Stage Under Siege - Tim Robbins' "Cradle Will Rock" - Interview

Interview, Dec, 1999 by Chuck Stephens

There are always busybodies in public office who think they can dictate what art others can and can't look at. Cradle Will Rock, the astonishing new movie by Tim Robbins, shows how Orson Welles's theater group and painter Diego Rivera contended with censorship in the '30s

In 1937 Orson Welles mounted the premiere of Marc Blitzstein's pre-labor musical, The Cradle Will Rock, for the Federal Theater on Broadway. Congress, Just beginning to heat up the Red Scare, shut down the theater project, which it considered a hotbed for Commies, and guards padlocked the theater where the show was to open a day before the first preview. In a moment of mad inspiration, Welles led his performers across Manhattan and performed the play anyway, from the aisles of an empty theater, against union rules, for an audience that had marched twenty-one blocks.

Five years earlier, Nelson Rockefeller had commissioned Diego Rivera to paint a mural In the lobby of the newly built RCA Building in Rockefeller Center. Rivera included a syphilis cell and a portrait of Lenin in his atom-age tableau of early-twentieth-century life. Rockefeller was not amused. He called In his Jackhammers and had them erase the mistake. Every last brushstroke.

In Tim Robbins's Cradle Will Rock, these two legendary events slip the bonds of time and collide. A very smart, very screwball, and ultimately very chilling comedy about American culture's fat cats and underdogs in the '30s, Robbins's playfully detailed and breathlessly paced movie is a complete about-face from the seriousness of Dead Man Walking. Deftly crosshatched with farce, Cradle Will Rock remodels history as a kind of thinking folks' slapstick; it's a grandly populated escapade where a ventriloquist's dummy sings the "Internationale," where culture (then as now) gets sucker punched by politics, and where Orson Welles may well have been the Johnny Rotten of his day. Robbins explained why when he spoke to Interview from Vancouver, where he was busy with his own little War of the Worlds: a starting role in next year's astro-thriller, Mission to Mars.

CHUCK STEPHENS: Cradle Will Rock ties together so many historical events and characters from all over the culture map. How and where did you find a place to start?

TIM ROBBINS: Several years ago, someone told me the amazing tree story of Orson Welles's production of The Cradle Will Rock, and I immediately thought, Wow, that's an amazing ending for a movie. How can I make a movie with that ending? So young and so brilliant--before Citizen Kane, before the War of the Worlds radio broadcast, Welles had had this fantastic theatrical career. And in reading about the theater of that era, I found Hallie Flanagan's history of the Federal Theater, Arena--she was the theater's head--and that was completely inspirational for me. Reading that book, I became overwhelmed by the magnitude of Flanagan's achievement, especially in light of my having been a theater major in college, and never hearing one word about it. One would think that if you were a student of theater in the United States, you would certainly have heard about a national theater that reached something like 25 million people.

CS: Did the Federal Theater have a mandate?

TR: Many theater people were unemployed during the Depression, and Flanagan chose to put them to work on something dating and innovative: creating a theater that supported not only reinterpretations of Shakespeare and Marlowe, but also modern playwrights like O'Neill and Shaw. She also invented this whole new kind of theater called the Living Newspaper, which was a mixture of information and vaudeville and circus, and she made it possible for touring companies to go into areas that had never really seen theater before. Flanagan had a lot of guts, and she made plays that people wanted to see, that were hugely successful. Only about 10 percent of the plays the Federal Theater did were social in nature--and of course those were the plays that congressmen of the day seized upon and used as a way to attack and dismantle her accomplishments.

Some things never change. Congress will always find the crucifix in the urine, and get a lot of play in the press by condemning it. In his recent attacks on the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the mayor of New York City did the same thing. He achieved a terrible silent victory, because anytime a politician does this kind of thing for political gain, artists tend to censor themselves, and arts administrators tend to be more careful and cautious about what they'll exhibit, in the interest of perpetuating funding. But when you cut funding for artists, and when you intimidate people who are creating, you're really just hurting the cultural wealth of America.

CS: What else about the '30s Interested you?

TR: I was fascinated by what had happened with Diego Rivera's mural at the Rockefeller Center. Even though that happened in 1932 and Welles's production of Cradle was in 1937, the stories had so many thematic links that it seemed natural to interweave them.