Talk:Hail, Caesar!

Text-merge about October 2014

I have moved to Hail, Caesar! (version 2) an alternate version which was text-merged into this version. Anthony Appleyard (talk) 11:41, 3 December 2014 (UTC)

"Commie rats"

A number of characters are listed as "communist screenwriters." Is this from the script? It seems doubtful; and if it isn't from the script, they would be more accurately listed as "blacklisted screenwriters." Theonemacduff (talk) 06:19, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

The cited sources says "Communist", not "blacklisted". So that's what we've got for now, ahead of the release. Barte (talk) 06:32, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

@Theonemacduff: They are Communists, not rats, and not blacklisted. Mathew5000 (talk) 09:32, 4 February 2016 (UTC)

Well, this is a movie, not reality, so for now we go with the source. IRL, the blacklisted writers were, for the most part, people who had been members of the Communist party at one time or another, howsoever briefly, so the two categories (blacklistees: Communist screenwriters) overlap to a considerable degree. Image a venn diagram where the two circles occupy almost the same space. As for the rats, apologies; I should have put it in quotation marks, as citing a common political slur of the period. Theonemacduff (talk) 18:16, 4 February 2016 (UTC)

Confirming Mathew5000's post. No blacklisted writers appear in the film. Also no Godhead. Barte (talk) 21:29, 5 February 2016 (UTC)

 Done -- Reads good to me. -- AstroU (talk) 00:12, 18 February 2016 (UTC)

Big Lebowski reference?

This is just a pet theory but maybe a reliable source will take it up: did anyone who has seen the film think that Scarlett Johansson's mermaid costume, when first shown, resembles a large underwater bowling pin? Barte (talk) 00:08, 15 February 2016 (UTC)

We just saw (and appreciated) the movie; and the thought didn't occur to us. It never seemed like a mermaid fin either. -- AstroU (talk) 00:14, 18 February 2016 (UTC)

It helps to either be looking for it or obsessed. Barte (talk) 00:20, 18 February 2016 (UTC)

Country of production

I would like to discuss about the country of production of this film, regarding a recent edit I made. I still think that the UK is a country of production for this, considering it's in the IMDB page of this movie, and a British company (Working Title) was involved in this. You can ignore Japan. Going to ping TropicAces since he was the one that reverted my edit and for the two of us to discuss about this. Daerl (talk) 02:30, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

I think you make a good case. Working Title is based in London (news to me). It's headed by Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner, whom we list as the two producers in addition to the Coens. Barte (talk) 03:24, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

McCarthyism

Why does the 'Historical context' section not include a reference to McCarthyism? From a European perspective, this seems a glaring omission and so I raise the issue here first (rather than simply editing the article ) to politely enquire why? John007.6 (talk) 09:47, 3 May 2017 (UTC)

The relationship between the film and McCarthyism is complex, but it's certainly worth a try. Here are a couple of sources that might prove useful: [1] [2]. See also the related discussion above. Barte (talk) 11:58, 3 May 2017 (UTC)

The Last Tycoon

Among its many references to Golden Era studio films, Hail, Caesar! has structurally and thematically most in common with the 1976 film The Last Tycoon, and at least the beach house scenes from it are directly referenced in the Coen film. It's just that The Last Tycoon was made during the liberal, challenging, and thought-provoking New Hollywood era when the liberal auteurs and writers (caricatured in the Coen film as religiously Soviet-loyal commies) had taken over. Being a retrospective look by a more liberal and non-conformist era back at the perished conservative Golden Hollywood studio system, The Last Tycoon thus is a drama ending on a bitter note that stands symbolic for the end of the Golden Hollywood era when big studio head Monroe Stahr (aka Robert DeNiro, aka Irving Thalberg) realizes that money, stars, and production values may make big shiney, soulless soap bubbles as box-office hits, but nothing of lasting historical or artistic merit, and that that's why Stahr's first love, the silent movie actress, had mysteriously wasted away when he and his attitude had taken over Hollywood. That had been the lesson of the breakup of Golden Hollywood that had given rise to the liberal, non-conformist, thought-provoking era of New Hollywood with much smaller but much more radical, clever, and thought-provoking films out-of-the-ordinary, as told in retrospect by The Last Tycoon.

The Coen film, as pretty much the modern anti-thesis to The Last Tycoon, is told from the perspective of our current conservative Blockbuster era that is pretty much an exact repetition of Golden Era Hollywood. That's why Hail, Caesar! takes a much more lenient, nostalgic, and concilliatory look at its historical twin predecessor of an era as a mild comedy where there's nothing really wrong with how the studio system, direct predecessor to today's big Blockbuster studios, ran things. The Coen Brothers pretty much paint intelligent and liberal New Hollywood, chronologically sandwiched in-between the two conservative corporate commercial eras, as a short disruption due to a few silly commies and madmen as represented by the scatterbrain, book-smart commie writers that kidnap actor Baird Whitlock. Because the conservative Blockbuster era has forgotten the lesson of why the just as conservative and soulless Golden Era studio system broke down, the Coens can find nothing fundamentally wrong in their film today with how the big studios of the Golden Hollywood era were running things, unlike Elia Kazan did with his New Hollywood film about the end of the Golden Era back in the 70s.

That's why in Hail, Caesar!, studio boss Mannix is pretty much sainted in the end and he and his system granted eternal live as something like the best of all possible worlds, as humanely flawed as it is, but only in a way that even makes it allthemore likable (unlike as is the case with doomed Monroe Stahr and his likewise doomed system in The Last Tycoon), and that's why the Coens caricature the liberal and thought-provoking writers and auteurs (who thought out-of-the-box and would be responsible for New Hollywood) as religiously Soviet-loyal communists, a lot like some telefilm about a decade ago called the "We love Big Money in politics" Democratic Party "a recruiting ground for neo-marxism" for being "too liberal and radically left-wing". That's the true reason why the writers in Hail, Caesar! refer to themselves as "the future", not just as some foolish pretense but because they pretty much represent how the Coen Brothers obviously think about New Hollywood, which during the Golden Era still *WAS* "the future" that lay around the corner.

In any case, here's a number of reviews in sources good enough for Wikipedia that draw parallels between Hail, Caesar! and The Last Tycoon, lazily googled within five minutes: [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], some mentioning the connection just in passing, but some of them even remotely echoing the analysis I've pointed out above. So I'd say at the very least our article here should mention that at least some critics have compared the two films and drawn parallels between them. --2003:71:4E07:BB06:9C7A:4EA9:9E4:89CF (talk) 22:34, 30 November 2017 (UTC)