Ever since I was a ten-year-old troublemaking punk growing up in the North Cambridge projects, I knew I wanted to be a writer. Not for fame and fortune. I didn’t even know or care about that back then. All I knew is that I wanted to get into people’s heads and mess them up the same way Edgar Allen Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, and Harlan Ellison got into mine. Better yet, scare the bejesus out of them like Joseph Stefano’s masterful Outer Limits series had me and millions of other kids hiding behind our sofas in terror. That’s all.

In 1985, I had my first writing success in the Northwest Pacific Writers’ Conference Ferry Tales contest. They wanted a story as relates to ferries, the major source of transportation between Seattle and ports all over the San Juan de Fuca Straits, so I gave them one: “The Midnight Shuttle,” the story of a man who gets wicked heartburn and decides to get some fresh air on the last ferry ride out of Bremerton, Washington, only to discover he had died and was on Acheron, the mythic ferry to Hell. I was neck-deep in dark stuff at the time, and I wanted to share the dread. Writers and Christopher Nolan will understand.

That story took second place, and Heloise was slated to hand me my award at a dinner in Tacoma. That is, until I committed my one and only DUI in celebration of my victory and spent the weekend in county jail instead. Such are the ups and downs of life as a writer. In 1998 I decided to pursue a career in screenwriting. In 2004 my first script, Ludwig the Great, a Pythonesque twist on the life of King Ludwig II, garnered a number of prestigious award noms and an invite to a red carpet awards gala at the WGA Theater in Beverly Hills. I met stars like Andy Garcia, comedic genius Barry W. Blaustein (a personal hero and inspiration of mine), and did I say there was an open bar? What more could an aspiring alcoholic hack scribe ask for? (more…)

Some things never change. If it’s a day ending in a “y” you can be sure there is more bad news coming out of Iran. It’s like an Islamist Groundhog Day of horror shows in endless loop. Outside Iran itself, no one is becoming more aware of that self-evident reality than the Cannes Film Festival and the world film community. On this very day last year, internationally renowned Iranian film director Jafar Panahi was locked away without official charge in a crypt-like solitary confinement cell in Evin prison’s notorious Ward 209. In response, Hollywood’s top filmmakers issued a petition calling for Mr. Panahi’s release last April. Cannes soon followed in calling for Mr. Panahi’s release in May.

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That event is perhaps best remembered by Mr. Panahi’s empty jury chair and actress Juliette Binoche’s tearful plea. Mr. Panahi responded to Cannes’ supportive efforts to liberate him by smuggling out a thank you note from Evin. The regime’s response to that heinous offense was to sentence Mr. Panahi to an additional two months in Evin, followed by a Gestapo-like raid on his home to terrorize his family into media silence. Yet the international pressure seems to have worked then, as Mr. Panahi was freed from prison on May 25. Mr. Panahi’s liberty turned out to be short-lived. In December, Mr. Panahi was convicted of “propaganda against the system” by an Islamist kangaroo court in Tehran and sentenced to six years in prison.

Mr. Panahi was also banned from the film arts and leaving the country for 20 years. In effect, the regime issued Mr. Panahi an artistic death sentence. This time, however, Mr. Panahi had notable company. Director Mohammad Rasoulof, who had campaigned for Mr. Panahi’s freedom last year from outside Iran, was issued a matching sentence for his alleged crimes against the Islamist state. Both filmmakers are currently out on bail awaiting appeal. So once again, Cannes is neck-deep in campaigning for Mr. Panahi’s exoneration as well as Mr. Rasoulof’s now. The organization just issued a statement linked to a petition containing 17,000+ signatures that reads like a who’s who of the film world.

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With the recent unjust imprisonments of famed Iranian directors Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof, the world finally seems to be coming to terms with the Islamist regime’s rank inhumanity toward its best and brightest and is taking a stand. At the upcoming Academy Awards, Hollywood’s own top creative film artists will be wearing white ribbons in support of the two laureled filmmakers. For many of them, this most recent campaign to free Jafar Panahi on the very heels of campaigning for his freedom from Evin prison last April and May must make it all seem like a nightmarish Groundhog Day.

