Thanks to Jack Webb’s inviting me to write for “Dragnet,” I became a proud member of the WGA back in the late 60s, but the honeymoon came to an unseemly end at a strike meeting a few years later.  Because the Guild had decided to try dividing the opposition by allowing independent production companies to keep their doors open during the strike, so long as they agreed to abide retroactively by the final contract, I, who was then employed by Talent Associates, found myself in the odd position of crossing a picket line in the morning and leaving my office to carry a picket sign from 3-4 in the afternoon.

At the strike meeting, someone had suggested that because a number of us would be gainfully employed for the duration of the work stoppage, we should have to kick in an additional 3% to the strike fund.  That seemed fair to me, so I raised my hand along with just about everyone else.

Then another writer suggested that because the networks would be using re-runs in order to keep product on the air, the same 3% levy should be placed on residual payments.  That seemed an equally fair notion.  This time, however, when I raised my hand, I found I was one of very few.

That was my initial wake-up call.  The second occurred during a strike meeting in the 80s, when our negotiating committee reported that we had come to terms on DVDs.  We were agreeing to accept 1.2% of producer’s gross.  Oh, and by the way, it would pertain only to movies produced after 1971.

When I saw Julius Epstein trudging up the aisle, it dawned on me that the Guild had just screwed him out of “Casablanca,” not to mention dozens of other Warner Brothers classics of the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s, that he’d co-scripted with his late brother, Phil.

Why, I wondered, hadn’t the Guild settled for, say, just 1% of producers gross, but insisted that the deal cover every movie going back to “The Great Train Robbery”?

(more…)

 Because I’ve just finished reading my friend, Ben Shapiro’s excellent new expose, “Primetime Propaganda,” I’m reminded how fortunate I am that during most of the time I was writing for television, I was a Democrat.  Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t have had a TV career at all.

As Shapiro points out, TV has grown increasingly liberal over the past 50 years.  Although he is only 27 years old, he has been diligent in his historical research.  Moreover, because he is young, Jewish and wore his Harvard Law baseball cap when he interviewed the writers, producers and network executives, who have created the product and scheduled the programming over the years, they all assumed he was, like them, a devout leftist.

I suspect that even without the baseball cap, these limousine liberals would have probably assumed that, like everyone else who enters their well-insulated bubble, Shapiro idolized Barack Obama.  Why else would they not have bothered checking out his credentials?  After all, in spite of being a practicing attorney, Shapiro has written three previous books, all espousing his conservative values, and is a contributor to several right-wing blogs.

Even I, who personally know several of the makers and shakers in the industry, was shocked to read some of the things they had to say about conservatives.  You would have thought they were discussing jihadists, except they are generally far more respectful when referring to the people who wish to behead us.  It’s only when it comes to writers and actors with whom they have political differences, that they’re united in their desire to see them blacklisted or, better yet, dead.

The irony of course is that these are the same self-righteous characters who have carried on incessantly about the inequity of the industry’s having blacklisted Communists 60 years ago.  Hypocrisy aside, there is a world of difference that is apparent to most normal, fair-minded people, between a conservative opposing ObamaCare and a Communist tithing 10% of his MGM salary to the Soviet Union, where Joseph Stalin was starving millions of Russians to death and assassinating his political rivals.  Even the fact that Stalin had his boot on the neck of hundreds of millions of people who had the misfortune of living in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and East Germany, was of no concern to the Hollywood lefties.  It should be noted that these were the same folks who made Siberia, the hellish place to which Stalin exiled Jews and other nuisances, the tagline to a thousand benign jokes in a way they’d have never dared with Auschwitz or Buchenwald. 

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It recently dawned on me that even though Hollywood couples often avoid marriage even when they have children together, while others are often married for embarrassingly short periods of time, the movies continue to promote the old-fashioned notion that marriage constitutes a happy ending in every romantic comedy they churn out. They do this because they realize that even though shacking-up and one-night stands are typical for many of them, it does not constitute the norm or the ideal for most people in the audience.

That being the case, you have to wonder why in so many other areas, they go out of their way to ignore or even deride the values and beliefs of most Americans. When it comes to such things as same-sex marriage, tax-funded abortions or the alleged villainy of the U.S. Military, Hollywood is consistently out of step with the majority and they’re darn proud of it.

