The New Blacklist: A Book Excerpt
Is there a new reverse blacklist in Hollywood? In this excerpt from a chapter of an untitled book that screenwriter and PJM CEO Roger L. Simon is writing for Encounter Books, he speculates on whether this new blacklist indeed exists --and whether he is on it.
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People often ask me whether my political change hurt my Hollywood career- whether I was and am the object of a new reverse Blacklist that discriminates against those who, as I did, publicly supported and continue to support the Iraq War or, worse yet, voted for George W. Bush in 2004.
Bush was my second vote ever for a Republican, the first having been for Arnold Schwarzenegger only months before. In my previous incarnation I had voted for candidates from the Socialist Labor Party and the Peace & Freedom Party, for which I had briefly been an organizer back in the seventies (the party itself was brief), as well as numerous Democratic Party candidates, usually voting in rote party line fashion, pulling the lever obediently for minor candidates for offices like municipal judgeships and school boards whose names I didn’t even recognize, let alone whose policies I had the slightest idea about. But to what extent my political switch or supposed switch (more of that in a later chapter) - a change writ large on my blog and later on Pajamas Media, a change that made me, to my knowledge, the only person to be profiled positively by Mother Jones and The National Review within one fleeting lifetime - hurt my movie career, I simply don’t know.
Maybe I wouldn’t have had much of one anymore anyway. The insider joke about the old Hollywood Ten from the original Blacklist was that none of them were any good at that point and that the glamor of being blacklisted kept them alive and in the public eye. Of course, that was an unfair accusation - not just in regards to Dalton Trumbo, but also to Ring Lardner Jr., who came back from the Blacklist to write The Cincinnati Kid and the first M. A. S. H. Albert Maltz, who wrote the WGA-award winning Broken Arrow under a pseudonym and later Two Mules for Sister Sara under his own name, was no slouch either. Anyway, in my case, it’s likely I lost some work, but I would have to have a clone to be sure what would have happened to me in the last half decade or so had I continued my life as it was. I would like to think that my public stand against Islamofascism cost me a half-dozen Academy Awards or three, but that would be blowing my own horn in the extreme. Hollywood careers are fragile things at best, especially for writers. And mine wasn’t at its height at the beginning of the Millennium anyway. I was then a decade past my Academy Award nomination and I was getting on in years for the business in general. Writers deep in their fifties are not the most sought after commodities in the film industry for a number of reasons, including a notorious inability to tolerate story meetings with twenty-five year old studio executives fresh out of Wharton who haven’t seen any movies pre-dating Spiderman II and think Chinatown is just some downtown neighborhood with over-priced lofts. It’s also true that older writers, as experienced and skilled as they may be, may not be the perfect people to write films for the Industry’s most coveted demographic - the sixteen-year old male - even though that audience is now much more heavily engaged playing computer games, which, I am told, are considerably more interesting than the movies nowadays anyway. That wouldn’t be difficult.
So the Hollywood screenwriter is in a classical trap. By the time he has fully learned his craft, he is ready for the thresher. (When I was in college, my doctor father told me one of his patients - obviously a movie exec - asked my father in a baffled tone, when informed by him that his son wanted to be a screenwriter, “Why not a producer?” I rolled my eyes at the time at what I thought was outright philistinism. Now I realize it was just practical advice.)
But beyond my place in them, the movies were losing their allure for me. The film business - swallowed by conglomerates from Paris to Tokyo - was becoming increasingly corporate and boring, nowhere near the fun I remember it having been. At the same time, cinema itself was no longer central to the culture the way it had been in the sixties, seventies and even most of the eighties, when everybody - including a sunglass-wearing dog in a legendary cartoon, sitting at the desk of the pooch’s CAA agent - said he wanted to direct. It was part of the zeitgeist. Who could forget the buzz when films like Breathless, La Dolce Vita, Apocalypse Now, Bonnie and Clyde or Lawrence of Arabia were coming out? There was nothing like that now - at least not for me. Society had moved on. We live in a time when technology is king, Steve Jobs more important than Francis Ford Coppola or Federico Fellini. Marshall McLuhan has been proven right - the medium really was the message, the iPod more important than the films played on it. Meanwhile, on television, I was finding reality shows like the Discovery Channel’s “Deadliest Catch” more interesting than anything devised fictionally.
