Megan Fox adjusts her "talent" before their next scene.

1. Dear Hollywood: Stop The Age Discrimination

Age discrimination is a problem in Hollywood. Seriously, what is the fascination with jamming twenty-somethings into every role? It doesn’t work. These young girls simply don’t have the maturity or the depth to play the parts of women. It strains credibility beyond the breaking point when they cast some silicon enhanced girl to play the nuclear scientist or the head of a corporation or. . . well, any woman in a position of authority. I know powerful women, professional women, and women with a great deal of maturity, and none of them look or act anything like Hollywood seems to think.

And please stop casting girls as the wives of old, old, old male actors. It’s creepy. Teri Garr and Richard Dreyfuss worked in Close Encounters because they looked like a couple. Septuagenarian Harrison Ford married to Megan Fox doesn’t. Not only can we not see them getting together in the first place, but we can’t see them as a “normal, loving couple.” Instead, the words “gold digger” and “cradle robber” and even “grave robber” come to mind. And holy cow, stop casting “mothers” who are only a year or two older than their movie “daughters.” Was there a plague in Hollywood that wiped out all the women over 40?

2. Dear Hollywood: Stop Cloning Actresses

Hollywood also needs to end its cloning experiments. It needs to stop rejecting actresses if they have the slightest trace of individuality or if their bone structure is 1% off the model. Seriously, this makes it impossible to cast people who look the part. Forget the nuclear scientist mentioned above, what about the average waitress or the mother of three or the cop? Real women don’t look, act or dress like Malibu Strip Club Barbie™. This is the female equivalent of casting only musclemen as extras, and is again kinda creepy.

"We are the Borg. We are ready for our close up."

More importantly, by casting clones, Hollywood guarantees that few modern actresses will be memorable because it’s the distinct actors we remember. Indeed, few of the top male actors fall into the “pretty boy” category. Outside of a Redford, a DiCaprio, or a Cruise, few leading men look anything like male models. Bogart was a small man with a crooked face and a lisp. Stallone looks like he lost a fight with a blender. Bruce Willis beat the blender, but it took 12 rounds. Jack Nicholson is the blender. How about James Cagney, DeNiro, Bill Murray, Charles Bronson, Steven McQueen, Clive Owen, Benicio Del Toro, Alan Rickman, Adrien Brody, Daniel Day-Lewis, Dustin Hoffman, Tommy Lee Jones, Richard Dreyfuss, etc. . . not a standard profile in the bunch. And when you get into character actors, the defects and distinctions multiply. . . Steve Buscemi anyone?

I’ll bet you could visualize each of these men as you read the names. Why? Because these men are memorable. They weren’t cast because they are pretty to look at, they were cast because they are distinct — they stand out both in looks and personality.

Believe it or not, the same thing has always been true with the great actresses as well. Look at the actresses we remember. Few of them can be called “classic beauties”: Lauren Bacall was rather butch, as was Katharine Hepburn, and is Sigourney Weaver. Lucille Ball was hardly a looker. Sophia Loren and Julie Andrews were beautiful, but not in a beauty queen sort of way. Loren was gorgeous and wild. Andrews had “girl next door” beauty. Betty Davis, Barbara Eden and Angela Lansbury all looked 60 the moment they were born. We remember these actresses because they stood out, i.e. because they were different. What’s more, we feel we know them because their personalities come across so strongly on the screen.

Now tell me how many of these you can visualize: Scarlet Johansson, Kate Hudson, Rosie Whitely, Cate Blanchett, Elisha Cuthbert, Rachel McAdams, Kristen Stewart, Jessica Biel, and Elizabeth Shue Banks. I doubt most people could pick them out of a line up and none of them have memorable personalities. In fact, most actresses today are so interchangeable that I wonder if anyone would notice if you swapped a couple out in the middle of the film. . . “hey, weren’t you blonder before?” And even when they do stand out, it’s usually for the wrong reasons: Megan Fox. . . idiot, Lindsay Lohan. . . train wreck, Anne Hathaway. . . bleached by aliens.

Unfortunately, because Hollywood is looking purely for beauty, they aren’t finding great actresses anymore. To me, the test of a great actor/actress is whether or not they could have taken on a great role. For example, could any of the actor/actresses listed above replace any of the guys in Glengarry Glen Ross? The male actors listed above could have done it. Hepburn, Bacall, Weaver, Davis, Eden and Lansbury could have done it. . . Julie Andrews, probably not. But what about the modern actresses just listed? Don’t make me laugh. Nor could any of them have taken over for Bacall in To Have and Have Not or Hepburn in The African Queen. Sure, they can all take over Megan Fox’s role in Transformers or whoever’s role in the next romantic comedy, but that’s about it.

3. Dear Hollywood: Stop Lying About Strong Roles

Finally, we come to the issue of strong roles. Hollywood actresses have complained for some time about a lack of strong roles for women in Hollywood. I think their complaints are valid. But Hollywood doesn’t know how to fix the problem. So instead, they try to redefine the problem. Now we’re told about an El Guapo-like plethora of strong roles involving action heroines. But this is nothing but el toro kaka public relations.

Imagine you are a director and you want your daughter to have a “strong role” in your film. Here you are describing the role: “Basically, you put on a tight leather cat suit and some S&M gear. Then you run around shooting at people and flashing your chest and your butt. I will collect money from men who will reeeally enjoy watching you jiggle and bounce across the screen. Sound good pumpkin?”

"For an extra $10, I'll do an empowerment table dance."

Hollywood apparently sees no problem with this, as that pretty much describes most roles given to female action stars. But how is this a strong role? These women are acting out an adolescent male sexual fantasy. They might as well be in Hustler.

