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.

Gay rights zero Sean Penn’s PR jaunt for the Mad Mullahs in Tehran in 2005, praising the Islamists even as then president-elect Mahmoud “No Gays in Iran” Ahmadinejad was jacking up the regime’s barbaric anti-gay pogrom. The sordid and embarrassing Team Oscar trip to Iran in March 2009, in which actress Annette Bening praised the regime’s women’s rights record even as Roxana Saberi rotted in Evin prison across town, and as Iranian-American filmmaker Esha Momeni awaited an Islamist kangaroo court for the crime of filming a women’s rights documentary. She awaits trial still.

The Academy’s posting of the self-aggrandizing Road to Isfahan promo last summer, with no mention that many of the Iranian filmmakers featured in it had been blacklisted by the regime. In essence, the Academy profited from their McCarthyite misery. AMPAS knew, in the same way that you now know. I told them. The Academy’s emailed response? They don’t get into politics, don’t you know. Same with the AMPAS Iran film seminar in L.A. last October. Two blacklisted Iranian film artists, including renowned actress Fatemeh Motamed-Aria, were barred from leaving Iran to attend.

The show went on, the blacklisted whitewashed from the Academy’s program in Orwellian fashion. Also noticeably absent from Hollywood’s list of cause celebres’ is renowned Iranian director and President of the Asian Film Academy Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who now serves as official spokesman for Mir Hussein Mousavi and the Greens outside Iran. Who in Hollywood has invited Mr. Makhmalbaf to speak on the plight of the Greens and Iranian film artists? None I can find. How can you explain any of this to where it makes any sense at all? Why not any peep out of Hollywood on Iran at all?

Theo Van Gogh

Is it the Islamist Fear Factor? Are they just too enamored of blood-drenched dictators like Chavez, Castro and Ahmadinejad that they can’t find it within themselves to say a bad word about them? Or is it just plain endemic Hollywood racism? Polanski is white, after all. Panahi and most Iranians are not. I’d like to believe that, but I don’t really. I just believe leftist Hollywood is so morally corrupt that child rape and cop killing are morally defensible, yet dissent in a fascist dictatorship is not. Perhaps if Mr. Panahi had drugged and raped a tween, he would be getting the rabid and unqualified support of the lefty Hollywood establishment today. How I only wish to God that were a sick joke.

For those of you who do still have some shred of morality and human decency left in your souls (unlike some people), here are two petitions for the release of entombed director Jafar Panahi. One is at Facebook, the other at Petitions Online. Thank you, on behalf of Mr. Panahi and his family. And thanks to the many worldwide voices who have NOT remained silent in the face of this abomination of justice for a cutting-edge director, whose only crime is being cutting-edge in a fascist dictatorship where such innovation is rewarded with the death of a thousand cuts. I can think of many lefty Hollywood film types more deserving of that fate than the brave Jafar Panahi.

Here’s an idea. Why don’t we petition the Iranian government and work out a trade? They send us Jafar Panahi and all their blacklisted film artists, and we send them all the signatories to Roman Polanski’s petition. Let’s Make a Deal! And no, I’m not joking. I would make that trade in a heartbeat. I am at my wit’s end with Lefty Hollywood, people. For over a year now I have been pressing the case of Iranian film artists, and they were all just as dead silent on the subject then as they are toward Jafar Panahi and other persecuted filmmakers in Iran today, some of whom they once called friend.

I have even tried to shame them into action. But how do you shame the shameless? How do you explain morality to moral reprobates who equivocate the drugging and anal rape of a child? Who believe critics of dictator Hugo Chavez should be thrown in jail? Who believe that we were as racist and terrorist as the genocidal Imperial Japanese in the Pacific War? Who believe America is evil and everything it stands for sucks, even as they lead lives of freedom and luxury not possible anywhere else on earth? What happened to the Hollywood heroes of old who made fun of fascist dictators, often at risk to their own lives, instead of jaunting off to run PR campaigns for them?

Maybe it’s time for a new and revolutionary tack, people. Maybe it’s time to found a new Hollywood built on the principles of the old. The Hollywood in which the brave Victor Laszlo was a hero, not the murderous Che Guevara. In which America’s greatness and heroism was praised, not vilified. In which the American people were enlightened with great film stories that made them proud to be Americans, not browbeat with leftist anti-American propaganda. There is a great hunger in America for that brand of storytelling in film. A market of hundreds of millions just waiting to be tapped.

A huge undertaking, no doubt. But nowhere near the task faced by our Founding Fathers, and look at the miracles that ragtag band of rebels wrought. We Americans can do anything we put our minds to. But that is a piece for another time. For now, forget those useless leftist Hollywood idiots. We can deal with them later. Right now, Jafar Panahi and his family need each of us to speak out on his behalf. His life is hanging in the balance. Please sign the petitions at Facebook and Petitions Online linked above. As I have said in Part One, concerted voices raised in outrage have saved lives in Iran before, and can do so again. To save one life is to save the world entire. That is all that matters now. Hollywood lefties can go fuck themselves. History and their silence will damn them for all time.

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.

Now, many of we mere mortals may not agree with the leftist Hollywood establishment’s unqualified support of Mr. Polanski given his crimes. Most Americans, and even most French, decidedly did not. The New York Times called the French divided on the issue, as they only supported Mr. Polanski’s extradition by a 70% margin. Larger point being, it is comforting to know that even for admitted child rapists, the leftist Hollywood establishment will always be there to raise a staunch defense of their film industry paisans in the face of rank injustice and gross violations of their basic human rights.

You might think that anyway. Perhaps that’s even what they want you to think. But then there’s the story of Jafar Panahi, the cutting-edge Iranian New Wave film director who has consistently pushed the envelope of Iranian film, all in the face of perhaps the worst censorship on earth as dictated by the Islamist regime’s Ministry of Islamic Culture and Guidance. And outside of child rape, directors Panahi and Polanski have a lot in common. Both have won the Golden Lion at Venice and the Silver Bear in Berlin, and have been showered with many other international awards and accolades for their cutting-edge films. And both have presided over prestigious international film festival juries.

Yet somehow that keen leftist Hollywood sense of moral outrage regarding the mistreatment of renowned film directors is curiously nonexistent with respect to the nightmarish situation now being endured by director Panahi and his family. The contrast is actually quite stark. As Polanski awaits a decision on his extradition from the luxury of house arrest at his ski chalet in Gstaad (where he was also allowed to wrap post-production on his latest film, The Ghost Writer), his Hollywood friends and admirers like Ewan MacGregor continue to speak out on his behalf, believing the drugging and anal rape of tween Samantha Geimer a bygone best forgotten.

Meanwhile, the 49-year-old Jafar Panahi is imprisoned in Tehran in what can only be called a crypt as the Islamist authorities attempt to break his spirit. Though they may not succeed on that front (and have not to date), they may yet break his body. His health has deteriorated in prison, and he is at great risk of a heart attack and premature death. His crime? Supporting the Green Revolution and planning a film on it. Mr. Panahi was first arrested last July as he and others laid flowers at the graves of Neda Soltan and other victims of the regime’s brutal post-election crackdown. He was released a few hours later, but continued to speak out on behalf of Mousavi and the Greens at great risk to himself. Like a dark Shakespearean tragedy, the outcome was inevitable.

On March 2, 2010, Iranian security forces conducted a sweep of Mr. Panahi’s residence in Tehran, arresting Jafar, his wife, his daughter and fifteen dinner guests present at the time. They also ransacked his home and seized many personal belongings.  His wife and family went a month not knowing Jafar’s location or condition. Finally Jafar’s wife, Taherah Saeedi, was allowed to visit him in solitary confinement, where she found Jafar pale and weak. An attending physician told her Jafar had twice experienced severe chest spasms and was at risk of a major heart attack. That is the situation Mr. Panahi and his family endure today. A tragic outcome is all but a foregone conclusion.

Fortunately, many prominent voices in film around the world are speaking out loudly on Mr. Panahi’s behalf, even a few in Hollywood. Veteran actor Brian Cox, to his great credit, has not only signed onto a petition demanding Mr. Panahi’s release, he even added an eloquent statement and the prestige of his C.B.E on Mr. Panahi’s behalf. American filmmakers William Farley, Rob Nilsson, Tristam Powell, film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum and countless others from around the world have also signed on, as well as the Sarajevo Film Festival, the European Film Academy, Berlinale, APSA, NetPac and many others. Even fifty Iranian filmmakers have stuck their own necks out in protest. In fact, outside of the United States, unqualified support for Mr. Panahi’s release is near-universal.

And then there’s Hollywood. So where are all the big Tinseltown A-list names who couldn’t rush to Roman Polanski’s defense and sign a petition demanding his release fast enough? The Woody Allens? The Michael Manns? The Taylor Hackfords? The Martin Scorseses? Where is Whoopi Goldberg arguing on The View that laying flowers at the grave of Neda Soltan wasn’t “crime-crime“? Where is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences? Or even one American film festival?

It’s not like they don’t know. Variety and WSJ entertainment writer Anthony Kaufman blitzed the industry in late March through emails, Twitter and Facebook, and has received only one response and petition signature to date, from writer-producer James Schamus. So here we are, over a month into renowned director Jafar Panahi’s interment in a crypt in Evin prison without charge, and with absolutely no support from the same A-listers who had a petition out on Polanski within 24 hours of his arrest. Mr. Kaufman wishes the industry were less apathetic, but I have a different word in mind.

Disgusting! And if you’re not as disgusted over this pathetic and inexcusable situation as I am yet, it gets a lot worse in Part Two. Keep a barf bag handy. You’re going to need it. In the meantime, please sign on to the petitions for Jafar Panahi’s release at Facebook and Petitions Online. It was concerted voices raised in outrage that freed Tahmineh Milani, Mehrnoushe Solouki and Roxana Saberi. They may yet again. Feel free to give AMPAS a heads up as well. They’ve done this before. And they have a lot to redeem themselves for regarding Iranian film artists. More on that in Part Two.

The greatest element — that’s a bold claim, considering the hot competition among the movie’s other collaborators. But in hindsight, few would argue that the marvelous sets, vehicles, and spy gadgets of Goldfinger, masterminded by production designer Ken Adam, are any less iconic than Ian Fleming’s novel, Sean Connery’s performance, or John Barry’s musical score.

Production design is a largely unsung art. Both the script and the need for historical accuracy tend to serve as harsh governors on the dreams and fantasies of the people charged with designing a movie’s sets and props. But the Bond films, Adam says, “are done so loosely that the script isn’t the Bible that it is in most films. It changes all the time, and the whole process of writing is like some democratic debating society.”

When Dr. No went into production in 1961, Adam got a mere 14,000 pounds (out of the movie’s total budget of 350,000) with which to design all of the interior sets for this “tongue-in-cheek spectacular,” including the casino in the opening scene, Bond’s apartments, M’s office, and the sprawling, futuristic lair of the villainous doctor himself. He performed his task in England while the rest of the cast and crew were off filming exteriors in Jamaica, and when they returned they were stunned by what they saw:

Adam, originally a German who fled to England with his family before the War, called on his love of German Expressionism to invent outrageous sets that were, as he called them, “theatrical realism. . . exaggerated practicality. . . hyper-reality by design.” Larger-than-life, yes, but still of life, much like Fleming’s novels themselves. “Nobody could foresee the success of Dr. No,” Adams insists. “What happened was like magic, almost.”

Two years later Adam arrived on the set of his second Bond film, Goldfinger, with a budget many times that of his previous effort. His first task this time out was designing the new car Bond was to use. He settled on the Aston Martin DB5 because, “It was sort of the most prestigious British sports car at the time. We couldn’t have used a Ferrari or something like that, you know.”

An admitted “sports-car freak,” Adam went nuts pimping out Bond’s ride with its now-legendary array of special options, using the rationale that “all the gimmickry and gadgets were just what I would have wanted in my own car.” The entire crew was encouraged to submit their own ideas for upgrades, and by the time he was finished he had spent 25,000 pounds — almost double the total production design budget of Dr. No — on the Aston Martin alone. As it happened the vehicle was only on screen for thirteen minutes, but Adam’s conception of it was so wildly inventive and fun that it became the most famous car in movie history.

The sets for Goldfinger were no less well imagined. Everyone has their own fave: the gorgeous apartment where Bond wakes to find his lover covered in gold paint, the vast Bank of England dining hall — bad brandy, good cigars — where Bond gets the details of his mission, the cavernous laser room where our intrepid hero nearly becomes special agent castratum, the plush confines of the Lockheed jet where Bond meets Pussy Galore and outfoxes the clever peep-holes used by the lovely Mei-Lei.

Everything in the film drips with the opulence, style, and color for which the Bond series is known — all of it spawned from the mind of Ken Adam, and laid out in drawings inspired by his life experiences and unique visual sense. “No design is worth doing if you just reproduce reality,” he stresses. “I don’t believe you can get a sense of reality by copying. I think you can get that better by not copying. But you must always be honest. You mustn’t do things just to create chi-chi effects. You must have a reason.”

Take Auric Goldfinger’s breathtaking Kentucky country estate, with its stables and Playboy Mansion-like diversions. Adam remembers that

We called the set where he keeps the harnesses and tack the rumpus room. . . I knew this rumpus room had to convert into a gas chamber, so all the walls were designed to close. Even the big stainless steel fireplace came down so that no fresh air could get in. It was pretty horrifying, actually.

And at the same time the other moving objects, like the billiard table, had a practical purpose by turning round and becoming the briefing model of the raid on Fort Knox. The rotating bar was a little gratuitous, but once I’d started I thought, “I might as well!” So it turned from a rather harmless-looking, luxurious tack room into a combined War Room and gas chamber.

