VIDEO ART : On the Outside Looking In : With ‘Made in Hollywood,’ Norman and Bruce Yonomoto hope to make their artful Tinseltown dream come true

“Everybody believes in the Hollywood dream--and it’s in me too,” confesses Los Angeles artist Bruce Yonomoto, who’s been collaborating on critically acclaimed videos with his brother Norman for 14 years. “It’s shaped the expectations we have, the way we want our faces to look, the way we want our lives to be lit with a certain warm, lustrous glow--it’s inescapable.”

The Hollywood dream, that pervasive mythology that colors much of contemporary life, is the subject of the Yonomotos’ “Made in Hollywood,” which has its L.A. premiere at the Museum of Contemporary Art this Saturday in a joint presentation with the Long Beach Museum of Art (the piece also screens on November 2 as part of the AFI Video Festival).

Their most ambitious production to date, “Made in Hollywood” interweaves an encapsulated history of the American film industry with various droll observations on modernist myths of creativity, all the while poking fun at the consumerism that’s become a religion in this country. Commercials for Stater Brothers supermarkets--those laughably lyrical montages of golden wheat fields and hugging families--turn up throughout the piece.

Structured as a soap opera chronicling the travails of Tammy, a sweet country lass who follows her dream to Southern California, “Made in Hollywood,” which stars Mary Woronov, Michael Lerner, Patricia Arquette and Ron Vawter, is a sad saga of shattered illusions for some of its characters. For others, it’s an exercise in adaptability, a lesson in how to salvage the semblance of a dream from the scrap heap of popular culture.

Budgeted at $100,000 and jointly financed by Germany’s ZDF Television and a $20,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, “Made in Hollywood” has a polish and a clear narrative line that’s new to the Yonomotos’ work, and they’re hoping the piece might serve as an entree into feature filmmaking. The Yonomotos may not approve of Hollywood, but they want to be dealt into the game anyway.

Talking with the pair at Bruce Yonomoto’s elegant house in the Hollywood Hills, the brothers come off as very much like their work--which is to say, they’re witty, smart, steeped in media theory, and wickedly cynical about the messages the culture is currently feeding us.

“Hollywood created an international language by clamping down on core parts of human experience, and romantic love is the hook media has in most people,” observes Norman Yonomoto, who at 44 is the older of the two brothers (Bruce is 41). “It gets into our lives by bombarding us with images of how people relate, what love is, what friendship and family are. Obviously, media doesn’t create the desire for romantic love--we’re born with that because it’s tied to reproduction--but media definitely shapes the way that yearning is manifested.”

“At this point we interact with movies in a behavioral way--it’s a trigger mechanism and we respond automatically,” adds Bruce, warming to the Yonomotos’ favorite subject. “Our work tries to shed some light on the manipulation that occurs between audiences and film--the way they make you cry, for instance. We’re not lampooning those emotional responses, nor do we think people should be immune to manipulation. However, they should have a deeper understanding of what’s taking place, because corporate Hollywood has very cynically appropriated these emotional cues and uses them drained of content. Spielberg is a master at this.

“Early filmmakers like Eisenstein and Griffith had political agendas,” he continues. “Granted, they could be reactionary and twisted, but their goal was to enlighten. Now the emphasis is on selling products, and that’s what ‘Made in Hollywood’ is about. Our film travels through the history of Hollywood and comes to the conclusion that commercials are the apotheosis of that history. In terms of how much money is spent per minute, commercials cost far more to make than films. Moreover, commercials have become the repository for symbols representing values that no longer exist in our society.”

This is an interesting theory, however, it’s based on the assumption that people don’t want to be manipulated. One could make the case that people don’t mind it at all as long as it feels good.

“Obviously the public wants to be manipulated,” Norman agrees, “but at the same time, viewers are becoming increasingly bored with what’s available to them. This beautifully constructed Hollywood machine is turning into a dinosaur, and it has to adapt. The choices people have as far as number of (TV) channels is increasing, but at the same time, the structures, stereotypes and genres of the entertainment industry are becoming increasingly narrow.”

