“MICHAEL MOHHHRRREEEEAAAHHHHTTTEEEEE?!” she echoed again.

“I thought you wuh dead!”

Symbolically I had, indeed, died to the business of celebrity and fame. It frightened me. Sickened me, actually. Made me commit a kind of career suicide. Because my career blip had fallen off Katharine Hepburn’s radar screen, I had become dead to her.

I’m sure, though, if I had ever called again, it would be her, Hepburn and not her secretary, picking up the phone in the East Side Manhattan brownstone she owned. This particular clip from “Glass Menagerie” says it all.

“Then go to the moon, you selfish dreamah!!!”

That is Hepburn rocketing the whole, profoundly ignorant, lifeless world to an equally banal and distantly barren planet. The faint echo placed upon Miss H’s cry of “dreamah” is particularly resonant now, insofar as the symbolic son that Kate was exhorting was, in real life, the playwright Tennessee Williams whom I also knew. About whom I will write in a future Big Hollywood post.

I came to know both Ms. Hepburn and Tennessee because of “Glass Menagerie.” My friendship with Tennessee lasted much longer than the volatile one I’d briefly shared with Hepburn.

Why?

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The Chicago Black Sox might appear to be about as American a corruption as possible.

Highly recent testimony to Chicago’s immortally blackened reputation, however, is here.

God bless Ann Coulter!!

Furthermore, after having channel-hopped two of the United States’ greatest film noir classics – 1954’s “On The Waterfront” and 1957’s “Sweet Smell of Success” – there is something misleadingly American about the disease still infecting the United States.

Both Chicago’s Unionized Obama Nation and New York’s Bloomberg Occupation on Wall Street?

To coin a relevant movie title, they are “The Swampy Smell of a Waterfront Success!” A “triumph” born of the string-pulling games played by pecking orders in power. A Grand Revival of Political Malevolence in the American Bloodstream is erupting out of the possibly inner-party, Republican opposition to Herman Cain. It not only smells of racism, according to Donald Trump’s accusations, but also of a political desperation that will eventually solidify Cain’s integrity and endurance.

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How can an actress from England who doesn’t appeal to me at all in interviews as her very British self — how can she so mesmerize me as a Canadian shiksa goddess of marital perfection in the film “Barney’s Version”?

Only an exceptional actress could ever pull that off.

Unadulterated goodness is, I feel, the hardest and most challenging thing for any actor or actress to play. No one really believes you can be that sainted, least of all yourself.

Having worked with a few of the female greats, Katherine Hepburn and Meryl Streep, and met a few others such as Bette Davis, I found the unadulterated health and blistering sanity of Rosamund Pike’s Miriam in “Barney’s Version” most astounding.

Everyone in the audience just has to fall in love with her during our first glimpse of this vision of her Miriam’s low key, Canadian nobility.

We actually drop off a cliff in the same way alcoholic, eternally Boychick Barney does. She is, of course, strikingly beautiful but eloquently frank and irresistibly unselfconscious. How does Barney win her and keep her for as long as he does? That is the major flaw in the script.
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It is splendid how Norman Rockwell’s “Freedom of Speech” is not only a double-edged sword but a spear-studded cannonball for world freedom as well.

The Politico-inspired loud-mouthing about Herman Cain’s apparent indiscretion – or perhaps his avuncular bonhomie toward a malevolently ambitious female – the accusations hurled at the presidential candidate have backfired!

It highlights the beauty of freedom of speech.

Yes, we in America also have the freedom to lie and to maliciously exaggerate. However, the court of public opinion in American democracy will decide whether or not accusations are justified or merely the product of greedy but increasingly frightened political ambitions.

Justice Clarence Thomas was the first-such target of left-wing, railroading, character-assassinating, Beltway connivances. It didn’t work then, and it won’t work now.

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This photo of Bette Davis is, I think, the most perfect ever taken of her. Why? Because it is the most boldly complete, capturing what was most beautiful about her but also what was most dangerous: the unreleased dreams boiling behind her eyes and in the full pout of her mouth.

I never really understood nor appreciated Davis’s greatness as an actress until I watched her performance recently in ‘Dark Victory.’

For those who’ve never seen it, ‘Dark Victory’ centers entirely around the Davis character Judith Traherne and the manner in which she copes with her certain and imminent death from a brain tumor.