A strong role is one you would be proud to let people watch. It involves playing a character that either brings out strong emotions in the audience or it involves being the kind of person people respect. That means using your wits and maintaining your moral code in the face of adversity and pressure to surrender. It means overcoming the obstacles you face through strength of character. The leather-clad dominatrixes and slinky spies are not demonstrating some strength of character within themselves, they’re selling sex.

Mommas don’t let your daughters grow up to be actresses. . .

Am I right? What actresses would you say are great? And don’t you find it a little bit strange that a place as liberal as Hollywood would be so openly sexist and ageist? Hmmm.

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

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

However, once Obama was elected and began pushing his radical agenda, while simultaneously surrounding himself with advisors who should never have been allowed within a mile of the White House, Henry began feeling his oats.  Suddenly, with the Democrats in control of the House, he was no longer a back-bencher.  He even got to have his name on a piece of major legislation, the Waxman-Markey Cap & Trade bill, a singular disaster that would send all of our energy costs soaring while simultaneously providing China and India with a tremendous advantage over what remains of our American industry. 

That was bad enough, but even after those notorious ACORN videos aired on Glenn Beck’s TV show, Waxman and 74 of his left-wing cronies on Capitol Hill voted to continue funding ACORN, and that cut the Gordian knot for me.  At that point, even old school ties weren’t enough to dissuade me, and, in a very sad frame of mind, I wrote the article. 

An hour or so after it was posted, I received an email from Waxman’s office in Washington.  It began: “Dear Burt, I can understand that we have disagreements about politics.  I can see that you have some embarrassment about our past friendship, but you are not responsible for me and I am not (thank G-d) responsible for your views or actions.  But I do resent that whatever I may have said to you in a conversation years ago is now being dredged up (and maybe made up) to make me look bad.  I never thought I had to remember things I may have said to you to be provocative at the time, would be repeated and distorted, as if it were ‘on the record.’” 

(Note:  Just for the record, I made up nothing and I distorted nothing.  What I said he said about the steroid-using baseball players he called before his committee was exactly what he said; namely that he had no idea they were even famous until he saw his fellow congressmen lining up for their autographs; and, in response to a question I posed strictly out of curiosity, replied that he had no idea how long after an athlete stopped using steroids, they would continue to show up in drug tests.  Besides, neither of those statements is particularly provocative.  They merely indicate how unqualified and unaware a congressman can be and still feel himself entitled to sit in judgment of other people.  The other thing I addressed in the article was Henry’s boasting that he and his colleagues were going to investigate Fox for biased news reporting, and my responding that I thought it was a swell idea so long as they then did the same with the NY Times, the three major networks, CNN, MSNBC and the Washington Post.  That time, I even had a totally impartial witness, my wife Yvonne.) 

Responding to his first paragraph, I wrote:  “Dear Henry, I don’t blame you in the least for being angry.  But you can imagine how I felt when I saw your name included with the other 74 Democrats who voted to continue funding an organization as corrupt and vile as ACORN.  For the life of me, I could not think of a single reason why you would wish to align yourself, even for partisan political reasons, with a group that has not only been guilty of election fraud, but, as those now famous videos made clear, have no objection to assisting a pimp to set up a brothel.  And not just any brothel, but one employing abducted 13-year-old girls from Latin America.  Also, I did send you a note some months ago wishing you a speedy recovery when I heard that you had been rushed off to the hospital, so even though you never acknowledged it, it would suggest I’m not entirely heartless.” 

Waxman’s email went on: “As I recall our poker friendship, you used to keep a card with every cent I ever lost to you to be sure you were paid.  When you sent out a letter pleading for your friends to help you out at a difficult financial time in your life, you promised that you would repay every cent.  I sent you $100.  I never asked you for the money, nor have you offered to repay it.  I did not want to embarrass you then or now.  But since you have no hesitation to try to publicly hold me up to scorn, I see no reason not to ask you to repay your debt to me.  I would like to use that money to donate to the ACLU or some other group that will defend your rights, along with everyone else, to free speech and other Constitutional protections.  Sincerely, Henry Waxman.” 

To this, I replied, “The card you mention was not for poker losses.  Those were always minimal because none of us had any money, and were invariably paid off at the end of the game.  The card was to keep track of the money I loaned you, and which you took an extremely long time to repay.  It was to help you continue playing blackjack during one of our occasional trips to Tahoe or Vegas.  I am truly sorry, though, that I did not pay back the $100.  That was an oversight because in moving from one rental to another, as circumstances forced us to do several times once Hollywood ageism made me unemployable, I lost the IOU list.  When, some years later, I was finally able to earn some money, I did pay back those whose names I remembered and those who subsequently reminded me.  I regret that I forgot your generosity.  I will have the check in the mail to you this afternoon.  You are free, of course, to donate it to the ACLU, to ACORN or even to help pay for Nancy Pelosi’s next facelift.  It’s your money, after all, unlike the money that Waxman-Markey will cost American taxpayers and American businesses.  Regards, Burt.”) 

Do I regret that Henry Waxman is one of 250-odd Democrats who are only too happy to rubberstamp every piece of legislative lunacy concocted by Obama, Axelrod, Emanuel, Jarrett, Holdren, Jennings, Sunstein and Jeff Jones?  Of course.  Do I regret that Henry Waxman has so totally lost his moral compass that even when 172 of his fellow liberals  voted to stop funding ACORN, he stood steadfast with the sleazebags?  You bet.           

Worst of all, he probably sees it as being politically courageous.  On the other hand, normal human beings, who haven’t spent most of their adult lives feeding at the public trough, recognize it as aiding and abetting.