Check out the finished set in the following clip, and as each shot reveals new architectural glories and wonders, keep in mind that this isn’t some real-life room rented from a billionaire’s mansion, it’s a movie set, built from scratch and designed from the ground up by Ken Adam:

Theatergoers in 1964 were dazzled by these ingenious sets, and almost a half-century later they have yet to lose their ability to inspire awe.

This elaborate design came from a deeper place in Adam’s psyche than may at first be apparent. He lived most of his life in England, but he was born Klaus Hugo Adam in 1921 Berlin, emigrating to the UK only when the rise of Hitler threatened his family’s safety. During the war he became the only German-born pilot in the Royal Air Force, serving his adopted country with distinction against the country he was originally from. Twenty years later, during the making of Goldfinger, he still hadn’t got past the dichotomy of his upbringing. “Remember it was the 1960s,” says Adam:

The Second World War was still very much in everybody’s minds. . . I had to keep in mind that all the gangsters are going to be finally poisoned by gas, you see. . . .

When the Germans now write about me, it’s not that they say, “he was affected by the sadistic ideas of the period,” but I grew up with some of these things. So knowingly or not knowingly, I tried to show some of those impressions, my early impressions, in my designs. . . it’s mixing this kind of playful fantasy with the ultimate horror.

Given Adam’s background and influences, it’s not going too far to posit that Goldfinger’s luxurious abode, so wondrous and modern yet laced with a sinister aspect, beggars comparisons to places like The Berghof, Hitler’s “eagle’s nest” hideaway in the Bavarian Alps, where profoundly evil men enjoyed the very best wine, women and song as they poured over intricate maps, scale-models and globes while plotting the assembly-line domination and destruction of whole populations. And the fiendishly clever bit of mechanized death that lies at the heart of Goldfinger’s “rumpus room,” with every avenue of escape clipped off like the tickings of a well-designed watch, evokes painful memories of the meticulously engineered real-life abattoirs of the Holocaust.

“In hindsight,” Adam says, “I think Goldfinger was maybe the best example of a Bond film that I designed, where the settings accentuate the dramatic message of the film. I had a completely free hand.”

The Cold War was a constant presence in the work of Adam throughout the Sixties, not only in the Bond series but in films such as Dr. Strangelove (1964 — where he designed the memorable War Room for Stanley Kubrick, foregoing the chance to work on From Russia, With Love to take the job), as well as more realistic spy films like The Ipcress File (1965) and Funeral in Berlin (1966), both starring Michael Caine. But perhaps his single greatest Cold War set, the one that veers the furthest into cinematic outrageousness while remaining utterly convincing, was the interior of the United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox as depicted at the end of Goldfinger.

“I’d seen the vault of the Bank of England,” says Adam, “and you know gold is so heavy, so it’s never stacked more than two foot or two-foot-six high. . . I’m sure the inside of Fort Knox is very dull, with low vaults and a few trolleys traveling around.” But of course, for a Bond movie dull simply won’t do. “The public wanted to see gold!” Adam thought, and so he gave it to them using all of the sumptuous splendor he could muster. “If you go to the biggest gold depository in the world you expect to see gold towering up to the heavens. . . I wanted to build a cathedral of gold, almost forty foot high — completely impractical.”

Adam was aided by the fact that, due to stringent security, virtually no one among the public knew what the interior of the Depository looked like. There were no pictures floating around, no descriptions of any kind:

Remember, the President of the United States wasn’t allowed inside. And I was really rather pleased about that. Because it gave me the opportunity to design it the way I thought it should be designed, with gold stacked up to forty feet in height. I also liked the concept of putting the gold behind bars, you know, spectators being on the other side. I liked playing around with that. . . a surreality, which in fact is accepted by the audience as reality.

The final result of his designs inspired veneration in audiences. Film scholar Christopher Frayling, a keen follower of Adam’s career, recalls his first viewing of Goldfinger back in 1964: “The audience erupted with applause — even at a matinée — when Oddjob got his comeuppance by being electrocuted. . . I’d never known a cinema audience to spontaneously applaud like that. But there was something about the way in which the sequence worked; it satisfied everybody.”

The towers of gold, the impregnable bars, the futuristic elevators, Oddjob’s deadly bowler hat, the bomb threatening to make the bullion holdings of the United States radioactive — all of these things were designed by Adam and the rest of Goldfinger’s art department out of whole cloth, following Adam’s crucial decision to go whole-hog and make the Bond series not a humdrum copy of reality but the stuff of which cinematic dreams are made of.

Adam likes telling an apocryphal story “from reliable sources” about how the newly inaugurated Ronald Reagan, upon entering the White House for the first time, demanded to see the War Room from Dr. Strangelove and was dejected when his handlers informed the “amiable dunce” that none in fact existed outside of the film. Liberals have perpetuated the story ad nauseam ever since (usually prefacing it by such well-worn phrasings as “it was said that. . . ,” “I’ve heard that. . . ,” “According to many sources. . . ”) because it fits neatly into their fantasy view of conservatives in general and Reagan in particular. But, although they won’t admit it, many of those same people were themselves taken in by the glittering interior of Fort Knox in Goldfinger. “Everyone is now convinced Fort Knox looks like that,” Adam says, “As a film designer you can create a reality which is more acceptable to the public than the actual thing. . . United Artists got so many letters saying, how were we allowed in when the president wasn’t allowed, and so on. So I consider that a successful design.”

The late critic David Sylvester went much further than that, calling Adam’s sets “probably the most amazing and enthralling pieces of fantastic architecture in the history of talking pictures.” Millions of viewers around the world — from Presidents on down to the poorest kid at the cheapest matinée — would agree.

Next week in For Conservative Movie Lovers, we conclude our pleasure cruise of Goldfinger with a study of the best critical volume written about Bond, wherein a conservative writer defended 007 in the wake of a widespread academic and media backlash against the series.

Previous posts in the series “Ian Fleming, Sean Connery, and Goldfinger”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Three books about Ken Adam. Production design is rarely given full-book treatments, even as other aspects of filmmaking are immortalized in hundreds of volumes of criticism and analysis. The work of two-time Academy Award-winner Ken Adam, however, is featured in no less than three major retrospective editions: Moonraker, Strangelove, and Other Celluloid Dreams: The Visionary Art of Ken Adam by Ken Adam and David Sylvester, Ken Adam: The Art of Production Design by Christopher Frayling, and Ken Adam Designs the Movies: James Bond and Beyond by Adam and Frayling. All are meaty, colorful books filled with drawings and photos illustrating the intricate and inspired work that went into the design of such Bond films as Dr. No, Goldfinger, You Only Live Twice, Diamonds Are Forever, The Spy Who Loved Me, and Moonraker, not to mention Dr. Strangelove and the dozens of other movies he worked on throughout his career.

Ken Adam (production designer). This 150-page oral history transcript is housed at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Margaret Herrick Library, and can be accessed and read by any interested scholar in the Los Angeles area. The interviews contained in the transcript were conducted in 2002 by Jennifer Peterson.

Article on Ken Adam in frieze magazine. Frieze bills itself as “the leading magazine of contemporary art and culture.” This piece by Dan Fox, published in Issue 51 for March-April 2000 and now reprinted on the web, is notable for its expert analysis of the artistry underlining Adam’s designs and drawings.

Christopher Frayling discussions with Ken Adam. These candid interviews took place in 2008. The sound on the videos could be a lot better, but if you persevere you will hear some interesting stories about Adam’s work on Dr. No, Dr. Strangelove, Goldfinger, and production design in general.

Ken Adam, designer — Cold War Modern. Here’s an Adam excerpt from a much longer documentary, with more interview material about his life and career.

The Champ is that rare film that features a pair of strong male leads doing masculine things in a masculine universe, but with nuanced and delicate characterizations that delve far deeper than the usual sports movie, tearing at the raw edges of what it means to be a parent in an imperfect world, to live through the tragedy of a broken family, and to suffer the premature loss of childhood innocence. On the surface, these subjects would seem ill at home in one of the most famous boxing movies of all time. But The Champ is not based on a true story, or cribbed from a famous novel — it was wholly conceived in the mind of the screenwriter. And not just any screenwriter, but the most prolific (and arguably one of the greatest) in Hollywood history. Who was he, you ask?

Well, first of all, he was a she.

Born in 1888, Marion Benson Owens grew up in San Francisco as the middle child of a no-nonsense ad executive, but soon developed into a rebellious little Bohemian with a variety of artistic pretensions. She was above all precocious and full of imagination. Whenever her aunt would invite other ladies over for séances (a favorite pastime in those days), young Marion would play the part of a possessed girl channeling spirits, inventing all manner of accents, characters, and stories with which to delight her audience. Her uncle, an old seaman, often took her along to visit his buddies in seedy bars and taverns. Watching the gruff men smoking, drinking, and cursing in their salty element, she gained early first-hand experience in the sort of masculine banter and swagger that decades later would grant The Champ so much verisimilitude.

Looking for ways to express her imaginative longings, Marion began to draw and to write poetry, things that failed to impress her down-to-earth businessman father and socialite mother. Their divorce when she was a teen imbued her soul with another of the painful elements that would later figure so prominently in The Champ. Among her parents’ friends was the great Jack London, the first millionaire author in history. Although it is unknown whether she read any of his seminal tales about boxing (The Game, “A Piece of Steak”) it is known that he heartily encouraged her writing endeavors, spurring her to submit what would become her first fledgling short story and poetry sales.

Marion’s early marriage to a magazine illustrator failed, as did a second to a steel magnate. By 1915 a series of transient jobs (including time spent in Europe as a WWI combat correspondent!) had ended with her in Los Angeles, nibbling around the edges of the molten Hollywood film industry. Meeting the famous actress Mary Pickford was a turning point, as they quickly began a warm friendship that would last over fifty years. Soon she was acting in bit roles for silent movies under the stage name “Frances Marion” (one of her distant relatives was Francis Marion, the legendary “Swamp Fox” of the Revolutionary War). The name would stick, and the former Marion Owens would be Frances Marion for the rest of her life.

Ultimately, acting wasn’t her forte. Her first chance to write for a movie came about due to a funny circumstance. The movies of 1915 were silent, yes — but amazingly, studios were getting complaints from lip readers who claimed that the words mouthed on-screen by the actors didn’t at all match the displayed dialogue cards. (Because there was no sound, actors could say anything — including plenty of things no lip-reading Christian ought to “hear”!) Directors began requesting scene-appropriate mock dialogue for the actors to use. The newly christened Frances Marion obliged, and began what would become a lifelong career and passion.

Within a few years Marion the writer was a hot property, penning a continuous stream of “scenarios” and making an obscene amount of money doing it. She became the personal screenwriter for her friend Mary Pickford, as well as the ghost-writer for Pickford’s newspaper column. In 1917 alone Marion cleared $50,000 for her scriptwriting chores. She wrote lightning-fast, sometimes cranking out a feature-length script in as little as three weeks. No one knows exactly how many movies she wrote during the teens and twenties. The Internet Movie Database has records for 150, but copyright filings at the Library of Congress reveal that to be a low-ball figure. The estimated totals published in various sources are all over the map, ranging as high as 325.

What isn’t in dispute is that Frances Marion remains the most prolific screenwriter in Hollywood history. During her tenure she was also the best-paid writer, man or woman. “She had more muscle than most women in Hollywood,” observed actress Gloria Swanson, “because she was a gold mine of ideas — ideas that could become stories that could become scripts that could become films that could save careers, lives, and corporations.” In 1926, Variety reported that Marion was to be given a staggering $100,000 to write exclusively for Sam Goldwyn. Still later, as M-G-M’s prize scenarist, she would be paid upwards of $30,000 per week. “I’ve been so glad to get the money,” she said, “that I never worried much about the credit.”

In 1919 Marion married for the third time, to an ex-Army Chaplin named Fred Thomson, who had been a military adviser on one of Mary Pickford’s pictures. Unlike her previous marriages, this one worked out exceedingly well — after a decade of trying, she had finally found true love. A few years later, when Marion called on her husband to fill in for a missing actor on one of the pictures she was directing (yes, she even directed a few films), he promptly became an overnight sensation. Thomson ended up starring in dozens of films, most of them written by his wife, and soon her husband was one of the most popular Western stars in America. The happy couple adopted one son, had another naturally, and built a sprawling twenty-four acre estate in Beverly Hills. Life was wonderful.

Then, in late 1928, tragedy struck in the form of a rusty nail on the floor of a horse stable. Thomson stepped on it, developed tetanus, and quickly sickened while his doctors flailed around trying to diagnose his illness. His death on Christmas Day (so emotionally similar to the one she was soon to write for The Champ) sent her into a tailspin. Forty years old and with two babies to raise, she was hospitalized several times for exhaustion and grief. A fourth marriage to director George W. Hill ended in divorce (soon after, Hill committed suicide), and with that Marion swore off marriage forever, dedicating herself to the raising of her sons while alleviating her loneliness with occasional flings and affairs.

It was in the aftermath of her beloved husband’s death that she wrote the movies for which she is best remembered. Sound had arrived, and dialogue suddenly had grown substantially in importance. Whereas before a screenwriter need only write small bits for subtitle cards, now they were required to invent whole monologues and long debates bristling with dramatic energy. A new set of rules regarding pace, length, and nuance were required. Techniques that worked wonderfully in the silent era now fell flat. Unlike many, Marion’s well-rounded and emotion-laden characters transferred well to talkies. With the support and encouragement of the brilliant young producer Irving Thalberg, she penned hit after hit for M-G-M, and in 1930 became the first woman to win an Academy Award for a non-actress category when she took home the statue for The Big House, a gritty prison film.

