I've been on the Universal Studios tour, and listened up, and I've certainly been to umpteen movies. Maybe Robert Osborne says it a couple of times a day on TCM; maybe a Mayer or a Selznick coined the phrase in 1928 or something. Somebody here knows its derivation, I'm sure. Whatever its origin, one of the dominant and most beloved tropes describing early Hollywood as well as today's film/teevee entertainment biz is, "The Dream Factory". Whatever the human imagination could wish for, whatever dreams or fantasies---or nightmares---delight and haunt the human consciousness, the Biz can render them into clean, safe portions of fluffy escapist fare, or maybe challenging, alien stews, but all with a comfortingly pre-determined beginning, middle, and end, like an amusement park thrillride. All facets of visual and textual artistry are brought to bear in filmmaking, with the most talented wordsmiths, designers, performers, and technicians able to turn a backlot into a den of Ali Baba so real that one must pinch oneself, to make sure it's not a.....dream.
Quickly the money, fame, power, and influence generated by the Biz exceeded even the wildest dreams of the early moguls and performers, and for the most part it's all only increased up to the present day. Naturally such an industry has attracted the most talented actors and performers---sorry---the best looking of the most talented actors and performers, along with the most ambitious and driven of the other Dream Factory worker cadre. Since the beginning of recorded time, artists and performers have consistently proven more experimental, rebellious, unconventional, risk-taking, or "liberal"-minded, shall we say, than common sorts, in terms of lifestyle choices, leisure activities, and especially in terms of deference or lack thereof to socio-political and sexual mores then prevailing among "average" folks. Moneymen and powerbrokers of all times and places have eagerly demonstrated this special entitlement mentality, especially where conventional sexual mores are concerned, perhaps most pithily captured by Mel Brooks in History Of The World Part I..... yes, "it's good to be the King".
From Fatty Arbuckle to Lindsay Lohan, self-directed, often destructive or exploitative licentiousness has predominated among workers at the Factory, even as the Factory has always sought to provide reactionary comfort food to the masses alongside daring experimental dishes. "Hollywood" is and has always been a Party Place, where anything can happen behind the scenes as well as under the lights---and frequently the former is more shocking than the former. This dynamic is only natural for those who comprise the Dream Factory, because they themselves came there to turn their own wishes and dreams into immediate reality as well. The fruits of imagination, ambition, greed, power and control, narcissism, and pleasure are grown, plucked, and devoured from the same Dream Factory trees. Crucial personal validation for writers and performers can be had on a grand scale, as on AND off screen those limit-setting hometown naysayers are proven to be provincial and wrongheaded about Our Boy. This particular heretofore-misunderstood demographic can be revealed as heroes; that heretofore-celebrated institution or social convention can have its long-warranted comeuppance; and, especially important for Factory workers over the years, unconventional or deviant sexuality can be explored without tiresome judgement, at least off-screen, and increasingly on screen as well. Homosexuality, for instance, may indeed be just another facet of "normality", but the flag was raised in Hollywood, first with concerted off-screen tolerance, and then with the latter-day on-screen cause led by Factory homosexuals, writing and producing major social validation pieces like Philadelphia and Angels In America......which then gave way to TransAmerica. "Those people who called me and my friends 'different' in Bumswab, Nebraska, will themselves be considered society's freaks when we're done", goes the validation narrative behind countless scripts and minor subplot additions from resentful, self-righteous Factory narcissists.
Most often, in my view anyway, the Dream Factory worker's validation-entitlement quest is quite personal, quite self-referential, not redolent of larger concerns for others, despite appearances. Whatever issue or topic du jour comes down the pike, it's more of an adopted affectation for Workers, especially actors, many of the the best of whom, in the world of Method anyway, are empty-headed vessels looking for something Meaningful with which to fill their gourds [read: Sean Penn]. Cocaine or Communism, it's about striking a cutting-edge pose---so long as it remains pleasurable and convenient. Many Factory useful idiots found out that cocktail party dabbling in "Balance of Power" and "Bad America" nostrums was quite inconvenient for their careers, as post-WWII America sought to assess Stalin's reach at home and abroad in the nascent Atomic Age. One gets the sense from the deluge of Dream Factory mewling about the "Red Scare" and HUAC ever since, that the ethics or merits of their own actions, or HUAC's, were irrelevant, along with actual geo-political realities, at least compared with the sheer inconvenience and indignity of having preferences, careers, and Personal Validation Narratives, interrupted with impertinent (to them) inquiries concerning the nation's domestic security. The very Idea of asking them to explain themselves!
Roman Polanski is angry and indignant as well right now, and so is the Dream Factory on his behalf. The script of his Life Movie is not supposed to tend this way, though of course there's still hope this jailing could turn out to be his Last Obstacle before well-deserved redemption, in the faces of mean-spirited, law enforcement bureaucrats who've never had an orgasm. Polanski and other Dream Factory denizens have already visualized a ten-minute standing ovation for Our Hero at the Kodak Theater on Oscar night next January, perhaps as a sort of normative bookend to the courageous shunning so many of them delivered to Elia Kazan because Kazan put truth and America's security before Factory loyalty in the time of maximal existential danger to this nation's survival in her short history. "Heroical Victim and Survivor and Triumphant Artist" is the desired theme of the Polanski Life Movie. No room for tiresome, inconvenient consequences for a long-passed sequence of events, events of minor "One Friday Night In The Groovy Seventies" significance to Polanski. These are, after all, narrative events of which he, Polanski, is the true victim, given his misbegotten exile as an importance Artiste from America.......as compared to the pedestrian, largely-theoretical sufferings of a long-ago recompensed cipher-woman who was pimped to him by her Hollywood mom as Factory fodder per long-established Factory rights and privileges. For the Biz, the Factory, Polanski's oeuvre far outweighs any other consideration at this juncture, because in the Dream Factory, some pigs are manifestly more equal than others, and things like the law, and personal responsibility, and sacrifice, and the dignity of "little" people, are contingent, elective, exigent concepts for the Personal-Reality Makers of the Dream Factory
