Comme un Républicain à Hollywood

[Taranne]

Republicans in Hollywood feel bullied

By Paul Bond Paul Bond Mon Oct 20, 10:35 pm ET

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) – At a recent event for Republicans in Hollywood, an actress was asked whether she had ever worn her pro-Sarah Palin pin to an audition.

"You must be joking!" she said with a laugh, adding, "But I see Obama stuff all the time."

It's no secret that the entertainment industry is overwhelmingly liberal -- political donations this presidential cycle from the movie, TV and music industries recently were running about 86% Democrat versus 14% Republican. But being outnumbered is one thing, but being bullied by your liberal co-workers into keeping your opinions to yourself is quite another.

Is that what's going on? Yes, say many of the industry's conservatives. That's why secret organizations with such names as "SpeakEasy" and "The Sunday Night Club" spring up every so often. They're not conservative per se, they just let it be known that attendees of their gatherings may freely discuss politics without being chastised for not toeing the liberal line.

"Are you kidding me? Of course it's true," Kelsey Grammer said when asked whether the town is hostile to conservatives. "I wish Hollywood was a two-party town, but it's not."

Grammer said he knows of a makeup trailer that sported a sign warning Republicans to keep out and of U.S. war veterans who keep their backgrounds a secret from their Hollywood co-workers because they hear them belittle the military.

He even said that, earlier in his career, his job was threatened by a prominent sitcom director who demanded he donate money to Barbara Boxer's U.S. Senate campaign. To keep his job, he gave $10,000 to Boxer and the Democrats.

Nowadays, Grammer is a bankable actor who is unafraid to speak his mind. His advice to less established industry players, though, is to shut up about politics -- "unless you think the way you are supposed to think," and that means liberal.

Unlike Grammer, most Hollywood conservatives appear to be of the closeted variety. "I know every liberal at work and don't know any conservatives because they never speak up," a longtime executive at Warner Bros. said.

However, there are many who are trying to make Hollywood more accommodating to political diversity. Andrew Breitbart is one. At his Breitbart.com (http://www.breitbart.com), he's launching a "Big Hollywood" blog with 40 industry conservatives tasked with -- among other things -- highlighting liberal intolerance.

"There's an undeniably vicious attitude against those who dissent," Breitbart said. "Hollywood is the most predictable place on the planet, not exclusively because of politics but because of narrow-mindedness."

Breitbart maintains that liberals have pushed conservatives too hard in Hollywood and that Americans have noticed. His intent is "to stop the bullying."

One "Big Hollywood" blogger is Andrew Klavan, an accomplished novelist-screenwriter who made a splash with a Wall Street Journal article comparing Batman and the "The Dark Knight" to President Bush and the war on terror.

"It's not easy being different," he said. "The liberals aren't all that liberal. We think they're wrong, but they think we're evil, and they behave like it."

Klavan said a producer, worried that Klavan's political reputation had become common knowledge, asked recently whether he could pitch something Klavan wrote but under an assumed name. Klavan declined.

"I don't want to be the Dalton Trumbo of the right," he said, referring to a notable screenwriter who fell victim to Hollywood's blacklist during the anti-communist hysteria of the 1940s and 1950s.

If you lean right, pitch to those who are sympathetic, or at least tolerant of conservative viewpoints, Klavan said. Mel Gibson, Jerry Bruckheimer and Joel Surnow come to mind.

Klavan also said liberalism seeps into too much Hollywood content nowadays and offers as proof the several anti-Iraq war movies that have been boxoffice bombs.

"These aren't even movies about the war on terror," he said. "They're Vietnam War movies, made by people who sit around at Skybar discussing their pacifist world view."

TV also is too one-sided, he said. "They don't even make fun of Barack Obama," he noted. "How is that possible? The guy's hilarious."

Another "Big Hollywood" blogger is Evan Sayet, whose writing credits include "Win Ben Stein's Money" and "Politically Incorrect With Bill Maher."

Six years ago, while a staff writer for a popular talk show, Sayet said, "I was informed I could not write jokes about ebonics, global warming or any other cause coming from the left."

Nowadays, Sayet heads a conservative comedy troupe called Right to Laugh that performs at the Laugh Factory in West Hollywood and similar clubs nationwide.

Even liberals acknowledge that they have an easier time than conservatives in Hollywood.

"The person who will get snickered at and picked on is the one wearing the McCain-Palin button," actor Eric Roberts said. "But that's OK. It's America. A free country. If you're going to stick your neck out, it's gonna get whacked."

"You just said liberals discriminate more than conservatives," interrupted his wife, Eliza, an actress and casting director.

But the couple maintain that taking any passionate political position -- right or left -- can be difficult. They recalled when Eric was a guest on "The O'Reilly Factor" and, after returning to the set of the TV show he was working on, a producer told him: "We're doing a TV show here. We don't need that kind of politicizing. Don't go public with your views."