But it was in Mexico, on a research trip for an upcoming western, that she had the “Eureka!” moment that would result in a film even more memorable and close to her heart. She watched in fascination as a man got tossed out of a saloon along with his young son. The boy was angrily defending his drunken dad, calling him “the Champ!” This scene of familial loyalty and moxie from a little boy touched her, and when she got back she asked Thalberg if she could write a different story than the western they had been planning. As Thalberg was vacationing in Europe, he assigned Marion to Harry Rapf, one of M-G-M’s top producers. It was an inspired choice, for Rapf gave Marion additional ideas that ultimately nudged the story far closer to the one we now know and love.

Rapf’s friend, director Chuck Reisner, had told him some tales about the misadventures of his son Dinky with a horse at a Tijuana racetrack. Marion incorporated these into her plot, and added heaping portions of emotional resonance drawn from her own life — divorce, untimely death, the hole left by the absence of a parent. Her flair for melodrama was exquisitely developed by this point, honed to a razor’s edge by fifteen years of writing hundreds of silent films. The resulting screenplay featured a mix of powerful elements appealing to both males and females. Alcoholism especially was given a harrowing treatment (and this during Prohibition, which had not yet been repealed).

Many critics find weepy melodrama loathsome, but Marion prized the ability of movies to elicit strong emotions. Years later, in a book on screenwriting, she would say:

A character exists only in his emotions and sensations. Without the expression of feeling, he no more represents a living person than does a fleshless skeleton. If he does not realistically express some credible emotion himself, he will not be likely to arouse feeling in those who watch him. His own characteristics and the plot arrangement should set him in situations that plausibly arouse his own fear, hope, passion, desire, anger, love, jealousy or other emotion, and his own feeling should be expressed so realistically as to arouse emotion in the beholder.

After she finished the story proper, screenwriters Leonard Praskins and Wanda Tuchock were brought in to add dialogue and flesh out the scenes. According to Marion, surgically adding layers of witty banter and comedy to an outwardly dramatic movie is a tough business:

If anyone [believes] that we sit around holding our sides with laughter as one hilarious gag after another is suggested, they are gravely mistaken. We sit in a room and build our comedy scenes with concentration. It was grim work, and even when we thought we had hit upon what comedians call a “belly laugh,” nobody so much as cracked a smile.

The resulting script was strange, the first of what would eventually be seen as a new genre, the “male weepie.” It’s a delicate balance: take the masculinity from such a script, and it’s just another Little Women type estrogen-fest. But take away Marion’s feminine melodrama, and it’s just another fight picture with shallow, cardboard heroes. As things turned out, audiences suffering through the Depression heartily embraced Marion’s heartfelt tale, and the script for the movie won the veteran screenwriter her second Academy Award.

Marion would continue writing for M-G-M until 1946. By then, in her late fifties, she was thoroughly disenchanted with the business. Most of her silent-era friends were dead or retired, and it was near impossible to get anything personal made anymore. Whereas The Champ had been pitched and developed at light-speed, now everything was homogenized by a legion of script doctors and production-code enforcers, assembly-line style. Writing in that environment was, in her words, “like writing on sand with the wind blowing.” The personal, heartfelt projects of yesteryear had given way to

the era of messages, of art; the intellectuals have taken over and the films aren’t simple and direct any longer. . . The poor people who write for the films! Film writers are like Penelope — knitting their stories all day just to have somebody else unravel their work by night.

Thus, with her children almost fully grown, she abandoned Hollywood and moved East to write novels and plays. Her last brush with Tinseltown was to adopt her Champ screenplay into a new vehicle for Red Skelton, changing the prizefighter of the original into a comedian and naming it The Clown (1953). Shorn of its hard-boiled masculinity, it bombed.

Frances Marion never worked in Hollywood again, and died in 1973 at the age of 84. In 1987, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was attempting to create a display featuring real Oscars from every year of the awards’ existence, they were having a problem finding one for 1930. Marion’s son Richard came through by donating the statue she had received for writing The Big House. When asked about how his mother had displayed her Oscars during her life, he replied that she generally used them as doorstops.

One of Richard Thomson’s earliest memories of his mom was walking into her bedroom early in the morning to find that she already had been up for several hours writing. “Her hair was down,” he recalls, “but she was sitting up with papers all over her bed.” The most prolific screenwriter in Hollywood history — lonely, tinged by tragedy, yet still possessing a little girl’s imagination and heart — gutting out the stories that made a generation of Americans laugh and weep.

Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers, a look at the underrated actors who brought Frances Marion’s ardent effusions to Oscar-worthy life.

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

The go-to gal for information about Frances Marion is Cari Beauchamp, who over the last decade has single-handedly spurred a renaissance and reevaluation of the forgotten screenwriter. Her 1997 book Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood is the source from which most modern articles, including this one, glean substantive information about the author of The Champ. There’s also a Turner Classic Movies documentary film of the same name narrated by Uma Thurman and Kathy Bates. Beauchamp, a former press secretary for ex-California Governor Jerry Brown, is to be commended for shedding light on a much-neglected area of Hollywood history.

Another documentary on the early history of women in Hollywood is Reel Models: The First Women of Film. It might be asking a bit much for Big Hollywood readers to watch this given the narrators (Shirley MacLaine, Susan Sarandon, Hilary Swank, and Minnie Driver, plus Barbra Streisand introduces it). But if you can get past them, check it out for the content.

Frances Marion wrote a fair number of books in addition to her screenwriting output, two of which Big Hollywood readers may particularly wish to hunt down. How To Write and Sell Film Stories was published way back in 1937, and serves as a sort of Syd Field primer on writing for the big screen. Off with Their Heads! is her autobiography, and contains many stories about early Hollywood.

Jack London’s “A Piece of Steak” is one of the most affecting short stories you’ll ever read, penned by one of our very best authors. A harrowing boxing tale, it’ll put you in the proper mindset to fully appreciate what Frances Marion did with The Champ.

Returning once again to the land beneath the Big Hollywood sign for a most important poll question. “The Stoning of Soraya M.” has received powerful rave reviews across the political spectrum. The buzz is hot. From the leftie pundits at HuffPo (who only seem to be discovering the true human rights horrorshow nature of that regime now, most curious) to the Righties at Big Hollywood and elsewhere, SORAYA M. is a must-see movie that will linger with you long after you’ve left the theater.

Strangely enough, Amnesty lnternational’s Elise Auerbach doesn’t like it. Because stonings in Iran are so rare, don’t you know. No suspension of disbelief for Ms. Elsie. I’m sorry, what’s her job again? Oh yeah, Iran Specialist for Amnesty International. Go figure. Personally, I happen to think one stoning is one too many. And it wasn’t the only one, not by a country mile! But that’s just me. I’m not an Iran specialist for AI. Like, say, Ms. Auerbach. Nice work if you can get it, huh, Ms. Elsie?

By the way, did the acronym AI in the context of Ms. Elsie’s employer and thumbs-down review of Soraya M. remind anyone else of Artificial Intelligence? But I digress. To be sure, there are a number of disturbing productions from Thugocracy Studios that have lingered with me for a very long time now. A young woman’s brutal and heart-wrenching Islamic clothing violation arrest I posted last May, which has generated 6000 hits since. The gay executions. The 140 children on Death Row.

The mass hangings. The stonings and executions of a lot more women and young girls than just Soraya M. Here’s a thugocracy twofer, sisters Zoreh and Azar Kabiri, each charged with adultery, already hit with 99 lashes and now awaiting the rock-throwers. Do their husbands want new wives too, like Soraya’s? Who needs a messy divorce when a good clean stoning works just as well? Nice law if you can get it, if you’re a philandering, misogynist God-fearing Islamist, and the fascist women-hating judges give your word as a man twice that of a woman’s in court.

If you want the full bloody extremist Third Reich tour of Iran, here it is. Here’s the regime’s gay-friendly extermination program. Boys In The Band it ain’t. Point being, will SORAYA M. make the AMPAS nominee list next January, even in its now-extended format of ten candidates for Best Picture? Or, will the Academy bury it as a dirty reminder of their collective shame this past March?

First, let us admit that no politics takes place during The Academy’s selection process. FISH HOOK! You people are just too easy. As for me, I’m torn. See, the Academy, particularly the Nine Stooges of Team Oscar, bravely commanded by Academy Prez and Stooge-In-Chief Sid Ganis, may find it embarrassing to rave about a powerful film on a brutal stoning in Iran after producing TEA WITH AHMADINEJAD and praising the regime’s boffo womens rights record, as thugocracy stooge Annette Bening did. Very unfavorable contrast with Soraya M.

Then again, by rallying to the Forces of Good and whitewashing that abysmal affair in now-chaotic Iran, as they’ve already attempted to with their lame website promo The Road To Isfahan (seen the real Road To Isfahan lately? It ain’t no Bob and Bing movie, that’s for goddamn sure!), they can once again proudly don the mantle of human rights champs, the one they so misplaced for their last tea and finger cookies soiree to the gay-slaughtering and women-stoning Islamist butchers of Iran.

So whattaya think, people? Does “The Stoning of Soraya M.” get showered with Oscar praise, and perhaps even Oscar gold, as Academy absolution of their egregious PR sins in Tehran? Or, do the King-Of-Hearts on Wilshire Boulevard put SORAYA M. in the closet, with all the 4000-plus exterminated Iranian gays? You know, the ones they so forgot about to play the roles of Hollywood Diplomats at the Ahmie and Khamie Punking Extravaganza? Or is it just too powerful a film for even the Academy to sweep under the rug as an Inconvenient Truth?

Cast your vote in the Comments section. Assorted woolgathering on the subject will also be welcome. I leave it to you fine folks at Big Hollywood to ward off the trolls. I’ll be too busy working on my Oscar-quality script honoring and paying homage to no less than Oscar himself.

That is not a punchline, either. Truth is stranger than fiction. Started it last year, when I still adored the Academy and all its members beyond measure. So shall it end, in the spirit of that love. I don’t let politics poison my scripts. I guess I now know why they call it La La Land. You really do have to exist in a state of unreality to get anything worthwhile done. Speaking of states of unreality, feel free to cast your own vote here with the Asylum of Motion Picture Airheads and Stooges.

Lastly, the WaPo, and others of the Leftie LibDem persuasion like President Obama, say any help to the people of Iran, or even siding with them, is a bad move. That smells like moral cowardice to me. Such naive and wishy-washy idealists have stood idly by from King George to Adolf Hitler. I personally believe in calling freedom-crushing, blood-drinking, power-grabbing dictators for what they are. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, Let Iran Be Iran.

Siding with the Iranian people, who are unimaginably oppressed and trying to shake off their Gestapo-like shackles can’t be bad. Besides, should they win this war on ruthless clerical fascism, which has nothing to do with Allah, whose side do you want them remembering YOU being on?

Playing nice never works with the Hitlers of this world. The regime is already blaming us for interfering anyway. Always have. Makes it easy to label people like students and dissenters as Imperialist and Zionist traitors and execute them. Ever read 1984? May as well commit the crime. And it’s not like they’ve been holding Death to America rallies for thirty years to show their affection.

Let’s show some of that love back. I would also add to that love of a free Iran any requests by a future Iranian People’s Resistance, if the bloodshed of innocents mounts to sickening proportions (which it most likely will), to include smuggling arms to them from Afghanistan and Iraq. Let the regime deal with the kind of Islamic-driven insurgency they’ve been fueling in both countries, not to mention Gaza and Lebanon. Sorry, people. I’m siding with the victims here in full measure, not the perpetrators.

I always side with the Resistance against Hitler. I also believe Congress, The White House and the State Department should be made aware of that sentiment as well. Oh, and if you do contact the White House, please have them correct the President in addressing Khamenei. It’s Supreme ASSWIPE. Do we support Hope and Change in Iran? Or do we play nice, so Ahmie can slaughter all the rounded-up protesters with bloodthirsty impunity, then tell us to fuck off as he finishes his shady basement nuclear project, as he’s always done to the UN, the IAEA and every other nation on earth?

As for me, I say DEATH TO THE DICTATOR! FREE IRAN! Good Night and Good Luck, especially to the poor innocent Iranians suffering unimaginably at the hands of Ahmie and Khamie’s Islamist Gestapo goons even as we speak. It’s the Basiji, Hamas and Hezbollah goons that deserve to die. I’ll gladly help with that any way I can. So should we all. Anything less would be uncivilized. Let’s be the Iranian people’s Right Guard, and help eliminate the foul stench of fascism once and for all.

It’s really stinking up the joint, isn’t it? Lastly, I’d like you all to send a shout-out to the stunningly beautiful and incredibly humorous (she thinks I’m funny) Hannah Irani, aka LuvManatee, at her YouTube and Twitter pages. She is an Iranian-American medical student in LA who is spending a lot of her time live-blogging Iran. Tell her a joke to cheer her up, let her know you’re with her and the Iranian people all the way, and ask her how you can help.

I must say, during these tumultuous times, I have truly found out just how incredibly gorgeous Iranian women are. Persian Princesses all. Women that beautiful have to be saved. Just think of the bennies. A lot of hot bennies for you gays, too

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: Here are some protesters in Iran torching the gas lines to a basiji building and blowing it up. It’s at 0:05 on the far right of the screen. Five Islamist Gestapo basiji goons dead, many injured.  It’s the feel-good movie of the summer. Just listen to those cheers! Somebody give that cameraman an Oscar, LOL! You know, I generally don’t like bloodshed. But only if it’s the wrong blood being spilled. Other than that, the Iranian Resistance has carte blanche.

FREE IRAN! DEATH TO THE DICTATOR! Worth a second shout-out, yes? See you at the Oscars!

It is a tale well worth returning to share with you, Dear Readers.

Documentarian James Longley, perhaps best known for his award-winning film Iraq in Fragments, was already filming in Iran in late February when Team Hollywood arrived. According to this March 2nd press release by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences website, Mr. Longley became part of the Team Hollywood crew in Tehran and participated in all activities.

