The Drama Behind Hollywood’s Biggest Night

Welcome back to the Bulwark. It goes to Hollywood. My name is Sunny Bunch. I’m a cult writer at the Bulwark. And I’m very pleased to be joined today by Michael Schulman, New York Times best selling author.

He’s got a new bike out called Oscar Wars, a history of Hollywood and gold sweat and tears. He is a staff writer at The New Yorker where he’s been contributing since two thousand six. He’s run-in for The New York Times, Vanity Fair. The believer, all all sorts of places. And this book is great.

It’s it’s it’s a it’s a big it’s a big large tone. You’ve got a lot of Oscar history to cover here. You know, we’ve got almost a century of Oscar talk to get through here. So I’m gonna I’m gonna try and move through the eras. We’re gonna we’re gonna get it all in here, but for being on the show, Michael.

I really appreciate it. Yeah.

Thanks for having me.

Alright. So there is a there’s a there’s a moment at the at the end of your book where you’re talking about kind of the the cilliness of introducing, you know, the most popular Oscar category and the tension between rewarding what is what is the best movie of the year and what is the most popular movie of the year. And you have you have this line. It’s interesting because the Oscars should be celebrating merit regardless of profit profitability. And they should be lifting up small movies.

And I’m I’m actually I after reading the book and getting this line, I I wonder if that’s actually true. Right? I mean, your whole book your whole book is is about the kind of underlying tension between what is actually good and what people are voting for and, you know, why the Oscars were even created in the first place. Right? Well,

yeah, the Oscars have always had a tension, a tug of war, between whether to award size and spectacle and the sort of production value of film or whether to ignore all that and lift up something that is sort of small and has a has a a a kind of less showy version of the the the art form. I mean, from the very beginning, the first Academy Awards in nineteen twenty nine had two top prizes. One was for outstanding picture, which went to wings, a gigantic War movie with a lot of special effects and planes flying in the air and battle scenes. And the other category was best, unique, and artistic picture, which went to sunrise, which was a little, you know, smaller kind of psychodrama. And I think you can see that tension through the decades.

I mean, think about nineteen fifty three, the year that the greatest show on Earth, the big seslopied de Mill circus spectacular, somehow beat, you know, high noon, which is a less showy spectacular, gigantic movie, but a much better movie in a million different ways. And I think all the way up to this year, you see that in the nominees where you have Avatar and Top Gun Maverick, you know, big movies. Sitting across from tar and women talking. And I think it’s and then you have something that’s combines the two of them, like everything everywhere at once, which is why I think that’s one reason I think it’s it’s it’s got so much momentum. It kind of has both in one package.

But I do think the academy has always pulled between what to reward. The size and scope and and this sort of sheer magnitude of filmmaking power or movies that hone in on something small and do it really well. Well,

Will Saletan let’s even take it a step back further than that because, you know, one of one of the things I I love about your book and it’s it’s a topic I knew a little bit about, but I learned learned a lot here. Is the actual formation of the academy, the actual introduction of the Oscars, which was done at least in part to Stymie Union building activity in the in Hollywood in in the industry, you know, kind of try to try to show folks, hey, you you know, you wanna win the big awards, you can’t you can’t necessarily join the unions. You gotta be part of the academy. What what was the talk us through that and the the impetus of some of the producers and the the stars and the directors who were instrumental in the founding of the the Academy in the Oscars.

Yeah. That was certainly a part of it. So the Academy was founded in nineteen twenty seven by thirty six people who were a cross section of very powerful people in silent era Hollywood, but the idea came from Louis B. May are the very powerful head of MGM. And the rhetoric that the early Academy had was it was very utopia, it was all about creating harmony in the industry among the various factions in the industry at the time, and it was about lifting up you know, the art of motion picture, blah, blah, blah.

But if you look a little closer about why they were saying those things, One of them was that Hollywood was not a union town except for the craftspeople, but the actors Directors and writers were not unionized. There were signs that that might change, actors’ equity, which organized stage actors, back east was trying to make inroads in Hollywood. And people like Louis Louis Louis Louis or knew that if that happened, it would be a huge thorn in his side. And so when they talk about harmony and how, you

know,

everyone was fighting that, you know, Producers were fighting with writers and directors were fighting with executives. What the academy did in large part in its early years was oversee contract negotiations and mediate disputes. You know, if an actor was fired unfairly or someone a writer claimed they didn’t get paid enough for a draft that the academy would step in and hear cases and deliver verdicts. And this was extremely controversial from the start because the the rank and file in Hollywood believed that this was essentially a tool of the producers. To kind of preempt real unionization and and kind of control control all mediation and and contracts.