To me, Davis had been a very eccentric woman more than a great artist — one who, with turned-down lips, had an eternal chip on her shoulder. At any moment, Davis might snap your head off in the most histrionic manner possible before anyone who simply happened to be present, making you feel smaller, more useless and pathetic than last year’s want ad.

I crossed paths with Davis for a very brief instant on stage in New York when she was the one to hand me my Tony Award for a performance in John Hopkins’ play, ‘Find Your Way Home.’

Perhaps that “chip” she seemed to carry was, in some way, a central part of her character. I really don’t know nor can I say that for certain about her, never having had the intimidating privilege of working with Davis. That, however, could not diminish the enormously powerful size of her acting. Like Katharine Hepburn, with whom I did work, she was larger than any corner of a so-called ordinary life. (more…)

Norman Rockwell’s clearly privileged and very New York “Connoisseur” is staring at what I would call A Portrait of the Progressive New World Order.

Few citizens anywhere would have a living room large enough to hang this very bloody-looking billboard in. Secondly, few of us are “Connoisseurs.” Thirdly, is it really worth “The Connoisseur’s” time to try and understand this painting? A true art connoisseur instantly said the object of discernment is Rockwell’s impressive version of a Jackson Pollock. “No. 00,” perhaps.

I, for now, can only come up with “A Satellite Photo of Some Third Millennium, Urban Nightmare,” or, “The Fundamental Transformation of the United States of America.”

This painting within a painting, given the Progressive Obsessions of art critics, might eventually be worth more at a Sotheby Auction than the painting itself. “The painting within the painting?! Wrap it up and throw the rest in the wastebasket! I’m a rich man who hates Norman Rockwell but loves Jackson Pollock!!” In other words, such a destructive buyer would be some mega-rich Progressive. He’s possibly George Soros or the now exponentially enriched Jeffrey Immelt.

With both Sarah Palin and Herman Cain being, for me at any rate, the political equivalent of Norman Rockwell, I believe this visual version of the Progressive New World Order, hanging so impressively on the museum wall, looks out, beyond The Connoisseur, at the conservative writers and readers of Big Hollywood, and reminds us of how prophetic Norman Rockwell can be. (more…)

The death of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko instantly comes to mind when seeing Mel Gibson’s ‘Edge of Darkness.’

Why?

Premeditated, homicidal radioactive poisoning.

Such an assassination by a personalized nuclear weapon has only one notable precedent, and that is the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in London. Since Litvinenko died under British protection, and the producers of ‘Edge of Darkness‘ come from a BBC television series, one can’t possibly deny these connections between fiction and fact.

However, the mainstream press and Wikipedia seem deliberately deaf, dumb, and blind to the obvious. For them, the radioactivity theme is an “environmental issue.”

BBC’s most recent attention to the Death of Alexander Litvinenko as a dissident of neo-Soviet Russia, September 12, 2011, is here.

Not only is Vladimir Putin implicated in this murder, but the book on Litvinenko’s assassination, authored by Alex Goldfarb and Marina Litvinenko, the widow of Alexander, stresses the strong connection between Putin and one of his major benefactors, George Soros.

Hmmm …

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The little boy sitting with a cop in a diner could have been myself sitting with my police surgeon father on a morning of “custody fights” between my “mom” and my “dad.” I wasn’t a runaway yet. I would be.

George Moriarty, my father – tacitly known as a “Little George” to my grandfather, “Big George” Moriarty – was easily as “big” as that police officer in Norman Rockwell’s ‘The Runaway.’

Over a decade older than that boy in the painting, I ran away to New York City and London only to face a painfully humiliating return to Detroit where I was born.

Oh, well … we’ve all had those moments in our lives … and, as I’ve learned, “God had other plans for me than my own” and God’s plans turned out more blissfully rewarding than the ones I’d dreamed of as a boy.

However, it seems like more than 40 percent of Americans are now running away from the defining principles of America and America’s individual freedom. They applaud Barack Obama’s efforts to “fundamentally transform the United States.”

Why do I say that?

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That’s my grandfather in the middle … well … my grandfather sure looked like the home base umpire in this American classic by Norman Rockwell.

George Moriarty umpired five world series.

After one particularly contentious game, Big George, as I had learned to call him, “took on” not one, not two but three angry ballplayers after the game was over. He showed up for work the next day a bit bruised and battered.