In other words, regarding the movies and me - the feeling was mutual and it was no longer love.
So I have not lost sleep worrying whether I have been blacklisted. Still I am sure this new form of Blacklist exists, but not nearly to the formalized extent of the original list of the forties and fifties with its Red Channels and dramatic hearings in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, featuring ‘friendly’ and ‘unfriendly’ witnesses. Times are different and the system functions in a very different manner. Now it operates through an almost invisible thought control caused by a post-Orwellian “liberal” conformity so pervasive a formal Blacklist is not necessary, indeed would work against itself. In some ways, this new, less overt, list is more ominous than its predecessor, because there is nothing concrete to rebel against, no hearings, no committees, no protest groups pro or con, no secret databases that I know of. There doesn’t need to be. There is no there there, in Gertrude’s immortal words - only the grey haze of a mindless received “liberalism”, the world as last month’s New York Times editorials, half-digested and regurgitated, never questioned or even analyzed, going forth forever with little perceived chance of reform, as if it were the permanent religious text of some strange new orthodoxy.
You see this new faith in practice at the average Hollywood story meeting. These are ritualized events and have been for the decades that I have participated in them. You wait an inordinately long time for your appointment, often longer than at a doctor’s office, but with nowhere near the legitimate excuse on the part of the person keeping you waiting. Movie executives are definitely not in surgery. The intention of the delay is merely to confirm your lower place in the pecking order. (I personally know of a case when John Huston and Jack Nicholson were kept cooling their heels in a tiny room by the now-forgotten head of ABC Motion Pictures for nearly two hours - I assume he didn’t realize they had come to pitch him Prizzi’s Honor. Or maybe he did and this was a form of envy/vengeance.). Once inside the executive’s office, that pecking order between talent and management thus confirmed, it is instantly waved off in a burst of small talk and a call for the requisite mineral water - originally Perrier, now something more exotic like an obscure Welsh brand in a blue bottle whose unpronounceable name you can barely remember. But the small talk is what’s important, the prelude to the actual pitch, which can be as short as five minutes. This small talk can take a number of forms but usually revolves around the freeway traffic (a perpetual subject), the Lakers (declining in importance recently) and, over the last half-decade or more, a ritualized Bush bash. Fucking Bush did this or that… did you hear the stupid thing the idiot said, etc., etc.? You don’t even have to hear Bush referred to specifically - just the word idiot suffices. You know. (Who else could it be? Certainly not the Dostoevsky character.) The subtext is that we are all together, part of the secret society, the world of those who know as opposed to those who don’t.
If you don’t agree with this particular weltanschauung, even if you dissent from its orthodoxy just a tiny bit, you have but three choices: One, you can argue, in which case you are almost certain to be dismissed as a fool, a warmonger or a right wing nut (all three, probably) and therefore have little or no chance at the writing or directing job that brought you there. Two, you can shut up and ignore it (stay in the closet), in which case you feel like a coward and experience (as I have) a dose of existential nausea straight out of Sartre or, three, you can stop going to the meetings altogether, in which case you have blacklisted yourself.
I don’t know the size of that self-selected blacklist, but suspect it is substantial though not as large as the number of nausea victims - those in the closet. People have to make a living after all, just like in the days of the original Blacklist. Only there are no “fronts”, as in the Woody Allen movie of the same name. No one has come forward with an offer to pay me to write an anti-war movie under a pseudonym, a remake of The Battle of Algiers, perhaps, set in Sadr City, although, with my radical past, I suspect I could do a better job of writing left-wing movies than Hollywood has lately, judging from the box office receipts of those films.
