The Man Who Warned the World About Mass Manipulation Wrote Hollywood Screenplays for MGM

[00:00:00]When Aldis Huxley arrived in Los Angeles in 1938, he was nearly broke. He had left England the year before, carrying his pacifism, his damaged eyesight, his wife's declining health, and a reputation as the most unsettling novelist in the English language. What he did not carry was financial security.

[00:00:21]The royalties from Brave New World were not enough. He had a family to support.

[00:00:27]Hollywood studios were paying serious money to serious writers. And Huxley was nothing if not a serious writer. He went to work for MGM. In 1940, Aldis Huxley, the man who had published the 20th century's most precise dissection of how mass entertainment functions as an instrument of social control, delivered a screenplay for a drawing room comedy adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. It starred Greer Garson and Lawrence Olivier. It was a hit. His name was on it. He also worked on the 1944 Jane Air adaptation for 20th Century Fox, contributing substantially to a script for which he received only partial credit. He did uncredited work on other studio projects throughout the late 1930s and 1940s. For nearly a decade, one of the most rigorous critics of the Hollywood Dream Factory was employed by the Hollywood Dream Factory.

[00:01:27]He was not naive about the contradiction. He wrote to friends during this period about the experience of watching the studio system operate from the inside. The way stories were flattened, the way complexity was removed, the way every narrative was shaped to produce a specific emotional response in a mass audience and then release it cleanly, leaving nothing uncomfortable behind. He was watching in the MGM script department the precise mechanisms he had described in Brave New World. The felies made real the engineering of emotional experience at industrial scale. He kept taking the work. He kept taking notes. The man who warned the world about mass manipulation spent a decade inside the machine that manufactured it. When he came out, he knew exactly what he was talking about.