Two of the “vengeful players,” however, couldn’t even make it to the next game. That’s only one of the stories I was told about my grandfather and how tough he was.

He and Charlie “Boss” Schmidt were the only two Detroit Tigers that the rest of the team wouldn’t mess with. That
category included the great base-stealing intimidator, Ty Cobb. The man that sat visibly in the dugout sharpening his spikes!

Given Cobb’s bullying ways and my grandfather’s sense of right and wrong, Law and Order and our family’s protective instincts for Law and Order have been in the Moriarty family for three generations.

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I took a week off from my Enter Stage Right memoir, The Haunted Heaven, and this series for Big Hollywood. Why? For time to ponder how some people are losing their jobs because of their free speech.

More than one message about free speech has obviously been sent in the past few weeks.

Some people, such as presidential candidate Ron Paul, think that President Obama has become the very dictator that Woody Allen said was necessary for America.

Meanwhile the veteran likes of former Ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, thinks the President, rather than being a dictator, is “naïve” and his policies “incoherent.”

According to Bolton, President Obama is an American “innocent abroad.”

Which is more dangerous?

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This series was inspired by the a six part, video examination of Dimitri Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony.

Before you go to sleep, however, or bump up another article, stay with me and this article’s title.

The cited video is Michael Tilson Thomas’ exceptional and exceptionally moving tribute to the soul of Dimitri Shostakovich and the hidden meanings within his Fifth Symphony that has profound relevance to the direction we are headed into with the Progressive New World Order.

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The Tilson Thomas complete video is an intensely condensed portrait of Stalin’s Russia. I consider the Tilson Thomas lecture/documentary a “must-see” for anyone viewing America primarily through the eyes of Hollywood and the performing arts.

The Soviet Union ravenously fed on the terror we can find breathing beneath the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony. The nightmare is only there, however, and can only be perceived if we begin to understand the musical code with which Shostakovich is constructing an obligatory deception.

Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony is a lie?

How do you appease a terrorist, the homicidal Communist Joseph Stalin, while, at the same time being true to yourself and your calling as an artist?

With that challenge in mind, why would I ever come up with the title, Bringing America Home Again?

The history of Stalin’s Russia is vitally important as a measure of how far the Progressive New World Order has dragged America and Americans away from their original faith in individual freedom and individual responsibility.

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My recent observations on Christopher Hitchens received impressively varied responses. Most, however, or most of those I’ve read so far, acknowledge the vitally important test of a human being’s honesty: the presence or absence of hypocrisy.

I attribute the vitality of the comments entirely to the power of Christopher Hitchens. Such lively discourse is the fruit of Hitchens’ indisputable right to be taken seriously by anyone with any common sense at all.

Though the speed of his eloquence and the size of his vocabulary, not to mention the impeccable King’s English he can wrap it in, are intimidating, the sincerity of his insights into this American Epoch of Progressive Lies and Hypocrisies are most welcome.

This demands the greatest respect, even from Hitchens’ enemies.

There are actually only two British-trained intellects living today I respect more than Christopher Hitchens and they are Paul Johnson and Mark Steyn.

When you consider how Hitchens’ body of work contains a bit of both Johnson and Steyn, in both historical range and humor, that achievement alone is worthy of tribute, particularly given the circumstances Christopher Hitchens now finds himself in.

I’m turning 71 next Spring. After a bout of heart failure and subsequent surgery, I find myself much closer to the end of my life than I had ever imagined. However,  I do not face Death’s Door with such close proximity as Mr. Hitchens.

Then again, who knows?

Life, or in my case, God may have other plans than I do.

I’m presently staring at a rather savage looking wolf on my computer screen. His eyes are “in the hunt” and visions of my helplessness before his teeth possibly locking around my throat?

Just a thought.

But then again there are the wolves of the intellect, equally as savage and merciless. I’ve met a few.

One in particular, Tom Wolfe, author and owner of many “mounted heads on his hunting wall”. He might not even remember the luncheon meeting arranged by a mutual acquaintance.

Conversation was cut short before the appetizer.

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The Bloomberg terms for this year’s 9/11 Memorial are not only wrong, they are spiritually, metaphysically and, even in Karl Marx’s terms, dialectically “unbalanced”. Bloomberg is courting an even worse disaster than 9/11.

