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.

We can see how this mentality applied itself to Gen-X filmmakers. When these future auteurs wanted to make a film they maxed out their credit cards (Smith,) or volunteered for medical experiments (Rodriguez) and shot with the cheapest supplies available.

For Andrew Breitbart the path tread has been comparable. How can one reform a corrupt media complex that’s in the Democrats’ back pocket? Become the Media. Control of NBC is not necessary to launch stories that result in the defunding of ACORN or a congressman’s resignation.

Breitbart was born in 1969 – almost the middle of Generation X. The first 100 pages of Righteous Indignation, his hybrid memoir-manifesto, trace a trajectory not uncommon to others now in their mid ‘30s to late ‘40s. Breitbart’s college years were a time of high grade slack, irresponsible gambling, chemical self-destruction, and Marxist indoctrination. Emerging out of the haze with a worthless degree Breitbart set about rising from the bottom of the Hollywood pecking order.

His job as a script deliverer meant shuttling packages around town while listening to the radio. This drew Breitbart into politics and the media, with the first blow to his anti-intellectual Hollywood leftism dealt during the Clarence Thomas hearings. The coup de grace came in the subsequent search for alternative answers when Breitbart dared tune his radio dial to someone he thought was a “Nazi,” Rush Limbaugh.

Then began a media voyage through the late ‘90s and first half of the ‘00s including apprenticeship with Matt Drudge during the Clinton years and constructing The Huffington Post while George W. Bush was in office. Righteous Indignation then shifts into manifesto form with two chapters that should be released as stand-alone pamphlets. Chapter 6 is “Breakthrough,” an accessible summary of the Left from Rousseau through Marx to the Frankfurt School and Saul Alinsky. In chapter 5 Breitbart lays out his rules of political warfare in his “Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Revolutionaries.”

The remaining chapters tell Breitbart’s narrative putting the Rules and the Breakthrough knowledge into practice to fight ACORN and defend the Tea Party.

What won’t you find in Righteous Indignation? Some manifesto of Breitbart’s political beliefs.

Breitbart is not driven by creating some “right-wing” utopia. He’s not obsessed with Liberalism vs. Conservatism as David Mamet is. He’s focused on disrupting and exposing the practical and concrete effects of the Left.

The takeaway from Righteous Indignation is that citizen journalists now have all the tools needed to bring down corrupt politicians, bad laws, and destructive organizations. Breitbart has bypassed the mainstream media gatekeepers just as his Gen-X cinema peers overcame the boomer blockbuster mentality.

The endowment of Generation X Hollywood Apostates is pragmatic independence: Ideology is not important. Dealing with the problems themselves in an effective way is what matters. Results matter. New institutions can and should be built.

In Part 5 of the Hollywood Revolt, we’ll conclude with a look at the future of both film and politics as a new generation rises and an old one is reincarnated.

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.

If I speak with some hostility about the Boomers’ failings and excesses it’s partially because that’s my nature as a Millennial/Gen Yer. According to William Strauss and Neil Howe’s books each generation acts as a check on the excesses of its parent generation. As young adults in the ‘60s and ‘70s the Baby Boomers declared war on the cultural institutions of their GI Generation parents. The GIs (born 1900-1924) are what Howe and Strauss describe as a “civic” generation; they were driven toward creating social harmony. The Boomers (an “idealist” generation) were a check on that, fomenting greater individualism in the 1970s and culture wars in the 1990s. That our electoral maps are so split today is their fault. When the Civic GI President Ronald Reagan won in 1984 it was almost a solid red map. My generation – also a Civic generation – is a reaction against Baby Boomer extremes and will seek to create greater social harmony. This will become much more apparent as the younger Gen Yers in junior high and high school now start to make waves in 10 years.

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet (born 1957) has been emblematic of the divisive Boomer paradigm for his whole career. His plays and films are famous for the “Mamet style” of short bursts of memorable dialogue and the mainstreaming of casual profanity.

And so in his book detailing his rightward shift away from a “Brain-Dead” Hollywood leftist, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, the reader finds this same mindset applied to the political essay. The need to divide the world into clear cut categories of Liberalism and Conservatism pervades the text. Mamet even capitalizes them to Emphasize the Great Importance of the Political War between Boomer Liberalism and Boomer Conservatism. Gone is Simon’s sense of skepticism in Turning Right at Hollywood and Vine.