In truth, it is. The various Islamist regimes of Iran have been at total war with their Hollywood for a very long time now. In 2001 director Tahmineh Milani was sentenced to death for her film The Hidden Half, and well after approval for general release by the regime’s religious censors. Only international and heated domestic outrage spared Tahmineh’s life. Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese were howling back then too, as was the Academy. In February 2007, documentarian Mehrnoushe Solouki was thrown into the hell of Evin for the crime of stumbling across a regime mass grave during a shoot. Again, only international pressure freed her from her now-recurring nightmare.

SSDD in Iran’s film industry. Consider yourself lucky if you only get the McCarthy treatment. But the regime doesn’t stop its war on film and filmmakers at its borders. Last June, suspected Iranian operatives kidnapped exiled filmmaker and regime nemesis Daryush Shokof in Cologne, Germany for daring to screen his film Iran Zendan (Iran Prison), a brutal reenactment of the rape and torture of Green protesters inside an Iranian prison. Again, only international heat and intense pressure from the German government somehow made Mr. Shokof magically reappear on the banks of the Rhine in Cologne soaked, dazed and incoherent after twelve days missing.

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I’ve named this piece For Jafar as a tribute to both the unjustly imprisoned Jafar Panahi and HBO’s brilliant documentary For Neda, which took us beyond the political and social symbolism of Neda Agha Soltan’s tragic needless death and straight to Neda’s heart and life as told through her family, friends and the relics of Neda’s left behind, such as her surprising tastes in Western fashion and huge stack of highly illicit books considered literary treasures outside Islamist Iran. There was much more to Neda Soltan, of course.

In For Jafar, I will similarly attempt to go beyond The Nightmares Before Christmas and all that entails for a time. Rather I will share with you what few snippets I have I gleaned of Jafar Panahi’s life as a living human being and not a tortured innocent film poet given an artistic death sentence, what Jafar himself called wandering in the larger jail. A most poetic analogy as you might expect from the eloquent filmmaker, and dead on point. If you’re a passionate artist denied your art in toto, is that really any better than a summary execution?

Filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof 

Imagine Picasso robbed of his paints, brushes, canvass and stone. What is left of the man? Of course, the two filmmakers will first have to survive six years in Islamist Iran’s Dantean prison system to greatly improve their life status to merely being banned from their art for life. Always a dicey proposition in Islamist Iran. Dark questions abound. What if Jafar goes on a hunger strike again? The last one nearly killed him. His health was already failing rapidly back then from the regime’s Winston Smith treatment, which has failed to break him as it has many innocent Iranians brutalized in the shadows of hells like Evin.

But many others in the film world, the media and the blogosphere will be discussing at length the political and social ramifications of Mr. Panahi’s intolerable situation, or making strong political statements in support of Mr. Panahi and demanding his immediate and unconditional release. Oscar winners Martin Scorsese and DGA President Taylor Hackford already have, God bless ‘em this Christmas Season. The Europeans and Brazilians are getting restless too, never mind the Iranians. (more…)

“When a filmmaker does not make films, it is as if he is jailed. Even when he is freed from the small jail, he finds himself wandering in a larger jail.” - Jafar Panahi

On Monday afternoon I received word from an Iranian friend of mine on Facebook regarding the harsh prison sentences recently meted out by an Islamist People’s Court in Iran to renowned international filmmakers Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof. The news is now breaking worldwide and will no doubt cause a stir everywhere, from Hollywood and ABC to Cannes and the streets of Iran. In brief, the two nationally revered auteurs were just sentenced to six years in prison each for the crime of “participating in a group agitating propaganda against the system.” How Nazi-like does that sound?

The famed directors were also barred from filmmaking for twenty years. Obtaining visas to leave Iran in the future will no doubt be just as severely problematic, as is nearly ever other facet of life in Iran today under the bloody iron boots of the present Shiite Islamist extremist regime terrorizing the nation. It’s called the Ahmie and Khamie Show. How you likin’ it now? I can’t say how I feel about it. I can show you. But War Is Not The Answer, at least not today. That’s just my Alpha Male talking. Against my better judgment, let’s Give Peace a Chance with that foul inhuman regime. Just one more time.