Often the funniest lines delivered by these celebrities occur when they exchange marriage vows. The most appropriate musical accompaniment isn’t Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March,” but a couple of rim shots after the “I do’s.” On occasion, the marriage is over before the gifts have been unwrapped, sometimes even before the cake has been cut.

For instance, Julia Roberts/Lyle Lovett (21 months); Michael Jackson/Lisa Marie Presley (19 months); Charlie Sheen/Donna Peele (14 months); Jennifer Lopez/Chris Judd (7 months); Pamela Anderson/Kid Rock (5 months); Renee Zellwegger/Kenny Chesney (4 months); Nicolas Cage/Lisa Marie Presley (4 months); Drew Barrymore/Jeremy Thomas (6 weeks); Carmen Electra/Dennis Rodman (9 days); Dennis Hopper/Michelle Phillips (8 days); and, a drum roll, please: Britney Spears/Jason Alexander (55 hours).

Some of these ceremonies no doubt took place at Las Vegas chapels, but a couple of them, I suspect, occurred at local In-N-Out Burger stands, where the marriage certificates came with an order of fries. (more…)

One of the reasons that movies today are so devoid of compelling characters and engrossing plots is that the folks who make them are, more often than not, too young and too isolated from humanity.  That’s not to say that writers and directors in their 20s and 30s can’t be talented, but, as a rule, what they have are a passel of petty grievances (the studios, their agents, the deals, other people’s success, etc.); what they lack is wisdom.  They simply haven’t lived long enough or suffered enough major losses — friends, parents, spouses, children — to have developed a grown-up’s philosophy.

Perhaps that also helps to explain why nearly all of them are liberals.  When all that one hears all day long is left-wing claptrap — and especially when future employment demands acquiescence to the prevailing tenets — it’s easy to understand the half-baked inanities these wienies so arrogantly espouse.  They speak of tolerance as if it’s something they copyrighted, but they despise everyone who isn’t in lockstep with them.  Although they make their living with words, when it comes to debating the opposition, they rely on a mantra of “racist,” “fascist,” “bigot” and “homophobe.”

This isolation from large segments of the population, relying strictly on other members of the industry for one’s social and intellectual life, might also explain why even major stars subscribe to the blathering of someone like Barack Obama, who carries on very much like a movie star. (more…)

EXCERPT FROM Burt Prelutsky’s: Liberals: America’s Termites or It’s a Shame That Liberals, Unlike Hamsters, Never Eat Their Young

These days, there is another blacklist taking place, but they’re calling it a graylist because the victims are scriptwriters who made the stupid career decision of allowing themselves to become gray-haired or, in some distinguished cases, even bald. 

Back in 1999, a class action suit was initiated by about 150 of us.  Today, there are over 600 of us who are plaintiffs suing the various studios, networks and major talent agencies, for conspiring to blacklist WGA members on no other basis than their age. 

Some people might find it ironic that Hollywood’s liberals, who are still inflamed over a blacklist that took place 60 years ago, not only condone it in their hometown, but practice it every day of their lives.  (more…)

EXCERPT FROM Burt Prelutsky’s: Liberals: America’s Termites or It’s a Shame That Liberals, Unlike Hamsters, Never Eat Their Young

Although, as a rule, those people who star in movies are more obnoxious than their colleagues in television – perhaps because we’re not inviting them into our homes – the folks on TV tend to be even whinier.           

The question that comes to mind is when appearing on the tube went from being a well-paid privilege to being an inalienable right. 

So far as I know, it first became an issue when “Murder She Wrote,” a CBS staple from 1984 to 1996, was canceled.  The phenomenon may have pre-dated that event, but that’s when I became aware of the sea change.  Prior to that, diehard fans were naturally disappointed whenever one of their favorite shows bit the dust, but it was understood that nothing went on forever. 

However, in 1996, Angela Lansbury went ballistic over her show’s demise, even though it had already made her enormously wealthy.  As I recall, Ms. Lansbury felt that CBS had not treated her and the show with the proper reverence.  She didn’t seem to realize that a pink slip is a pink slip, and should not be confused with a condolence card.  In any case, I felt that someone should have pointed out to the lady that CBS is a corporation and not a friend of the family – although God knows this particular corporation had been enormously generous to her family, most of whom had wound up on the show’s payroll – and that a 13-year run is about as reverential as TV ever gets.  (more…)

Over the last few years, I have lost friends and become estranged from relatives because of politics.  At one time, I would have thought such a thing was unimaginable.  But in the past decade, as the rift between those on either side of the culture-values-political divide has expanded, it strikes me it was inevitable. 