When Team Oscar left Iran, however, Mr. Longley remained to complete filming on his current film project involving, ironically, the Iran elections, when an amazing thing happened: the Green Revolution. On June 16th, Mr. Longley became both a witness to history and a victim of it. I will leave you with Mr. Longley’s account of the events that transpired in the ensuing chaos of post-election Tehran, as told by Daily Variety. They are the only words that need to be spoken.

A transcription from the hardcopy June 19th issue of Daily Variety:

U.S filmmaker James Longley was arrested briefly this week while shooting scenes of his current project chronicling the Iran elections. In an email published on a blog, Longley described his experience at the hands of the security forces who beat his translator:

“It made me really question what I am doing in this country. It has become impossible to work as a journalist without the risk of physical violence from the government,” wrote Longley.

One Iranian filmmaker, who insisted on anonymity, said that German co-producers had insisted the director leave the country and complete post-production in Berlin.

“I was still in Tehran 48 hours ago, but my co-producers got worried about me being able to get the film out of the country. so I left,” the helmer said. “You never know what’s going to happen. There is a lot of pressure on Iranian filmmakers now because a lot of them supported Mousavi, and they’re scared Ahmadinejad will crush them if he wins.”

Here is an in-depth post-arrest interview I found with Mr. Longley. Well worth the read. No idea if he was party to the original 300 and the Wrestler punking when Team Oscar got off the tarmac, but if he was, that must suck. That means he got DOUBLE-punked! By punk I mean like Hitler and his Gestapo punks, not Marlon Brando or The Outsiders. Like Hitler punked Chamberlain? Stalin punked Trotsky? Like Ahamdinejad and Khamenei are trying to punk the Iranian people right now? Very different class of punks from American. But it’s still getting punked. Got all that now?

I hope and pray Mr. Longley has a long chat with his former Team Oscar compatriots if and when he returns to AMPAS HQ. The regime was no different in March than it is now.

The difference is, the world is watching now. And seeing the naked ruthless brutality of the regime as it really is. Just as I’ve know it to be for thirty long years now. From the Embassy Hostage Crisis in 1979 to Roxana Saberi today. Looks like the same old Islamist extremist terrorist regime to me. Didn’t the Khamenei-led Death To America rallies in response to Obama’s peace video strike anyone else as hopeless?

I also hope and pray for all the innocent Iranians now at the brink. As Drudge just reported, the Revolutionary Guard is now being brought in, and the harshest measures yet are expected to be applied to anyone protesting the vote in the streets. If it wasn’t serious before, it is now. This could be the tipping point one way or the other. If the people continue to oppose the government in the streets after this warning, it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets any better. If it gets better at all.

To understand the depth of the Nazi-like horrorshow being staged by the basiji militias on innocent Iranians, all you need do is watch this video. Funny thing is, you really can’t see anything happening. Worst part is, you really don’t have to. Besides all the screaming that is self-explanatory, the banging and car alarms you hear are of basiji militias on a neighborhood rampage.

Dictatorships will fight to the death to preserve their power, even if it means slaughtering their own people. Yet that is why I opposed Team Oscar’s trip in the first place. They’ve been slaughtering their own people by the bushel ever since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Gays, women, bloggers, students, dissidents, even children. Whatever God or power in the universe you believe in, please pray for the safety of the Iranian people. I’m doubling down with both God and The Force.

Good Luck and Good Night. And peace. I hope.

And let me make this perfectly clear, even if they do say Jehovah!

Sentence must be read before being carried out. And unlike Soraya M., the board members of the Asylum of Motion Picture Airheads and Stooges will deserve every rock that’s thrown their way. I also believe that, in light of events in Iran today, the following commentary will stand out in much starker prominence than it did when I first started reporting on them in early March, when Team Oscar first set off for the Unfriendly Skies of Islamist Iran.

The backstory. In late February, the decision by AMPAS (as defined above) to send the Nine Stooges to the fascist hostage-taking, women-stoning, gay-exterminating Islamic Republic of Iran (at that time, things may be changing) set me off hotter than a Kim Jong Il nuke. Five days after the gay rights infomercial Oscars, no less! My gay rights heroes.

Somebody give ‘em an Oscar! For what it’s worth nowadays. Sean Penn getting an Oscar for playing a gay rights hero with his sorry track record on the subject is like Yasser Arafat, Jimmy Carter and Al Gore getting Nobel Prizes. They just ain’t worth what they used to be these days.

But I digress. On With The Show Biz Trial.

For ten days and uncounted humiliating punkings in early March, Team Oscar was a national embarrassment and a disgrace to this country and people, and an affront to the innocent Iranians suffering under a yoke of oppression not seen since Hitler’s Third Reich. A yoke which they are desperately and bravely fighting and even dying to cast off even as we speak.

And now, despite all that transpired back then, and all that is happening now in Iran, AMPAS is looking to whitewash the whole affair as a Bob Hope and Bing Crosby Road trip! Not on my watch! Fat fucking chance! Can you imagine how Iranian gays felt, watching the same people who facilitated tearful speeches on “gay rights for everyone” socializing and galivanting around town with the very monsters who were hunting them down, torturing and killing them?

If that alone isn’t a stoning offense, then nothing is.

Some may consider my charges harsh, even unreasonably so. So be it. Brutal Injustice and rank hypocrisy bring out the Zarqawi in me. But I will present to you, Dear Hollywood non-Academy Readers and Fine Fellow Americans everywhere, the foul evidence at hand in toto.

When charges have been read, and sentence is to be passed, I will leave it to the rest of you stoners as to which direction your rocks should fly. But first, to put the matter into Supreme Court-like perspective, look at the precedent law upon which I base my charges and my case.

THE WORLD v. SOUTH AFRICA

In 1985, during the oppressive Apartheid era of South Africa’s all-white fascist regime, actors, artists, producers and many fine musicians like Little Stevie van Zandt and The Boss, Bruce Springsteen, united to make a statement against that racist government, which held Nelson Mandela behind bars unjustly for 29 years, and murdered noted anti-apartheid activist Steven Biko while in police custody. That murder was memorialized in the Peter Gabriel song of the same name.

In conjunction with worldwide sanctions and divestment of business from South Africa at the time, the musical statement made by that group of most talented artists, better know as Artists United Against Apartheid, was immortalized in the song Sun City, which became a smash hit worldwide. We all know the rest of the story. The white South African government eventually folded, and Nelson Mandela was freed and then elected to the presidency.

What were South Africa’s crimes besides just Mandela’s imprisonment and Biko’s murder? Officially enforced racial segregation and subjugation, violent repression and the banning of opposition political parties. Certainly more than enough justification for international outrage, and both official and unofficial sanctions.

Yet compared to the current theocratic Hitlerite thugocracy running the Islamic Republic of Iran, which the world is also widely sanctioning today, South Africa’s Apartheid government was operating an island paradise fit for Chinese Uighurs. In Iran, political empowerment is nonexistent, and has been since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

All the power is in the hands of Supreme Leader Ali Khamanei and the Mad Mullah Guardian Council. Reform was impossible. Any measure passed by Iran’s Parliament, the Majlis, deemed ‘un-Islamic’ by the Mad Mullahs could be overturned on review. The Church is the State in Iran. Like a nationwide Westboro Baptist Church from Hell. Only worse. Much worse.

Examples. Children are routinely executed, gays are hunted down, tortured and brutally exterminated, and women and young girls are stoned and hanged, even for the crime of being raped. Until international outrage interceded, as happened vis-a-vis Roxana Saberi, seventeen-year-old Nazanin Fatehi was awaiting a death sentence for the crime of stabbing and killing one of the three God-fearing Islamists who attempted to rape her and her niece in a West Tehran park.

Here is a 27-minute documentary that re-enacts the attempted rape and the unbelievably misogynist injustice which followed. Had the world not screamed so loud in outrage, Nazanin would have suffered the same fate as that of twenty-year-old Delara Derabi, who was hanged by the Islamic Republic only six weeks ago. Iran has held mass hangings as recently as May 14th. And given the official death penalty announcement for Mousavi protesters, many more may follow depending on the outcome of current events.

This doesn’t even take into account the fact that many in Iran’s terror-sponsoring Islamist extremist leadership, including ‘moderate’ Hashemi Rafsanjani and recent presidential candidate Mohsen Rezai, former head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and former ‘diplomat’ to Argentina, are wanted by Interpol for their involvement in the worst terror attacks in Argentina’s history back in 1994. An Interpol warrant was issued for Rezai as recently as May 22nd.

Here is a piece I wrote back in early March, branding the regime as today’s Third Reich. Look at all the horrific and barbaric evidence of crimes against humanity committed both at home and abroad, and you tell me if I’m overstating the case. Keep also in mind that Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists are now in the streets of Iran, beating and killing the same Iranians who have supported and patronized the Islamist groups for decades.

Taking time out from killing innocent Jews to killing innocent Iranians. No surprise there, since the regime already kills its own people on an assembly line basis. Even bloggers. Given all this brutal evidence of the Iranian thugocracy’s bloody track record which spans the globe, I ask you, Dear Readers of jurisprudence and humble advocates of human rights for all, how was the Islamic Republic of Iran worthy of cultural diplomatic exchange, and South Africa not?

They should be forming Artists United Against Insanity to oppose Iran’s theocratic thugocracy, not flying over for tea, fingers cookies, and film seminars! Disgraceful!

Charges as follows. Bear with me. It’s a longer list than you think.

1. THE FIRST PUNKING OF FAR TOO MANY

Even though AMPAS was promised no politics would be involved in the visit, Team Hollywood was no sooner off the tarmac at Khomeini Airport in Tehran than they were totally punked by the best punks in the world, with harsh demands for apologies and submission by Iranian leaders over the films 300 and The Wrestler, or they wouldn’t get to meet their Iranian film buds. Curiously, Team Oscar was allowed to meet with their Iranian counterparts shortly thereafter. My question to the Academy is this: did they apologize or not?

Iif you recall, what so outraged Iranian government stooges over The Wrestler was Mickey Rourke breaking an Iranian flag and tossing it into the crowd. Deliciously ironic, considering the desecration of our flag is a national sport with the regime. There was also a declaration by Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hassan Qashqavi, that thirty films currently in production in Hollywood were ‘anti-Iranian.’

Civilized governments don’t act like that. Yet I broke the punking story in America to Drudge and Nikki Finke because I knew something like that was going to happen. I was looking for it. Hell, the regime has been punking us for thirty years! Ahmadinejad had even said Hollywood was devoid of all culture and art. Something’s Gotta Give. I must admit, however, that maybe Ahmie was onto something with that comment. Never thought I’d agree with anything the Little Hitler said.

Academy politics makes strange bedfellows, I reckon.

That infamous Punking Heard ‘Round the World should have proved to all concerned that President Obama’s attempt at diplomacy through Team Oscar was a horrendous failure, as all other efforts since have been. Like the Khamenei-led Death to America rallies in response to Obama’s peace video. Yet Team Oscar suffered that humiliation and degradation only to suffer many more. And the rest of us, since Team Oscar represented us over there as a nation as well.

Some were even worse, if you can believe it. In short, if somebody wrote a script like this, no one would ever believe it. But I already read the book. Been reading it since 1979.

2. TEAM OSCAR’S STOOGES TRAIN IRAN’S PROPAGANDA STOOGES

Iran ‘film industry’ experts, many of whom Stooge Team Oscar no doubt gave seminars to, gave their own previous film seminars on Iran TV on the Ziono-Hollywoodist conspirators for making such anti-Iranian celluloid slanders as Harry Potter, Chicken Run and Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. And let’s not forget the Jew Disney’s cartoon conspiracy, Tom and Jerry. Also deliciously ironic, considering Iran exports child martyrdom cartoons across the Middle East, a business so thriving the BBC called it, in blackly comic Joker-like fashion, ‘booming.’

I can understand the cultural aspect Team Hollywood pursued. I even respect it. But in my opinion, given the circumstances, it was the equivalent of sending a cultural team to Hitler’s Berlin during the Holocaust. The real great Iranian filmmakers were all heel-ground. The ones who aren’t languish in Evin prison or are awaiting kangaroo court religious tribunals, like Iranian-American Esha Momeni, for the celluloid slander of interviewing Iranian women for a womens rights documentary for her master’s degree.

Filmmaker Tehmineh Milani was sentenced to death for her celluloid slander. Again, only international and, in Ms. Milani’s case, even domestic outrage saved her neck from the rope. Another filmmaker, the French-Iranian Mernousche Solouki, was thrown into Evin prison for the crime of stumbling across a mass grave.

Here’s Ms. Solouki’s recounting of the event. She still suffers nightmares from her experience in Evin. I read that, and other horror stories of the Gestapo-like Evin prison when Roxana Saberi was still there. Horrified me. I know her father must have known of that. He’s from Iran. He must know. They all do. I can’t even imagine how he felt with Roxana there. Again, the South Africa analogy.

Yet despite all those goings-on, Annette Bening took time out to tell the world how great women’s rights were in Iran. Which brings us straight to Team Oscar’s next great offense.

3. ROXANA SABERI AND THE SOUND OF SILENCE

Throughout Roxana’s unlawful detention, i.e. hostage status as a political pawn, and bogus conviction on trumped-up espionage charges, Team Oscar couldn’t have been more silent or unheard from than Roxana herself. Not one public message of support for either Roxana or the Academy during her unlawful detention in Evin, never mind anyone else in Hollywood except us right-wing extremists. In fact, the whole human rights-championing left-wing PRAVDA-like MSM and government pulled a complete disappearing act on Roxana right after Hillary demanded her release, like she was bad press for the Obamamessiah to be swept under the rug.