And and this turned very, very ugly in the thirties when, you know, after So basically, the the the academy’s existence successfully repelled actor’s equity in the twenties, essentially. And unions, and it preempted the formation of of of unions until during the depression, the gilts rose up, you know, sag. And the screenwriter skilled, the screen director skilled. And once those bodies existed, they really went to war with the academy, all out war. They told their members to send in their resignations.

They could not be in the academy. They later in the thirties, they started boycotting the the Oscar Sarah Longwell. And it it it was not guaranteed that the academy would exist because everyone hated it so much. And the way this got resolved was that Frank Capra, who was the president of the Academy for a long time in the thirties. He loved the idea of the Academy.

He loved winning Oscars. He thought this was important that this thing survived. And so he essentially decided that, okay, if everyone hates the fact that the academy is weighing in on labor disputes and economic issues. We’re just not gonna do that anymore. And so the academy just stopped doing those things, and they kept the Oscars, which is the only thing that they did that people in Hollywood seemed to like because everyone wanted to win this award.

What was it what was it about the Oscar that appealed to Frank Capper so much? Because, I mean, it is a really interesting little kind of sidebar in this in this whole big story is that, like, Frank Capri is, like, desperate to win an Oscar. He’s desperate. He like, he just he wants he wants the he wants the, you know, the the praise and the But he also finds himself, you know, kind of in a stuck in a in a between a rock and a hard place here because he’d, at the same time, doesn’t wanna you know, look like a chill for the studios. He doesn’t wanna sell out his fellow directors and and other artisans.

What was what was that all about? Exactly. I mean, well, Capa wrote an autobiography, the name of above the title, which is a really fun amusing book and not completely trustworthy because Capa kind of rewrote his life story to be a capa comedy. You sort of read these tales of has coming up in the world, and it it sort of feels like, you know, mister Deeds goes to town or something. Everything is very plucky.

And falls right into place. But it’s really interesting to hear his version of events and how he saw himself, which was as this impoverished immigrant who came from Italy as a child and pulled himself up as bootstraps and kind of used his his wit and his and his, you know, his wiles to to become the most successful director in Hollywood, he saw the academy as the ultimate manifestation of the establishment, and he wanted to be part of the establishment. And he saw winning an Oscar as a way to do that. And he pursued it. I mean, the way he tells it, he just basically decided what movie to make based on what would win him an academy.

Award. And then once he did that with it happened one night, he became president of the academy and sort of became the the establishment. I mean, this is sort of what he wanted. He wanted to be part of that that Echelon. And fascinatingly, at the minute he becomes academy president, he’s he is now being besieged by these gills, and he was know, he was a Republican.

He really was not that interested in in in the labor organizing. But then suddenly, he his own peers, the the screen director’s guild, brand new thing, they wanted him. You know, he was the most successful director and he was sort of brushing off this this union until they finally got him to join. Then he became president of the union, and suddenly he was fighting himself because that union was at war with the academy, which was him. And so he has this great tail that he, of course, dresses up with all sorts of hijinks believe them believe them or not.

Where he actually sort of he he threatened to destroy the very Academy Awards ceremony that he was supposed to host as president, unless the producers, you know, recognized his his guilt and and gave into their demands. And it it all worked out in the end just in time and he, you know, MC, the the Oscars, But, you know, I mean, it just it was it was really a war. And, you know, the the the spirit of the book is I look for moments of of major conflict. And throughout the thirties, that’s what it was. Howard Bauchner: Yeah,

I mean, I it’s it’s also interesting to see kind of how how Oscar fights also influenced credits for movies. I mean, this is particularly true in the in the in the world of green writing, I think. And there there are two kind of moments in particular that are that are interesting and worth highlighting here. The first is the fight over citizen Cain and the credit for citizen Cain and who was gonna actually get the screenwriter credit for that. Now if you’ve seen Netflix original bank, Of course, you.