To bear false witness against God, of all defendants, to blame Him for 9/11, branding Him and his representatives as persona non grata without a full trial is literally demanding God’s complete abandonment of New York City.

Is preventing clergy from participating in the 9/11 Memorial excluding God Himself?

Yes.

Why?

Try excluding a single State’s representative, Senator and/or House member, from a Congressional Ceremony Honoring Abraham Lincoln.

Try it, and may God have mercy on you.

The Almighty, if you haven’t noticed, runs a Democracy as well or better than Washington does.

God has also been known to take sides in American Wars.

Particularly the domestic wars of her Revolution and the nightmares of 1860-65.

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Odd how many Americans can agree with Christopher Hitchens on many issues, i.e. his rage at Henry Kissinger. I sympathize totally with such disgust.

The Hitchens contempt for the Tea Party, however, is the grandest dividing line, largely due to the tea Party’s fervent belief in God and its faith in Sarah Palin whom Hitchens repeatedly heaps fear and loathing on.

Hitchens, however, warns the world to not patronize Sarah Palin!

He points out that his favorite film on American Presidential politics is Gore Vidal’s The Best Man.

With an almost bottomless irony of ironies, he further adds that at one time Ronald Reagan was considered for a role but he was dismissed as “insufficiently Presidential”.

Therein lies the substance of his concerns about Sarah Palin and her Presidential Insufficiency.

It also strengthens my faith in the fact that Sarah Palin will, indeed, be America’s next Ronald Reagan and more.

The “more”, I’m certain, is what most terrifies Christopher Hitchens.

His contempt for America and anything classically American is so deep it makes him blind. He traipses out the history of the 19^th Century Pledge of Allegiance, smugly noting that the words “under God” didn’t reach the Pledge until the 1950’s. He finds it “funny” that Palin cross-referenced the Pledge of the Allegiance with the Declaration of Independence.

“God” reached the Declaration of Independence in the 18^th Century. In that profoundly obvious sense she was totally correct in saying she stands with the Founding Fathers.

A smirking history professor who is also a repeatedly self-described atheist would consider the ultimate truth of her statement irrelevant in the face of her historical liberties.

More the pedant he.

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 Thanks to Big Hollywood’s Alfonzo Rachel, I witnessed an entertainment miracle going off in Phoenix, Arizona.

This is my third time through the Katt Williams, flame-throwing, soul-burning comic meltdown! 

This is so far beyond having an audience in the palm of your hand, it is an entire American Counter-Revolution!

This must be not only the worst night and foulest nightmare of this heckler’s life, I don’t see how this fool could walk after the justified incineration he waltzed into.

The almost 8 minutes of deliriously savage brilliance rises like a great symphony to culminate in the only possible ecstatic climax: The Star Spangled Banner!!!

This fifth time through for me brings tears to my eyes! Shouts of gratitude!! America is in a major foxhole right now and a pathetic heckler has, indeed, UNITED THE TROOPS!!!!

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With the President’s address to a joint session of Congress on September 8, I expect a mildly new turn on an old Progressive tune: “America’s not going anywhere without Karl Marx & Friends!”

America’s increasingly far Left academia has always been “nudging” its way into power. The first great, 20^th Century landmark for these “enlightened despots”, as Voltaire described them, came when a professor of the ordinarily Left-leaning Harvard University, Dr. Henry Kissinger, found his way into the Oval Office of Republican President Richard Nixon.

The not-so-good-doctor seemed to have literally crawled inside the soul of this undeniably insecure but ingeniously manipulative politician, also known as Tricky Dick. Their administration, as we know, came to a rather disgraceful end.

However, Red China’s oldest American friend, Henry Kissinger, knows that his influence from deep connections with Beijing is now as strong as it ever was.

Why?

His “kind”, his “fraternity” from Harvard and the University of Chicago are back!

Above you see a decidedly self-confident, Presidential manipulator, Barack Obama, surrounded by two of his favorite academicians, Samantha Power and Cass Sunstein.

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Will Sarah Palin become our next Ronald Reagan and more?

Or will she remain a female Rush Limbaugh?

I don’t think Sarah Palin has any alternative but to run in the 2012 Republican primary.

Her clearly stated analysis of “Crony Capitalism” in Iowa yesterday places her in her own, wonderfully unique territory for a Republican candidate. As the “rogue” image she has always enjoyed, targeting the Fat Cats in the Establishment on both sides of the aisle is exactly what Americans of both political persuasions have been praying for.

