Thank you to everyone who participated in the informal have you been ostracized? poll. The results were interesting. More “in the closets” than I expected, and as I read the words, “just keep my mouth shut,” I became rather angry that my fellow Big Hollywood readers feel bullied in the workplace. Because that is what it is: bullying. When a human being fears that he may lose his job if he has the wrong thoughts, he is being bullied. Period. It doesn’t matter if the taunts are in your face or hovering unannounced in the air, only a bully uses his size and power to intimidate others into toeing the line.

Several of you indicated that you have lost your job, left your career or been blacklisted, which is even more disheartening.

Graphic designers and people in advertising, according to the comments, feel compelled to keep a very low profile. It makes sense, because this is an industry where the work must be commissioned. In order to stay employed, the artist needs to stay in the good graces of the powers that be. (more…)

Every time I speak about my experiences with the publishing industry, someone taps me on the shoulder, eager to share a story of their own. It should not surprise me – Big Hollywood is a site dedicated to the biases of the entertainment industry – but I am moved by the instant camaraderie I feel for the individual standing before me. It is as if we carry wounds that only fellow political outcasts could possibly understand, and when one of us emerges from beneath the cone of silence, there is hope that another may do so at any moment.

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:

——

Industry: Publishing

Position: Author

Status: Just keep my mouth shut

——

Industry: Music

Position: Mixer

Status: Out of the closet and out of work (more…)

Not long ago, my wife and I had a dinner meeting with two business colleagues. To call it a dinner is actually a bit of a stretch. It was a tasting of appetizers for an event we would be hosting just a few days later. After about four rounds of bite-sized hors d’oeuvres, and a glass of wine with each, our male companions revealed that they were both gay. It wasn’t something they needed to tell us – my wife and I have highly evolved gaydars. Our line of work, friends, and proclivity for fashion tends to place us, happily, in gay-friendly environments.

At some point the conversation turned even more personal. “I feel comfortable with you guys,” said one, as he proceeded to tell us his coming out story. It was a fascinating and heartfelt account of a teenager who was dating a classmate, only to find himself attracted to her brother. The other, inspired by his colleague, also began spilling the beans on his very recent coming out. His was a relatively late confession for a gay man in his late 20s living in Los Angeles. Both accounts were different in many ways but carried a common theme – fear of judgment. Each had worried about how those around them would react to their admission. One had even lived among some who outwardly expressed, in vulgar terms, their vehement disgust for the gay lifestyle – an intimidating environment for anyone that has yet to publicly divulge their sexuality. The fear of losing friends and alienating family members was at times crippling, they both conveyed. There was a constant concern of whether those around them would shun, or embrace, who they were.

It wasn’t the first time I’d heard a coming out story, but this time something was different – their experience felt a lot like mine.

If you have a right-of-center worldview and live in Hollywood, you can understand what I’m saying. Coming to the realization that you don’t think the same, politically, as most of the people around you was a truth I came to just recently. When you first recognize this fact, one learns pretty quickly to tread lightly when the topic of politics is broached. There is nothing so telling as the look on the face of a liberal-minded Angelino as they first learn that you are from that other camp. That glazed look is unmistakable. At best, they are guarded when they speak to you next. At worst, they spread the word to those on their team, dinner schedules no longer show availability, and calls are no longer returned. It’s a soft bigotry that you have to experience to fully comprehend.

(more…)

The first time it happened I rolled my eyes. The second time I felt mildly irritated. And the third? Well, I was just plain pissed off.

In a six-month period, while reading novels for my book club, I encountered three instances of an author making some cozy reference to Karl Marx – Marx at the graveyard, Marx on the bookshelf, and fond memories of reading Marx on a carefree summer day.

If one of the characters had been a rabid history professor on a rant, or perhaps a teenage ideologue on a mission to destroy capitalism, then references to Karl Marx would have fleshed out the character and enhanced the story. But no such characters appeared in the three vastly different novels. The Marx references were superfluous. Those brief allusions, dangling mid-paragraph like a turkey’s wattle, seemed more like words meant to appease someone, perhaps to reassure the publisher that the author embraced the correct thoughts.