We all we all know. We all we all know this story, but it but it is but it is a really interesting little glimpse into how how the Oscars and and the glory that came with winning one kind of also empowered the very unions they were trying to repel. Right?

Right. I mean, you know, the the mediation over you know, something went into into dispute over who who wrote the screenplay that, of course, affects who gets potentially nominated or wins an academy award. So it has it has this extra importance. I mean, mostly, I think screenwriters just want they’re fighting over credit, if they’re fighting at all, and then if they get nominated, then that’s that’s extra. But with with citizen Kane, that you know, that dispute, which we all know about from from Bank, resulted in Orson Wells and Herman Bank with Sharon Credit on the screenplay.

Very uncomfortably sharing credit. And then that turned out to be the only award that citizen came won at the nineteen forty two that, you know, notoriously lost everything but that. And Pauline Kaye, who wrote about citizen Kaye, famously and and and Mankowits’ contributions decades later felt that the only reason that the Academy gave them best screenplay was essentially because Hank was one of their own. And Orsula Wells was an outsider. So if you believe that, you know, if it hadn’t been from Mankowitz’s screenwriting co credit, citizen Cain might have gone completely empty handed.

Howard

Bauchner: Yeah, and then and then you were about a decade or so later, we’re into the Hollywood blacklist and the the Oscars play kind of a key role in breaking the power of the blacklist. Right?

Right. I mean, so I was I saved this chapter to last to to actually write because I, you know, I was I was sort of intimidated by the the gigantic history of the blacklist and how dark it is, you know, really the darkest chapter in Hollywood history period. I think. And and yet, when I when I delved into this story, it it turned out to be a kind of comedy within the tragedy of the Bulwark House, which was you had these screenwriters working on the black market under fake names. And they kept kind of accidentally winning Oscars, and the Academy didn’t know what to do.

You know, first, you had okay. You had Dalton Trumbo famously from the Hollywood ten. He had gone to prison for defying Hewack. And then he he he wrote he he wrote the story for this movie, The Brave One, under a fake name Robert Rich. And then Robert Rich won the Oscar in nineteen fifty seven, and no one could find this guy because he wasn’t real.

And so it became what what life magazine called a who won it? Everyone’s looking for Robert Rich. And Trumbo who was so clever realized that he could use this mini scandal to turn the tables on the academy and try to destroy the blacklist. The the academy had just instituted a rule saying that if you were blacklisted, essentially, if you had if you had been in the communist party or if you had you had not cooperated with with a congressional committee, you would you would be disqualified from getting an Oscar nomination. And so there was this rule, this hard and fast rule.

And and Trumpo realized that he could sort of exploit the the contradiction that these people were supposed to be blacklisted. And yet, they were all over town writing for, you know, bargain rates, and they were writing movies that were now winning Academy Awards. They just weren’t using their own names. So he would tell the press people that came to him asking, are you, Rob Rich? He’d say, oh, I mean, maybe.

It might be me. It might be my friend, Michael Wilson. You know, who’s also blacklisted. Trying to create this

this

play up, the open secret that blacklisted writers were writing, not just a lot of movies movies that now were winning Academy Awards. And after two years of this farce, the Academy ended up presenting the rule because it was unenforceable. I mean, other crazy things happen. Like, the year after the imaginary Robert Rich won, the bridge on the River Cry one for its screenplay, which was credited to Pierre Bull, who wrote the book that the movie was based on. Well, everyone who Pierre Bull barely spoke or wrote in English, you know, he’s a French man.

And and everybody basically knew that the people who actually wrote the screenplay were two blacklisted screenwriters Michael Wilson and Karl Forman. And so suddenly you have like another fake Oscar being given out and it’s and it’s and, you know, every time this happened, Trumpo would just delight and, like, plant, you know, from behind his typewriter in the bathtub, just kind of sort of plot his next move. And and they finally sort of overcame the Academy rule. Howard Bauchner: Yeah,

I mean, it’s it’s a very it’s it’s a funny chapter for sure. I you know, one of the one of the kind of rolling regular controversies regarding the Academy of Bush Pictures art sciences is who is actually qualified to vote on the Oscars. Who do they open up the roles to? And most recently, we saw that, you know, with the the efforts, the academy made to diverse fighter ranks. Right?