Let’s give them a chance to undo their most serious wrongs to Mr. Panahi, Mr. Rasoulof, the Iranian people, the film world and the rest of civilization at large. The Free Jafar Panahi page is still up on Facebook from the last time Mr. Panahi was unjustly imprisoned, as is the main Jafar Panahi page. Petitions should be peppering those walls in very short order. The popular Cineuropa will also no doubt be on the petition job soon, as they were the last time around. Nothing yet on Mr. Rasoulof. Will update. Feel free to send the Academy a line on behalf of the two filmmakers as well, and please be courteous. This is business. (more…)

The HBO documentary For Neda, directed by Antony Thomas and narrated by famed Iranian actress Shohreh Aghdashloo, first aired on HBO in the United States on June 14 but went viral in Iran on June 1, well before the regime even knew about it. In an HBO interview, Mr. Thomas stated that the goal of the film was to look beyond Neda Agha-Soltan as the most prominent symbol of the Green Revolution and into the soul of whom Neda was as a human being. To that end, Mr. Thomas and crew succeeded brilliantly. The emotional rollercoaster ride one undergoes while traversing Neda Soltan’s short but eventful life in For Neda ranges from the tender and sublime to black despair and furious outrage.

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At times, For Neda also induces in the viewer an unnerving sense of paranoia. Throughout much of the film, the regime is the evil villain unseen on the screen but whose ominous presence is most keenly felt. The rather ordinary but highly illicit home interview sessions in Iran with Neda’s family and others engender a dark foreboding to the point you almost expect regime jackboots to bust down the doors at any moment. The rest of For Neda is also fraught with many palpable dangers that make the fictional James Bond’s seem trite by comparison. In For Neda, we know that the consequences of regime discovery and reprisal are as perilous, real and horrifying as it gets.

For those reasons and many others, Neda’s family refused to talk to the media for the longest time. After Neda’s death last June 20, the regime forcibly moved the family to prevent their home in Tehran from becoming a Green rallying point (which it had in fact become), then thoroughly silenced them. Yet after much coaxing online, Neda’s family finally (and fearlessly) agreed to a live interview in their home to tell Neda’s life story. The man chosen to travel to Iran to secretly interview Neda’s family and capture it all on video for HBO was Saeed Kamali Dehghan, a courageous 24-year-old Iranian expatriate and editorial contributor to the UK Guardian. (more…)

Since my scathing two-part Big Hollywood editorial on imprisoned Iranian film director Jafar Panahi nearly three weeks ago, I have found myself drawn neck-deep into the campaign to push for his freedom. In that cause I have email-blitzed the media, the Academy, all the major US film festivals and as many contacts in Hollywood as I know and could find. I sent out deep background on his case, petitions for his release, and heartfelt pleas for Hollywood voices to speak up on Mr. Panahi’s behalf, along with not-so-veiled threats of PR Armageddon should the deafening silence continue.

I also informed all parties involved that I would do the same for any of them under similar brutal and inhuman circumstances. Whatever it took, be it sweetheart pleas or promises of a nuclear PR war. I have since dropped the latter approach, as I have been informed by Iranians also campaigning for Mr. Panahi’s release that it was not helpful to his cause. So on Mr. Panahi’s behalf, I have traded in my sword for a plowshare for the duration. Not a problem. I’m not a total ideologue. Just mostly.

This past three weeks have also brought many valuable learning experiences as well. I have since found that Facebook, which I have avoided like the Plague because I have enough on my geek plate already, is an incredibly valuable social networking tool that reaches even into the heart of Iran itself. I have made many new friends behind the Islamist Curtain, among them a Panahi family member, by posting any good news I could find on the Jafar Panahi and Free Jafar Panahi Facebook pages. (more…)

In Part One of this two-part series, I described the widely varying treatment of renowned directors Jafar Panahi and Roman Polanski by the leftist Hollywood establishment vis-a-vis their arrests and incarcerations, Polanski for child rape, Panahi for mere dissent. It is merely the latest chapter in a long and sickening history of the Hollywood Left’s willful blindness to and even profiting from the McCarthyite persecution and dire straits of creative film artists in Iran revolting over a stolen election, while child rapist Polanksi gets the Oscar treatment with regard to calls for his release and freedom.