The prevalence of (what I think is misleadingly called) a progressive ideology within the publishing industry is no secret, but I was not fully aware of the scope and the depth of it until I slipped past a checkpoint and entered the exclusive community.

When a small publisher picked up my mystery novel in 2008, political harmony seemed irrelevant. Shortly after signing the contract, I attended a writers conference in New York and there my naive assumptions met their demise. At a cocktail party, an author made a scathing remark about a conservative politician and everyone clapped and cheered. I didn’t clap, and as I looked around I realized that I was the only one.

(more…)

Trust me, I am no Chelsea Hander fan, but GLAAD’s fascist war against humor and Hollywood rolling over most every time they crybaby over something, is an appalling assault on free and artistic speech.

THR:

E! Entertainment talk show host and comedian, Chelsea Handler, may have a problem on her hands after making several jokes about Dancing with the Stars competitor Chaz Bono on her show, Chelsea Lately, Tuesday night. The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) issued a request for Chandler’s apology on Wednesday.

“Last night’s episode of Chelsea Lately repeatedly made a mockery of Chaz Bono’s transgender identity when discussing the transgender advocate’s upcoming appearance on Dancing With the Stars,” writes GLAAD’s Associate Director of Entertainment Media, Matt Kane.

Kane points out that the “transphobic humor” started in Handler’s opening remarks and continued later in the show with her roundtable comedians, Fortune Feimster, Bill Bellamy, and Jo Koy.

“The Dancing with the Stars cast has been announced,” Handler joked in her opening remarks. “It includes Chaz Bono, otherwise known as Chastity Bono [laughs] before she got her penis [laughs].”

(more…)

Ever since I was a ten-year-old troublemaking punk growing up in the North Cambridge projects, I knew I wanted to be a writer. Not for fame and fortune. I didn’t even know or care about that back then. All I knew is that I wanted to get into people’s heads and mess them up the same way Edgar Allen Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, and Harlan Ellison got into mine. Better yet, scare the bejesus out of them like Joseph Stefano’s masterful Outer Limits series had me and millions of other kids hiding behind our sofas in terror. That’s all.

In 1985, I had my first writing success in the Northwest Pacific Writers’ Conference Ferry Tales contest. They wanted a story as relates to ferries, the major source of transportation between Seattle and ports all over the San Juan de Fuca Straits, so I gave them one: “The Midnight Shuttle,” the story of a man who gets wicked heartburn and decides to get some fresh air on the last ferry ride out of Bremerton, Washington, only to discover he had died and was on Acheron, the mythic ferry to Hell. I was neck-deep in dark stuff at the time, and I wanted to share the dread. Writers and Christopher Nolan will understand.

That story took second place, and Heloise was slated to hand me my award at a dinner in Tacoma. That is, until I committed my one and only DUI in celebration of my victory and spent the weekend in county jail instead. Such are the ups and downs of life as a writer. In 1998 I decided to pursue a career in screenwriting. In 2004 my first script, Ludwig the Great, a Pythonesque twist on the life of King Ludwig II, garnered a number of prestigious award noms and an invite to a red carpet awards gala at the WGA Theater in Beverly Hills. I met stars like Andy Garcia, comedic genius Barry W. Blaustein (a personal hero and inspiration of mine), and did I say there was an open bar? What more could an aspiring alcoholic hack scribe ask for? (more…)

Today in THR:

Separately, Di Bona has been trying to convince Hollywood that the only reason he allowed Shapiro to interview him was because he was purposely misled.

Di Bona told Daily Variety that Shapiro “misrepresented the nature of that interview and subject matter of his book.”

Shapiro responded by sharing a partial transcript from the interview, where he tells Di Bona the book is about “the social content of television.”