There are many reasons for the failure of these movies, but chief among them is not what the right-wing blogs say - that they are out of touch with the public. That may be true to some degree (issue movies, taking at the very minimum nine or ten months to make, usually considerably longer, are almost always late to market as far as public opinion is concerned). It is that they are fake - these films are not really believed by their makers in any deep sense. They are a cinema of “as if” and all but the most biased sense this on some level. This is the opposite of a movie like the classic of classics Casablanca, a film that triumphs with its audiences for being heartfelt. Hollywood’s anti-war flicks are essentially posturing. They are cinema made by people who think they are supposed to be anti-war, but don’t really feel anything. No wonder the audience doesn’t respond. (This wasn’t true of a few of the Vietnam War era films that had more genuine passion, just as the demonstrations against the war then were vastly more impassioned and well attended.) Sometimes, as in the case of Brian De Palma’s Redacted, these films seem to have been made to rescue a failing career through having the “correct” political views. This may have been unconscious, or barely conscious, on the part of the filmmaker, but true nevertheless, cynical as that accusation sounds.
For evidence you need go no further than the selection of the subject of De Palma’s movie- a rape/murder of an Iraqi woman by US troops. This choice of theme is intended to convey a message against the Iraq War, but horrid events of this nature have happened in all wars on all sides, including World War II, when GI’s are known to have raped and murdered German women. So De Palma’s point is irrelevant and his work no more than propaganda, unless he wants to say we should never fight a war, which, of course, he doesn’t. (Nazis, in Hollywood’s received wisdom, are still bad.) He wants to say we shouldn’t fight Bush’s war, the Republicans’ war. But in this particular case, the Army punished the servicemen involved severely, also casting doubt on the director’s premise. It is unlikely, however, that De Palma cares. He is after all a member of the club - or fighting to get back into it - and lives in the world of the pervasive haze I have described above. To him, thinking that way is natural, like breathing. It is a kind of “going with the flow.”
Meanwhile, those flailing against this flow have a tough time. Some of this is obviously political. The system has excommunicated them. But some of it is due to this uncomfortable truth: For the most part, Republicans are lousy filmmakers.
[MORE TO COME: including an analysis of the exceptions to the rule about Republican filmmakers from South Park to Gibson - although for some of this you will have to wait for the finished book. And, since this is a work-in-progress, I, of course, reserve the right to, as the saying goes, “amend or extend” my remarks. In fact, I fully intend to.]
Roger L. Simon is an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, novelist and blogger.
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33 Comments
David Thomson:“Still I am sure this new form of Blacklist exists”
New form of blacklist exists? I strongly recommend that Roger L. Simon reads Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colony’s Long Romance with the Left by Ronald and Allis Radosh, and Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced The American Flim Industry In The 1930s And 1940s by Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley. There is absolutely nothing new about the leftist establishment destroying the careers of those refusing to embrace their agenda! Simon himself would unlikely have become a screen writer of note if he had earlier been perceived as a “tool of the right-wing reactionaries.” Ron Silver is probably also on the same tacitly understood blacklist. They have, whether they realized it or not, burned their bridges behind them.
Nov 1, 2007 - 4:04 am Helen Smith:“They have, whether they realized it or not, burned their bridges behind them.”
Or maybe they have opened the door in front of them…
Nov 1, 2007 - 6:04 am Drugstore Cowgirl:Just read an article in Elle magazine about Patricia Heaton that basically set out to prove that everything she stands for is wrong and to try to force her to back out of her beliefs and her position on Conservative or religious issues.
What was so appalling to me was the attitude of the author and those actors interviewed for the article who are “friends” of Ms. Heaton. Obviously to be a Republican and especially a Christian Republican is to be part of the Evil Empire and to lose work because of your repulsive–to them–views is perfectly OK. In fact Tony Shaloub said that he didn’t believe that Ms. Heaton really believed all those things she claimed to.
The fact is that only the viewpoint of a Liberal, atheist Democrat is acceptable in Hollywood. And they are quite smug and unashamed of this.
Nov 1, 2007 - 6:06 am david still:I am a very talented nuclear power specialist but I can not get a job with the government because I think there is a blacklist. Proof? I have not been hired.