They added younger members, more members from minority groups, more members from foreign countries — Mhmm. — which I think, you know, people credit for among other things helping parasite win best picture, you know, moonlight was benefited from that probably. And and everyone’s like, oh my gosh. Well, this is, you know, this is so controversial, but this has happened before. This has happened before.

Right? There there’s a there’s a interesting story in your book about the team up of Gregory Peck and Candace Bergin to kind of get a new Hollywood in through the doors of the Academy. What what was that? What was that? Tell tell us that story.

What was that all about?

Yeah. So this was nineteen sixty nine. Gregory Peck, who was well past his Atticus Finch Davis, was the president of the academy, and it was very clear to him that there was a problem. You know, Hollywood in general was behind the times. It it had no idea how to speak to the youth audience, you know, except for these notable exceptions like two thousand one space Odyssey and the graduate.

But, you know, the Oscars were giving best picture to Oliver, you know. And those groundbreaking movies like the graduate two thousand one weren’t really winning. And and you know, Peck realized that something had to change. And then along came, Candice Bergin, who was twenty two, twenty three, she was a young Starlet and kind of It Girl. But she’d been raised in Hollywood, and her father was, of course, Edgar Burton, the ventriloquist.

And she watched the awards in nineteen sixty nine and just thought, this I don’t see anyone my own age. I don’t see anyone like me. I don’t see any movies that reflect me. So she wrote to Gregory Peck, and these their exchange, which is wonderful, is all preserved in his papers at the Academy library. And basically said, you the academy is full of antiquities who are, you know, gumming up the works of the academy.

You need new blood. Can I go out and recruit some of my hip friends essentially? And and peck said, yeah, sure. Be my guess. Here are some here are some some membership cards.

And she went went out and found people like Dennis Hopper who was, you know, of course, this wild man who is coming out with easy rider. And, you know, she was very uniquely positioned to bridge the generation gap. Kansas Bergin. And at the same time and so she got a bunch of people in. At the same time, Peck was planning something much more dramatic, which was to institute a new rule that said, if you hadn’t worked in seven years, you would be relegated to non voting status.

And so he came out with this plan right after the nineteen seventy awards and also preserved in his papers at the Academy Library are the angry letters that he got from old timers saying, you know, how dare you? And, you know, people who had worked on Abbott and Costello movies in the thirties, how dare you tell me that I’m irrelevant? And and and meanwhile, you you bring in like, you know, Barbara Streisand becomes a member before her first movie is even out. Know, funny girl. And so you just saw this this clash of generations where pet kind of was in the middle and and realized he had to steer the ship.

And and and get with the times. And all of this should sound familiar to anyone who followed, you know, the the post Oscar so white controversy in twenty sixteen where something very similar happened. And the academy decided it needed to bring in a lot more diverse members, whether that was age, race, gender, geography. And and there was a ton of pushback and and outcry. And and they were also demoting certain people to what they called emeritus status where you couldn’t vote for the Oscars if you just had if you were out of the industry and it just hit on this this very Hollywood sort of fear of obsolescence.

So I I was — Yeah. — it was fascinating to me how history kind of repeated itself. And in fact, in twenty sixteen, the president of the Academy at the time, Xiaobin Isaac’s in a letter to the membership, used up the Gregory Peck initiative as a precedent for what she was doing. Let’s

talk a little bit about the research because it’s it’s interesting to hear you talk about the going to the academy library and and going through the papers. What was what was the research process like for certainly the first half of or so of this book. I mean, you’re you’re dealing with people who are, you know, long dead in certain cases or less long dead, but still not not around. And there’s there’s just a there’s just a a wealth of information here. So I mean, what what was your what was your actual research process like you just go to library going through personal papers?

How was that how was that that what was that process like?

Well, it took me about four years to finish the book. And that was really just because of how much research I I had to do, you know, I I felt like in order to write you know, even just a chapter about the nineteen forty two Oscars. I had to learn everything there was to know about, you know, how how Hollywood and general responded to the outbreak of world war two, etcetera, things that have been written about citizen, Cain, and and all that. And but the research process trache really changed from one era to the next. I mean, it’s the book starts in the twenties.