—–

Di Bona is one of several Hollywood executives Shapiro interviewed, and he is using video snippets of those encounters to promote the book, subtitled “The true Hollywood story of how the left took over your TV.”

In one video featuring Di Bona he confirms the anti-gun messages that were routinely inserted into episodes of MacGyver, a show he produced two decades ago, and in another [see above] he opines on the lack of conservatives working in Hollywood and adds: “I’m happy about it.” Those videos, along with others featuring different TV executives, were revealed by The Hollywood Reporter on Wednesday.

Contacted late Thursday, Di Bona sought to clarify things he said during his interview with Shapiro.

(more…)

This one goes out to New Blacklist-denier Patrick Goldstein of the L.A. Times….

PopEater:

Known around left-leaning Hollywood for her conservative stances on weighty issues like abortion and stem cells, ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’ star Patricia Heaton is happy to explain how important her Christian faith is to her and how it shapes her views and career choices. …

Telling me that she has many gay friends and doesn’t oppose gay marriage, Patricia gets frustrated being automatically lumped together with other conservatives, a characterization she says has cost her possible work.

“We know for a fact there are some people who have said they wouldn’t want to work with us because of our politics,” she said, with her husband David Hunt adding, “We get lumped in with lunatics.”

Who but the worst kind of ideological bigot wouldn’t want to work with Patricia Heaton, one of the most talented actresses to ever star in a sitcom? If an iconic Emmy winner is losing work over her perfectly reasonable right-of-center political positions, what’s life like for those just trying to break in or the 99.7% who live hand-to-mouth in this business of show.

(more…)

—–

Was questioning George W. Bush’s intelligence racist — a phony narrative Letterman himself relentlessly pushed?

Was digging into Bush’s National Guard records three-years into his presidency racist and off-limits?

Letterman knows Trump is no racist, he’s just trying to chill the billionaire into silence and at the same time send a ‘dog-whistle’ to his showbiz pals to follow suit. They all watched Obama’s poll numbers drop as Trump went after their precious one, and now they’re hurling around the word “racist” just as readily as McCarthy hurled “communist” in order to shut Trump up and shut him down. 

This is nothing more than a variation of the showbiz blacklist of the 1950s; the creation of a phony charge in order to intimidate into silence and marginalize a political opponent.   

(more…)

—–

You have to love how matter-of-fact the above discussion is. Short version: ”Yeah, the miniseries is fair and so we now know for a fact that Joel Surnow’s $30 million project was discriminated against because of his personal politics.”

Switch out the word “conservative” with Islam, gay, Black, female, Leftist or whatever and tell me how la-dee-da everyone would be about it. Of course they wouldn’t be — nor should they be.  But because everyone already knows how things operate for conservatives in Hollywood and either agree with the discrimination or are used to it, no one cares.

There’s also a bigger play at work here, the same play we saw in the fury ginned up by the Left prior to the release of the “Passion of the Christ.”  With the help of the mainstream and entertainment media, the idea is to make conservatives who engage in the culture so freakin’ miserable it scares others away who might consider doing the same thing. By so toxifying the atmosphere whenever a conservative encroaches on to their totalitarian hold on the culture, it effectively says to others, it’s not worth it — don’t do it.

(more…)

You don’t have to be an art critic to see something tasteless going on at Pratt Institute. Since 1887, this venerable New York institution has been dedicated to educating “artists and creative professionals to be responsible contributors to society.” Yet teachers and administrators at Pratt have been nothing but irresponsible in their recent dealings with a fifth-year drawing student named Steve DeQuattro.

Mr. DeQuattro is a political artist. He uses his background in graphic design to illustrate the dominant political culture of his world. At Pratt, this means creating work that addresses, as he wrote to me, the “growing bureaucracy, higher tuition, new buildings for administration, new offices, and departments, and left-wing bias, all at the expense of the students.”