The Secret Knowledge is a collection of 39 short essays. Mamet has crafted an experience like the signature Boomer film “Forrest Gump.” Life is like a box of chocolates – and devouring the delicious morsels of Mamet’s book is an addictive treat, filled with surprises. Who cares if it’s just a political sugar rush? Most conservatives are familiar with the bibliography Mamet cribs his ideas from: Sowell, Hayek, VDH, Friedman, etc. Thus they won’t learn anything life-changing but will still enjoy the thrill of Mr. Mamet’s Wild Ride. And if that sentiment doesn’t summarize the Boomer cinema of Lucas-Spielberg-Bruckheimer-Moore-Stone then what does?

The endowment of the Baby Boomer Hollywood Apostates is the call to fight, the drive to confront with big special effects, and the need to divide ourselves from the intolerable. This makes for satisfying blockbuster popcorn films and effective (James Carville-Karl Rove style) political warfare. While there is plenty to critique in the failings of the Boomer presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush credit must be given: the Boomer political strategists were masters. Too bad they wasted their brains on winning the electoral fights while ignoring (and sometimes exacerbating) the more vital policy fights.

In Part 4 of the Hollywood Revolt, we’ll see how the Gen X leader Andrew Breitbart is reinventing this confrontational spirit – what he calls Righteous Indignation — and redirecting it in a more pragmatic, effective way than the Boomers ever could.

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.

Part 1 of this series established the unique nature of the Hollywood Left with Ben Shapiro’s Primetime Propaganda. This West Coast socialist colony of wannabe revolutionaries is superficial and anti-intellectual in its politics. It’s this aspect of Hollywood leftism more than any other that destined Simon to one day escape.

Simon was a serious leftist and Turning Right establishes his credentials. The Civil Rights Movement was his first taste of activism. His second chapter describes a misadventure in 1966 when en route to integrate a segregated bathhouse in Myrtle Beach he encountered a racist Southern cop and severed his finger while changing a tire. Turning Right is filled with these narratives of the strange situations Simon’s leftist politics took him. One chapter recounts his journey through Red China, another his trip to the Soviet Union, another to Cuba. In one chapter Simon describes the KGB’s attempts to recruit him via a crime writers’ association front group. (Simon was the creator of the Moses Wine series of mystery novels, a hippie detective conceived long before the Coens dreamed of The Dude.)

This is a far deeper political experience than Simon’s Hollywood peers and in the hands of an award-winning novelist it makes for an infectious page-turner.

Simon did not have a Road-to-Damascus moment that pushed him to the Right. It was a slow surrender over the course of decades. He notes that by 1987 he was no longer a Marxist but still a man of the Left. During the 1990s the O.J. Simpson trial’s racial politics were another nudge. However, it was not until 9/11 that the Left’s disgraceful reaction pushed Simon to the edge and eventually overboard.

But did he emerge as a conservative?

I have often said that I’m uncomfortable being called a conservative—it’s so square—but these days I almost always find myself getting along more with conservatives on political issues—except for social ones, as you can tell.

On religion Simon identifies as an agnostic. His conservatism takes a similar open-minded, anti-ideological path:

What I am left with is a collection of ideas with which I have dabbled throughout my life, never fully discarding any of them, even though some are completely contradictory of others. I regard Marxism, Freudianism, libertarianism, laissez-faire capitalism, Zen Buddhism, Quaker pacifism, neoconservatism, neoliberalism, that whole galaxy of isms, as arrows in a quiver to be drawn at will, depending on the adversary or the necessities of the situation. That may sound dangerously close to yet another ism—cultural relativism—but I assure you it is not. I do think there is almost always a good and evil, a right and wrong—although often you have to look closely—and the relativist view of the world is at best lazy and at worst a stalking horse for fascism. Those arrows in my quiver are no more than an arsenal for helping me find that elusive truth. And perhaps for taking action. Sometimes one is not enough. Sometimes I don’t need or want any of them.

