Academy Anniversary Quotes

Moving on from the elite scientists of the National Academy and the Royal Society, is there any evidence that, in the population at large, atheists are likely to be drawn from among the better educated and more intelligent?

On the 20th anniversary of the crackdown, when three shifts of people a day were sharing the watching responsibilities, she decided it was too good an opportunity to miss. She photocopied two articles she had written and distributed them to all the policemen and plainclothes agents, telling them, “You guys are the ones watching me, but you don’t know why you’re watching me, do you? I’ll give you this information so you know why.” She discovered that some of them had no idea what had happened on June 4th, and one—a young female student from the Police Academy—even abandoned her post in disgust after discovering the reason she was there. “There is nothing we can do about this,” another watcher told her. “We were sent here by our superiors. They’re all messed up. Their brains are all addled.

While the picture houses were struggling to maintain their audiences, things were not going terribly well on the production side of the business either. The previous November unions representing the craft trades—painters, carpenters, electricians, and the like—had secured something called the Studio Basic Agreement, which granted them important and costly concessions. The studios were now terrified of being squeezed similarly by actors and writers. With this in mind, thirty-six people from the creative side of the industry met for dinner at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles in January 1927 and formed a kind of executive club to promote—but even more to protect—the studios. It was a reflection of their own sense of self-importance that they called it the International Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, elevating the movies from popular entertainment to something more grandly artistic, scientific, and literally academic. In the second week of May, while the world fretted over the missing airmen Nungesser and Coli, the academy was formally inaugurated at a banquet at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. (The idea of having an awards ceremony was something of an afterthought, and wasn’t introduced until the academy’s second anniversary dinner in 1929.)

The world of Shindana—of top Mattel brass working side by side with the founders of Operation Bootstrap, the Watts-based job training program under whose auspices the toy company was formed—was a far cry from the way the thirtieth-anniversary issue of Barbie magazine depicted Barbie's world in 1966. "Our inner cities burned but the pot roast couldn't," the caption says under a picture of Barbie at a Tupperware party. "Mom and Dad and the leaders they elected tried to keep a lid on things." As I said in this book's opening chapter, studying Barbie sometimes requires the ability to hold contradictory ideas in one's head at the same time. When it comes to Mattel and representations of racial diversity, this is especially true. Although the Handlers have not been part of Mattel for twenty years, the company can still be viewed as a cousin to the Hollywood studios. Mattel actually did get into the movie business in the seventies, when its Radnitz Productions produced the Academy Award-winning Sounder, another multicultural product that predated the multicultural vogue.