But before I get into the stomach-churning details of the Hollywood Left’s shattered moral compass vis-a-vis directors Polanski and Panahi and other Iranian film artists, I would like to take a moment to honor more of the true heroes who have spoken out loudly on Mr. Panahi’s behalf and signed petitions for his release. The National Society of Film Critics. The Boston, L. A. and  Toronto Film Critics Associations. Arin Paul of the New York Times. Filmmaker Ken Loach. Rutger Wolfson, director of the Rotterdam Film Festival. German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle. Human Rights Watch. French Minister of Culture Frederic Mitterand. Iranhumanrights.org. The list really is long.

Of course, noticeably absent from those petitioning and publicly calling for the release of Mr. Panahi from his unjust tomb-like captivity in Tehran are all of the prominent Hollywood A-List petitioners for Polanski. So Mr. Polanski’s arrest for child rape is worthy of international pressure and outrage, but famed director Jafar Panahi being tossed into a crypt in Tehran on “unspecified charges” is not? Welcome to Lefty Hollywood. And it only gets worse. The most tragic case of Jafar Panahi is yet one more sorry, perplexing and infuriating chapter in leftist Hollywood’s incredible blind side to any human rights violations in Iran, never mind only those perpetrated against Iranian filmmakers today. (more…)

“Roman Polanski is a French citizen, a renowned international artist now facing extradition. This extradition, if it takes place, will be heavy in consequences and will take away his freedom. Filmmakers, actors, producers and technicians – everyone involved in international filmmaking – want him to know that he has their support and friendship.” – From the petition to free director Roman Polanski.

Jafar Panahi

“Every possible way has been used for breaking his spirit. He is deprived of his basic and legal rights. Can all of this be called anything but torture? Does a regime have the right to treat one of its artistic elite so shamefully and inhumanely on the basis of a film that has not yet been made?”  -  Taherah Saeedi, wife of renowned Iranian New Wave filmmaker Jafar Panahi, on her husband’s arrest and imprisonment in Tehran.

On September 27, 2009, famed Hollywood film director Roman Polanski was arrested on arrival at Zurich Airport by Swiss authorities on a 31-year-old L.A. warrant for the 1977 drugging and raping of 13-year-old Samantha Geimer, now 45. A huge swath of the liberal leftist Hollywood establishment wasted no time in leaping into action over the Swiss authorities’ dismaying breach of social justice and inhuman treatment vis-a-vis director/child rapist Polanski. Over 100 well-known filmmakers and A-list celebrities signed a petition of outrage demanding Mr. Polanski’s immediate release. (more…)

Can any of you remember a time when so many creative film artists in Hollywood shit where they eat by endlessly voicing such outspoken contempt and loathing for the majority of the American people, our history and our way of life? I can’t. Now I’m not talking about Hollywood Lefties going off on political tangents like at HuffPo. We do the same damn thing here. I’m talking fighting words as defined in the Chaplinsky ruling. Too many fighting words coming out of Lefty Hollywood these days.

I don’t know about you, but I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take them anymore. Prime example. Sean Penn calling for the arrest of anyone who tags dictator Hugo Chavez as a dictator. That must now include the mass arrest of the entire leadership of the OAS, which just slammed Pennhead’s hero El Chavista on his horrific human rights record. I will say it: that statement is as un-American as it gets, and is dictatorial in itself. Those are fighting words, IMHO. Tell me where I’m wrong.

Then we had Tom Hanks effectively saying that the Japanese and Americans wanted to destroy each other only because they were different breeds of racists. That intellectually vacuous statement not only slanders America’s most honorable record in the war against a genocidal Imperial Japan, it slanders the sacred memory of every US service member who fought and died in that conflict. As a Navy veteran myself, and the son of an Army veteran of Normandy Beach on D-Day? Fighting words. (more…)

Many of you know the story of Jerry Maguire, the agent with a conscience. Ya, I know. It’s only a movie. But sometimes movies can be great moral guideposts. Ironic that I should use one of Hollywood’s finest morality plays to illustrate how Tinseltown should operate at its most basic level.

