Susan George blacklisted in Hollywood, after love scene with Ken Norton

George was never gonna get work in glossy movies. Her acting ability was modest but most importantly, she had a dirty look to her so was quite limited in terms of castibilty. I did like her breasts in 'Straw Dogs'.

Please excuse my cynicism, but:

Funny to see all the conservative reactionaries trot out their usual "oooh, look at those Hollywood liberals, they're so hypocritical" booshwah.

The big myth that deserves to be punctured here is that Hollywood is, or ever was, all that "liberal" in the first place. Large parts of Hollywood are deeply, deeply conservative, madly in love with notions of returning America to an imagined golden age of cheerful innocence that never existed to begin with.

Hollywood is the machine that gave us "It's a Wonderful Life," in which James Stewart is persuaded by an angel to forgo suicide to keep his beloved little golden-innocence town from turning into Pottersville. And a few years later, the same James Stewart, in real life, was out stumping for his best buddy Ronald Reagan, who, after becoming president, did his damnedest to... turn all of America into Pottersville.

Hollywood is the machine that doesn't mind handing out Oscars to the likes of Tom Hanks for his part in a movie that shows that, by golly by gum, it's just plain wrong to discriminate against a gay man with AIDS who, after all, is going to be dead pretty soon anyway. It's not very nice, don't you know, and besides, don't you know, it's bad for business.

And then, a few years later, Old Hollywood (presumably in collusion with a substantial enough minority of New Hollywood) reacted with shock and horror at the mere thought that a true masterpiece of gay-sympathetic cinema, "Brokeback Mountain," might win Best Picture. So, realizing that 3 of BBM's 4 competitors were doomed to split the lesser-masterpiece vote about equally, and nobody could agree which one it should be, settled on... "Crash," an easily forgotten effort whose uninspiring message seems to have boiled down to "hey kiddies, let's all feel good about telling each other how really, really bad we feel about racism." One of several times in Oscar history when Best Picture has gone to worst of 5.

Another was several years before, when they handed out the big Gilded Turkey Award to "Around the World in Eighty Days," in which one of the white heroes tosses off the N-word without a second's thought. Just the kind of casual racism that Hollywood is comfortable with casually overlooking. Just like they pretty much casually overlooked, oh, say for instance, the entire intellectual content of "Gone With the Wind." Which garnered just oodles of Oscars, as I recall.

Some say "Mandingo" is the antimatter opposite of GWTW. I say "Gone With the Wind" is the antimatter opposite of "Mandingo." Truth always comes before its reversed mirror image, after all. And after all, the only seriously implausible thing about "Mandingo" is the notion that Susan George's character, in real life, would have actually dared to hop into bed with her ebony buck. It's not unrealistic, mind you, that she might want to. It's just that in real life, she most likely would have been too terrified of her fellow honkies' reactions to risk being caught.

Well, hey, all that Oscar stuff, that's the Academy, which isn't necessarily all that representative of Hollywood as a whole. But it does represent its old guard, the guys who mostly control the pursestrings, and who still play a huge role in deciding what gets made in the first place. Which means, I suppose, that we won't be seeing our current Great Recession era produce anything anywhere near as hard-hitting as, say, "Catch-22," let alone anything as American-Nightmarish, yet somehow freakishly truthful, as "Mandingo."

Compared to the myth that Hollywood is, or ever was, "liberal" enough to be hypocritical about it, the myth that Susan George getting naked in front of a camera with Ken Norton actually damaged her career is almost laughably small-potatoes. "Hypocritical" means "acting in a manner opposite to who you pretend to be." I don't recall Hollywood ever pretending to be liberal enough to make the "Susan George blacklisted" rumor, if it were true, hypocritical. The only Hollywood I recall is the machine that never promised us a rose garden, and never delivered one, either.

"I don't deduce, I observe."