At the time, my linked article above generated twenty times more Google hits than the entire media coverage combined. It’s at over 7300 hits now, more than 100 times the number of hits generated on Google vis-a-vis coverage of Roxana in late March.  I’m still getting hits on it. I don’t think people can believe what they’re seeing still. But I digress. You get the point.

No public statement of support from Team Oscar for Roxana that I can find. Team Oscar member William Horberg’s Iran blog made no mention whatsoever of Roxana’s unlawful captivity, or any plea they might have made on Roxana’s behalf to Iranian authorities. I have to assume none was made. Perhaps the Academy could clear up that matter, too. Inquiring Minds Want To Know.

Knowing the King of Hearts-like unreality that resides in the La La Land of AMPAS HQ, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to hear any of them claim credit for Roxana’s release in the future, or even for the green revolution going on in Iran today. If they do, just remember Annette praising the regime’s great women’s rights record while Roxana was still in Evin. For starters.

That should clear things up.

What was really depressing to me throughout Roxana’s Hostage Crisis was how few in Hollywood spoke up on her behalf, when no one knew whether she would live or die. That will forever be a black stain on those who profess to be the greatest human rights champs in the world.

4. OF STOOGES FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC

Perhaps the most vocal filmmaker during Team Oscar’s prolonged humiliation in Iran was domestic thugocracy stooge and new Team Oscar BFF Alireza Davudnejad, who wrote an open letter to President Obama claiming that the only road to peace, freedom and justice in this world was for the President to destroy all of America’s nuclear weapons and give up its UN veto.

Mr. Davudnejad also requested a schedule as to when those world-shaking peace, freedom and justice-inducing landmarks would be carried out. This, from a regime that foments war, writes injustice into its penal codes, crushes freedom with an iron boot, and races to build nuclear weapons they swear to Allah and their own people they’ll use on Israel just as soon as they’re built.

Now THAT’S Comedy! Fortunately, the President didn’t fall for it. If he had, it would have been the Punking Of All Time. No punking for Mr. Ali-Duh, but a gold star on the forehead for effort. Mr. Davudnejad did, however, manage to give a closing backhand to his new BFF, Team Oscar:

“My last recommendation is not to follow your previous cultural policies and avoid your Hollywood friends from playing any tricks to dominate the cinemas of Iran. The United States once removed Iranian cinema from the Iranian life with the help of the former dictatorship; and sacrificed our industry with the import of foreign films.

The fallen cinema of Iran has once again regained its footing with the Islamic Revolution and has been fighting to survive for thirty years. We will not forgive the enemies of this cinema wherever they are. By the way, which is harder, to relinquish the veto right, or to forbear the domination of Iran’s cinema again? You have a hard path ahead. I pray for you. Only the right path has no deviation.”

How about neither, Ali-DUH? Over my freakin’ dead body! Go sit on a projector!

By the way, you got all that, Sid, Annette, and the rest of you Ziono-Hollywoodist conspirators? No more tricks! Or they won’t even let you apologize next time!

Q. What was the difference between Team Oscar and Ali-Duh in Iran?

A. He’s a domestic film industry stooge.

Yet another degrading episode Team Oscar let slide. I guess they’re more on the M side of S&M. Seeing as they represented all of us in a diplomatic capacity, so were we. How does it feel? Mr. Ganis also stood by for yet another punking by the Director of Iran’s House of Cinema, one of many he seemed unfazed by. Some people are just gluttons for punishment, I guess.

As a comic relief sidebar, the culture ministers who approved Team Oscar’s trip were summoned before an angry Majlis, Iran’s parliament, to explain who let the Great Satan into their pure Islamist paradise. But that’s how it goes. Nobody is safe in Punkedville. Even the punks! No word on if the ministers apologized, but it was rumored Mr. Ganis couldn’t find his ministerial escort anywhere.

Hell, they’re the liberals in Iran! Fuggeddaboutit!

5. THE BURQA BABES OF BABYLON

It would seem that, as Team Oscar was reeling from their hot-off-the-tarmac punking, the Mad Mullahs used the opportunity to wrap up the goils like mummies in burqas. They may call it a fashion statement or cultural sensitivity, but why didn’t they make a bold statement by wearing Western dress the whole time, instead of looking like every other oppressed woman in Iran?

6. THE GENOCIDE PRIDE PARADES, or BOY, CAN THESE GUYS THROW AN O-BASH!

On March 6th, the same day Iranian authorities promised to release Roxana Saberi ’soon’ after SOS Clinton’s demand the day before, news broke of the ICC warrant issued for Sudan’s genocidal leader, General Omar Bashir. It was an insult, an offense and a crime against humanity (Majlis Speaker Lari Alijani’s words, not mine) against the Iranian regime’s BFF O-Bash.

In response, the entire upper leadership of Iran’s thugocracy, along with their Islamist Gestapo Blackshirt stooges from Hamas and Hezbollah (the same ones beating and killing Mousavi protesters this week), took to the streets of Tehran AND Khartoum, the very streets where the genocide was and is being committed to this day, to throw genocide parades for human vampire and Dear Leader Bashir.

Now, what should you do if you know your host country is officially celebrating the most abominable crime known to man in the streets below your gilded cages? Do you a. speak up in outrage? Do you b. hightail it out of Dodge as fast as you can? My answers are a and b. Team Oscar’s appears to have been c. keep the tea and finger cookies coming, Ahmie! Now I don’t know the law in that situation, so maybe some fine Hollywood lawyer could tell me. Is that being silent accomplices?

See, I believe genocide parades are a crime in themselves, as though other nations were celebrating Hitler in the streets of Berlin and their own streets, had Hitler been charged by the League of Nations for genocide during the Holocaust. But that’s just me.

SUBPLOT: I just read that O-Bash flew to Zimbabwe on June 10th. He’s wanted for genocide. Why is he being allowed to fly all over Africa and the Middle East with impunity? What, we don’t have aircraft carriers out there that could send up a couple fighter jets to escort Blacula to justice?

7. AHMADINEJAD’S WILLIE HORTONS

As a bonus, highlighted by Ahmadinejad’s condemnation of Hollywood as devoid of culture and art, and followed up by the summoning of ministers to the Majlis over Team Oscar’s invite, both Ahmadinejad and Supreme Asswipe Khamenei used Team Oscar as their Willie Horton in the recent elections. You know. Who let the Great Satan in?

So rather than fostering a liberalization of Iran, as they no doubt naively thought, they instead served as a political tool with which hardliners could beat moderates over the head with. Considering the extreme Islamist nature of Iranian politics (as least last week), they made the situation for moderates even worse. The only thing they didn’t appear to do was make the political ads themselves. But they did train the propaganda stooges who no doubt made any, if any were made.

Damage done either way. Hooray For Hollywood!

THAT’S A WRAP!

I suppose I could rummage for even more egregious offenses, and glaring or willfully blind oversights. But I have far more than enough to convict. If you seek more for purely historical reference, feel free to check all my linked articles above. You’ll find ‘em. My problem was trying to choose which offenses and oversights to pick from.

WILLIAM HORBERG FOR THE DEFENSE

Currently posted at the Academy website is the following prosaic account by William Horberg of Team Oscar’s late-term abortion of a trip to Iran: The Road To Isfahan. Let’s hear what he has to say in Team Oscar’s defense before we stone them. That may seem predicative of the outcome, but remember, these offenses took place in Iran. Islamist extremist rules apply. Got it now?

Actually, just check the link above. We’ll stone ‘em now and rule ‘em guilty later. I mean, come on people. Given the evidence, they may as well have been jumping up and down and screaming “Jehovah!” Time to get stoned. And if you’ve misplaced yours, here’s another one.

IN CLOSING

Now, I fully condemn the shooting of Dr. Tiller by lone madman Scott Roeder in Kansas, as all right-minded human beings should. But I would fully endorse the shooting of whatever single-digit IQ Academy PR doctors were behind this afterbirth. They Shoot Horses’ Asses In Hollywood, Don’t They? If anyone at the Academy had any brains, they’d be stocking up on ammunition like a right-wing extremist Timothy McVeigh-like Montana militia for that very purpose right now!

QUALIFIER: Yes, I’m kidding. No need to call DHS just yet, thank you very much. Besides, you’re as likely to find a gun at Academy HQ as you are a hymen on Heidi Fleiss.

Despite the current brain-dead off-the cliff lemming leadership at AMPAS today, I love film. I love Hollywood I even love the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences. Always have. Broke my heart to declare war on them. I even told them so. But all the above is Casus Belli. Gloves are off.

The blackest irony of all? I was in the middle of writing a loving screwball comedy tribute to Oscar when the news of their trip broke! By the way, I even warned them that if they tried giving all this Iran shite the Red Carpet treatment, I’d pull the rug out from under them. And I know and they know I’ve caused a lot of PR damage already over their Iran trip, both here at Big Hollywood and elsewhere.

My Iran opeds since the PUNK’D piece on Nikki Finke February 28th are pushing 30,000 hits at one blog alone. Can’t anyone in this business keep their mouth shut? How stupid can you be? Are they total masochistic gluttons for punishment? Oh yeah, I already covered that. Drop that last one off at the Department of Redundancy Department, LOL! In the meantime, I’ll do my best to have the Nine Stooges ejected off the Academy board and into the Pacific.

Now, I’ve had some very juicy tastes of Tinseltown. The Red Carpet A-List circuit in Beverly Hills and Los Angeles. I’m not a Guild Member, but my first screenplay got a number of finalist nods from some of the toughest Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated contest judges in Hollywood. And I got an option with it. I got some chops. And I’ve only gotten better over the years through hard work, practice and learning. I know that because industry pros doing my coverage told me so.

But you know what? As much as I wanted to trash that story and never write another word in screenplay format again, I love that script. Put a lot of love and time into it. Think it’s my best work so far. So does my writing partner. In fact, I’m going to finish that script very shortly. And I’m going to finish it in the spirit in which I started: with love, tenderness and affection, even towards Academy members I wrote into the script with boundless love that I totally detest now.

How? I call it professional detachment. Like sniping Nazis as I lovingly listen to Mozart. Best of, worst of. I don’t let politics poison my scripts. I’ll leave the Lefties to do that. I’d rather not bomb at the box office. And I’ll have coverage done by someone I know and trust networked into the industry like a spiderweb. If I get a nearly impossible grade of RECOMMEND and it doesn’t move, I know my self-inflicted film industry Hiroshima is complete.

But you know what, people? I’ll take as many of them with me as I can, just like the wounded Mickey Rooney in Ambush Bay offering Japanese soldiers pineapples. He had plenty for everybody. Point being, I won’t stand for this crap and let it slide just to sell a script. This matter goes way beyond film to me. Look at it this way. AMPAS spends four hours championing gay rights at the last Oscars, then flies off to Iran to give that gay-butchering regime its gold-plated PR kiss, even praising women’s rights in the most violently misogynist regime on earth? STUFF IT!

God, how I wished I lived in the era of the Hollywood of an earlier day, when the top stars flocked to the service of their country, instead of the service of thuggish and violent dictators like Chavez, Castro and Ahmadinejad. By the way, Sean Penn holds the Trifecta of Shame on that one.

Let me be explicitly clear that I believe extreme left-wing morons like Sean Penn, Danny Glover and Harry “Bananas” Belafonte are the minority in Hollywood. Squeaky left-wing wheels get all the grease. I know a lot of great people in the industry personally. And I can’t praise highly enough Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Mia Farrow, Jim Carrey, Gary Sinise, Robert Davi and so many great USO supporters like Saddam million dollar bounty-offering Bruce Willis, Scarlett Johansson, Jack Black and Ben Stiller.

There are really too many to name. But you know who they are. As to the distinct minority, I will quote my former Obama-like governor and liberal tank commander Michael Dukakis for the first time in my life: “A fish rots from the head down.”

Tom Hanks dares to call gay marriage opponents un-American? Well, if President Obama, most Americans and 52% of Californians are un-American for not supporting gay marriage, what is Tom Hanks and the rest of the Motion Picture Asylum guilty of for signing off on a trip to a regime that hunts gays online, raids gay parties, tortures them horribly and then hangs them from crane wires to die agonizing deaths that can take up to an hour, as they did with two gay teenage boys?

There’s too much blanket idiocy in Hollywood. Megan Fox, jokingly telling the Transformers to take out all the white trash to save the earth, the irony totally lost on her. The Twitter crowd at afterellen.com. Like Adrianne Curry, who calls Prop 8 a human rights offense, but remains dead silent on the holocausts against LGBTs in Iran and Iraq. Why isn’t Dustin Lance Black screaming to the skies about this stuff? I couldn’t find any evidence of him opposing the AMPAS Iran trip on purely humanitarian grounds. WHY NOT?

No. I, a straight conservative Republican screenwriter, offended to my very core by the savagery of Shiite extremist gay death squads in Iran and Iraq, have to be the one screaming to the skies about LGBT terrorists who engage in atrocities even the Nazis can’t compare to. Like super-gluing gay men’s anuses shut and pumping them full of diarrhea cocktails so the gay killers, some on our tax dime, can catch a few pious laughs as their victims endure unimaginable agony before dying.

No. I am left with the dirty jobs and lonely tasks of networking REAL gay advocates like Michael Petrelis and the Gay Patriot blog over these inhuman gay horrorshows. I am the one who has to research and dispatch gruesome reports to sites like BestGayBlogs.com, and LGBT orgs all over the globe like LGBT Network EU. I am the one left to scrape around for signatures on petitions at Iranian Queer Railroad and Iraqi LGBT to save the lives of Iranian and Iraqi LGBTs, who live in fear of torture and unimaginable horrors the incredibly spoiled toddler-like Hollywood Leftie morons and unmarried gays of California will never know.

