The Library of America just released a new collection of film critic Pauline Kael's best writing. According to Clive James, she taught us how to think about more than movies:
Some of her judgments about Hollywood spread right out to cover the whole of American society.
This is one of the big hurdles that defeat artists in Hollywood: they aren’t allowed to assume that anybody knows anything, and they become discouraged and corrupt when they discover that studio thinking is not necessarily wrong in its estimate of the mass audience.
Right there is one of the differences between the American and, say, the British cultures. In Britain, an editor will permit a writer to make an allusion if he, the editor, understands it. In America, an editor might well understand it but he will want it taken out, for fear that the readers won’t.
The Dish 