Nov 1, 2007 - 7:04 am william:There were over 100,000 Japanese wrongly interned during WWII. Compare that number with the several thousand people who lost their jobs due to the blacklist during the Cold War. Now compare how many books, how many films have been made about the blacklist victims vs the Japanese. (And did any blacklist victim protest the Japanese iternment at the time.) What are the chances of Hollywood making a movie about the Jehovah Witnesses who were rounded up and killed in Nazi concentration camps? There are many victims in the world, but Hollywood celebrates only left wing victims and right wing oppressors.
Nov 1, 2007 - 7:44 am Leslie S.:Like this quote about the new Hollywood in your book:
“…only the grey haze of a mindless received “liberalism”, the world as last month’s New York Times editorials, half-digested and regurgitated, never questioned or even analyzed, going forth forever with little perceived chance of reform…”
Nov 1, 2007 - 8:02 am ronbo:I remember the Peace & Freedom Party! As I recall, the emphasis was on “party”.
Nov 1, 2007 - 8:13 am Val Prieto:Roger, You are in the same “club” as Andy Garcia, whose Lost City may not have been a cinematic masterpiece, but its subject matter made the Hollywood elite cringe. How dare Garcia depict the glorious Che Guevara in such a way!
Im told Andy had a heck of a hard time getting the backing, then the studio, then the distributors.
You are spot on, Roger.
Nov 1, 2007 - 8:42 am holdfast:Are Republicans generally bad fimmakers beceause they are, in the main, capable of seeing the world as it is rather than as they would like it to be? And is this what really seperated the Neocons from other conservatives? And is that why the Dems hate the Neos so much - because they are worse than heretics, they are apostates?
Nov 1, 2007 - 9:11 am cgkxpress:“reverse” blacklisting?
Isn’t “reverse” blacklisting just blacklisting?
Isn’t “reverse” racism simply racism?
Why the need to assume that it’s that it’s a one way street for the most part?
I know Roger didn’t write the introduction paragraph, but it gets to me when the “reverse” tag is used.
Nov 1, 2007 - 10:38 am Linda Frank:One reason I think Simon is right about this blacklist is that the “art” films that come out are all on the left. These are not normally made to make a big profit, but to make a point. Where are the rightwing art films? Or even the centrist ones? You don’t see them.
Nov 1, 2007 - 10:41 am actor212:Writers deep in their fifties are not the most sought after commodities in the film industry for a number of reasons
Gee, you’d think removable teeth would be an asset in Hollywood…but hey, what do I know? I’m just a 50-something actor who works…
Nov 1, 2007 - 10:55 am Pat:“There are many reasons for the failure of these movies, but chief among them is not what the right-wing blogs say - that they are out of touch with the public. [. . .] It is that they are fake - these films are not really believed by their makers in any deep sense.”
I respectfully disagree. Moviegoers are willing to accept all sort of unrealistic things in films for the sake of pure entertainment. For example, the action-movie genre is full of conventions, plot points, and visual effects that we all know are “fake” because things don’t work that way in the real world. But we suspend our disbelief because the movie is fun.
The recent left-wing movies have failed not because they are fake, but because they are boring. The Hollywood crowd have completely forgotten that their job is to entertain us. They have convinced themselves that they are our moral and intellectual betters, and it’s their job to take us by the hand and lead us out of our ideological darkness. The result is a slew of movies that condescendingly lecture us on how stupid and evil we are.
Moviegoers are not willing to pay good money to sit in a room for two hours and be scolded and patronized. So they take their time and money elsewhere. Video games and YouTube are far more entertaining than the leftist screeds now playing in theaters. It’s as simple as that.
Nov 1, 2007 - 11:09 am Roger L. Simon:Pat, we don’t really disagree here. They are boring. I submit to you, though, that they are boring in part because they are fake. They have no passion, which, I suppose, is another way of saying they are not entertaining. Movies with great passion do entertain. Like him or not (and I don’t) Michael Moore is successful because he does have a passion (just not our passion). He does then entertain some people, obviously. These other fictional films are, as I noted, “as if” presentations. They don’t entertain because they are not really felt.