As a screenwriter, I now know what it feels like to work under an offensive and idiotic oligarchy that is totally brain-dead and out of touch with the realities of the world at large, and those whom they profess to lead. In that respect, though I do not agree with them, I now understand the passionate outrage Lefties felt during the reign of the Bushitler. Like Michael Moore’s and Al Franken’s bloviations during that dark time, I do not expect my heated rants to impact my Golden Bubble-insulated industry oligarchy one whit.

In fact, I fully expect it to to earn me black marks and disfavor, the full McCarthy treatment they so profess to detest, yet practice every goddamn day. Ron Silver, anyone? But like the aforementioned Twin Towers of Leftie-ism, I care not one whit what the ruling establishment thinks. My anger is righteous and justified. In fact, it could not be moreso. What’s happening in Iran and Iraq are de facto gay genocides. What cause could be more righteous than trying to stop those?

Screw sexual conduct! They’re innocent human beings targeted for extermination. They don’t deserve that barbaric treatment. No one does, except the blood-drinking Islamist Gestapo stooges that are doing it all! If that revolution in Iran goes through and the people win, somebody Tweet them to hang on to all the crane wires. They’re gonna need a lot. For the Hamas and Hezbollah Blackshirts, too.

If my harsh words mean my film career is dead, so be it. In fact, if I came to Hollywood for no other reason than to address the horrific hypocrisy of so-called gay and human rights champs who are anything but (some like Bening and Penn even extremely damaging to those they don the mantle of Human Rights Champs for), or to champion the cause of Iraqi and Iranian LGBTs unlike any cause I’ve ever championed based on purely humanistic outrage, then I will feel that my life will have had meaning.

If I have helped to save the life of only one Iraqi or Iranian gay, I have saved the world entire. I can go to my grave totally at peace with myself. If I must bury my screenwriting career ahead of me, this is a small price to pay. So many others, like those now on the streets of Iran fighting and dying for the freedoms that are as natural to us as breathing, or risk brutal torture and horrific death merely for sexual conduct or being raped, are paying far higher prices than we most likely ever will.

In closing, I am resigning from Big Hollywood. I came here on a mission nearly four months ago to bring attention to all I have highlighted above. All the in-between was a bonus. And I do have a comedy piece in the hopper, which is rare for me. Haven’t had much to laugh about lately. Which is why I want to return full-time to screenwriting as well. There’s enough tragedy on Planet Earth. If I can use my award-nominated humor to inspire laughter and comic relief, then that is my main mission now. The rest I leave to the card deck of fate.

If I return, it will be in the cause of those who cannot speak for themselves. There is no shortage of hacks and pundits flame-throwing politics these days, and there are far too many not flame-throwing at all on issues that should enrage them beyond measure. As I am enraged today. Certainly beyond politics.

I do not need anger management. Like Johnny Rotten sang with Public Image Limited, Anger is an Energy. Righteous anger is what freed South Africa. Righteous anger fills the streets of Tehran as we speak. Righteous anger is why we Americans no longer say to each other, “G’day, Mate! ‘Ow about a pint and some bangers and mash? Got some up in me lorry! God Bless the Queen!”

In closing, God Bless The Queen anyway. And God Bless America. I say that as an agnostic secularist, okay? It’s good luck! And may God look down a lot more kindly on the poor LGBTs in Iran and Iraq. Perhaps, if there is a God, and I’m hedging my bets here, I hope his hand is in events in Iran. Maybe with a youth-driven revolution, LGBTs, filmmakers. students, dissidents, bloggers, and raped women need not fear for their lives anymore, or offered the choice of castration or death if they wish to remain gay.

What? Did you think Ahmadinejad was kidding when he said there were no gays in Iran? He said it with the same certainty Hitler said there were no Jews in Germany. The discussion is moot. I really hope to God that changes, as Iran itself seems to be right now.

We do, however, have a most powerful hand in Iraq. The gay killings must stop. The gay death squads must be disbanded with an iron fist. Just like Al Qaeda. Or, to tell the truth, I don’t care if Al Qaeda takes the place over. I would feel the same way if I were in West Berlin in 1947 and the locals were still hunting down and killing Jews. Let the Red Army move in.

Uncle Joe, they’re all yours! Bin Laden, they’re all yours! Let them ALL share in the terror they love with a religious fervor! OR, they can wise up and join the human race. If not, screw ‘em. Let ‘em go back to Al Qaeda torture houses and eating bombs for breakfast. I may not be gay myself. No, really. But must one be Jewish to be totally repulsed by Auschwitz?

Good Luck and Good Night, all. Peace. I hope

I know this to be true. Being a news junkie myself, I have found time after time as I was reading about a supposedly breaking subject, like ABC’s recent coverage of the targeted LGBT murders in Iraq, that it had already been on display for all to see in Big Hollywood posts for months.

Not to toot my own horn, but…well, okay, I’m tooting my own horn. And those of Andy Breitbart and John Nolte, who have given I, and so many other wonderful and insightful Hollywood right-wing fringe types, a magnificent bullhorn we otherwise would not have. We appear to be doing the dirty jobs our media just refuses to do. It’s a labor Hercules would completely sympathize with.

Here are some prime examples.

THE OBAMAMEDIA: The British press, the UK Telegraph in particular, are VERY unhappy with White House spokesman Robert Gibbs today. Seems Mr. Gibbs offended them beyond belief with this statement, in response to the British tabloids hammering the Obama Administration over the suppression of torture photos, a la the reviled BusHitler:

“Let’s just say if I wanted to look up, if I wanted to read a write-up of how Manchester United fared last night in the Champions League Cup, I’d might open up a British newspaper,” (Gibbs) continued. “If I was looking for something that bordered on truthful news, I’m not entirely sure it’d be the first pack of clips I’d pick up.”

The UK Telegraph found the irony of that statement delicious:

Can you imagine Gibbs making these remarks about The New York Times or The Washington Post, or NBC, ABC or CBS? This would never happen. The British press, especially the Telegraph, has been singled out because they frequently publish articles critical of the Obama administration and are not afraid to take on the status quo in Washington.

Increasingly, millions of Americans are turning to online UK news websites for cutting edge reports on American politics and U.S. foreign policy that the mainstream media refuses to cover in the States, especially if it is unflattering to the Obama White House.

Mates, you’re not telling Big Hollywood anything new. We reported that our Fourth Estate was now a Fourth Branch of Government a month ago. Of course, these UK complaints of Obamamedia malfeasance would hardly have been necessary were President Obama a Republican, which we here at BH also hypothesized in Alice In Wonderland fashion. Fact is, if Obama were a Michael Steele-like Republican POTUS, the US press would be all over him like white on rice. Can I say that?

Who’d a-thunk we and the British tabloids would ever be banding together and staging a revolt against the American government and its PRAVDA-like propaganda wing, the VSM? Strange days, indeed. I also find it incredibly ironic that, as President Obama goes out of his way to appease the Hilterite Islamist extremist regime in Iran, his administration lackeys, through pure idiocy, are marching us down the path to yet another war with the British. Not only that, just how bad is it when the British revolt against OUR tax policies? Sorry, but I’m with the Redcoats this time around.

OBAMA AND THE LEFT: On May 26th, US News and World Report opined on the dissatisfaction of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party with Obama’s Bush Lite policies. On May 24th, Gary LaMarche tried to quell the Leftie uprising against Obama with this HuffPo piece. However, if you read the comments, many Lefties aren’t biting. Sorry, Gary, the Kumbaya routine doesn’t work with tinfoils. Same at KOS, which is telling their readers to quit with the ‘Obama is a War Criminal’ crap.

Again, Big Hollywood beat all to the punch on May 23rd. We knew how much of a disappointment Obama was to the Left. It is, in fact, a complete train wreck of liberal politics, naive idealism and harsh realities. And we’re lovin’ it! Again, Big Hollywood is ahead of the curve.

OBAMA AND GAY RIGHTS: On May 23rd, the New York Times published Frank Rich’s OpEd ‘La Cage au Democrats’ in which he commiserated with gay rights advocates of how little support LGBTs were getting from the Obama White House. He closed it out with this stinging rebuke:

The gay civil rights movement has fewer obstacles in its path than did Dr. King’s Herculean mission to overthrow the singular legacy of slavery. That makes it all the more shameful that it has fewer courageous allies in Washington than King did. If “American Idol” can sing out for change on Fox in prime time, it ill becomes Obama, of all presidents, to remain mute in the White House.

Ouch! Dead Bullseye, Frank! Sorry to tell you, Mr. Rich, but you’re only splitting Big Hollywood’s arrow. BH contributor Charlie Winecoff covered this issue in-depth at Big Hollywood way back on March 19th in his ‘Love, War and Gay Marriage’ OpEd. He saw what was coming based on Obama’s own statements, positions and even associations with gay-haters like Farrakhan. On May 8th, we illustrated how even Ronald Reagan was a better friend to gays than Obama probably ever will be.

Double Ouch! Sorry, Frank. You guys at the Times have to keep pace better than that, or you just might find yourselves relegated to dinosaur status. Wait a minute…Oh, never mind.

LGBT MURDERS IN IRAQ: Yet another issue that is beginning to inflame American gay advocates, who are fast becoming infuriated at the brutal and systematic extermination of LGBTs in Iraq on our dime, sanctioned by both Supreme Leader Ali al-Sistani in his fatwa of death against Iraqi LGBTs and by the Iraqi government itself. Not only are LGBTs being slated for execution by al-Maliki’s government, the Interior Ministry police are raiding gay parties, hunting gays online, and either arresting them or killing them on the spot. Shiite gay death squads are now common in Baghdad.

News outlets such as ABC are finally beginning to cover this issue in-depth. Gay rights advocate Michael Petrelis of the Petrelis Files blog has long been on point on this issue, holding demonstrations and raising money for Iraqi gays. Though encouraged by the media attention this horrific plight of gays in Iraq is finally getting, he could not be more outraged by the willful ignorance of this issue by the White House, the State Department and his Congressional representative, none other than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Though Mr. Petrelis was not entirely enamored of my Reagan/Obama piece on gay rights here at Big Hollywood (he called me a right wing blowhard on his blog), he does credit BH for addressing the issue as he wished so many others in the gay community and politics would, and praises our calling it for what it is: a gay holocaust. What else do you call a targeted extermination program?

That said, the Reagan piece was not the first BH OpEd to address the burgeoning problem of targeted gay murders in Iraq. That was highlighted in my very first piece for Big Hollywood, entitled ‘One Critic’s Review of Mr. Ganis Goes to Tehran’ way back on March 9th. It was, in fact, Team Oscar’s trip to gay-butchering Iran at that time, not five days after the gay-infomercial Oscars, that sent me into fireball mode and led me directly to BH in the first place.

Not only did that piece describe the longstanding gay holocaust in Iran, a de facto genocide of Iranian LGBTs, it exposed for all the world to see what a human rights sham AMPAS and so-called Hollywood gay rights champs like Sean Penn and Dustin Lance Black really are. Team Oscar member Annette Bening went so far as to praise women’s rights in Iran (an oxymoron if ever there was one), even as fellow American Roxana Saberi was being held hostage as a political pawn right across town in Evin prison. Need more be said?

Again, Big Hollywood was way ahead of the curve.

Speaking of which, the targeted killings of Iraqi LGBTs poses a very curious question. If Prop 8 opponents are so infuriated and outraged at the perceived abysmal gay rights situation in California, as these Tweeting celebrities at afterellen.com seem to be, and in which model/actress Adrianne Curry sarcastically retorted, “treating gays like they aren’t human is wonderful!” then where is the outrage over the hunting, torturing and extermination of gays in Iran and Iraq?

Where is the fury over gay men in Iraq having their anuses glued shut, and being forced to drink diarrhea cocktails that induce horrible suffering before death? Sounds like way less than human treatment to me, Adrianne. Where, oh where, is the outrage?

Just goes to show. Hollywood celebrities may not be gays rights advocates, but they play them on TV. And where else, but for a few lone gay blogs like the Petrelis Files, will you find this pressing issue covered in as much depth as here at Big Hollywood? Hmm. Curious.

TEAM OSCAR IN IRAN: Who else was covering Team Oscar in Iran like Big Hollywood? No one in the entertainment industry I could find. A few outraged conservatives, that’s about it. And it looked like AMPAS shut down all PR coverage of Team Oscar after the punking episode (a story lead I broke to Drudge and Nikki Finke, hee hee!), I had to get all my scoops from the Tehran Times and the Middle East press! This, for the most historic mission in Academy history! How sad is that?

Do any of you remember their grand Red Carpet heroes’ welcome at LAX? Me neither. Hell, they were so quiet about the trip, I though the Iranians were holding them hostage! I thought maybe they had taken me up on my offer to trade the Nine Stooges for Roxana Saberi. No such luck.

And show me anyone else in the media or entertainment rags who was pointing out that Iran’s film industry, which Academy prez Sid Ganis is still praising, spits out the worst anti-Semitic propaganda since Goebbels’ Reichministry. They’re marketing and exporting child martrdom cartoons like Hollywood does SpongeBob! Doing a bang-up business too, if you’ll pardon the pun.

THAT’S A WRAP! As a contributor I will do my best, as many other fine folks here at BH are doing, to keep you all up to date on the goings-on in Hollywood and elsewhere,  that you just won’t see covered in all too many other so-called media outlets. Considering how many pressing subjects the Obamamedia is dodging to keep Dear Leader spotlessly clean, that won’t be hard to do. The real problem will be deciding on which subjects the media isn’t covering to choose from.