He noted, though, that the admonition came from a like-minded liberal whose concern was for maintaining high ratings. Nevertheless, the experience had a cautioning effect on Roberts.

"I pick my battles now. If you support Sarah Palin, I'd walk away," he said. "I wouldn't chastise you, I'd feel sorry for you."

Beyond the various "secretive" organizations around town, there is the more obvious Hollywood Congress of Republicans. Headed by actor Mark Vafiades, HCR boasts 160 members who meet about nine times a year to socialize and hear from various right-leaning special guests.

At a recent HCR event, "Saturday Night Live" alumna Victoria Jackson, for example, joked that she's probably the only conservative Christian to have kissed both Sean Penn and Alec Baldwin. Then the comedian-gymnast stood on her head until the room agreed to vote for McCain-Palin, which didn't take long.

Although Obama fundraisers can draw hundreds of moguls, actors, musicians and professional athletes eager to spend time with the senator, McCain's few appearances have been more understated affairs.

The most recent event, in fact, didn't even draw the candidate or his running mate. Instead, spouses Cindy McCain and Todd Palin headlined while comedian Dennis Miller supplied the entertainment.

McCain and Palin don't spend much time in Hollywood -- even to raise money -- because they figure a Republican can't win California. But the party ignores the entertainment capital at its own peril.

"They didn't only write off California, they wrote off our culture," Breitbart said.

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter

[Taranne]

An American fail

What happened when a bunch of disaffected rightwingers made a wacky political comedy? It tanked at the box office! Surely a conspiracy against Tinseltown's rich, Republican and grumpy? John Patterson investigates

It's so very poignant to see the American DVD release of John Milius's red-baiting 1980s classic Red Dawn happening in the present political climate. It makes you wonder whether the distributors thought they ought to get it out before the era it so neatly embodies is definitively flushed down history's toilet. Like Oliver Stone's W, it has a two-week window of opportunity to cash in before it becomes utterly irrelevant.

Make no mistake, Red Dawn, which speculates darkly on what might happen if America were invaded by the Russians, is an important movie, perhaps the most important rightwing movie ever made in Hollywood. To a generation of overweight rightwing bloggers of the post-Star Wars generation — the Reagan babies who thought Alex Keaton was the hero of Family Ties, not a creepy yuppie dickhead and Ralph Reed-lookalike — Red Dawn is what The Battle Of Algiers was to late-60s leftwing radicals. It may not offer as plausible a blueprint for revolution as Pontecorvo's classic did for the Weather Underground or the Red Army Faction and countless more serious third world revolutionaries, but it offers something rightwing moviegoers rarely get to see: the consoling myth of people of a common political perspective and common values working together — beleaguered, outnumbered, always in mortal danger — to overthrow a sick leftwing dispensation and usher another, brighter, righter world into being. In their minds, these guys dream of being one of Patrick Swayze's teenage insurgents, the Wolverines from Red Dawn.

It flatters the vanity of rightwingers in Hollywood that they are a tiny subversive force, kept out of the precincts of power by scheming liberal studio heads, black- or grey-listed, or enslaved as involuntary drones in a huge factory for subversive leftie propaganda. That they are, in short, victims.

This mindset inflects two films that feature similar casts and are both classifiable as conservative movies. Swing Vote is a mild, rather dreary, political comedy in which Kevin Costner (a one-time GHW Bush contributor who has since recanted) plays a feckless Joe-the-plumber-type blue-collar bozo who ends up casting the lone vote that will decide who wins the presidential election. In the movie he's cynically courted by the candidates, Republican Kelsey Grammer and Democrat Dennis Hopper. Its politics are cuddly centre-right but those of An American Carol, from post-9/11 rightwing convert and Airplane writer David Zucker, are mean-spirited and hard-right, the ramblings of rich overdog creeps who see threats to their fortunes as threats to America. Naturally it received its premiere at last month's Republican convention.

Grammer and Hopper both reappear in this miserably unfunny adaptation of A Christmas Carol — backed by $20m from the producer of The Passion Of The Christ — in which a truly vicious parody of Michael Moore (played by Chris Farley's brother Kevin — Tommy Boy must be rotating in his commodious casket), having mounted a campaign to abolish the fourth of July, is tormented by various "spirits of America past". The remainder of the cast is a who's-who of the contemporary scrag end of Hollywood's New Right. Grammer is the spirit of fascist-sympathiser George S Patton, while Jon Voight is George Washington. Voight has been busy on the campaign trail for John McCain this year and in July he shared with the Washington Times some sense of how dementedly far gone he now is in his politics. To wit: "The Democrats have targeted young people, knowing how easy it is to bring forth whatever is needed to program their minds. I know this process well. I was caught up in the hysteria during the Vietnam era, which was brought about through Marxist propaganda underlying the so-called peace movement." (It goes on like that for 1,000 words.) Other righties like James Woods and Robert Davi have also lent what remains of their threadbare prestige to this excrement (the only absentee is sanctimonious war-hawk Ron Silver), and the result is as you'd expect. At the box office two weekends ago, it was one of many bad films crapped upon from a great height by Beverly Hills Chihuahua.