Nov 1, 2007 - 11:25 am pch1013:““art” films that come out are all on the left. These are not normally made to make a big profit”
You just answered your own question. Not to over-generalize, but lefty independent filmmakers are less likely to care about “making a big profit.” This also explains the left-wing bias in academia. It’s just not lucrative enough for some right-wing intellectuals, who choose to work at lavishly funded think tanks instead.
Nov 1, 2007 - 11:39 am ad:I do not know about passionless, but message movies usually strike me as being thoughtless. As soon as you see the synopsis (or ad) for something like Rendition you already know who the Good Guys are and who the Bad Guys are, and that nothing will happen that questions a Message that you already know.
So why watch the film, when you know everything about it already?
It will be almost pure duckspeak.
Nov 1, 2007 - 12:29 pm Thomas:Hollywood *is* capable of making pro-American movies. It’s just that they will only do so when a Democrat is in the White House.
Can you imagine Harrison Ford’s President in “Air Force One” or Bill Pullman’s President in “Independence Day” being portrayed during a Republican administration?
I’m half-considering voting for Hillary in ‘08, because the only way my Revolutionary War screenplay would have a snowball’s chance of being produced (thanks for the vote at the film festival, BTW) would be if a Hollywood favorite were running the country.
Nov 1, 2007 - 12:38 pm John Moreschi:Wasn’t it Samuel Goldwyn who said “If you want to send a message, use Western Union”?
Nov 1, 2007 - 1:08 pm Bugs:Anti-war Hollywood? In the words of Donovan: “Everybody’s hustlin’ just to have a little scene.”
The reason nobody wants to watch anti-war movies is that they are redundant. There’s nothing a screenwriter, director, or actor can say about the war that we haven’t already heard, seen, or read about on the Internet. There is no aspect of this war that has not been discussed, and there is no reasonably well-informed citizen who doesn’t already know both sides’ arguments by heart. We do not need to be educated on the subject, nor do we need works of art to shatter our preconceptions and provoke discussions. For once, we are way ahead of the “creative” types in Hollywood. Pro-war or anti-war, American citizens are on the job.
Hollywood is like a little kid interrupting a grown-up talk. It’s just trying to get attention.
Nov 1, 2007 - 1:30 pm Dirty Harry:Roger Simon isn’t saying Hollywood’s “not” out of touch, he’s saying that being out of touch isn’t why these anti-war films are failing.
As someone who’s paid to review these films, I can tell you that Roger is exactly right. They’re failing exactly for the reasons he mentions. If being “in” touch was a requirement for a good film that would be the end of the film business.
Great liberal films I vehemently disagree with politically but cherish as a film lover, such as Apocalypse Now, Platoon, etc… weren’t made by poseurs like Paul Haggis or individuals desperate to to reclaim their former reputation like DePalma and Tom Cruise. They came from a filmmaker’s passion to tell a story and the end result was a piece of art that transcended politics.
Oliver Stone was a veteran in touch with his subject but that doesn’t mean he was (is) in touch with middle America. Same with Coppola. And yet, they still made timeless films.
I don’t think anyone who saw Crash would argue Paul Haggis is in touch with anything on the Planet Earth. But that’s not why his movies stink. They stink because he’s a phony trying to please an industry and stay on the cocktail A-list — when he should be making movies from passion, passion, passion…
As far as the blacklist goes, it took two years, many beers, and a finished film before my two producers and I admitted quietly to each other that we were all conservatives. That’s the reality…
Nov 1, 2007 - 1:35 pm ras:Roger,
When your book comes out, can you answer a q: why - w/an industry worth billions of dollars but hostile to its own customers - haven’t enough serious competitors emerged who consistently make films that people want to see?
Nov 1, 2007 - 2:35 pm Ginia:Being in a Blue Territory, many times I have held my tongue because I thought it was the polite course of action. Then I admitted to myself that I was allowing others to think that I agreed with them on issues that I don’t. Last week instead of keeping quite I said “I disagree” suddenly I am no longer invited to events but that is okay, I am feeling much better and I don’t have to hold my tongue.