Challenging “Too Big To Fail” is exactly what most Americans hope for in a President.

No one, out of all the Republican candidates, has thrown down such a clear and arresting gauntlet as Sarah Palin has!

Mamma Grizzly will put the Fat Cats through a refresher course in traditionally American Economics!!

If she’s President!

As we all well know, traditional rules of the Free Market and American Democracy have been so corrupted that we can no longer recognize the United States from a foul-smelling, lawless, 1940’s and 50’s Las Vegas.

We all know Sarah Palin is not a Keynesian but she’s not a Milton Friedman Libertarian either!

That distinction automatically separates her from not only the Crony Capitalists but from Rick Perry who I do believe is a Libertarian, a la Glenn Beck, although much more cunningly veiled than Beck.

Why?

He’s running on a Republican ticket.

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Arnie Grape and I 

What’s Eating Gilbert Grape is one of my favorite films.

Of all time!

The cast is beyond perfect.

Led by Johnny Depp, Juliette Lewis and Leonardo Di Caprio, the love story that is Gilbert Grape puts its director, Lasse Halstrom, at the very top of my heroic list. A personal pantheon that only includes one other director: Elia Kazan.

Yes, for me Halstrom’s What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? is almost the equal of On The Waterfront.

Almost.

Why?

The two scripts, the directors and, above all, the actors convey, with piercing depth, the courage it takes to love unconditionally.

In Gilbert Grapes’ case, it is the hero’s ultimately unconditional love for his family and his brother Arnie’s love for life itself.

Because my experience of family was the antithesis of Gilbert Grape’s, I don’t sympathize with the Depp character as I have increasingly identified with Marlon’s Brando’s Terry Malloy. In On The Waterfront we ultimately see the hero’s unconditional love of not family or tribe but of truth. Despite the union thugs and their increasingly dangerous threats, Terry Malloy must risk his life to tell the truth.

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I went to University of Detroit’s Jesuit High School in Northwest Detroit.

Out of all my educational experiences, those formative four years were the best and the most enduring. Matched up against four years of the Ivy League at Dartmouth College and a year abroad in England on a Fulbright Scholarship, the Catholic experience was the deepest, the longest lasting and, in my opinion, the greatest contributor to a long – 70 years so far – and wonderfully rewarding life.

Here is an undeniably clear revelation of the growing divide between traditional America as seen in this Catholic Preparatory School, and the Obama Nation’s radically Leftist virulence poring out of union bullies and SEIU troublemaking.

Not only will the Progressive values of an Obama Nation leave our children and grandchildren holding a massive debt, those generations of Americans, increasingly influenced by The Obama Nation Value System, will be crippled and live a life of total dependence upon government and unions and eventually the devouring greed for power in a Progressive New World Order.

The Children of Obama will find no other recourse in life but increasing dependence upon the political and governing likes of Barack Hussein Obama, the SEIU and this cabal’s inner circle of CEO’s that are, like George Soros, “too big to fail”.

No one and nothing, from Napoleon, Stalin and Hitler to the Roman Empire, the Third Reich and World Communism have ever proven to be “too big to fail”.

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The comment section of any blog or internet site is always a re-education. Not about diversity of opinion but about the human condition itself.

No matter how close two people’s opinions might seem to be, eventually there will be a difference of some sort between them.

In short, we are all confronted eventually with the isolation everyone feels because of their own inalterable uniqueness.

Not even Siamese twins can agree about everything.

At such times, philosophers such as France’s Jean Paul Sartre conclude that “Hell is other people!”

“L’enfer est les autres!”

I don’t agree, of course.

What had always been hell for me was the fear and experience of isolation itself.

I then realized how God’s very existence in the lives of men was inspired and maintained by such moments of inevitable isolation.

“Someone or something must and does understand me!”

Then, of course, one’s relationship to such a Something is up to debate.

Does the Something expect something of you, demand something of you and, of course, if you don’t measure up?

Hmmm … what are the consequences?

This is where my immeasurably vital experience with Alcoholics Anonymous comes in: “Let go, let God.”

That is their incantation: “Let go, let God!”

Which means: “Stop asking yourself that stupid question and let God answer it for you and He will.”

And He has.

How?

By erasing the nightmares of anxiety that arose from your asking the stupid questions in the first place.

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