An Insider’s Observations On Hollywood’s Decline

If you feel frustrated by the lack of quality films being produced over the last few decades, you are not alone. Anyone who watches Turner Classic Movies regularly rather than seeing recent films probably feels the same way.

But is there a simple explanation as to what has changed about the movies?

One legendary Hollywood veteran working behind the scene’s had a strong opinion as to what happened.

Sydney Guilaroff, MGM hair stylist

Sydney Guilaroff (1907-1997) is a name you will see in the credits of hundreds of films from the 1930s until the 1980s. Working as the supervising hair stylist at MGM and for stars who specifically requested his services, Guilaroff was an innovative leader in his field, and friend to dozens of Hollywood stars including Ava Gardner, Great Garbo, Katharine Hepburn, Lena Horne, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and Natalie Wood.

Guilaroff’s 1996 autobiography Crowning Glory Reflections Of Hollywood’s Favorite Confidant (as told to Cathy Griffin) 1996, General Publishing Group, contains a short passage describing Hollywood’s descent.

From Crowning Glory:

The world of movies, in which I lived and worked for more than 60 years, was a golden age, a time when American films represented this country at its best, when audiences expected to be thrilled and entertained with romance and glamour in stories that embodied humankind’s
highest aspirations. The films made in those years promoted and displayed standards of beauty, romance, pride and hard work that people sought to emulate in their daily lives. It was an industry of visionaries, a business of high artistic standards, and at MGM, at least, greatest of
all the studios, a family of craftspeople, artisans, performers and executives worked together with love and care, which is still evident in each frame of every movie. They will live forever.

But that world and that age are long gone. I can think of hardly more than a handful of films made in recent years that will stand up for another half century. The reasons are not hard to understand: The motion picture industry was founded by entrepreneurs, small businessmen who had come from other backgrounds. They were inventing a new art form even as they built their studios. The best survived into the era in which I was fortunate enough to play my own small role. And because their personal values reflected a simpler and more congenial age, they often treated their employees with the sort of respect and devotion otherwise found only in extended families.

Today, however, the studios are owned by huge and impersonal multinational corporations that have sacrificed art on the altar of profit. Their films are too often triumphs of technology, bursting with elaborate special effects but sadly lacking in stories that celebrate human values, promote culture or elevate the spirit. Instead, most Hollywood films now are aimed at the lowest common denominator, glorifying greed, lust and violence, the basest aspects of human nature. Audiences now expect and accept wildly exaggerated tales featuring totally unbelievable characters, and the life expectancy of each $40 million epic is determined week after week solely by its box office receipts.

Even worse, those who appear in today’s films are a different breed. Movie stars were once admired and emulated by people around the world. Now the so-called superstars look much like their audiences. Their public behavior is frequently despicable and unprincipled: top-billed actors bashing automobiles with golf clubs over traffic disputes or consorting publicly with the most sordid of prostitutes; actresses proudly bearing babies whose father’s names they cannot even recall; screen stars ingesting all manner of illicit drugs and behaving like spoiled children instead of public figures. They demand wealth and fame as their due for working in the cinema, but they do little in return for the moviegoing public except provide the worst examples of human misconduct.