Nov 1, 2007 - 3:43 pm Lisa:Could it be that the “non-boring” filmmakers just can’t get financing for their films because they aren’t “liberal” enough? There has to be more talented conservatives out there…so where are they?
Nov 1, 2007 - 4:11 pm John Moore:pch1013
The idea that lefties in academia or Hollywood prevail because they are less interested in money is incorrect.
Have you checked the salaries of professors lately? Why anyone would pay $250,000 a year to an English professor who wouldn’t be caught dead teaching Shakespeare is beyond me, but it happens.
Have you noticed that many lefties in Hollywood make millions of dollars per year?
Have you ever been to a lavish, expensive Hollywood party in a very expensive Hollywood person’s home, full of total wing-nut lefties ?
One of the characteristics of Cognitive Disorder of Progressives is their ability to maintain a permanent state of cognitive dissonance - in this case, by living in total hypocrisy.
Nov 1, 2007 - 7:08 pm Tony Kahn:Roger, the graphic at the head of your piece came from a docudrama I did for NPR called “Blacklisted,” a six part series on my family’s 15 years experience under the Hollywood Blacklist. My father, Gordon Kahn, was one of the so-called “Hollywood Nineteen,” and, in my humble opinion, a very fine writer.
If anyone is interested in hearing what the day-to-day experience of that period of fear was like, I invite them to listen to the show at http://www.wgbh.org/blacklisted. (Studs Terkel, among others, called it “one of the finest radio programs I’ve ever heard.”
Nov 2, 2007 - 6:12 am Howard432:Most of you should pay attention to the commie admired commie movies of the thirties and forties. I defy you to find a commie message in them, yet they were universally praised by communists of the time. Try “Body and Soul” “Force of Evil” and others made by the “Hollywood Ten.” This current bunch are just untalented ego driven clods “writing” what the suits want to read. Lectures, instructions on correct behavior, attacks on our government; there was none of that in the classic commie movies. That the studios continue to finance and distribute polemics that have zero track record of recovering costs simply means that capitalism ain’t a factor in Hollywood.
Nov 2, 2007 - 7:22 am RES:There is a fourth response to the ritualized Bush Bash, albeit somewhat risky and difficult: subversion. Responses such as “Where did you hear/read that?” or “Wonder what he meant.” open avenues to plant seeds for the subversion of the dominant paradigm.
Nov 2, 2007 - 7:28 am TBinSTL:At what point will there be enough people on this new blacklist that they can band together and make their own work?
Nov 2, 2007 - 3:18 pm John:Just to follow up on Thomas’ remarks above that Hollywood wouldn’t make a movie like “Air Force One or “Independence Day” right now — when Bill Pullman starred as the heroic president, the producers of that movie debuted it in the summer of 1996, just before the Clinton-Dole election. Eight years later, the same producers in the run up to the 2004 election came out with “The Day After Tomorrow” with, shall we say, a slightly less flattering portrayal of our national political leaders. And guess which picture did better at the box office?
It’s interesting that the higher percentage of openly non-doctrinaire liberal Hollywood stars over the years seem to have come from the action/adventure genre — Arnold, Bruce Willis, Tom Selleck, Chuck Norris, and going back to John Wayne and Steve McQueen. Sly Stallone may not be part of that group, but a check of his campaign donations over the years shows Ds and Rs in the bunch.
Virtually all of them didn’t “come out” until after their careers were going strong, but as the pro-U.S. movies of the 1990s showed, their success and the type of film they’ve been involved with can be made by anyone, liberal or conservative, and there’s no question it’s been tried by liberals, such as with the recent Bourne movies. But none of those stars has reached the same iconic status, and the reason in large part may be the types of action films they choose tend to reflect their own political beliefs — i.e. the U.S. sucks if there’s an R in the White House — while the public wants to see movies that at the very least, don’t care who’s in charge in Washington. They just don’t want to see their beliefs and their own society trashed just because of the result of the last political election.