One could also make the case that criticizing media because of its propensity to manipulate hardly seems like late-breaking news; Jean Baudrillard and his posse of fellow French theoreticians pretty much mined out this point of view over the past decade. Moreover, everything from a kiss to a plate of spaghetti can be viewed as a form of manipulation.

“Of course, this kind of critique of filmmaking and media isn’t new,” Bruce concedes. “Godard, Rohmer and Bunuel all did it in the ‘50s, and it is backtracking in a way. But somebody has to protest and express a demand for films that have more going on than the creation of the desire for commodities. In the end our motives are selfish--I don’t

want to live my life at this level of consciousness, and want to be presented with stimulating material that challenges me.”

The Yonomotos’ ambivalent obsession with the American Dream as depicted by Hollywood makes perfect sense in light of their upbringing. Two of four sons born to second-generation Japanese Americans, the Yonomotos recall that their childhood was profoundly affected by their mother’s having spent three years at the Tule Lake internment camp during World War II. Their father was also briefly held at a camp, but was released early when he was drafted and sent to war (incredibly, the U.S. government drafted many of their Japanese-American detainees). Raised in Santa Clara--an area later to be known as the Silicon Valley--the Yonomotos grew up keenly aware that all was not as promised in the land of the free.

“Oddly enough, our parents weren’t bitter about what was done to them,” Bruce recalls. “It was more like they wanted to forget and put it behind them. In fact, most of the people we knew who were in camps don’t even remember, or claim not to. Still, being born right after the war, we encountered plenty of racism when we were growing up--there were only five Japanese in our entire school.”

“The internment camps did leave our parents with a deep mistrust of institutions, and we were taught from the time we were very young to take everything that was told us with a grain of salt,” adds Norman. “Our parents used to take us to church, then when we got home they’d say, ‘You know, those are beautiful stories, but they’re just stories.’ We’d visit our grandparents and they’d take us to a Buddhist temple, then when we came home my mother would say, ‘Those are wonderful stories as well, but they too are just stories.’

“At the same time, we grew up believing completely in the American Dream as televised--which is a desire for commodities, stereo sets and so forth,” he continues. “We both grew up in front of the T.V. set, and our family just loves the movies--from the time we were babies they were taking us to them. And our parents believe in the romantic ideals of films, especially my mother. The Nisei (second-generation Japanese Americans) tend to be more American than Americans, and our parents encouraged that in us. Because of the war, they wanted to negate the Japanese thing as much as possible.”

Having had what they describe as “a very liberal upbringing,” the Yonomotos were interested in art from an early age and after graduating from high school, Bruce headed for the University of California at Berkeley, where he studied photography, lithography, art theory and Asian studies from 1967 to 1971. Norman attended film classes at UCLA from 1964 to 1966, then went on to two years of advanced film study at the American Film Institute. Bruce recalls that his classes in Asian studies “made me aware that half my education was missing--that I had a European education, but had no knowledge of Japan,” so in 1974 he departed for a year of study in Japan.

In another part of town, Norman graduated from AFI in 1972 deeply disillusioned. “When I got out of school I wasn’t too happy with what was happening in the film industry,” he recalls. “There was so much great experimental stuff being done in the ‘60s, but by 1972 the industry was evolving into a real conservative corporate structure.”

In 1975, Bruce returned from Japan and enrolled at Otis Art Institute “as a way of becoming involved in the community,” and it was there he discovered video. “I’d always been interested in media, so video seemed like the ideal form for me, “ he recalls. “Nam June Paik was, of course, a big inspiration, and at the time the Long Beach Museum had an exceptionally progressive video program. Video was an art form with a lot of promise then.”

The following year the Yonomotos collaborated on their first piece, a 90-minute film called “Garage Sale” about a transvestite named Goldie Glitters who ran for homecoming queen of Santa Monica College. While Bruce laughingly dismisses the film today, it solidified the brothers’ commitment to work together and confirmed their feeling that video was the appropriate form for the things they wanted to express.