The world, after all, saw friends and families divided in America during the 1860s and in Germany in the 1930s and now we see it here.  On the one side, we have Americans who believe that, in spite of its flaws, America is the greatest, most generous, nation on the face of the earth.  On the other side, you have Americans who believe that this nation is a house of horrors that has to be radically transformed by the radical transformer in the Oval Office, which these days should be renamed the Offal Office. 

If you’re convinced, as I am, that Barack Obama is the greatest menace America has ever faced — a far graver danger than Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union or Islamic fascism, simply because they all lacked the ability or determination to destroy our Constitution — losing a few friends and relatives is no big deal.  (more…)

My ex-wife pulled off one of the most diabolical stunts ever perpetrated on one human being by another.  When she was a kid, she took it upon herself to teach her younger brother the names of all the different colors.  But for reasons known only to her and Satan, she taught him the wrong names.  So, although he wasn’t color-blind, he wound up being what you might call color-dumb, believing that purple was yellow, green was orange and white was brown. 

What brought this to mind was discovering that it was the late Tim Russert who labeled liberal states blue and conservative states red.  Inasmuch as red had long represented the Soviet Union and the politics of those lunkheads around the globe who were devoted to Communism, I wonder if Russert had intentionally set out to muddy the waters or if he, too, had had a sinister older sister. 

A great many people, including right-wingers who should know better, have given Obama high marks for antagonizing his liberal base by deploying 30,000 troops to Afghanistan.  For one thing, General McChrystal had started out requesting 80,000 additional men and then lowered his request to 40-60,000 when it became obvious that Obama, even after spending two years insisting that Afghanistan, unlike Iraq, was a good war that had to be won, actually believed that he could personally beguile Al Qaeda and the Taliban as easily as he had America’s lap dog media.  (more…)

When I was just a kid, I saw the stage musical, “Peter Pan,” starring Mary Martin in the title role and Cyril Ritchard as Captain Hook.  It is to this day the only version of that old war-horse I ever liked.  I still don’t know why that story has retained its popularity since 1904.  Even Walt Disney couldn’t work his magic on it.

What I remember best about the show, the tunes aside, is that at the point when Tinkerbell’s light was flickering, and she was supposedly at death’s door, the audience was urged to start clapping in the hope that our applause would somehow save her.  Suddenly a woman seated behind me leaned forward and said, “Little boy, you aren’t clapping.  Don’t you want Tinkerbell to live?”

“I know the story,” I told her.  “She’ll live even if nobody claps.” (more…)

This is the time of year when most people are busy resolving to do better in the future. Some people vow to go on diets or exercise more, some promise to give up smoking or booze. But, year in and year out, I vow to cut liberals more slack and give them the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, just as with other people’s good intentions, my own rarely last until nightfall. The difference is that the reason mine die on the vine, as it were, has nothing to do with my own lack of character, but everything to do with the failings of liberals.

For one thing, liberals are hypocritical. They have agendas when they’d be better off having principles. They praise whistle-blowers and investigative reporters, but only when Republicans, conservatives and/or the U.S. military suffer the consequences. So it was that they lionized Daniel Ellsberg for turning the Pentagon Papers over to the NY Times and heralded Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward for their Watergate expose, but demanded that James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles be prosecuted for their ACORN videos and wanted the computer hackers who uncovered the East Anglia emails, the ones proving global warming to be a major hoax, to be tarred and feathered. (more…)

Back in 1946, Winston Churchill, in a speech delivered at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, referred to an Iron Curtain that had descended across the Continent, behind which all the capitols of the ancient states, from Berlin to Belgrade, from Budapest to Sofia, were under the boot of the Soviet Union.

Today, freedom-loving people are faced with a second such curtain. It doesn’t exist in Eastern Europe this time, but along the Potomac. On one side, there are despots like Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Waxman, Sunstein, Emanuel, Axelrod, Specter and Conyers. On the other side are those of us who are sick and tired of having ex-community organizers and their left-wing henchmen doing their best to enslave us. They treat the Constitution like toilet paper; they bribe millions of us, including illegal aliens, with cash and free health benefits, while simultaneously bankrupting the rest of us, along with our kids and their kids.

