American Dream

American Dream
DVD cover
Directed by	Barbara Kopple Co-directors: Cathy Caplan Thomas Haneke Lawrence Silk
Produced by	Arthur Cohn Barbara Kopple
Music by	Michael Small
Cinematography	Tom Hurwitz Mathieu Roberts Nesya Shapiro
Editing by	Cathy Caplan Thomas Haneke Lawrence Silk
Distributed by	Channel 4 Films Cabin Creek
Release date(s)	October 6, 1990 (New York Film Festival)
Running time	100 minutes
Country	United States United Kingdom
Language	English

American Dream (1990) is a cinéma vérité documentary film directed by Barbara Kopple and co-directed by Cathy Caplan, Thomas Haneke, and Lawrence Silk.^[1]

The film recounts an unsuccessful strike in the heartland of America against the Hormel Foods corporation.

Synopsis

The film is centered on unionized meatpacking workers at Hormel Foods in Austin, Minnesota between 1985 and 1986. Hormel had cut the hourly wage from $10.69 to $8.25 and cut benefits by 30 percent despite posting a net profit of $30 million. The local union (P-9) opposed the cut, but the international union, the United Food and Commercial Workers, did not support them.

The local union is shown hiring a freelance strike consultant, Ray Rogers, who comes in with charts, graphs and promises of a corporate campaign to draw national press attention. Rogers delivers in the short term, but, it is not enough to defeat opposition from Hormel management and the UFCW international union.

The local union, in defying its national union, believed that its workers should be paid more by Hormel than unionized workers at other companies. This came at a time when the U.S. had just emerged from a deep recession and inflation was at or near double digits, thus making the company's financial position fragile despite its profitability.

A negotiator for the national union is shown on camera explaining that their rapacity cost the national union forty years of benefits, as the local union made the mistake of "tearing up" and attempting to rework the contract, thus opening the door for Hormel to toss out guarantees and benefits that had formerly been standard. Other companies in the field subsequently followed suit, as Hormel and its contract were considered the "gold standard" in the industry.

American Dream features footage of union meetings and press releases, Hormel press releases, news broadcasts, and in-depth interviews with people on both sides of the issue, including Jesse Jackson.

Exhibition

The film premiered at the New York Film Festival on October 6, 1990. In January 1991 it was screened at the Sundance Film Festival. On March 18, 2002, it opened in New York City.

Reception

Striker gets arrested.

Roger Ebert liked the documentary and its message, and he wrote, "This is the kind of movie you watch with horrified fascination, as families lose their incomes and homes, management plays macho hardball, and rights and wrongs grow hopelessly tangled...The people in this film are so real they make most movie characters look like inhabitants of the funny page."^[2]

The Austin Chronicle's film critic Marjorie Baumgarten also appreciated the film, and she wrote, "Kopple's Academy Award-winning documentary American Dream exposes the human cost of Reaganomics...What American Dream wants to learn is: how did this human tragedy happen—at Hormel of all places, a company with a reputation for progressivism? Decades ago it was among the first to furnish its workers with guaranteed annual wages and profit-sharing plans. Generations of family members worked at the plant, taking pride in their products and their relationship to the manufacturing process. The answer the movie presents is Reaganomics, the 'as long as I've got mine, the hell with everyone else' attitude prevalent in the 1980s".^[3]

Awards

Wins

• Academy Awards: Oscar; Best Documentary, Barbara Kopple and Arthur Cohn; 1991.^[4]
• International Documentary Association: IDA Award; Barbara Kopple; 1991.
• Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards: LAFCA Award; Best Documentary; 1991.
• Sundance Film Festival: Audience Award Documentary; Filmmakers Trophy Documentary; Grand Jury Prize Documentary; all for Barbara Kopple; 1991.
• Directors Guild of America: DGA Award; Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Documentary/Actuality; Barbara Kopple; 1992.
• National Society of Film Critics Awards: NSFC Award; Best Documentary; 1993.

See also

• List of American films of 1990

References

External links

Organized Labour portal

• American Dream at the Internet Movie Database
• American Dream at Allmovie
• American Dream at Rotten Tomatoes
• American Dream at Barbara Kopple official website (includes film clip)
• American Dream film review at At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert (video of television segment)