As a BH fan and reader, I look very much forward to reading more of the great Greg G. spilling his guts, Charlie Winecoff’s unique perspectives on the issues of our day, John Nolte’s insightful and unbiased reviews of Hollywood films and TV shows past, present and future (as well as his calling the biased reviewers out for their politically-motivated hit pieces), interviews with outstanding Hollywood filmmakers you just won’t see in HR and Variety, and many other great contributors like Robert Davi, Bert Prelutsky, Andy Breitbart too numerous to mention here.

You want the real Hollywood scoop? You know where to come! Peace, all. I hope

Or, by its Hollywood acronym, RATS. Funny. I actually found that startling contraction fitting, not for Roxana (not hardly), but for all of the major black hats and clueless morons who populated this nerve-wracking Thugocracy Studios production, which had civilized people everywhere both riveted and outraged in its most grueling and suspenseful moments.

Not to mention for Roxana and her parents. But before we get to heroes and villains, let us look at the story to date with all its dramatic twists and underpinnings, many with significant international implications. Just like a good Hitchcock drama should. And I caught ‘em all!

By pure happenstance, Your Most Humble Critic and Boy Reporter was already hot on the job covering Iran (unlike some people) and hammering AMPAS for their tea and finger-cookie soirees with these guys, when I saw what Iran was pulling with Roxana and called it for what it was: a hostage crisis. And on the same day HRW called it the same in a press release on March 13th, which I didn’t find out until the 19th thanks to our on-the-ball Vein Stream Media.

Even then I had to look. But HRW called it on the 13th based on international law. I called it the same day from knowing Iran too goddamn well. Why not test Obama? See what he’s made of? They’ve tested every other US president since Carter, and let’s face it. Obama ain’t scarin’ nobody right now.

Fortunately, this particular but not totally unexpected production of Iranian political theater has now ended with Iran’s magnanimous ‘gift’ of Roxana Saberi’s freedom. You know. Like the British getting their Easter ‘gift’ of their own sailors back. My heroes. The Easter Bunny’s got nothin’ on them, huh?

Though President Obama called Iran’s merciful end to this sordid and cruel international affront ‘a humanitarian gesture’, it has been anything but from the beginning. If anything, this tormenting episode of international injustice and flouting of the law should prove just how unworthy a diplomatic partner Iran is. See, diplomacy requires both sides to be civilized to work, and the backstory on Iran’s regime, as with Roxana’s story there, is as uncivilized as it gets.

And let’s be clear here. I am not advocating war with Iran, though what they’ve done and continue to do makes me feel very warlike. But I am advocating that the ugly truths about Islamist extremist Iran be put on display for all to see. Nobody else seems to be interested in covering Iran’s abominable human rights situation. Is that too much to ask from Your Most Humble and Obedient Critic? Despite the nightmare we, Roxana and her parents had to endure, Roxana’s one of the lucky ones.

In order to understand RATS in toto, we must look at the whole backstory of Islamist Iran since 1979 to put Roxana Saberi’s ordeal into its proper context today. I’ve been following Islamist extremist Iran for thirty long years, starting with the US Embassy Hostage Crisis on November 4th, 1979.  See, I knew that date because I was due by legal contract to head for boot camp on November 13th, which I did. You remember things like that. You know. Heading for boot camp, heading for war.

Especially when it was peacetime when you signed up.

It sure looked like war at the time. Yet strangely, war didn’t happen. President Carter was too busy gnawing his nails down to the knuckles for 444 days, with one abortive rescue mission in between gnawings. If I were President back then, I would have at least started taking out Iran’s military facilities with B-52s if we didn’t get the hostages back. Ronnie got ‘em back right away after he became President on January 20th, 1981. I think they knew The Gipper would have bombed them to Hell to free our hostage citizens. He was that kinda guy.

A smart move on Iran’s part. But even Reagan suffered greatly from the Iranian thugocracy’s proxy terror attacks from Hezbollah, like the Marine Barracks bombing in Lebanon that killed 241 US servicemen on an international peacekeeping mission there. See, Iran just moved their terrorization of Americans and others into the shadows, letting their Brownshirt Hamas and Hezbollah goons do all the dirty work outside Iran. You know. Like Hitler’s used to do.

In fact, every president since Carter has been tormented by Iran, Obama no less. Clinton had the Khobar Tower bombings in 1995. For W, it was Iran-paid and trained militias and EFP IEDs in Iraq, killing and wounding hundreds of American soldiers. No Hope For Change with Obama on that score either, it would seem. Or with Iran’s supplying the Taliban with weapons.

And we are far from alone in the category of Iranian death and devastation. Iran’s thugocracy is currently being held accountable for the worst terror attacks in Argentina’s history, including one former Iranian ‘diplomat’ now running for high office and wanted by Interpol for his involvement in the bombing. See, that’s the reform candidate for president in Iran.

Welcome to Extreme Politics in Islamist Iran. Al Capone and The Joker would fit right in.

But why Argentina? I can understand the whole Great Satan thing, but what did Argentina ever do to Iran? Was the Iranian thugocracy pissed about Argentina no longer supplying WMD components and nuclear supplies, which Argentina cut off in 1992, the year the terror attacks began?

Or was it because of Argentine-born Jews? And all Jews everywhere deserve to die, and in the greatest numbers possible? Maybe it was a twofer. You know. Like Death To America and Death To Israel. They love that stuff, at least enough to paint it on all their missiles.

It’s right up there with “Death To The Jews!” Or partying with their BFF O-Bash.

Then again, do terrorists REALLY need a reason? I think they’re more than content to watch the world burn. Look what Iran’s Islamist Nazi thugs do to their own people! Seventeen-year-old Nazanin Fatehi, sentenced to death for stabbing and killing her and her niece’s would-be rapist in a park in Tehran. One thirteen-year-old girl stoned to death for being raped! Gays hunted down and exterminated. As bad as we, Israel, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and the rest of the world have had it from Iran’s terror-loving regime and its proxies, we’re the lucky ones.

Ahmadinejad was right about gays in Iran, you know. Just like Hitler was right when he said there were no Jews in Germany. The discussion’s pretty much moot. And Iran has now successfully exported their own Gay Holocaust to Iraq, which Bush should have stopped and Obama must.

Thus ends the prequel, and leads us straight to Roxana Saberi and today. I have a full recap of Roxana’s story from Day One here, in my BH piece bashing AMPAS and Hollywood over their dead silence and total absence in championing Roxana’s cause. Hell, Team Oscar was IN Iran when Clinton demanded Roxana’s release! You hear a peep out of any of them?

Roxana was BBC and NPR, not FOX! Wait, Mr. Snerdley tells me Roxana DID work for FOX on occasion. Okay, got it. The Hollywood blackout on Roxana all makes sense now. But Roxana is free, and that is all that matters. The rest, lessons learned. And that brings us to a few loose story ends.

What are we and the world now to think of the Iranian thugocracy’s brilliant facade of justice, showing us how merciful they can really be, and that they are truly nice guys after all if only we will be nice to them? Were Roxana the only story here? Maybe. But she isn’t. Not by a damn sight.

Iranian-American filmmaker Esha Momeni still faces her own kangaroo court tribunal for celluloid slanders, for her a women’s rights documentary. And former FBI agent Robert Levinson is nowhere to be found after two years The Iranian government even blocked efforts by the Swiss to track him down at our request. Wouldn’t even let them go to Kish Island to investigate. Hmm. Curious.

Most important of all, Islamist extremist Iran was, is and remains a human rights horrorshow, one of the worst in the world. Even bloggers pay for the wrong words with their lives, like Omid Reza Mir Sayaf, who died in Evin during Roxana’s unlawful detention there. And they seem just a bit too antsy to get nukes. That bothers me greatly. It’s one thing for Israel to have an arsenal. Would you want Hamas or Al Qaeda with a warhead? See, when it comes to nukes, Sanity Matters, okay?

My fear is, the world will look at the merciful end of this obscene miscarriage of justice, and cat-and-mouse toying with Roxana Saberi and us by Iran’s thugocracy, as the light at the end of a dark tunnel, whereas I see a freight train coming at us at full speed. Yet I have no power over those events. I can only report on them to the best of my abilities with what information I have.

Am I biased against Iran? You bet!

But not Iran’s freedom-loving people, who are suffering the most of anyone. The freedom-crushing and terror-sponsoring Shiite Islamist thugocracy is the real problem here. Just as it was with Hitler and his thugocracy of terror.

People need not to lose sight of what Iran’s Islamist thugocracy is really all about. And if you doubt my stern and brutal accusations, go look up the truth yourself. One Google search and you’ll be neck-deep in it. Then think of where this story is really going.

Now, on to the Heroes and Villains.

First up, the Good Guys and Roxana’s true BFF. Freeroxana.net, the North Dakota Legislature with their Free Roxana bill, the CPJ, The BBC, NPR and ABC with their 10,000-plus signature petition and strong words, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Iranian.com and too many others around the world to mention here. Roxana had, and has, no shortage of friends. I will even include the UK Guardian and Huffington Post, both of whom I’ve warred with, but which have long been on the Free Roxana Bandwagon with their peerless reporting on Iran and full support of Roxana.

I know, I know. But credit where credit is due.

Unfortunately, there was also no shortage of villains either, the greatest being the Iranian thugocracy itself, which unlawfully detained Roxana from the start, lied about Roxana’s release to SOS Clinton on March 6th, sent signals to Roxana’s parents as they left for Iran that Roxana’s release was being speeded up, only to land and see Roxana sentenced falsely to eight years for espionage, in closed session and without even a lawyer present. Broke everyone’s hearts.

Hitler had rigged courts like Iran’s that imprisoned and executed the innocent, and freed serial killers. How much further behind the curtain do you have to look to know the wizards are evil?

Yet I fully expect the Iranian thugocracy to use this ‘peace-seeking’ correction of an abomination of justice as a political and diplomatic club, or proof of their divine benevolence. Most likely both. And far too many will fall to their knees in gratitude over Roxana and agree. They don’t fool me. Then again, I’m not a fool when it comes to Iran. I’ve been watching their Islamist horrorshow for thirty long years. I’ll go by what history and my eyes and ears tell me, and not some clueless morons.

Speaking of which, Congress, The President, State, and the Invisible Press all pulled major disappearing acts on Roxana, when she should have stayed front and center after SOS Clinton’s demand for her release. Look at these unbelievable search results from March 20th, two weeks after Iran promised to release Roxana ’soon’. It’s like she was bad press the Obamamedia and government wanted swept under the rug.

No bill submitted to Congress in all that time in support of Roxana that I can find, only statements by Senators Byron Dorgan and Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Roxana’s home state. Too busy cleaning our pockets, I guess. Or calling us racist redneck teabaggers. Roxana who?

This whole sordid production also revealed to me how mile-wide and micron-deep Hollywood’s support for human rights really is. And I don’t mean Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Jim Carrey, George Clooney and the dozens of other real human rights and troop-supporting heroes of Hollywood.

I specifically mean the left-wing Looney Tunes Academy Of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which fancies itself as human rights champs. Name me one mention of Roxana Saberi from any prominent Academy member to date, even when Team Hollywood was in Tehran. Won’t find her anywhere in Team Oscar member William Horberg’s Iran blogging. No press releases. Yawn.

How about filmmaker Esha Momeni? Nope, no Esha. Or any mention of the Iranian regime’s hunting, party-raiding, online entrapping, torturing and slaughtering of gays that should have outraged them beyond measure but which they seem to have curiously overlooked, and not a week removed from their four-hour gay rights infomercial called the Oscars. They’re still silent about it!

It’s not like you really have to look for this stuff. And I know they know. I’ve told them. Repeatedly.

Wait a minute! Was Team Oscar on some super-secret Mission Impossible Thing for ObamaMan ? You know. “Should any member of Team Oscar be caught or killed, the President will disavow all knowledge.” Are they remaining silent and staying nice so they can infiltrate Iran again? If so, I apologize, guys. My only regret is that you all escaped unharmed. Maybe I should file an FOIA on that one. Why not? Shouldn’t be a problem. They seem to be just giving away secrets these days.

In summary, ‘Roxana: A True Story’ was a riveting, very uncomfortable and all too real life-and-death drama with plenty of ordinary citizen superheroes, Blofeld-like villains, Dr. Smith-like cowards and even a few Judases. Zeroes were Stars, and Stars were Zeroes. Yet this production should never have been staged in the first place. It should have ended after SOS Clinton’s demand. And Roxana’s happy ending is only one of far too few in today’s Iran. Too many play out like ‘Schindler’s List’.

On that note, how about we all start calling cruel, oppressive and violent nations for what they are, instead of what we wish them to be? It ain’t helping those who really need help. But a lot of people speaking up for Roxana helped save her. How about ‘Artists United Against Insanity’? Little Stevie’s still out there!

As to what the future brings, who can say? But Roxana is free now, so today I’m gonna have that symbolic piece of overdue birthday cake, and set aside my reporting for other endeavors. As to Iran, I will say Caveat Emptor to all. But I will spare you, in parting, one inevitable coming attraction to Thugocracy Studios already in production. It’s a sequel, actually. Or is it the third in a trilogy?

Stay Tuned!

First, the one of the main points of this fact-based opinion piece. And I know I’m going to catch hell from the Streisand and Brolin crowd on this one! Ronald Reagan was a hero to gays, and Obama has not been to date. I know, I know. The Evil Ronald Reagan, who practically invented AIDS? Reagan, the Adolf Eichmann of the Gay World? Not true. Not by a country mile!

In fact, Ronald Reagan was a better friend to gays and lesbians in his age than Barack Obama has been to gays in his. But don’t even go by what I say. I’m a right wing extremist, and very biased to what I believe. I admit it. Who isn’t these days? The press? LOL! But here are some irrefutable facts on The One and The Gipper I thought I’d throw out there. A gay buffet for thought, if you will. With swimming pools. And movie stars.