Their first video, “Based on Romance,” was completed in 1979, and “An Impotent Metaphor” followed in 1980. Here they introduced the themes they’ve explored in all their pieces: the cliches of Freudianism, the illusions of romantic love, the schizophrenic marriage of Japanese and American thinking, the tyranny of media and its ability to debase reality, and the moth-eaten myths of modernism. Subsequent tapes included “Green Card: An American Romance” in 1982, “Spalding Gray’s Map of L.A.” in 1984, “Vault” in 1984, “Kappa” in 1986 and “Blinky” in 1988. Several of these tapes have been featured in the prestigious Whitney Biennial, the Yonomotos have received numerous grants and their work has been screened throughout Europe and Japan.

Michael Nash, curator of video at the Long Beach Museum of Art, comments that “along with Bill Viola, Bruce and Norman are the best video artists in Southern California. They’ve created a form of soap opera perfectly positioned between the art world and media culture which offers a sophisticated critique of TV reality.”

Video art was unofficially launched in 1965, when Korean artist Nam June Paik--widely regarded as the master of the medium--unveiled a series of seminal works. Once hailed as the great hope on the horizon of the art world, video has yet to live up to its early promise.

“Video has certainly gone through a transformation in the past few years,” Bruce observes. “Video artists tend to have very precise agendas, and some of the work is quite powerful and instructive, but it’s always operated largely within the art world and the university system. There was a time when it was thought video had the potential to break out of that world into the mainstream, but so far it’s failed to do that. I’m still interested in video--largely because you can make an art videotape for $20,000, and you can’t make much of a movie for that--and I’m thankful this genre exists because it’s allowed many people, including us, to develop. At the same time, the film world has a distribution system and a mainstream critical dialogue that we want to be part of now.”

“Another reason we’re hoping ‘Made in Hollywood’ might lead to some projects with slightly larger budgets,” adds Norman, “is that working with extremely low budgets leaves you so drained by the nuts-and-bolts demands of making a piece, that you don’t have any energy left to think about what you’re doing.

“There’s a handful of producers willing to take a chance on experimental filmmakers like Spike Lee and Jim Jarmusch, and we’d like to fit into that slot,” he continues. “They have modest budgets, but their work addresses a mainstream audience and is distributed to reach that audience. However, it’s not life or death that the next project be a film. It takes so much energy to break into the industry that it can take over your life and your work, and we don’t want that to happen.”

While critic Kirby Dick praises “Made in Hollywood” for “revealing video’s unexploited potential as a force for cultural innovation and critique,” this piece is very much about biting the hand the Yonomoto’s hope will feed them, and it seems safe to assume that the industry might be less than cordial to their ideas. They claim, however, that their meetings with Hollywood have been reasonably friendly.

“Mostly, they just sort of shrug when we show them our work--and I get the impression they want to help us see the light,” Bruce laughs. “They don’t understand what we’re doing and usually just say, ‘Why did you make this?’ ”

If they get a green light from Hollywood, the Yonomotos will be the first video artists to make the leap to the big screen; should it happen next week, they’ll be ready to go, as the script for their next project is well under way.

“Ideas about media theory have surfaced in all our work, and with ‘Made in Hollywood’ we basically said everything we want to say on the subject,” says Norman. “Media theory will always be in our work to a degree, but we’re ready to examine other issues. The question of modernism--and the fact that it’s ending--seems to be where we’re headed next. Authenticity, the myth of the Bohemian artist, the idea that you can’t copy the master’s work but you should copy his attitude--those beliefs are central to modernism and we’re writing a piece dealing with them. It could possibly be a film, and I believe a mainstream audience would respond to a film that dealt with those issues in a provocative way.”

“If you make it look like a Merchant/Ivory production, there’s an audience for anything,” adds Bruce with a laugh.