Two years after the so-called Republican Revolution of 1994, the ultraconservative Ludwig von Mises Institute prominently featured an article entitled “How Antitrust Ruined the Movies” in The Free Market, its official newsletter. In it, the author, who had recently publicly beseeched the South to secede from the Union, argued that Big Government regulation was responsible for the decline in Hollywood since its golden age of the thirties and forties. Hardly an aberration, the article reflects a change in cultural climate. Gone are the insinuations of Jewish control and fears of a vulnerable public mind. Resentment had shifted from overtly blaming racial and ethnic groups to blaming the more nebulous but sufficiently malignant “Big Government.” Although the focus of resentment had changed, the net effect worked all the more artfully to keep certain Others at the margins. In a general climate that was hostile to notions of public interest and collective social responsibility, Congress could dismantle the last vestiges of New Deal socialism. One could redeem the poor and disenfranchised through a form of socially engineered “tough love.”

Given this new cultural climate in America, the Hollywood Question had taken a truly bizarre historical twist. Movies of the thirties and forties were apparently no longer at odds with down-home Americana. The conservative idyll of the American past now harbored both vertically integrated Hollywood and the small town in which movie palaces had screened products from motion picture's golden age. Such are the vicissitudes of the Hollywood Question.

Although it is tempting to dismiss The Free Market as representative of a crackpot fringe, its version of film history indicates mainstream shifts in American culture.