Click here for Part 1 on Ben Shapiro’s Primetime Propaganda, here for Part 2 on Roger L. Simon’s Turning Right at Hollywood and Vine and here for part 3 on David Mamet’s The Secret Knowledge.

A new kind of film emerged in the late ‘80s and first half of the 1990s to as an alternative to the mind-numbing noise of the Boomer Blockbusters. Smaller studios like Miramax rose to champion independent films. Generation X auteurs shaped by obsessive home video viewing – Quentin Tarantino, P.T. Anderson, Robert Rodriguez, Kevin Smith, and Darren Aronofsky – passed on the Hollywood path and instead built careers through low budget, DIY productions. “Reservoir Dogs,” “Sydney,” “El Mariachi,” “Clerks,” and “Pi” launched careers that would lead to Academy Awards and some of the most exciting films of the 1990s and 2000s.

These filmmakers’ origins are true to the generational temperament of their peers.

Children born in the ‘60s and ‘70s did not grow up in the affluence and tranquility of the 1950s consensus. Instead they took a backseat as the Consciousness Revolution of the 1960s raged. It was now when the younger Silent and Boomer Generations rose up to challenge the cultural institutions built and maintained by the GI Generation who fought World War II.

The children of this era were forced to become independent, entrepreneurial, and innovative early on. Unlike the Boomers growing up in the ‘50s and the Millennials in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Gen-Xers were not protected. The adults were too busy with the cultural chaos of the ‘60s and ‘70s to be the parents they should have been. Thus, Gen X knew that they had no one to rely on except for themselves. According to William Strauss and Neil Howe in their histories of American generations, this is standard for “Reactive” generations – and equips them for crises come middle-age. George Washington, John Adams, Ulysses Grant, Dwight Eisenhower, and Harry Truman were all part of “Reactive” generations too. (more…)

Click here for Part 1 and here for Part 2.

In many popular narratives of the period, it was the Baby Boomers (born 1943-1960) who “ruined” the movies. Here’s the pretentious film snob summary of the death of Hollywood’s alleged second Golden Age, as popularized by Peter Biskind. The seventies were filled with bold, dark art and transgressive intellectualism. Then the greedy Baby Boomers – like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas – made “Jaws,” “Star Wars,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” and “E.T.” All of a sudden Hollywood did not want to make serious, grown-up pictures. Now it was the age of blockbusters so simple that 3-year-olds can summarize them.

It was the 1980s when Boomer Blockbuster filmmaking would arrive in the event pictures of Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson. We see this tendency further in the films of arch-Boomers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer. For a definition of Boomer cinema just look at the output of their company Imagine Entertainment. These aren’t the New Wave-influenced pictures of Roger L. Simon’s generation.

It was the Boomers who also gave us our most strident and simpleminded cinematic leftists: Spike Lee, Oliver Stone, and Michael Moore. Think about these three careers. Over the past 30 years have any of them shifted an inch in their political thinking? Of course not and neither have most Boomers who are still arguing over sex, race, and the Vietnam War as though it were still 1975. (more…)

Read part one of this series here.

In William Strauss and Neil Howe’s Generations, the babies born 1925-1942 are classified as members of the “Silent Generation.” These were the kids who grew up during the crises of the Great Depression and World War II, entered young adulthood at the postwar high of the 1950s, and hit middle age during the cultural chaos of the late 1960s and ’70s. This life sequence puts them in Howe and Strauss’ “Adaptive” archetype, a recessive generation less populous in numbers than the ones before (the GI Generation) and after (the Baby Boomers.)

When this generation started making movies they transformed Hollywood. Peter Biskind’s 1998 book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and Rock ‘N Roll Generation Saved Hollywood lays out the popular narrative. The tail of the Silent Generation and the beginning of the Boomers (filmmakers born 1939-1946) put out major dramatic work that challenged the more bland conventions of mid ‘60s Hollywood cinema. The 1970s were the R-rated decade. Francis Ford Coppola made “The Godfather.” Martin Scorsese released “Mean Streets” and “Taxi Driver.” New serious actors like Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Jon Voight, and Robert De Niro delivered legendary performances. This was a film generation inspired by the French New Wave to treat movies as serious art.

Oscar Nominated-screenwriter, award-winning mystery novelist, and now Pajamas Media CEO Roger L. Simon was a member of this clique. Born in 1943, Simon is like others born at the edges of generations, a blending of both appears in his re-titled memoir Turning Right at Hollywood and Vine, recently released in paperback with new material. (more…)

The current economic crisis is not a failure of capitalism, but a failure of culture. Citizens United Productions’ film Generation Zero explores the cultural roots of the global financial meltdown – beginning with the narcissism of the 1960s which spread like a virus through the self-indulgent ’90s and exploded across the world in the present economic cataclysm.

Brought to you by award-winning writer and director Stephen Bannon, Generation Zero is the first film in the “Tea Party Trilogy,” which also includes Fire from the Heartland and Battle for America.  Featuring financial and cultural experts, authors, and pundits, including Lou Dobbs, Lawrence Kudlow, Tobin Smith, Victor Davis Hanson, Shelby Steele, Charles Krauthammer, Dick Morris, and Newt Gingrich, Generation Zero exposes the untold story of how the mindset of the Baby Boomers sowed the seeds of economic disaster that will be reaped by coming generations. Sean Hannity did an exclusive one hour special on Generation Zero, and the documentary has received extensive media acclaim. (more…)

My generation – the “Me Generation” – and those like us have stolen every last penny from our parent’s savings accounts (Social Security).   We’ve used that money to make ourselves appear successful and to vote ourselves more and more things we claimed to be “entitled” to.

When that money ran out, those of us who followed the mantra we were taught in the Leftist run public schools, “If it feels good, do it,” simply stole our children’s money, mortgaging their future for our personal comforts.  We’ve borrowed so much against their account that the numbers now are written in trillions – with each child born burdened with tens of thousands of dollars in debt – money we spent on ourselves — the moment they enter the world.

Now, with no more to steal from our parents or our children, many of us are demanding that we receive deeply discounted health-care services.  It’s something, we argue that we’re entitled to (for no other reason than that we’ve graced the world with our presence. )

The problem is that, forcing insurance companies to write bad policies – to take in in premiums far less than what they’ll have to dole out for the aging Boomers’ growing medical conditions – is untenable.  In fact, it is exactly the same formula these same Leftists used to force banks to make bad loans because they felt that everyone of their generation was “entitled” to own a house.

But the Boomers have a plan! (more…)

Whenever I stumble upon any media about JFK I’m always struck by how conservative he really was. By today’s standards, this speech would put President Kennedy squarely on the side of the Republican/Libertarian movement politically and on the receiving end of liberal media attacks worldwide. In an alternate reality I can imagine a young JFK giving this speech at CPAC as he preps for a White House run. Listen to this chilling warning about what we all know has already come to pass in Europe and is quickly creeping its way into mainstream American life unless we citizens act now to stop this train and derail it back into the ash heap of history.

President Bush’s 8 years in office was like someone taking a stick to a hornets nest that nobody knew still existed. He whacked it good and then paid the price with poisonous stings all over everything he tried to do. But the rest of us out there saw how the press and mainstream media reacted to him and that is how we came to clearly see what we’re really up against in the battle for America’s future. (more…)