In Jerry Maguire, the key conflict was Jerry’s realization that he was putting a pretty facade on the moral deterioration within his profession, and was in fact complicit in it. It took an injured hockey player’s young son telling him to fuck off and a bad dream for Maguire to realize the true ugliness of who and what he had become, especially when measured against the high standards of his idol and mentor, agent Dicky Fox. Those troubling events created in Maguire a perfect storm of revulsion, introspection and a commitment to reaffirm the basic principles of his profession, which he laid out in his memo “The Things We Think and Do Not Say.” In truth, he had me at hello. Tom’s a hottie! (more…)

“My role in life is to be a burr under the saddle. I didn’t pick that for myself, it just happens that’s the way I am. I wish I could be one of the really sweet guys, but for me nobody has a good word. That’s because my allegiance is to art, to the work. I have no allegiance to magazines, producers, studios, networks or anything. The work is what counts.” – Harlan Ellison, on writing in Hollywood.

For those of you here at Big Hollywood who think you are playing a whole new game in taking on the Tinseltown establishment in force, I have news for you. Scribe Extraordinaire and futurist iconoclast Harlan Ellison beat you all to the punch by about forty-five years. And if you don’t know who Harlan Ellison is, shame on you! He is a living legend with more Hugos and Nebulas than I care to count, as well as four WGA Awards and an Emmy nod. And all that’s just for starters. (more…)

This past April 15, as a half-million Tea Partiers hit the streets of America to protest the insane tax-and-spend policies of the Obama administration, a new epithet entered the American lexicon, and it was a beauty: “teabagger.” It was both an epithet and a double entendre you just couldn’t top, given the tea bag’s symbolism of the old Boston Tea Party and the anti-tax movement of today. In one fell swoop, a passionate movement was reduced to a perversion of passion: the dunking of one person’s scrotum into another person’s mouth. They got us. Big Time. And it’s everywhere now. Can’t get away from it. Even ABC’s George Stephanopoulos is using it now.

Credit where credit is due, and let’s face it. We Americans, right, left or center, take a churlish pride in a good slam dunk epithet. Not the hardcore racial third rail stuff, mind you. Just the playful sort. You know. Moonbat. Libtard. Tinfoil hat. In fact, tinfoil hat kind of backfired on Righties. Originally used to denigrate Lefties who adhered to psychotic conspiracy theories like 9/11 Truth, the term was embraced in full by the far Left as demonstrated by Markos Moulitsas’ Tinfoil Hat KOS conventions, smashing successes which attracted major left-leaning LibDem politicians over the past few years. (more…)

“The only way to upset the power structure in your communities is to goad them, confuse them, irritate them and, most of all, make them live by their own rules. If you make them live by their own rules, you destroy them. And never forget that ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. Comedy is our friend. Throw the kitchen sink at them!” – from Saul Alinksy’s “Rules for Radical Comedians.”

Alinsky

I never really had any insight into the pure comic genius of Saul Alinsky until I saw his new age Method followers display their considerable chops on the national stage. James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles, the Master’s ostentatious and envelope-pushing Dan Aykroyd and Gilda Radner-like proteges, whose hilarious ACORN skits also showed brilliant flashes of the late great Allen Funt. The Mysterious Mister X, the L.A. street comic who “Alinskyed” Faris Alkhateeb’s boredom-fueled Obama Joker art into an urban poster as devilishly humorous as Hannibal Lecter, also made as big a national splash as a 300-pound chub doing a cannonball into a crowded public kiddie pool. (more…)

From the riots and chaos of the 1960s to the anti-war rallies of the Bush years, the American Left’s revolution has been widely televised. In fact, the Big Three and Dead Tree Press played a major part in that revolution. From negative field reporting during the Vietnam War to negative reporting on McCain/Palin and the beatification and election of Barack Obama, the MSM has been marching in lockstep and waving the banner for the American Left all the way. RatherGate, anyone? Doesn’t get much more lockstep than a reporter trying to subvert a presidential election to the Left’s advantage.

But there’s another revolution underway in America today, and you sure as hell won’t see it televised or reported on by our new fourth branch of government. It’s not in their interest to do so. Nothing new there. For a long time now, political corruption has been rampant in the Leftist ‘mainstream’ media. In 1998, Matt Drudge made his big mark breaking the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which Newsweek had buried to protect President Clinton. Think Obama’s Tiger Beat would have done that for Bush? (more…)

The news is really unbelievable these days. All that I once thought were core American values and traditions are now being washed away in a sea of propaganda and political attacks from the radical Left, which now rules supreme and knows it. The Left in power is now waging an ideological war not only against conservatives, but any dissenting Americans who get in their way. Worst of all, they are using the full machinery of the government and their Lefty media lapdogs to do it all, and in the same fashion as Ahmadinejad’s government is demonizing the Green protesters in Iran.

