Sometimes, they move from left to right

Usually, they go the other way, but sometimes (Ron Silver, David Zucker) even Hollywood celebrities move in a conservative direction.

The latest to commit this act of apostasy is playwright and screenwriter David Mamet. I've not yet read his new book ("The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture"), but it's on my list. And he's got the quote of the day, as he speaks common sense that's so ... uncommon in his fellow members of the entertainment industry.

"The question is, can he run on his record in 2012, and the answer is no, because it’s abysmal," Mamet said. "He took a trillion dollars and where it went, nobody knows. He dismantled healthcare, he weakened America around the world, he sold out the State of Israel. All he’s got to run on is being a Democrat and indicting the other fellow."

Yup. Of course, it worked for him in 2008. Equally of course, he didn't have his record then.

Hollywood vs. Society, playing out yet again

It's long been a cliché to laugh at the obliviousness of Pauline Kael, The New Yorker's film critic alleged to have said that "I don't know how Nixon got elected. No one I know voted for him."¹ The idea of a disconnect between the "elite," however defined, and their public is certainly not a recent concept. And the sycophancy surrounding the movers and shakers in Hollywood was an old story long ago².

Which to some extent explains, I suppose, the monstrous disconnect between the Hollywood "elite" and the rest of society on the Roman Polanski story. The gulf between the way that Hollywood looks at the world, and the way the rest of us look at the world, is exemplified by the comments of Harvey Weinstein:

Weinstein Co. co-founder Harvey Weinstein, who is circulating the pro-Polanski petition...said that people generally misunderstand what happened to Polanski at sentencing. He's not convinced public opinion is running against the filmmaker and dismisses the categorization of Hollywood as amoral. "Hollywood has the best moral compass, because it has compassion," Weinstein said. "We were the people who did the fundraising telethon for the victims of 9/11 [ed. note - !!!!!]. We were there for the victims of Katrina and any world catastrophe."

The more I look at this quote, the more I realize what a perfect representation of the situation it is. Hollywood is in the business of symbols and illusion. What does he offer as evidence of Hollywood's moral compass? Symbols! "We did a telethon!"

This is an industry that's spent the last 8 years cranking out unwatchable films depicting American soldiers as evil invaders, or helpless victims, and the US Military as the source of all the trouble in the world, while that same military protects their right to make them. They take millions of dollars in salaries to make movies and TV shows bashing business executives as evil, greedy exploiters. They fly around the world on private jets making statements about how people have to consume less to protect the environment. They decry traditional values, selling promiscuous sex, both the hetero- and homosexual varieties, as normative values and virginity until marriage as a "hang-up", but wear AIDs ribbons at self-congratulatory awards ceremonies so people will know how compassionate they are about sexually-transmitted diseases. Because it isn't so much about what you do that determines your value in the world - it's having the right positions, and being seen with the right people, and showing the right symbols of your virtue.

In short, everything they do is about symbols and symbolism. To them, the details of the case aren't important - what's important is that someone like them, someone talented, someone used to getting whatever he wants when he wants it, a fellow artist, is being pursued by the law because of some technical violation of the values of the traditionalists. I mean, the girl was in the Jacuzzi, right? He didn't actually force her to drink the champagne, and even if he did, well, she could have left or something. She stayed, not because she was drugged (and without a car [or a drivers license - she was, after all, 13 years old]) but because she wanted it! (When you're an important Hollywood bigshot, they all want it, right?) I suspect that even Mr. Weinstein, if one could somehow force him to answer truthfully, would concede that forced anal rape of a 13-year old girl is actually a bad thing³, but he clearly doesn't see Mr. Polanski's act in those terms, despite that being exactly what happened.

So Mr. Weinstein, brave fellow that he is, follows Hollywood's moral compass of compassion and helping the guy in trouble with the law, and decides to start a petition to have Mr. Polanski freed. He gathers his staff, issue the order, and the Yes-Men say yes, and the Nodders nod, and he calls the other Hollywood big shots. And their Yes-Men yes, and their Nodders nod, and everyone's heart is in the right place, and oh, it feels so good to be so virtuous, fighting for the great artist against the Xians and the right-wingers and the people who can't see past their own narrow prejudices. And obviously, there's no down-side to this, because everyone that one works with and everyone that one sees, at least the important people, are all going to be in agreement, so everyone can all be brave together, facing the slings and arrows of the little, unimportant people that one doesn't care about, except that those slings and arrows emphasize how very, very brave one is being. Well, that's a boost for the old morale, all right. And hey, maybe everyone can get together for a telethon next week for relief for all those naked people whose huts got washed away by the typhoon last week, wherever it was, that George Bush caused with his global warming and polar bear hunting and genocide in Iraq!