Obviously, no one’s alive, no immediate descendants of those people are alive. So it was really about going to libraries, but the mostly the academy library and here in New York, the New York public library for performing arts, a Lincoln Center. And you know, reading old books that have been published from the time and from the year since, reading contemporary press you know, like old issues of variety, how things were covered at the time, magazines that are long, long, long, long, long gone, that that went into depth about all of that the politics Ron DeSantis and that. And then yeah. And then and then letters, you know, private correspondence, you know, they have so much great stuff especially the Academy library.

I mean, I was reading telegrams between Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. I mean, just incredible stuff. And, like, you know, the correspondence that the Academy had with Adolf Zücher, the the head of Parramat, about accepting the first ever Academy Award for outstanding picture and and him, you know, he he, you know, there was a draft of, like, his acceptance speech, which was pre filmed as a as a as a as a sound film, a short short short sound film to be shown at the ceremony because he was stuck in New York. So there’s there’s some incredible stuff to find. And then as the errors got a bit later, suddenly there would be, you know, maybe someone to interview, maybe a descendant, like I talked to Trump and, you know, gotten Trumpo’s daughter and Gregory Peck’s sons and people like that.

And once I hit the sort of seventies, suddenly people started to be really around who had worked on the films. And until I got to the present, you know, the last big chapter is about the year of Oscar silhouette and moonlight and monocland. And those people are not only still around, but very much still in the industry. And that reporting was much more similar to kind of the Hollywood reporting that I do for the New Yorker where I’m calling people up, people are anxious about, you know, what to say about their peers because they’re still in the biz and yeah, it’s just totally different.

Yeah. No. It’s fast. I and you can you can feel it reading the book because there’s a there’s a definite shift from you know, lots things are in the past tense too. Things are in the present tense, which as any close reader of magazines or newspapers will tell you, like, okay, he’s talking this is again, this is me as a journalist reading it thinking, like, oh, okay.

He’s he’s talking to somebody now. He’s, you know, as opposed to reading reading old correspondence or something. It’s just really interesting. And

several people I died while I was writing the book, and I so I started putting their quotes in in past death. She said because she was gone. I mean, you know, several people I mean, you know, Louise Fletcher talked to me about playing nurse ratchet Ron DeSantis for the Cuckoo nest, and she just died, you know, last year. And I, you know, I I sort of that was one of the last changes I made to the book to sort of acknowledge that Luis Fletcher had it was no longer alive.

Yeah. Yeah. Alright. So back back to the back to the meat of the book, you know, wait, I have a very I have a very serious very serious question here. This is the thing I was most shocked by in your book, frankly.

We we have to have some real talk here. The the Snow White, Roblow intro, would you insist is not as bad as everybody remembers it, makes it out to be.

I mean, it’s

it’s the subtext of that whole chapter is that the the producer that you’re got a bad rap. He got he got, you know, kinda kinda screwed by everybody. What is your what’s your what is your take on the that was the eighty nine Oscars, the nineteen ninety nine ceremony.

Notorious nineteen eighty nine Oscars, which are always talked about, is the worst Oscars ever. And that they open with an eleven minute opening number that infamously featured Roblo singing Proud Mary with a woman dressed as Snow White in a replica of the coconut grow with dancing cocktail tables. I mean, it’s just it’s insane. It’s absolutely insane. And it’s bad.

You know, it’s shlocky and and over the top and and completely campy. And people were kind of horrified by it at the time. But I do think that it’s I wanted to change the way we think about it, essentially, because it sort of just brought up every year as this joke worst Oscar’s ever. It wasn’t that horrible, Snow White. First of all, if you just look at the year before, it was just as slocky.

You know, the those the eighty the ceremony throughout the eighties started with these big crazy production numbers. And you know, I start that chapter with the nineteen eighty eight Academy Awards describing, you know, pee wee Hermann, you know, presenting an award and being attacked by robocop with, like, laser shooting. I mean, like, the the Academy Awards of the eighties were very tacky. And so the nineteen eighty nine opening number was kind of just the hypothesis of it, but it got all the blame. And a lot of that has to do Will Saletan Carr, who was he was best known for producing grease, but also for being a kind of flamboyant over the top figure.

