified the Klan, that film had come out in 1915, and swept the nation, and it helped revivify the Klan from its old days in the Civil War era and the Reconstruction era.

… [T]he Klan ended up being absolutely central to the fight for the presidential nomination [in 1924]…. The fights over whether or not to approve the anti-Klan plank for the [Democratic] party platform absolutely convulsed the convention that summer. They were literally fighting in the aisles. They at one point called in a thousand policemen to break up the brawling on the floor of the convention.

Ultimately, the anti-Klan plank and the party platform, it was voted down … by one vote....

When the anti-Klan plank lost by that one vote, 20,000 masked hooded Klansmen rallied across the Hudson River [from New York City] in New Jersey to mark the moment....

[As a show of national force following the 1924 presidential election, 20,000 Klan members marched and rallied in Washington, DC. They marched in Washington again, 50,000 strong, the following year.]
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In May of 1927, a thousand Klansmen and some assorted fascists marched in Queens, in New York City and they ultimately rioted and fought with police.... The police commissioner at the time made a point of telling the public that this was kind of a landmark moment for the Klan in New York City. It`s not that he didn`t know that the Klan was active in New York City. It`s just that New York City had never before seen a thousand Klansmen turn out in the streets in robes and masks like they did in May 1927.

According to news reports at the time, there were seven men who were arrested at that Klan march in New York, one of them was Fred Trump, who is the father of Donald Trump.