Propaganda Makes Money

One of the biggest things to help sway the public's opinion, whether it its politics, trying to make your enemy look bad at war time, or gaining public support for your group, is using propaganda to one's benefit. One can see this in just about any time period. In politics one can see how there are propaganda pieces that make their opponent look bad. But can one make money off of propaganda? During the Cold War, the movie industry in Hollywood might of figured out a way to make money while using the Communist propaganda for their own benefit. This is also why there is another theory out there that there are Communist that run Hollywood.

During the Cold War period, one theory is that Hollywood film directors used the Cold War to their benefit by using propaganda to make people see their movies. There were two movies that stood out that when talking about propaganda in Hollywood. The films “My Son John” and “Conspirator” portray a nice American family with nothing wrong with them. Then all of a sudden something happens and the family breaks apart. In one movie, the main character finds out that her husband is actually a Communist spy using her as cover. While in the other movie, it shows that a family member was brainwashed by Communist people and then that family member would try and turn them. In these movies, it showed that any common person could be turned into a Communist, whether if that is your mom, dad, neighbor, or even your best friend.

But why would the movie industry try to target Communism to make movies? Were they trying to warn people about Communism? Were they trying to cause a nationwide panic to show that anyone in America no matter who it was could be a Communist? Or was there more.

One can argue that the movie industry was falling behind during war time, people were getting hooked on watching TV at home instead of going to the movie theater. At this point the TV was making its rise, and would start talking about Communism and the war, so why would one need to go to the movies to see a movie. Well financially the movies were failing and with seeing the rise in TV ratings during the 1950’s and seeing how it was starting to grow, the movie producers went to start making movies that talked about things like Communism. Now with the movies talking about things like this, there was a huge rise in attendance. The only negative thing that this brought out was the fact that this in fact caused mass hysteria because now people thought that there were Communist everywhere including the people that you would least expect. Thus this put people on edge about who was a Communist and who was not.

Even the movie posters would use bright colors and bold fonts to catch the audience's eyes. The color red was used everywhere because the color red was associated with Communism. But this would also draw in the audiences with the bright tones, it was worth it to spend a little bit of money and see these movies.

Especially when looking at propaganda one needs to interpret what the main point of the propaganda is for. Throughout history there has been so much propaganda and there will continue to be so much propaganda. But in this piece, Hollywood manipulated the propaganda game and spun it to make money off of it. With the rise of the Television, the movie industry was scared and figured the only way to become popular again was to make people come back to the movie was to use propaganda themes for their benefit.

Attached is a propaganda movie poster, to see more and where this picture is from click here.