He threw these lavish house parties at his at his home. And, you know, he he was known for wearing a a an array of designer castans. And he was a very flamboyant openly gay man at a very homophobic time. And he dreamt his whole life of producing the Oscars. He he finally got the chance and and it ruined his life, essentially.

But part of the reason is that he wanted everyone to know, these are the Allen Carr Oscar These are gonna be the biggest, most glamorous costumes you’ve ever seen. I’m gonna bring back the glamour, bring back the style, and he put his name everywhere. So, you know, most people don’t know who’s producing the Academy Awards year to year. I mean, unless you’re really inside the, you know, the Oscar thing. People don’t pay attention.

But Alan Card put his name everywhere. And so and then he had staged this gigantic opening number that got terrible reviews. And because it got terrible reviews, Disney threatened to sue the academy for, you know, unlawful use of their Snow White design. And And because all of this was creating such terrible press for the academy, this group of Hollywood elders like Gregory Peck and and Blake Edwards and Julie Anderson all got together and signed an open letter to the Academy’s talking about what an embarrassment this ceremony had been. So It just built and built and built.

There was this snowball effect, and everybody knew where to point the finger, which was Alan Carr because he had put his name absolutely everywhere. Ron DeSantis so his life, you know, his career was ruined overnight. You know? It’s really a sort of in the way that I said before in the Bulwark list, I kind of found a comedy about the black list within the tragedy. For this chapter, I really felt like I was finding a tragedy within the comedy because all of the details of it are completely insane and, like, over the top, and eighties, and Schlocky, and and and nuts.

And yet, there was this real person at the center who was a kind of icarus figure who flew too close to the sun and and then, you know, fell into the sea. And, you know, for the Oscars, the impact that it had was that they set up a committee to review the quality of the show. And then the next year, you really have the first kind of modern Oscars where it was the first year that Billy Crystal hosted. And it was much more pared down. There wasn’t gigantic lavish production number that seemed trapped in another age from, like, you know, variety TV of the seventies.

It was it was it was the nineteen ninety awards. And you had Billy Crystal come out and, you know, do a stand up routine. And so yeah. So it it had a lot of impact for just the way that that the ceremony evolved.

And that is kind of what we have now. So, I mean, this is why you you have whoopi Goldberg hosting, Chris Rock hosting. I mean, this is this is the the kind of standard form of the show going after.

Yeah. And there had been host, you know, like Bob Hope. But you you you noticed the shift if you go from nineteen eighty nine to nineteen ninety, you know, they they sort of realized, okay, we we cannot put on a giant variety show with like chorus girls, you know, dancing in Oscar suits anymore because people had recoiled so much from the Snow White Roblow thing.

Yeah. Moving into the nineteen nineties then into the particularly into the what I mean throughout throughout the whole decade really, it’s the Oscars becomes the Charlie Sykes. I mean, it is a it is a a tricky time in the industry because Harvey Weinstein and his brother are basically, elbowing their way into every awards race, every conversation. They’re running aggressive campaigns. They’re running aggressive negative campaigns, which is something that you know, is very much frowned upon in the Oscars.

How did that how did that change the landscape of the Oscar competition. I mean, I it’s it’s I I, you know, I live through this era. It’s all it’s always kind of interesting to read the the post mortems and the the ways in which Weinstein understood that you could wrap a movie in politics and with political figures and buy yourself a lot of cover and free press.

Oh, that’s right. I mean, one of the things that he did was sort of kind of create humanitarian campaigns that that that that made his movies seem like they were causes, you know, even going back to my left foot, you know, he he brought Donald Day Lewis to Washington and screened the movie for, you know, fifty senators. And, you know, all the way going up to, like, Silver lining’s playbook, which he sort of turned into an important movie about mental illness, which I really don’t think it is. And Lion, which was his last campaign year, was Lion. And he placed this really tone deaf ad after Trump came to power with the face of that little boy from India who had some kind of red tape problem getting to the premiere and and the the ads it’s something like, you know, it took it took mountains of, you know, red getting over mountains of red tape to get Sunny power to the the premier of line next year.

He may not be able to. You know, and it’s so tasteless, but he just pushed every conceivable angle. So in the nine throughout the nineties, Miramax was growing and gaining a lot of power and visibility. And one of the ways that Harvey Weinstein did that was through very aggressive Oscar campaigns. So you know, he would do things like have his staff members call academy members at home to say, you know, have you seen the movie?

