I thought that perhaps it would be an interesting project to take an informal poll of Big Hollywood readers – conservatives, libertarians, and individuals who subscribe to other improper schools of thought – who work in the entertainment industry and feel out of sorts. We should keep it simple, so let’s start with something like this:

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Industry: Publishing

Position: Author

Status: Just keep my mouth shut

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Industry: Music

Position: Mixer

Status: Out of the closet and out of work

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Industry: Art

Position: Sculptor

Status: Lost some friends, but feeling empowered

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Please post in the comments section. I am especially curious about the percentage of people who feel they have no choice but to hide their political beliefs for professional reasons. If you want to email me a brief explanation, please put “Big Hollywood Poll” in the subject line and keep it as short and simple as possible. I have no idea what’s behind the floodgates that I’m prying open, so be patient with me.

Let the confessions begin!

The Wrap:

Kevin Spacey credited federally funded arts programs for his successful career and called for the federal government to continue its support for public arts programs.

The Academy Award-winning actor made his remarks Monday at the 24th annual Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

Spacey delivered the speech to a coalition of organizations who are in the to the nation’s capitol this week to participate in Arts Advocacy Day.

He related his own story of growing up as a child from South Orange, New Jersey, from a modest background with a lack of self-confidence. He got a major boost at age 13 when he was asked to perform a scene in a play and actor Jack Lemmon praised his performance and encouraged young Spacey to pursue his dream of becoming an actor.

“I would never had had that experience If I had not grown up at a time when there was enormous support for the arts in the United States,” Spacey said.

We fund the arts, we fund abortions, we fund NPR and PBS, we fund public unions that work against our own interests…

Is it 2012 yet?

The beauty of having a central gathering place online is the great networking and collaborations taking place.  Case in point, one of our gifted members, Joe Dan Gorman, who has some great, hard-hitting conservative messages in his songs and videos (a couple of which YouTube has banned – “You(Tube) can’t handle the truth!”…this will be a topic for another day), recently wrote and produced a new music video entitled We Will Not Submit and invited some of our members to join him in recording some back-up vocals for the song and taking part in his video, and it is already getting tons of great reviews and being aired on conservative internet and AM/FM radio stations across the country.

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Other recent collaborations include  AlfonZo Rachel, Nate Smoove, and Rufus Troutman on their latest song, Government Not the Answer.  Bobby Powers and Party Time, my songmate, BigDawg, and I recently collaborated on Freedom Reigns and performed an acoustic version at our CPAC Liberty Fest.  Several other cool collaborations are currently underway between members of our site – something BigDawg and I are thrilled to see.

We are not just about music, though.  We have also attracted filmmakers like Wendy Goldman and Becky Best, of Crusader Pictures, who are currently writing the script for their Feature Film Comedy, An Incorrect Man: “a comedic look at a world overrun with political correctness and bloated bureaucracy, where one man makes a stand—and gets hammered”…and are seeking support via a site called Kickstarter which enables everyday citizens to get involved in projects such as this one.  They will be filming in Nashville, as music will play a large role in their project and they look forward to working with some of our site members.

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Thanks to the wonders of modern technology and “Al Gore’s Internet,” these collaborations are taking place without members actually working together face-to-face which should encourage those of you who think you need a lot of cash, a band, a fancy studio, or production company to make things happen…and things are, indeed, happening. 

BigDawg Music Mafia is fast becoming the “go-to” place for conservative organizations looking for talent for their upcoming events and projects.  Fellow culture warrior and radio talk show host, Jason Worley, has requested some music for his Denver-based radio show, Grassroots Radio Colorado on 560 AM, KLZ and member Melody Himel Scalley, host of Politics on the Edge on 103.3 FM, WESR, is using one of my songs to open her show.  Liberty Bell Radio has also had a few members on their show and has been playing our members’ music.  Mark Skoda, who just launched a new radio show and television station (to be syndicated) in Memphis, will be teaming with us on upcoming projects.  California-based radio host, Alana Burke has also joined our site and will be inviting members to share their music on her show.  We’ve also been approached by NBRN.FM, a Nashville radio station, for some of our music for their broadcast rotation, and by a media company looking for talent for a project they are working on.  We were just recently approached for possible teaming with media company Reload with Emmy-winning director Steve Feldman whose goal is to produce movies, television shows, and mobile device apps that are created from a conservative (Biblical) worldview.  Some of our members are also going to be performing at the Freedom Jamboree in Kansas City this Fall as well as a TEA Party vs Hollywood:  PUT-UP or SHUT UP Tennis Challenge For A Cure event that one of our members, Ruth Bryant White, is helping plan for October 2011 at Caesar’s Palace and The Darling Tennis Court.  This is a charity event being held in honor of Shannon Tavarez, the 11 year old star of Broadway’s The Lion King who lost her battle with leukemia last November.  The event will have TEA Party leaders and superstars challenging Hollywood and “Mainstream Media” personalities in tennis matches (including table tennis!).   I would so love to see Sarah Palin and Kathy Griffin duke it out.  No contest there!  These are just a few examples of how all the great networking is opening doors to our members…and we are just getting this party started!

