The Hollywood Librarian

Well, yesterday I saw The Hollywood Librarian, a film by American Ann Seidl about - wait for it - Librarians. Don't get confused by the title, it's not about Librarians who work in Hollywood, and it's only rather tenuously about Librarians in Hollywood films. It's more a film defending the profession against those who may want to destroy it. I'm not saying that Librarianship as a profession is dying out, or that Librarians are an endangered species, and nor is Seidl. However, a film purporting to examine how Librarians are represented on film instead spends a large amount of its time following a group of people trying to save their library from closure. The public library in Salinas, California (home of John Steinbeck, a fact which, if you didn't know before, you'd know by the end of the film, and indeed, have imprinted on your brain for all eternity) has been under threat of closure because the townspeople voted for tax cuts. In order to save the money to give a lower rate of taxation to the populace, the budget was slashed, and the libraries were ordered to close. A small group of people were up in arms about it, and voted for greater funds to be allocated to the library, which saved it from closure. Cue empathetic shots of tearful Librarians bewailing the loss to the town's children should the library be forced to close.

Well whoopie-do. Cambridgeshire County Council faced budget cuts due to a shortfall in government funding in 2003. So it closed ten branch libraries (all in villages) to cover the deficit. No one has made a film about the volunteers who got half those libraries running again under the banner of Library Access Points, and paved the way for future schemes in other parts of the UK. But then again, we don't make propagandist documentaries in Britain.

This last part of The Hollywood Librarian was a bit too political. Sure, the United States government spends more on Defence (or Defense, depending on whether you can spell) than it does on any other public service, but that's not going to change any time soon. This is a nation afraid for its lives, not its soul. And to protect it from these imagined threats brought on by political scaremongering, money must be taken away from other areas in order to fund the great patriotic war machine. The US government apparently spends more each day in Iraq and Afghanistan than it does all year on public libraries. Well duh! Of course it does! Weapons, transport, food, soldiers - these cost a lot more than library books do. A Librarian is not going to cost as much as a Cruse missile, no matter how much you fluff up their job.

Anyway, back to the lack of "Hollywood" in The Hollywood Librarian. I thought that this film would be about Librarians as depicted in films, and to start with, it seemed to be, although the film clips were mashed together and had no context. For instance, we weren't told what the film was about, and whether the Librarian depicted was a main character. The clip of Desk Set, starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, depicted Hepburn's character Miss Watson, answering the phone and efficiently dealing with queries, yet we were not told anything about the film. According to the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com), the plot is as follows: "The mysterious man hanging about at the research department of a big TV network proves to be engineer Richard Sumner, who's been ordered to keep his real purpose secret: computerizing the office. Department head Bunny Watson, who knows everything, needs no computer to unmask Richard. The resulting battle of wits and witty dialogue pits Bunny's fear of losing her job against her dawning attraction to Richard." I thought the movie was set in a reference library from the clips that were shown.

Similarly, although The Hollywood Librarian shows snippets of the burning of books in films as diverse as Fahrenheit 451, Cleopatra (the burning of the Library at Alexandria) and Storm Center, it doesn't actually tell you why this was happening. Bette Davis in Storm Center is defending the right of the library to stock and circulate copies of an allegedly propagandist text: "The Communist Dream". "Though she has absolutely no sympathy with such a creed, the council question some of her past activities and she finds herself not just without a job but also branded as a subversive" [imdb]. Made in 1956 during the era of reds under the bed and at the time of the McCarthy witchhunts, I can understand how this film may have been controversial in its time, but this issue was not picked up on. Apart from an ebullient Caribbean Librarian now working for computer giant HP, none of the interviewees mentioned how a free circulating library represents freedom and choice as well as the twin goals of education and enjoyment.

Although many of the Librarians taking part in the film worked at public libraries, nowhere was there any mention of how important it is for them to be free. And surely that is a reason greater than any other to save public libraries.