They have saddled us with so much debt, unemployment and inevitable inflation, one can only assume it’s their plan that we’ll be too wretched to notice that they’re also taking away our rights and freedom. This is the doing of the same people who pretended that the Patriot Act, which did nothing more than try to prevent Islamic terrorists from plotting a sequel to 9/11, was the height of fascistic tyranny.

I guarantee that if our leading leftists were characters in a movie, a lot more people would be able to recognize their villainy. That’s because they would all look like albinos and talk with funny accents. (more…)

Based on the email I receive from my readers, I understand that I’m not alone in thinking that the left-wing lugnuts have turned America into the world’s biggest loony bin.  I’m not quite sure how they managed to pull it off, but the evidence of their mischief is obvious and overwhelming.

For openers, we have the administration’s refusal to let White House Social Secretary Desiree Rogers explain how the Salahis crashed the state dinner for India’s prime minister, Dr. Monmohan Singh.  These are the same folks who spent eight years insisting that the American people had a right to receive regular status reports on Dick Cheney’s bowel movements.

For my part, I am less concerned with the presence of the Salahis in the White House than with Rahm Emanuel, Cass Sunstein and David Axelrod, having the run of the place. (more…)

The other day I was asked if I thought I would ever come face to face with writer’s block.  I had to laugh.  Inasmuch as I generally write about things that annoy, frustrate or just plain drive me nuts, running out of material or losing the impulse to complain in print are among the very least of my worries. 

When you factor in that Barack Obama is my president, Joe Biden is my vice-president, Nancy Pelosi is next in line, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer are my senators, Brad Sherman is my congressman, Antonio Villaraigosa is my mayor and Jerry Brown is lurking in the wings to be my governor, do you really think I’ll be turning my pen into a plowshare anytime soon?    

But at least now you might have a better handle on why I look back so fondly on what I have come to regard as the good old days when an American’s major complaint was that he had taxation without representation. 

On top of everything else, I live in Los Angeles and have spent most of my adult life laboring in Hollywood, a place that some people regard as less an actual location than a state of mind.  I agree it is a state of mind in the same sense that paranoia and schizophrenia are states of mind.  (more…)

Many people were offended to see Barack Obama once again bowing to a foreign dignitary, the Emperor of Japan.  For my part, I was actually relieved that at least this latest breech of protocol didn’t involve his kowtowing to one of America’s sworn enemies. 

As most people are well aware, I have nothing but loathing for Obama’s policies, but even I am amazed by his reluctance to handle what I regard as the easy part of his job; namely, carrying off his responsibilities to be a figurehead, to be the proud symbol of this great and generous nation. 

Instead, he tours the world on our dime apologizing for our alleged failings and transgressions.  He goes to Denmark in order to lobby for the Olympics, in order that his corrupt Chicago cronies could cash in on crooked land deals, but he doesn’t go to Germany to help commemorate the falling of the Berlin Wall.  Next, instead of expressing the grief that every decent American felt over the slaughter of American soldiers and an unborn baby by an Islamic terrorist, this bozo gave a partisan shout-out at a Native American shindig.  Then, for good measure, he warned us not to jump to the conclusion that the Islamic terrorist was an Islamic terrorist.  (more…)

Whenever I hear people outside the administration prattle on about how evil and biased Fox News is, I know I am listening to a flock of parrots who have never even tuned in. As a conservative myself, I have a number of problems with the network. For one thing, I resent Bill O’Reilly’s ridiculing those who merely ask for documentation that their president was born in the United States, and I also wish he’d stop defending Obama against charges that he’s a Socialist or worse. If it walks, swims and quacks like a duck, Bill, it’s a safe bet that you can pop it in the oven and serve it at Christmastime.

I’d also appreciate it if Sean Hannity would wake up to the fact that a lot of us change the channel the second that Bob Beckel shows up on the Great American Panel.

On the other hand, I wish that merely as an experiment a dozen or so liberals could be forced to watch Glenn Beck for an entire week. I would be dying to know how they would react after watching videos of Obama, Rahm Emanuel, Cass Sunstein, Anita Dunn, Andy Stern and John Holdren spouting off when they think nobody outside the room will hear about their plans to transform America.  They would have made Dr. Frankenstein blanch but put a smile on Karl Marx’s ugly mug. (more…)

A lot of people seemed shocked to discover that the folks at the National Endowment of the Arts were so ready, even anxious, to devote their talents to propagandizing on behalf of Obama and his administration.  That merely proves that a lot of people haven’t been paying attention. 