Steve DeQuattro, "Sustainable Liberalism In a Box" (2011)

As part of his recent work, Mr. DeQuattro has designed a cereal-box-like sculpture that he calls, ironically, “Sustainable Liberalism in a Box” (the graphics are pictured above). He has developed a piece that takes the ubiquitous Apple iPod ad campaign to address abortion. He has designed a sobering five-foot-wide mural that tracks the Democratic Party’s record on race, from Jefferson’s slave-holding days up through the racially charged speeches of Senator Robert Byrd and Vice President Joe Biden.

As a senior in the school, Mr. DeQuattro has been working on this art in preparation for a group show for Pratt’s graduating students, which is scheduled to open on April 23. While his faculty advisor has been supporting him, his peers have not. Mr. DeQuattro says they recently wrote a letter to his professors, calling his work “offensive” and complaining about exhibiting alongside him. Last week, the chair of the fine arts department stepped in to prevent Mr. DeQuattro’s participation alongside the other students in the group show–an unprecedented move in the history of the department, says Mr. DeQuattro, despite the fact that none of his work is pornographic, libelous, or in violation of the laws of free speech. Mr. DeQuattro’s advisor did not return a request for comment.

(more…)

Communism is responsible for more deaths in the 20th Century than both world wars, yet liberals have defended it for decades. A new book by Grove City College professor and top Reagan scholar Paul Kengor – Dupes – documents this, showing how Communists used liberals to further their efforts in the U.S. This book masterfully documents dupes in the U.S. from the Hill to (my focus here) Hollywood.

Kengor’s strength is research (the book’s introduction alone lists 35 citations), and Dupes authoritatively identifies both dupes and true Communists in Hollywood, documenting them down to their Communist Party USA registration card numbers and how many times they wrote for Communist publications.

Take playwright extraordinaire Arthur Miller, for example. It is widely accepted that “The Crucible” is about McCarthyism. Beyond that, today’s educators have allowed what Senator Joe McCarthy and his “witch hunts” found to blend with the work of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In reality, they were entirely separate.

Kengor points out that the falsely titled “HUAC,” (a recent New Yorker article, which gives a good review of former Communist Elia Kazan, used the “HUAC” abbreviation too) which suggests the committee was the actual un-American organization, was chaired by Democrats for much of its existence, and it was attacked for its work by Communists regardless of who was in charge. (more…)

If I were a hardcore Leftist like Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir, I’d be a little freaked out over what I’m seeing in Hollywood these days, as well. Every smurf-less left-wing film released over the last few years has not only failed miserably at the box office, they’ve also been artistic embarrassments of the highest order. And yet, a good number of openly conservative films and those openly embraced by conservatives have been monster hits: “The Blind Side,” “300,” “The Dark Knight,” “Fireproof,” “Taken,” and both “Iron Man” films have grossed more than the production costs of all those anti-war flops combined. ”The Expendables” is currently thisclose to crossing a quarter of a billion dollars worldwide. Then there’s “Salt,” the “Twilight” saga, “The Book of Eli,” “Grown Ups,” “Gran Torino,” the Narnia trilogy, and the Pixar collection — all of which appealed to the right side of the political spectrum and have, to say the least, done better than respectable business.

Lit by the warm glow of a burning cross

In the world of documentaries, there’s a similar disturbance for those currently residing within the darkside of the force. You have Steve Bannon launching a full-frontal assault on the medium, Citizens United winning the most important Supreme Court free speech case in generations, Davis Guggenheim seeing the light, and Michael Moore becoming less relevant than a Sunset Boulevard lunatic screaming about capitalism as he tries to pull his pants off over his head. And do I really need to cite specifics on the utter collapse of the “edgy” nihilism that now represents the indie marketplace? 