You may not know this, but like former presidential candidate Barack Obama, then-candidate Ronald Reagan faced a polarizing gay-related California ballot referendum of his own in 1978. It was called the Briggs Initiative, better known as Prop 6, and would have banned all gays and lesbians from teaching in California schools.

This, in an America not nearly as tolerant of homosexuals or gay issues back then as now. Just ask ‘em. I remember. I read the far left Boston Phoenix. It was free, why not? And I knew fag haters. Too many, actually. But I digress. Back to 1978 California, presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, gays and the Briggs Initiative, better known as Prop 6.

As Prop 6 appeared to be gaining steam as the vote neared, with State Senator John Briggs stoking fears of gay teachers in the classroom with the full backing of California’s right wing, gays and lesbians were terrified that Prop 6 might actually become law. In their darkest hour, they turned to a most unlikely hero and savior: former California governor and conservative Republican Ronald Reagan, then gearing up for his 1980 presidential run.

After hearing the group’s concerns, candidate Reagan not only agreed with them, but became the bill’s most public detractor, even penning a scathing op-ed against it in the now-defunct Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, in which he said the following:

“Whatever else it is, homosexuality is not a contagious disease like the measles. Prevailing scientific opinion is that an individual’s sexuality is determined at a very early age and that a child’s teachers do not really influence this.”

Ronnie also stated that the same laws regarding the safety of schoolchildren applied to ALL teachers in the state. How’s THAT for progressive thinking from a conservative Republican, in an America not eight years removed from the Stonewall Riots? With former two-time Governor Reagan’s stern and vocal opposition, Prop 6 lost by a million votes. And John Briggs lost his race for governor in the primaries.

In taking the bold stand he did, candidate Reagan completely alienated the right wing in California, which blamed him for both the Prop 6 defeat and John Briggs’ primary loss. It was an act of political courage on Reagan’s part that might not only have cost him electoral vote-rich California, but the Presidency itself.

As it turned out, Ronald Reagan took California by a handy seventeen points in his 1980 landslide pummeling of Jimmy Carter, sending the President back to his peanut farm in Georgia (if only he had stayed there). And you can bet a lot of grateful gays and lesbians remembered Ronnie’s championing their cause, and pulled the lever for The Gipper. But despite all that, Ronald Reagan was a conservative of his time. Tolerance did not mean acceptance.

Again, from the Independent Gay Forum:

Reagan: “My criticism is that [the gay movement] isn’t just asking for civil rights; it’s asking for recognition and acceptance of an alternative lifestyle which I do not believe society can condone, nor can I.”

Aside from his tolerant personal attitude, Reagan’s actual record on civil liberties for gays was surprisingly good. Cannon reports that Reagan was “repelled by the aggressive public crusades against homosexual life styles which became a staple of right wing politics in the late 1970s.

Though liberals may harangue Ronald Reagan as I’ve indicated, the fact remains. When gays and lesbians desperately needed him as they faced REAL institutionalized homophobia, Ronald Reagan was there for them, and in a major way that turned the tide completely in their favor. In fact, the openly gay Log Cabin Republicans were spawned from this huge political victory.

Now let us move on to candidate Barack Obama and his wishy-washy stand on Prop 8, the gay California ballot referendum of his time:

“I’ve stated my opposition to this. I think [Prop 8 is] unnecessary. I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage. But when you start playing around with constitutions, just to prohibit somebody who cares about another person, it just seems to me that’s not what America’s about. Usually, our constitutions expand liberties, they don’t contract them.”

The main point that seemed to escape candidate Obama at this time was that they WERE playing around with the California Constitution. I believe candidate Obama missed an opportunity here to take a bold stand on gay issues like Reagan did, and speak out against Prop 8 from the liberal Democrat POV. He was, and is, a very charming and charismatic candidate and President. No denying that. He could have used that charisma and charm to sway many minds over, and with a very simple statement that could have swung the Prop 8 vote the 3 points it needed to pass.

Example:

“Though I myself oppose gay marriage, I cannot let this Constitutional ban go unchallenged. Amendments that restrict rights instead of expanding them are un-American. Therefore, I oppose the passage of Proposition 8, and I hope you will, too. I will further state that I only support this measure as civil procedure.

“Churches and individuals that are morally opposed to gay marriage should not be compelled under legal threat or duress to participate. That is their right under freedom of religion. I would no more want gays invading the rights of churches, than I would want churches invading the rights of gays.”

But, no. What we got was candidate Obama wetting his finger and sticking it in the air. Just like Bill Clinton with his poll-driven morality, trying to have it both ways. Not much Hope For Change there with regard to Democratic presidents, it would seem. Even in office, the Obama Administration has been wishy-washy on pushing gay issues like Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. But I don’t really care about that. Obama and gay advocates can hammer out DADT, among many other issues.

But even as a straight man, I am VERY concerned about the officially-sanctioned extermination of LGBTs in Iraq on our dime, what I now call the Gay Holocaust in Iraq. What else do you call a specifically targeted pogrom, with the express goal of exterminating a segment of the population? If this were merely a death squad issue, that would be matter for the Iraqi government.

Unfortunately, the Iraqi government is neck-deep in the gay butchery themselves. Interior Ministry police hunt down gays in Baghdad, raid parties, hunt them online by using fake foreign IP addresses (as Iran does),  then tortures and exterminates them in the worst possible ways. Just as Iraqi Spiritual Leader Ali al-Sistani declared they should be, in his 2006 fatwa of death against Iraqi LGBTs. Though removed from his website after controversy, the fatwa is still in full effect.

Allow me at this point to question the spirituality of a religious leader favoring any pogrom, or stating that ANYONE should die in the ‘worst possible ways’.

Here is one former Mahdi Army member who now makes a career of being a gay death squad ’surgeon,’ cutting out the cancer of homosexuality the Americans brought with them to Iraq. His words, not mine. Also, one particularly subhuman technique of killing gays, now quite popular with Iraq’s most pious Shiite extremists, is to super-glue a gay man’s anus shut, pump him full of a diarrhea-inducing compound, and have a few laughs as the victim suffers unbelievable agony before dying. The Iraqi tribes also now have carte blanche to exterminate any Iraqi LGBTs they find.

Unfortunately, this Gay Holocaust of Iraqi LGBTs, which has already claimed nearly 500 innocent lives in the most gruesome of ways since the 2003 invasion, and is now ramping up in violence and horror by the day, enjoys wide public support in Islamic Iraq. Just take a look at this recent report, also from Common Ills:

This morning AFP is reporting that signs are going up around the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad threatening to kill a list of people alleged to be gay. The posters are put out by the Brigades of the Righteous and AFP translates the posters as stating, “We will punish you, perverts” and “We will get you, puppies” has been scrawled on some posters — “puppies” being slang for gay males in Iraq. The Australian carries the AFP report here. These posters are going up around Sadr City. Where is the United Nations condemnation? Where is the White House, where is the US State Dept?

Very good questions, to which you may not like the answers. I know I don’t. Here’s State’s response to this worsening gay horrorshow in Iraq, again from the Common Ills blog:

Noel Clay, a State Department spokesperson, said U.S. officials “condemn the persecution of LGBTs in Iraq,” but he couldn’t confirm whether the violence they’re facing in Iraq is because of their sexual orientation. Clay noted that while homosexuality is against the law in Iraq, the death penalty is not the punishment for homosexual acts.

Now I don’t know who Noel Clay is, but I do now know that Inspector Clouseau is Einstein by comparison. I’m finding too much evidence. I don’t even have to look! How dangerously stupid is Noel Clay, to be in that lofty position as State and be so ignorant of the facts? Is he just stupid? Or worse, is it willful ignorance?

To be fair, this gay horrorshow started on President Bush’s watch. He should have done far more to nip it in the bud in 2006 after Sistani’s fatwa. In my mind, that will remain a black mark on his record. He should have put a stop to it, instead of letting it fester to the point it is today. All that said, this issue is now fully the Obama Administration’s and Congress’ problem lock, stock and barrel.

So where is President Obama? Secretary Clinton? Madame SOS said she would stand with ALL the Iraqi people! Where is she on this issue, so near and dear to gay hearts? Nothing on State’s main or Iraq pages. Even Queerty, a major gay blog, is slamming Hillary on this issue. How bad is that? Where is our Gay Rights Hero President on our American tax dollars subsidizing a Gay Holocaust?

What are we fighting for there? Freedom? What are we defending Iraq from? Islamist extremism? Starting to look like a lost war to me! And I supported President Bush every step of the way on this war, even when he was getting hammered for it by everyone! I believed the Iraqi people deserved a shot. For the first time in six years, I’m not so sure anymore.

I look at it this way. Either the Iraqi government and people can put a stop to this Auschwitz-like Gay Holocaust in Iraq, or I say withdraw and let Al Qaeda in Iraq take over. Certainly wouldn’t make life any worse for Iraqi LGBTs. And they can ALL share in the terror they enjoy so much! Hell, I’d even be willing to help and support Al Qaeda do just that! But only this once. You know. Like a Christmas armistice. Wouldn’t be the first time we helped Al Qaeda fight terror.

A brilliant strategy on fighting the war on state-sponsored Islamist terror too, if you think about it. Not only would Iran lose its considerable Iraqi Shiite power base, a supreme Sunni Al Qaeda in Iraq would be a mortal foe, and would no doubt be plotting 9/11s for Tehran and elsewhere in the Islamic Republic. As a bonus, Iraq Shiite extremists like the ’surgeon’ and all his gay-butchering Islamist Nazi pals would be the first to be hunted down and exterminated by a supreme Al Qaeda in Iraq. They could ALL enjoy some open-air surgery and super-glue enemas!

How Joker-like blackly comic great would THAT be?

Considering Iran has now seemed to have successfully exported their own Gay Holocaust to Iraq, how Joker-like great would all that be, too! I say let a Sunni extremist Iraq and Shiite extremist Iran turn each others’ nations into bombed-out wastelands of terror. And without the loss of one American life or dime. It’s one idea, anyway. Another hor d’ouevre for thought. And it couldn’t happen to nicer guys. Unless, of course, the Iraqi people decide to refrain from their most-popular anti-gay pogrom and join the civilized. Otherwise, I see no point in defending them any longer.

It sure would be nice to see others speaking out against this taxpayer-funded gay horrorshow in Iraq. Like our Gay Hero President, for example. Knowing Ronnie as I do, I’m sure he wouldn’t stand for this kind of abomination in any nation being rebuilt with American taxpayer dollars, or protected by American soldiers.

Congress, State and The White House really need to hear about this LGBT horrorshow in Iraq, loudly and repeatedly. Short of war, there’s nothing we can do about Iran’s Himmler-like extermination of gays. War works for me, though. But Iraq is ours. We broke it, we fix it. And you could not have much more severe of a breakage in Iraq than a Gay Holocaust. This is 100% Obama’s and the current government’s problem now. Those gay anal super-glueings started on their watch.

Time to stop it. Like right now.

Also, since Hollywood pretty much propelled Obama into office, why don’t you get on the horn to the gay and human rights chumps at AMPAS? See if they can give their best bud and Gay Rights Hero Obamamessiah a shoutout. Then again, considering AMPAS’ and Hollywood’s own deafening silence on Roxana Saberi and Iran’s Gay Holocaust, maybe we’d better wait until the next Oscars for them to champion “gay rights for everyone” again, like Penn and Black so tearfully pleaded for.

That stuff looks SO good on TV, doesn’t it? Just like President Obama and his so-called championing of gay rights, which appears to be totally MIA on EVERY gay rights issue. Hell, I’m a Reagan Republican, and I have a better record on this issue than all of them combined! I don’t care that they’re gay! They’re innocent human beings, and they’re being horribly tortured and brutally exterminated! Do you have to be Jewish to be totally repulsed by Auschwitz?

Based on Reagan’s record, I believe The Gipper would have put a stop to that shite and ordered American troops to hunt down the death squads, as American GIs once hunted down the SS ‘werewolves’ in postwar Berlin. I also believe he would have pummeled al-Maliki’s Shiite government over the issue as well. Which only makes the silence by the Obama Administration and Congress on this issue more profoundly deafening. O Gay Rights Hero President, where ARE you?

Oh  and if any of you ObamaBots believe anything I’ve said here is fantastic or untrue, look it up yourselves. I’m tired of spending hours researching and linking stuff I already know inside out. Plenty out there on all this gay horrorshow stuff, in both Iran and Iraq. Too much, actually. The Internet’s glutted with it! You just have to look. And not the other way, as even the Invisible Press seems content to. Look at how few in the MSM are reporting on this abomination. Gay blogs, mostly, along with the BBC and some S.F. TV affiliates.

The rest I leave to you. And our Gay Hero President and Congressional gay rights champs. Ya, As if. Too busy saying Israel needs a tougher line. Um, excuse me?

Goddamn, I miss Ronald Reagan. He stood up even for those he totally disagreed with. This bunch won’t even stand up for those they profess to champion! I guess that part I must leave to you, Dear Readers. Won’t you speak up for those who can’t, to those who should be and aren’t?

Do it for Ronnie! This is the ULTIMATE in taxpayer issues!

And somebody wake up Perez Hilton. Bigger problem here than Miss California, methinks. See if she can’t get the Prop 8 crowd as rabid on the horrific slaughter of Iraqi and Iranian gays as they are with the Mormon Church and us! I’ve sent him a dozen emails on this stuff. Crickets! My Gay Hero.

And just to show I’m not partisan or picking on Perez here (which is just too easy to do), the Log Cabin Republicans linked above need a shoutout, too. I’ve been cc’ing them on all my Perez Hilton emails. None too pleased with their response, either. Time to step it up. Hell, they’re the gays here! Why do I and only a handful of REAL gay advocates have to be the ones screaming to the skies about all this gay horrorshow stuff?

Hmm. Interesting question, indeed.