It’s my guess that a majority of those involved with the NEA — even those few who are talented — are always eager to roll over for left-wing politicians.  Partly it’s because they are so hungry for attention and partly because they lack anything resembling a moral compass. 

Allow me to give you a few notable examples of the way that people who earn their living in the areas of art and entertainment can voluntarily blind themselves to those matters that have moral implications.  Just recently, we got to watch a swarm of Hollywood retards climbing all over themselves in a rush to defend Roman Polanski, a piece of Euro-trash who confessed to having sex with a 13-year-old child.  All sorts of big name, small brain, celebrities lined up to sign petitions on his behalf.  By attesting to his character, they merely confirmed that they lacked any themselves.  (more…)

When Barack Obama was campaigning — not that he’s ever stopped — back in 2008, he made a number of promises.  As we all know, like a cad on the make, he was only trying to get us in the sack.  Once he had his way with us, he barely remembered our name, let alone his various vows.

Some of the things he swore to included keeping lobbyists out of his administration, providing five days for the public to review pending legislation and a bi-partisan approach to problem-solving.  Instead, lobbyists, particularly those representing unions, have freer access to the Oval Office than Michelle and the kids.  Not only is the public not given time to digest major legislation, neither are the legislators.  Early on, you may recall, Congress was given less than 24 hours to vote on an 1100-page, trillion dollar, so-called stimulus bill; more recently, when it came to health care, Obama was telling the sheep on Capitol Hill to vote even before an actual bill was written!

So far, as bi-partisanship is concerned, the Republicans have been banished to Washington’s equivalent of Siberia.  These days, bi-partisanship simply means that  David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel are in agreement.

There is one promise, however, that Obama has kept.  He vowed transparency, and anyone who can’t plainly see what the rock star and his left-wing groupies (Axelrod, Emanuel, Jeff Jones, Valerie Jarrett, Cass Sunstein, Anita Dunn) are up to is simply spending too much time watching “American Idol” and college football. (more…)

A while ago, I wrote a piece titled “Blowing the Whistle on Waxman.”  In case you missed it, I explained that Henry Waxman and I had been friends beginning almost 50 years ago at UCLA.  I also said that we had seen each other infrequently over the intervening years once he went to Sacramento as a state assemblyman and later to Washington as a member of Congress. 

Over the years, I moved politically from left to right, while Henry moved from left to far left to over the edge.  Still, I had a soft spot for him and, as a result, refrained from including his name when I would list the usual suspects, those left-wingers like Pelosi, Reid, Rangel, Boxer and Murtha, who were doing their utmost to destroy America. (more…)

I have a few questions on my mind and, judging by the questions asked by the likes of George Stephanopoulos, David Letterman and the mainstream media, if I don’t ask them, there’s a very good chance that nobody else will. 

First off, I’d like to know why the 535 members of Congress have to congregate in Washington, D.C.  As Dick Morris and Eileen McGann made perfectly clear in “Fleeced,” they don’t do very much in the nation’s capitol that they couldn’t do just as well or just as badly if they stayed home in their bathrobes.  Half the time, the sessions are devoted to naming post offices and other equally earth-shattering events.  (more…)

Back in 1954, a lawyer named Joseph Welch became famous virtually overnight when he looked contemptuously at Joe McCarthy and said, “Have you no decency, sir, at long last?”  As clumsy as the line was, he said it so effectively that the next thing we knew, Otto Preminger had hired him to play a judge and deliver equally sanctimonious lines in “Anatomy of a Murder.” 

The question of decency runs through my head every time I see or hear a celebrity or a politician these days.  For instance, I keep asking myself if I am more disgusted by what Roman Polanski did some 30-odd years ago or what his legion of defenders are presently saying in his defense.  Just because he directed a couple of good movies and a lot of lousy ones, we have most of Hollywood signing petitions on his behalf.  Whoopi Goldberg, who was apparently paying close attention when Bill Clinton was parsing the word “is,” has gone so far as insisting that what Polanski did to the 13-year-old girl wasn’t really rape.  The problem with calling these Hollywood freaks on the carpet is that the more repulsed that normal human beings are with them, the more convinced they are that they’re as sophisticated, not to mention morally superior, as their press releases claim they are.  (more…)