Whether the intent with some of these successful titles was to produce a conservative movie or not, there’s just no mistaking the fact that the films we “teabaggers” love and champion are not only good box office, but in many cases, on some level, they’re also artistic achievements the people behind them can be proud of.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not declaring victory. What I am declaring, however, is Reality — a reality similar to what the Left is rightfully panicking over as they lose control of the news media and hopefully both Houses of Congress come this November. And now, it must be more than a little unsettling for Salon-style Leftists to watch helplessly as popular entertainment culture — the most powerful propaganda device ever created — starts to slip just a little from their entitled, totalitarian grasp — and judging from his outrageously stupid and mean-spirited review, the writing O’Hehir sees on the wall with “Secretariat” has him completely unraveled. (more…)

Scores of people gathered this weekend on the national mall as part of the One Nation Working Together rally, offering, in the words of one of the event’s featured speakers, NAACP President Ben Jealous, “the antidote to the Tea Party,” and promoting liberal answers to issues ranging from job creation to immigration, to education and the environment – namely, more government intervention and higher taxes and regulation.

Actually, the attendance was easily in the tens of thousands, but sometimes it’s fun to take a cue from the MSM and just understate any fact that doesn’t serve your narrative.

Still, despite the impressive numbers, the predominately white rally does differ from Glenn Beck’s recent Restore Honor rally, and the Tea Party movement in general, in one way that illuminates the core difference between left and right.

Specifically, the Tea Party tends to be a movement of individuals, each pursuing their own interests, self-organizing in defense of their own rights, whereas the One Nation Working Together rally was the product of partnerships between over 400 labor, civil-rights, and other liberal organizations, many of whom bussed in their members by the thousands to bolster their numbers.

If there is any better picture of the top-down, coercive nature of liberalism than their approach to “grass roots” organizing, I’m not sure what it is. (more…)

If nothing else, you have to give the entertainment media credit for its inability to hit bottom. There is no low low enough for these people and just when you think they can’t possibly sink any lower, somehow they always manage to summon up that little something necessary to go the extra mile in the department of outright cruelty.

Last week the Screen Actors Guild announced that Ernest Borgnine will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award at next years awards ceremony. Obviously this decision is a no-brainer. The 93 year-old Oscar-winner’s been making films since 1951 and is still active today, including a role in the upcoming Bruce Willis blockbuster “Red.” But now, no less than the L.A. Times is suggesting that SAG reconsider their decision to honor the man because of — their words, not mine — “his personal politics.” 

In an online article titled “Should SAG Be Honoring Ernest Borgnine?”, here’s the rationale: [emphasis mine] (more…)

Robin Hood is back on the big screen in his umpteenth adaptation and he’s not only fighting social injustice by robbing the rich and giving to the poor, he’s fighting it by forcing English King John the cruel to sign the Magna Carta. More on that later. For now, let’s stick with the redistribution of wealth by banditry.

People love that idea. And because they do, Robin has had a massive influence on popular culture because the implicit anti-establishment message in his story can be used as a device to criticize society or sell almost any social movement, legislation or outright criminal activity in modern societies that have no relation to the brutal feudal times in which his legend originated. The result, the Sherwood Forest outlaw can be anything one wants him to be.

A Robin who “robs the rich to give to the poor” can be that mythical Marxist revolutionary or populist hero righting the wrongs of capitalism for the oppressed proletariat — even if he happens to be nothing more than a mass murderer like Che Guevara: (more…)

For over a year, Big Hollywood contributors have been documenting Hollywood’s intolerance towards all things conservative — both when it comes to our ideas being given a fair shake in the industry’s product and, most importantly, the intolerance towards individuals whose beliefs stray from the liberal plantation. Again and again, people have come to us to share the stories of how their social and political beliefs hurt their show business careers in ways both big and small. And to their great credit, most of these individuals have said so on the record; with their names and faces prominently displayed in the upper left-hand corner of their Big Hollywood testimony.

Without fail, every single time someone tells their story here, the insulting snark hits from every corner of the web, dismissing out of hand our ever growing list of witnesses to this new blacklist. Sure, the Gawkers and the Farkers are entitled to their fun. They peddle in shallow superiority and there are plenty of buyers. Welcome to Al Gore’s creation.