It is chilling to witness, in the United States of America of all places. Civil political discourse is a thing of the past. You cannot oppose ObamaCare without being a swastika-waving corporate Nazi stooge. Never mind the fact that no one will tell us exactly where all the hospitals, doctors, and nurses to treat 50 million new patients will magically materialize from, or how it will all be paid for.
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In Parts One and Two of this interview, Mr Lebaron described the many legal, moral and ethical problems plaguing the California legislative process. In Part Three, Mr. LeBaron describes how We The People can begin to bring the long-hallowed and honorable traditions of enlightened American lawmaking back to the State House in Sacramento.

Q: How could such a law as the Honor In Office Act be enforced?

JERROL: There are some legislators who will perjure themselves day in and day out. There is no hope for them, unless someone reports the violation. However, we are dealing with partisanship. That means that 45-55% are Democrats and 45-55% are Republicans, typically. The Honor In Office Act plays very nicely into that. Newly elected lawmakers might be far more conscious of the new rules. There are other lawmakers in office who have lost their way, because they have had no way to protect themselves from the less scrupulous. (more…)

In Part One of this interview, Mr. LeBaron provided background on his own classic American and Hollywood success stories, and why he started the Honor In Office campaign. Today, Mr. LeBaron tells us what Honor In Office is all about, and why real reform is so badly needed in Sacramento.

Q: Can you describe for me, specifically, what Honor In Office is all about?

JERROL: If you look at the header at the Honor In Office homepage you will see the phrase, “There was a time in this country when our leaders’ signatures meant more.” Be it the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, or bills passed by Congress to conduct the People’s business, our Founding Fathers and early members of Congress drafted, read in full, debated at length, and either passed or rejected whatever legislation was before the Congress. (more…)

THE BACKSTORY

From all appearances, Jerrol LeBaron’s life is both a classic American and Hollywood success story. Having started out in the construction industry in and around Los Angeles, Mr. LeBaron became restless and purchased a small jewelry business, which he owned and ran for seven years. In 2000, after dabbling in screenwriting and discovering just how difficult it was to market scripts in Hollywood, Mr. LeBaron sold his jewelry business and started the online Writers’ Script Network, now known today as Inktip.com.

Today, InkTip is the most successful venture of its kind in Hollywood, matching spec screenplays with prospective studios, producers, and other film industry insiders looking for new material. An average of twenty films a year are made from scripts discovered on InkTip. Mr. LeBaron’s bi-monthly magazine, containing the loglines of hundreds of screenplays in the InkTip database, is distributed industry-wide. Having optioned a script off of InkTip myself, I can personally testify to its success. (more…)

Since Iran’s Green Revolution began on June 12th we have all learned the meaning of the term Basiji, whom Matthias Kuntzel of The New Republic called “Ahmadinejad’s Demons.” Since Supreme Leader In Name Only Ali Khamenei’s son now runs the Basiji, I consider it more of an Ahmie and Khamie thing, like the election itself. We’ve seen what they’ve done: murderous beatings, motorcycle drive-by clubbings, even the shooting of innocents like Neda Soltan and Kaveh Alipour.

That violence is always blamed on those protesters by Ahamadinejad and other hardliners, as well as FARS and other state-run mouthpieces, all of whom are doing their damndest to demonize the Green protesters as enemies of the state, foreign agents, even domestic terrorists. Glad we don’t have that kind of stuff in America, huh? Ya, as if! What country are YOU living in?

What, in essence, are the Basiji? Are they not an ideologically and violently overzealous arm of the fascist Iranian thugocracy? Well, if terrorizing innocent citizens over ideology with full political backing is the key issue here, then what do you call the three menacing baton-swinging racist epithet-spewing New Black Panther Party poll watchers in Philadelphia, paid in full by Democrats, who uttered such overzealous statements as “you will soon be ruled by the black man, cracker”? (more…)