Glamour on the campaign trail

Though this book is published by Oxford University Press and the author teaches at the University of Southern California, it is really only semi-demi-academic.

Steven J. Ross has conducted interviews and trawled through archives, but his instincts are for the flat vividness of journalism rather than anything more scholarly or searching. In a footnote he may mention that Harry Belafonte, in an interview in the mid-1990s, got the date of a crucial meeting with Martin Luther King wrong by three years, but is happy to quote Belafonte’s version (in that same interview) of what King said — ‘We are caught up in a struggle that will not leave us’ — as if a memory confused about dates could be relied on for exact phrasing.

Ross has chosen ten exemplary figures (five conservatives and five radicals), from Charlie Chaplin to Arnold Schwarzenegger, to portray the changing tone of politics in the film industry.