Lately, however, Patrick Goldstein, a film writer at the L.A. Times, has been taking his own partisan shots. Tuesday, after Jonathan Kahn came out in the Wall Street Journal, there was this:

[I]t’s seems like quite a stretch to say that Kahn’s politics have held him back. But that’s what all too many conservatives do. They put the blame for their stalled careers on liberal Hollywood, when lack of marketable talent might be a far more likely source for the problem.

What’s curious about this argument regarding Kahn needing “marketable talent” is how Goldstein willfully ignored this part of the WSJ story:

One person stunned to hear of Mr. Kahn’s double life as a tea-party troubadour is top Hollywood record producer and Grammy Award-winner Walter Afanasieff. The two have worked on projects for years and are now midway through writing and producing an album for a young singer.

(more…)

That’s the affirmative answer to “Is there a Hollywood Blacklist?” recently posed here by Gary Graham.

It exists as certainly as political correctness and passive aggressiveness in Hollywood exist, and you know that it abounds and destroys the talented who take umbrage at George Bush jokes from the subtext of the parting “thank you for coming in” to the silence of the phone that follows.

But today’s blacklist is different from the one publicly posted by anti-communists during the 50s. This one resides in the like-minded whispers of the leftist candor cowards who took over Hollywood’s power positions during the 60s. And it doesn’t just embrace conservatives. Even liberals can find themselves on it for an act of political indiscretion. Think what you will about that 50s list, at least it was posted openly by men. The current one is hypocritically hissed in secret by boys who need accoutrement bodyguards to visit the men’s room.

You know who you are.

I first heard about the consequences of crossing Hollywood’s prevailing liberal orthodoxy from the late film and TV director Alex Grasshoff. (more…)

Over the last forty years, leftism has failed in every particular but one:  it has succeeded in demonizing the opposition.

Leftists will blacklist you—then if you complain, they’ll attack you for whining.  They will call you racist and compare your leaders to Hitler—then if you return the insult, they’ll scream about the decline of civility.  They will do everything in their power to cut you off from media and artistic outlets—then when you create outlets of your own they will savage them for their bias.  Like the mobster in a Raymond Chandler novel, they will beat your teeth out, then kick you in the stomach for mumbling.

As a result of their success in marginalizing dissenting opinions, nothing now creates a greater commotion in modern American discourse than speaking the obvious truth.

Last week during a stop in Washington DC, I gave a five minute interview to an extremely nice reporter named Peggy Star from CNSNews.  I pointed out that, while leftists speak their political minds openly and aggressively in Hollywood, conservatives are forced to meet in secret and speak in whispers to avoid insult and tacit blacklisting. (more…)

“Am I being black-listed?”

The agent across the desk laughed.  “Black-listed??  Ha ha …what… ‘Are you now or have you ever been a communist?’  Come on.  I mean …I know you probably shoot your mouth off about politics a little too much, but, still…”

But the Actor stared back.  His once-commanding gaze could use some sleep — or at least, some peaceful sleep.  Being an actor in Hollywood, he’d gotten used to going long dry spells between jobs; but never this long.  ‘Oh, the business is in a slump, it’s the economic downturn’, they all say.  (And when have ‘they’ ever been wrong?)  But the Actor had been around a long time and he’d heard the ‘business-in-a-slump, economic-downturn’ diagnosis repeated far too many times to really let it get him down; or let it keep him down, anyway.

But now…it seemed like something else.  This was different.

Lately, these past few years, the Actor, after having seen his once ‘up-and-comer’ status flare briefly as the new ‘It’ guy and having starred in a string of B+ action movies and a few short-lived TV series, had seen his career languish on ‘Thousand-Meeting Island’ only to glide past ‘Audition Mambo’ and settle eventually and almost imperceptibly into the maudlin malaise of the ‘also-rans’.  The river of scripts that once flowed to his door had become a creek, then a small stream, and finally a mere trickle.   New lines now appeared on his face with such alarming frequency it was now well late into the afternoon that he even ventured a side-glance at a mirror.   (more…)