Such is the endowment that the Silent Generation of Hollywood Apostates: skepticism toward easy ideology and a celebration of serious thinking across the disciplines.

This is a different message than that of a solid Baby Boomer like the 1957-born David Mamet. In Part 3 of the Hollywood Revolt we’ll consider the lessons of Mamet’s exciting essay collection The Secret Knowledge.

Check out the new Chris Weitz-directed “A Better Life,” based on a screenplay written by Simon 20 years ago.

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.

This month, the Obama Administration will be making decisions that will have a major impact on the future of our country and economy.  From the upcoming debt ceiling fight to a possible government shutdown, March 2011 will be a big test to see if we can restore America’s fiscal sanity.  Generation Zero will give you the perspective needed to see how we got into this financial mess in the first place and what we can do about it.  Our leaders have a chance this month to address it before the next crisis occurs, if only they will listen.

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!

Their scheme is simple – if they can force their grandchildren to pay for premiums for services they don’t want, don’t need and won’t use for decades, that money can then be used by the insurance companies to subsidize the cost of insurance to the aging Boomers.  In effect, the grandchildren will be paying for their irresponsible grandparents’ while themselves being deprived of the money they would otherwise use to further their education, start a business or make a down payment on their first home (if they can get a loan from the banks their grandparents destroyed. )

Make no mistake about it, this generation is a generation of thieves and the people who stole their parents and their children’s money to make their own lives cushier are at it again.  This time the target is their grandchildren.

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.

W. exposed the soft march of a bloodless communist revolution in America by simply being, well, your typical decent, hard working, plain spoken, self-reliant American. He didn’t fit the mold of the modern American man that had been carefully cultivated through the dull 90’s and his actions were all meant to expose the true intentions of the left and boy did his administration succeed!

The side that makes the most noise usually has the most to hide — and my ears are still ringing from the onslaught of loud misinformation that came from the left to achieve political power in America once again. Ronald Reagan may be the first actor to have become President but Barack Obama is the first President who is in fact just an actor.

I was raised by my Mother and Stepfather, both proud JFK Democrats. Much to my surprise my stubborn stepfather begrudgingly voted for a Republican for the first time in his life when he voted for John McCain and Sarah Palin. (He’s 77, a Marine who fought in the Korean War. My Mother has voted for both Republicans and Democrats) Voters like him can be found hanging around American Legions and VFW’s all across America talking about the current state of affairs and many of them know something has gone terribly wrong with their party. But because of the very situation that President Kennedy warned about and Bush brilliantly exposed, these voters were silenced by a press with an agenda that wasn’t truthful and whose main goal was to captivate an entire generation of young idealistic voters and then impress upon them a role model that was carefully crafted to fit a certain marketing demographic. 

Many of our arguments against a President Obama didn’t stick for obvious reasons. First time voters would hardly care that President Obama has never run anything before because it’s likely that they haven’t either. And having such a high opinion of one’s abilities regardless of experience is what being young is all about. “Fake it until you make it” is an awful and damaging approach but widely accepted as the way in on the left and the young that are drawn to the left all know this and put it to practice without ever graduating to real skill and craft. They lay blame on everything but themselves for the sad state of American capitalism but never stop to consider that making an effort to be a good and decent person is a big part of what makes capitalism really work.

Another way to know we’re dealing with communists again is their multi-pronged attack on the very institutions that keep people directed towards attempting good and decent behavior in the first place without the need for government intervention; your local church. 

We must unite the senior citizen vote to the young conservatives and create a silent super majority that will be unstoppable in 2010 and 2012. Imagine the parents and the children of the baby boomers all shunning the childish behavior of these spoiled brat adults who have wholeheartedly embraced what is bad about human nature and refuse to even try for what is good based on the grounds that it’s all relative. I’d like to see the baton of decency handed down from the grandparents to the grandchildren, totally bypassing the selfish parents in the middle. 

So since the Democrats brazenly hijacked the image of Lincoln as the climax in their Distort American History Tour, let’s resurrect JFK as one of our own and remind them that even though he was assassinated it didn’t mean it was OK to ignore his leadership and his call to self sacrifice and his dream for “Man to be what he was born to be — Free and independent”