Can we set up a screening? Have you seen it? Did you like it? What do you think? Just sort of relentlessly calling everyone.

And he would find little pockets of academy members, you know, if there were three academy members living in, you know, the Phoenix area, he’d set up a screening or something for them, and then just bring everyone from the movie the talent on, you know, weeks and weeks and weeks of relentless campaign stops, you know, and cocktail parties. And spent a lot of money, so much money that sometimes people who made the movies who were supposed to get, you know, profits on the back end realized that all of that had all disappeared because it had gone into the Oxford campaign. So, yeah, it was really about, you know, none of these things were necessarily things that he invented. But he saw himself as an underdog and he saw Miramax as an underdog. It was the New York indie company despite the fact that it was eventually acquired by Disney.

And so, you know, he really felt justified in just pulling out all the stops. That chapter about him culminates with the nineteen ninety nine Oscar Rae’s between Shakespeare and Love and Saving Private Ryan, which is very much remembered as the ugliest best picture fight ever. And I think that’s that was really the inflection point because it was so ugly. It involved, you know, part of this story had to do with DreamWorks, which really felt like, okay, this is, you know, saving Private Ryan is like our marquee movie. It’s the first movie they came out with since they had been created in nineteen ninety four that it was a huge hit.

It was a Spielberg movie. It was it was the obvious front runner for best picture. And then along comes Shakespeare in love from Miramax that kind of changed the conversation completely. And what really made it ugly was that DreamWorks heard through the grapevine that Weinstein was telling journalists to write that Saving Private Ryan was only good for the first twenty five minutes, the famous d day sequence. And then after that, it just became a standard World War two movie.

And so once DreamWorks heard that, it just became as all out war where that spilled over into the press. I mean, there was a Nikki Fink article in New York Magazine talking about how contentious this battle was. And I think people hadn’t really the general public had not been paying so much attention to the mechanics of Oscar campaigning in this way. But when Shakespeare loved one, best picture, it was such a shock. The dreamworks head of marketing at the time, Terry Press says that she was in the mezzanine watching and she said I felt like my face was on fire.

There was this just groundswell of resentment and anger toward toward Weinstein. And Hollywood didn’t want that to happen again. They they felt this guy had come to their turf and taken from something from them. So they essentially replicated his playbook. The next year DreamWorks had American Beauty, and they did everything they thought Harvey Weinstein had had done and and doubled it and and outspent every other studio in campaign spending, in ad spending.

And then the next and they won. And then the next year they won with Gladiator. And then two years later, Harvey was back in one for Chicago. And so as people in the studios realized that they needed to sort of they needed to play Harvey Weinstein’s game. That’s how this so called Weinstein playbook spread and this ecosystem was created of of of strategist.

And nonstop you around campaigning and big money to the point where the Academy had to start creating rules to sort of rain it all in.

Well, and this also gives rise to it gives, you know, it kind of creates the ecosystem for the Oscar bloggers. Right? Your awards, dailies, and that sort of thing a little surprised that you didn’t talk more about that because it feels like I mean, maybe this is just me looking at it from the outside as a a person on Twitter and a reader of blogs, but it feels like, you know, that was like that’s like a fairly big part of the story of the Oscar certainly through the late two thousands to the mid twenty tens that I I like, it didn’t didn’t feel like it got a lot of play in your book. I’m curious if from your perspective, as somebody who is, you know, kind of following the ins and outs of all this stuff, was it was it is it just not that was it just not that important the narrative setting amongst the Oscar’s vloggers not really that important as as certainly they they made it out to be. And everybody else, to be honest, it’s

just Yeah. To be honest, my my Weinstein chapter got incredibly long and I had to cut a lot of things. And just felt like I couldn’t go to every I couldn’t couldn’t couldn’t go into everything. But I I do have a little bit of that in there. It was really interesting to see how the the the growth of collection industry that was happening around the turn of the twenty first century that I just discussed was happening at the same time as the burgeoning of the blogosphere.