Let me just close with one comment for Mr. Weinstein. Sir, your moral compass is not pointing in the same direction that mine is. And I'm going to keep mine.




¹ - This characterization turns out to be unfair to Ms. Kael. She said something very like it in a lecture environment, but she was commenting on her isolation from Mr. Nixon's supporters rather than evidencing obliviousness to it.

I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them.

By ISRAEL SHENKER. (1972, December 28). 2 Critics Here Focus on Films As Language Conference Opens. New York Times (1857-Current file),p. NJ68. Retrieved October 1, 2009, from ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851 - 2006). (Document ID: 93431756).


² - P.G. Wodehouse's story, The Nodder, published in 1935, uses this brilliantly, as Mr. Mulliner describes the position held by his distant connexion Wilmot:

It is not easy to explain to the lay mind the extremely intricate ramifications of the personnel of a Hollywood motion-picture organization. Putting it as briefly as possible, a Nodder is something like a Yes-Man, only lower in the social scale. A Yes-Man's duty is to attend conferences and say "Yes." A Nodder's, as the name implies, is to nod. The chief executive throws out some statement of opinion, and looks about him expectantly. This is the cue for the senior Yes-Man to say yes. He is followed, in order of precedence, by the second Yes-Man - or Vice-Yesser, as he is sometimes called - and the junior Yes-Man. Only when all the Yes-Men have yessed, do the Nodders begin to function. They nod.

³ - I'm not 100% positive of that. I saw a local anchorman, a week ago, start to say something negative about John Phillips, realize that he might come off as judgmental, and soften the comment, or add a "some might say" or something. So, for some people, even condemning the act of drugging and raping your own daughter is a little too moralistic. After all, it isn't like he made an ad for Sarah Palin or voted for prop. 8 or something...

Frog with no legs is deaf

On July 8, 2007, License to Wed, a critical failure, opened at the US box office, and ended up taking in $10,422,258 for its opening weekend. It finished the year 50th on the list of the top-grossing movies of 2007.

There were also five Iraq-war related movies released in 2007. Each of which started with its fundamental premise a belief the George Bush is evil, the United States shouldn't be in Iraq, the US is wrong, the military is evil - standard left-wing, blame America first sensibilities. The people involved in these movies are some of the biggest box office draws in the world. Robert Redford, Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep headlined Lions for Lambs. Brian De Palma directed Redacted. Rendition starred Reese Witherspoon and Grace is Gone starred John Cusack. Tommy Lee Jones was the star of In The Valley of Elah.

Despite the starpower, and critical acclaim vastly exceeding License to Wed, not one of those movies finished ahead of it on the list. In fact, those five films combined opening weekend box office results were $10,935,511. That's right, the combined draw of those five critically acclaimed, high-powered films was slightly less than 5% higher than License to Wed.

So, what came out of Hollywood last weekend? You got it - another "the army is wrong" film, Stop-Loss. Anyone want to guess how well it did? Maybe this headline will contain a hint: Stop-Loss DOA.

The great thing about that piece is the quote from the "studio source" explaining why all of these movies are failing:

"It's not looking good - no one wants to see Iraq war movies. No matter what we put out there in terms of great cast or trailers, people were completely turned off. It's a function of the marketplace not being ready to address this conflict in a dramatic way because the war itself is something that's unresolved yet. It's a shame because it's a good movie that's just ahead of its time."

There are really two different things in that statement that need to be addressed.

First is the obvious business issue - if the studio knows before it releases it that there is no audience for the film, why the hell are they making and releasing it? Assume, for the moment, that the source is exactly right about why there is no audience, the fact is, they're saying up front that there is no audience. They are spending money making, promoting and releasing a movie that they already know no one wants to see. Does Paramount actually have share-holders? Is anyone responsible to them?

