When I returned from the war in Vietnam, I wrote a film script as an antidote to the myth that the war had been an ill-fated noble cause. The producer David Puttnam took the draft to Hollywood and offered it to the major studios, whose responses were favorable — well, almost. Each issued a report card in which the final category, “politics,” included comments such as: “This is real, but are the American people ready for it? Maybe they’ll never be.” By the late 1970s, Hollywood judged Americans ready for a different kind of Vietnam movie. The first was The … Continue reading Hollywood’s New Censors