And sites popping up like Oscar Watch and Gold Derby. All these things that created this that kind of this other parallel cottage industry of osteoologists that we have now, people who are covering it and prognosticating year round, I think those two things are they’re not the same thing, but they’re related in the sense that I think that the the contentiousness and the mechanics of the nineteen ninety nine race had become so public that people were thinking about just the campaign in a different way. People were thinking about the season in a different way. And it became more gamified and more online. And there were suddenly, you know, opportunities to to follow this this wild and crazy thing called award season, not just the week of the Oscars, but for months and months and eventually year round.

Yeah. Yeah. Wild times. Let’s see. I don’t know.

It’s it’s it’s an interesting it’s an interesting thing to think about, especially as again, like, Now you’ve got film Twitter, which basically, you know, thinks that it is out there setting the agenda, and I’m not sure that’s really the case. I don’t I I don’t get the sense that, you know, a a ton of academy members are necessarily paying attention, but maybe maybe it is with the the influx of newer and younger members. Well,

you definitely see with the rise of social media that there is pushback that sometimes hasn’t an influence in the time time. Doesn’t, but just think about Oscar so white. That was a hashtag. That was a trending hashtag that started in twenty fifteen and then exploded in twenty sixteen. And if that hadn’t happened, who knows if the academy would have acted and done something by by announcing this this diversification initiative.

But I think, you know, public pressure from social media certainly played a role that year. And I don’t know. You know, I’m I’m on Twitter. I, you know, I followed the awards conversation on on social media. And I think it’s really interesting because there is some overlap between film Twitter and the Academy.

The actual voters, but there also is a lot of non overlap and that can lead to some whiplash when people are just surprised by what the Academy is doing because we thought, oh, thought we had settled this on film Twitter months ago. We decided that so and so was terrible and this was bad and that was good. Yeah. And so and so is gonna win. And it turns out the academy is actually like, you know, nine or ten thousand people who some of them are on Twitter and some of them are like, you know, Eighty.

Yeah.

We could we could call this we could call this the green book effect. No. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

For sure. The the way to think about this. Alright. That was everything I wanted to ask. I always like to close these interviews by asking if there’s anything I should have asked.

If you think there’s anything folks you know about your book, about the Oscars in general, you know, what we’ve got coming we we’ve got an award ceremony here in a couple weeks. We got the I’ll be

serving the day. Right?

Was it March? What is it? It’s it’s coming up here. So what do what do you think folks should know?

The book is long, but it’s really fun. I hope, you know, I wanted to make it entertaining. So it does cover a lot of history, but I wanted people to have a good time. And I don’t know. I’ll be at the Oscars.

Looking forward to seeing what happens this year. I don’t think it’ll top last year in terms of, you know, crazy shit happening, but she’ll see.

Who are you wearing at the Oscars this year? Who are you wearing? Here’s an

important thing for people to know. I have finally after years of renting taxes from men’s warehouse, invested in my own actual Tuxedo, the first that I’ve gotten that I’ve bought since my high school prom. So I will be hitting the red carpet in my very own menswear House Tuxedo this year. And it’s I’m I’m I plant a wow.

Excellent. Excellent. That’s good to know. Michael, thank you for being on the show. I really appreciate it.

Thanks so much for having me, and thanks for thanks for reading the book.

The name of the book again, it’s Oscar Wars, a history of Hollywood, and gold sweat and tears. Michael Schulman is the author. You can find it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, wherever books are sold. And I definitely again, if you’re if you’re interested in the history of Hollywood broadly, just more broadly even than the Oscar specifically. This is a must read.

I mean, I think you you can’t understand the industry without understanding how the industry thinks of itself and what the industry wants to reward. I think it’s an important it’s it’s one of the most important lenses through which to to see the business of showbiz. So check it out if you get a chance. My name is Sunny Bunch. I’m culture editor at the Bulwark, and I will be back next week with another So of the board goes to Hollywood.

We’ll see you guys in.

If you miss Bob and Tom in the morning, don’t worry, because you can catch the Bob and Tom podcast all day whenever you want. I’d mentioned that when I was a kid, I went to something called the Grotto Circle I bought a chameleon from a guy walking up and down the aisles like he would have a trifle of beers and you scoffed at that. You’ve got this from Greg. My grandparents would take me and my brothers to the shrine inner circus selling chameleons, and this would have been in the early seventies. I think the days of the boxed chameleon probably over.

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