Wanna-be action stars who choose their material based on how they feel about the people in charge of the government face a dilemma — they can do a pro-U.S. movie when someone like Bush is in the White House, and risk antagonizing their friends and possibly sabotaging their future career if the film bombs, or they can go with the general flow in Hollywood and make movies where the U.S. military, the CIA, or some big domestic corporation is the supreme evil and maintain their standing in the film colony, even as they churn out film after film that underperforms at the box office.
As much as Hollywood likes to make money, you’d think that would trumph politics in the minds of at least one or two studio execs, but it doesn’t. And if someone like Giuliani or even part-time actor Fred Thompson wins next year, don’t expect “Independence Day II” to be showing up in theaters any time before 2014.
Nov 2, 2007 - 3:35 pm MagicalPat:I think this is true for the same reason that so many current liberal films are horrible. They put politics before entertainment. They twist the art form in order to preach their gospel. It is obvious and annoying.
John Stewart is a funny man who happens to be liberal. I imagine that comedic effect is his first priority, politics coming in second. If he put politics first, the comedy would suffer.
I went to a few tapings of the Fox half hour comedy hour. It was funniest when they did not insist on every joke having to reflect a conservative viewpoint. Unfortunately, they did not do enough of this.
Nov 2, 2007 - 10:05 pm bgates:“For the most part, Republicans are lousy filmmakers.”
A bit like saying “for the most part, black people are lousy Secretaries of State” - the examples to date have been mediocre, but hardly enough to generalize.
Besides, what political party can fill in the blank, “for the most part, ___ are outstanding filmmakers”?
Nov 2, 2007 - 11:15 pm Brown Line:Bugs wrote, “The reason nobody wants to watch anti-war movies is that they are redundant.”
Bugs, with all due respect, I think that’s not it. It doesn’t matter if the message is as old as the hills, as long as the story is compelling.
Consider Casablanca. What’s its political message? That Nazis are bad. Well, that’s a pretty redundant message: we all know that walking into the theater. And the fact is, in many ways it’s a silly, artificial movie - for example, Ingrid Bergman is the best dressed refugee I’ve ever seen.
So what makes Casablanca work, apart from the skill with which it’s told? I think it’s the fact that it isn’t just against something: it’s for something as well. Casablanca wasn’t just against the Nazis: it was for the Allies; but even more, it was for simple human decency, as represented by the love story and by the sacrifice that Rick makes for the woman he loves and the man he admires.
Well, will someone please tell me what the current wave of anti-war, anti-Bush, anti-America movies are for? They can’t be for the Islamofascists; that’s too nuts even for Hollywood. The only possible position they can take, without being utterly false, is “a plague on both your houses”. Their message is that nothing is worth fighting for, that no cause can be believed in, that virtue is a fake and ideals are lies.
With all due respect, Roger, but I think that the makers of these films believe in them sincerely. The problem is that the makers believe in cynicism. However, the movies, like all art, doesn’t just portray the world as it is. Art presents ideals as well - it portrays, or at least hints at, the world as it should be. Art without ideals, an art without vision, in fact is no art at all. These movies are animated corpses, artistic works without art. Who wants to plunk down $10 for that?
Nov 3, 2007 - 6:19 am George Glass:Yeah, those Hollywood liberals hate conservatives. I mean, that show “24″ , run by an outspoken conservative never got picked up beyond a first season because those lefties hate that kind of thing.
Patricia Heaton, an outspoken Republican, wasn’t she fired from “Everybody Loves Raymond” as soon as those pinkos found out about her politics? There’s no way they would keep her on until the end of the show’s run. And someone like her would never be hired by those commies to star in a new sitcom this season.
And what about Tom Selleck? That Republican can’t get any work. He certainly wouldn’t be back on TV on that show “Las Vegas” because everyone knows conservatives are blacklisted in Hollywood.
Heck, there’s no way a Republican actor could work for years on “Law & Order” or announce his candidacy for President on a show produced in Hollyweird by a bunch of lefties.
Thank God for this accurate book.
Nov 5, 2007 - 7:21 pm