The second point, however, is going to challenge one of the assumptions from the first point. The source is assuming that people just aren't ready for Iraq-themed movies. I'm not aware that there's any evidence to support that point of view. If you want to say that the American public is not ready for movies pointing out how venal and ugly the US actions in Iraq are, that it's not ready for movies about how evil the US Army is, well, I suppose that's true. But this studio source is acting like the scientist in the old joke*, who carefully measures how far a frog can jump with four, three, two, one and no legs, and concludes that a frog with no legs is deaf. You can't keep making anti-American movies and assume that American audiences aren't going because they're about the war in Iraq.

Well, I guess you can, if you're a Hollywood studio executive, but there's a serious flaw in the logic behind the statement. If there was a movie about the war in Iraq in which the US Army was a force for good and not evil, the results may well be different.







* - A scientist puts a frog on the floor and says, "Jump, frog, jump!" And then he writes in his notebook, "frog with four legs can jump 20 feet."

He then cuts off one of the frog's front legs, puts the frog on the floor and says, "Jump, frog, jump!" And then he writes in his notebook, "frog with three legs can jump 15 feet."

He then cuts off the frog's other front leg, puts the frog on the floor and says, "Jump, frog, jump!" And then he writes in his notebook, "frog with two legs can jump 10 feet."

He then cuts off the frog's other rear leg, puts the frog on the floor and says, "Jump, frog, jump!" And then he writes in his notebook, "frog with one leg can jump 5 feet."

He then cuts off one of the frog's front legs, puts the frog on the floor and says, "Jump, frog, jump! Jump, frog, jump!" And then he writes in his notebook, "frog with no legs is deaf."

Another in-kind contribution?

Just over a year ago, we were treated to the spectacle of elected officials threatening a broadcast network because they didn't like some of the reported political content of a made-for-TV mini-series. ABC stood up to them, somewhat, after cutting the "questionable" material, and The Path to 9/11 aired. I watched it, and while it's probably not accurate to say that I "enjoyed" it, I thought it was very well done, and I was glad that they had done it. As I said at the time,

Bottom line? The villains in this piece are not the Clinton administration officials who didn't capture Bin Laden. They are not the Bush administration officials who did not stop the attacks. They aren't the FBI agents who under-reacted to Zacharias Moussaoui's flight training or the judges that didn't let the FBI examine his laptop. No, the villains are, as is rightly the case, the terrorists themselves. Ramzi Yousef. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Ayman Al-Zawahiri. Osama Bin Laden. In hindsight, there were "dots" that could have been connected. There were missed opportunities, there were turf battles, there was red tape, there was bureaucratic infighting. But the villains are the ones the planned and executed the attack, not the ones who failed to prevent it. And that is clearly what the movie shows. All things considered, it's an impressive accomplishment.

I recorded it, and I've got it burned to DVD, though I've not watched it again. But if I hadn't burned it to DVD, I wouldn't have a DVD of it. And anyone who didn't do it then, hasn't got it. ABC has not re-broadcast it. Even more surprising, in an entertainment industry where virtually all movies go to DVD in 4-6 months, is that The Path to 9/11 is still not available. The NBC series Heroes, which debuted a short time later and ran its last episode during the May sweeps period, was released on a DVD set in August. For example.

They had a DVD release scheduled for January. January came and went.
They had a DVD release scheduled for June. June came and went.
They don't have a DVD release scheduled anymore.

Are they still protecting the Clintons, still invested in the storyline that Bill Clinton and his administration were "focused like a laser beam" on terrorism?

Anna Nimouse*, writing at National Review Online, has an interesting take, an angle that I'd not considered.

...where is the fiscal responsibility of Disney/ABC to their stockholders? With 28 million viewers one might reasonably expect sales of a third of that, or roughly $200 million in proceeds. That’s money that would eventually make its way into dividends in some retirement accounts. I smell a class action lawsuit brewing. By not releasing a highly successful film on DVD, when even Poseidon (an incredible $160 million flop), was released on DVD not even four months after its theatrical release, the Walt Disney Company seems to be purposefully not trying to make money, and that’s a breach of fiduciary responsibility.

And that's got me thinking. Could that $200 million that Disney is forgoing by leaving The Path to 9/11 in the vault be considered an in-kind contribution to Hillary Clinton campaign?


* - Yes, that is clearly an anonymous nom de plume. It's interesting that the atmosphere in Hollywood is such that the people who love to make movies praising the blacklisted writers of the McCarthy era can't be trusted not to blacklist actresses expressing Anna's sentiments...