The key to growing this movement of conservative culture warriors is agressive marketing and networking with other conservative organizatons.  I just had the great honor of representing BigDawg Music Mafia at an Emergency Conservative Leadership Summit in Washington DC at which over 50 TEA Party & other conservative leaders met to strategize a way forward toward 2012, to work together to keep eachother informed on the issues and what each respective organization is focused on.  I plan on staying fully engaged with these fine patriots to constantly drive our message home.

Still think it can’t be done?  Just watch us.  Got talent?  Join us.  Need talent?  We got that.  And to those who want us to “sit down and shut up”…we have a message for you:  “We will NOT submit”.

A senior official at the National Endowment for the Arts encouraged artists to promote President Obama’s political agenda in a conference call he organized with the White House. The NEA’s communications director Yosi Sergant eventually resigned in August amid accusations that the grant-making organization was becoming politicized. The administration called it a “teaching moment,” but the media didn’t seem to catch the lesson.

Read the full list here.

On August 28th, Josh Miller of Foxnews.com reported “Siobhan Dugan, a spokeswoman for [The Corporation for National and Community Service], said the call was organized by an ‘individual interested’ in the group…”

This statement does not correspond with the facts.

The FOIA documents clearly show that on July 29th at 3:39pm, Nell Abernathy, a representative of The Corporation, emailed Yosi Sergant, former Communications Director of the National Endowment for the Arts, indicating that she was the person behind the content of the meeting when she stated (emphasis added):

Thanks for chatting yesterday – I’m attaching a few docs and running through what I think are my next steps.

She goes on to discuss the “Art event coordination” and provides an invite and draft of the meeting agenda to Sergant. Abernathy also states, “What is a reasonable time frame for getting together a list and recruiting some of your friends to lead?” This is in direct contradiction to the above claim by Siobhan Dugan of The Corporation.

The FOIA documents also indicate that Buffy Wicks, Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, was the point person at the White House for this project.  This is seen in an email from Kalpen Modi, formerly Kal Penn of Kumar fame and now Associate Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement. When asked by Sergant to sit in on the August 10th meeting, Modi replied, “I thought you’d said Buffy was the [Office of Public Engagement] point person…” This supports the claim that Wicks was involved in the offline discussions of this arts effort.

The intentions of the meeting were made clear by another Sergant email correspondence. While inviting one of the participants, Sergant stated:

This call is for the people who can come up with a good idea and get it done. Little and big. They are putting together a network of the ‘producers & promoters’ out there like you and me… to turn on to activate on arts issues.

Organizing the art community so that they could be activated to address issues was the point of this effort. This was stated during the August 10th conference call and coincides with previous comments made by the White House including Buffy Wicks in a May 12th White House Briefing. Per the Briefing Notes:

She asked briefing participants to think through how their networks and organizations can participate in areas such as the arts in education, healthcare and preventative care, energy and environment, or economic opportunity.

This administration intends to make an unprecedented shift in its relationship with the arts, and that shift is to use the arts to persuade. We’ve seen this in the Entertainment Industry Foundation memo that encourage TV networks to incorporate the issues of health, energy, and the environment into their show story plots, as well as the August 10th conference call and May 12th White House Briefing.

Has the White House, The Corporation, or the National Endowment for the Arts backed off from this approach due to this controversy?

No.

Rocco Landesman, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, recently stated during his keynote speech at the 2009 Grantmakers in the Arts Conference:

Whatever might be said on television, radio or blog sites, I have no intention of walking away from the compelling themes of this presidency and a historic opportunity in arts policy.

A wise man recently told me, “There is no better way to show you’ve done nothing wrong than to continue doing what you are doing.” It appears that Mr. Landesman intends to put this statement to the test.

Big Hollywood will continue to investigate this arts effort.

Kerry Picket at the Washington Times reports today:

The Obama administration apparently met with 60 artists and creative organizers as early as May 12 according to an online document  (downloadable)by the Pratt Center for Community Development, State Voices, Arlene Goldbard, and the Nathan Cummings Foundation.  Other artists(link1 link 2)have corroborated this meeting happened. (h/t machogirl from FR)

Here are the bullet points from an online document called a “White House Briefing” report, though that has not yet been confirmed:

On May 12th, more than 60 artists and creative organizers engaged in civic participation, community development, education, social justice activism, and philanthropy came together for a White House briefing on Art, Community, Social Justice, National Recovery. …

Each of the sponsors of this meeting had been in contact with Yosi Sergant who was then an Associate with the White House Office of Public Liaison (and is now Communications Director of the National Endowment for the Arts.) Once we understood that a larger meeting would enable us to access more advisors and policymakers, it made sense to combine forces and invitation lists.

Then it gets creepy:

This group was inspired to further develop an idea that struck them during the briefing: the establishment of a new “Department of Alternative Thinking.” The DoAT would be a volunteer brain trust/think tank made up of the country’s most creative and maverick minds (thinkers, artists, innovators, and inventors). It would be set up as a free, public service to the White House and other government departments. The purpose of the DoAT is to integrate creative brain consultation (sideways thinking) into every aspect of governmental decision-making (whether it is the arts, the economy, healthcare, energy and environmental policy, international policy, national security, infrastructure, NASA, education, etc).

If this story proves true — and this document and two sources say that  it is — this is meeting/conference call #4 betwen artists and the White House.

How many more do we not yet know about?

You can read the full story here. The Washington Times also has a list of participants.