This signal failure to appeal to any moviegoers at all was immediately excused with cries of fraud and conspiracy at the box offices of the nation's multiplexes. This notice appears on the movie's website: "We have had heard from numerous people across the country that there has been some ticket fraud when buying a ticket for An American Carol this past weekend. Please check your ticket. If you were in fact one of those people that were 'mistakenly' sold a ticket for another movie please fill out the form below. Hold on to your ticket so we can have proof. Please email us a picture of your ticket stub to fraud@americancarol.com."

Imagine that: the bored, spotty teenagers who hand out movie tickets all got together in a gigantic plot — one that would impress a hardened 9/11 conspiracy-paranoiac — to underplay the success of An American Carol!

It is this sort of paranoia that really appeals to Hollywood's rightwingers. For years they have identified themselves as some oppressed minority of the truly good and true, like the persecuted early Christians or the French Resistance, working behind enemy lines with valour and honour (and all those other rightwing buzzwords), bathed in the Lord's good graces, as the hateful Lib'rul fascist elite forever grind their boot-heels in their faces.

Coteries like the Wednesday Morning Club, founded by far-right gadfly David Horowitz to establish a conservative beachhead in the movie business, include on their guestlists such figures as Tom Selleck, Kurt Russell (a Libertarian, not a Republican), rightwing British transplant director Lionel Chetwynd (Hanoi Hilton), gameshow host Pat Sajak, writer-producer and Robert Zemeckis collaborator Bob Gale, and ex-Cheers writer Rob Long. With a secret army as motley as this, the revolution will be a very long time a-coming.

It's the isolation that the beleaguered righties really savour: the opportunity to hang out with fellow egomaniacs of like political inclination, whine about how put-upon they all are, in their Bel Air mansions and palatial McBeach Houses, and to swell up in righteous indignation at the way the system keeps them down.

More surprising are those disgusting traitors to the noble cause; people like Dennis Hopper who, to my surprise, turns out to have been a Republican for years (let's face it, he makes self-styled Republican Party Reptile PJ O'Rourke look like a teetotaller). He recently jumped ship with this surprising announcement: "I voted for Bush, father and son, but this time I'll vote for Obama. I was the first person in my family to have been Republican. For most of my life I wasn't on the left. I pray God, Barack Obama is elected." No more Wednesday Morning Club meetings for Dennis, I fear, as the righties have been jumping all over him ever since.

The truth is that Hollywood's a pragmatic town. If it's rightwing and it makes money, it'll be backed. If it's rightwing comedy that's not funny at all, chances are the studios will pass on it. If not, the audience will soon enough find you out, as happened spectacularly with Carol, and with This Just In, the cancelled rightwing rip-off of The Daily Show created by self-proclaimed "rightwing nutjob" Joel Surnow, who I haven't spotted on the welfare line lately.

But this truth doesn't matter. What counts is that treasured sense of grievance and victimhood encapsulated in the words of Gods And Generals director, conservative Ronald Maxwell, interviewed at the rightwing Liberty Film Festival some years ago: "The elites are using us. Never forget that we are the victims." Spoken like a true Wolverine. Now say goodnight, boys, your day is just about done.

• An American Carol is heading straight to DVD, we presume

[roubachov]

Heureusement qu'il nous reste Clint !

[Taranne]

Heureusement qu'il nous reste Clint !

C'est vrai qu'il représente une curieuse exception à la règle. J'imagine que son talent est trop indiscutable pour qu'on le bannisse - et il ne fait pas/plus de films engagés, alors tout roule. Mais cette phrase d'Andrew Klavan dans le premier article que j'ai posté mérite réflexion:

The liberals aren't all that liberal. We think they're wrong, but they think we're evil, and they behave like it.

Et, de fait, la discussion est difficile avec les gens de gauche, surtout en ce moment où ils s'imaginent avoir enfin remporté la lutte finale.

[ledubitatif]

Et, de fait, la discussion est difficile avec les gens de gauche, surtout en ce moment où ils s'imaginent avoir enfin remporté la lutte finale.

Le problème principal étant probablement de sur-politiser des choses qui n'ont pas à l'être. Apparemment il y a des films de droite (un peu) et des films de gauche (beaucoup). Si l'on pouvait avoir des cinéastes qui se contentent de faire des films au lieu de vouloir sauver le monde, it would'nt be the worst thing would it ?