Nowadays, when I trawl through Blockbuster aisles, I find films with major stars that never saw the dark light of a theater. I’ve never even heard of some films. And I wonder about the parallel between society and film. History may be defined as the intersection of amazing events with amazing people. Will Mallory make the climb up the cliffs of Navarone? People created history by their choices, hesitations, fears, desires, whimsy, obsessions and visions.  Will the Colonel give in to Saito’s brutality? Great films, anchored by magnetic personalities, cast wide nets across our consciousness. Will Lawrence survive the Devil’s Anvil?

“Epic,”film producer Frank McCarthy (“Patton”) once told me, “is defined as a man who changes himself, his community and his world.”  In short, all the great character arcs in a movie script have driven the creation of events and epics which, in turn, are pushpins in World History. A noted script consultant, Chris Vogler,  distilled and explained the work of Joseph Campbell, an expert on tribal storytelling and myth. Vogler explains the hero’s journey through the Ordinary World, the Call to Adventure, the Refusal of the Call, Mentor, Threshold, Tests by Allies and Enemies, Approach, Ordeal, Reward and The Road Back.

I recently watched “JCVD,” a feature about action actor Jean Claude Van Damme’s downward spiral and its intersection with a bank robbery. The film was fascinating, awash with the celebrity-spin culture and its detritus.  Jean Claude plays himself in a confessional return to his hometown of Brussels and speaks of celebrity, inadequacy and his impotence against drugs and hype.  I believe that the film will become a noted sociocultural marker in the decline of Hollywood’s celebrity-driven culture.

The Great Epic World will always survive because the human attraction to its form is too resonant and deeply embedded in our humanity. Anchoring the Great Story on a ‘Star System’ is like giving an old drunk uncle with a key to the liquor cabinet and the keys to your prized Mustang. The rise of the celebrity culture is shattering our present film industry model. Perhaps this is good.

The industry was initially only feature films, shown with newsreels, cartoons, a B-picture and then the “A” film. Aside from rallies and religious gatherings, the movie experience was our common cultural touchstone. Then TV came into our living rooms where the binding involved “I Love Lucy” and Walter Cronkite. You saw both or shut your mouth around the water cooler the next day.  Jump forward with VHS, DVD, Blue-Ray, Netflix downloads, blogs, internet, Twitter, texting and cheap cell phones. We have the news burst cycle of seconds in an ADD mediacentric world. As individuals strive to establish their celebrity to become Stars, we experience the banality of the personal expose’ for the sake of fame, or worse, infamy.

This sensibility is confirmed by the misuse of ‘fame’ and ‘infamy.’ People don’t know the difference because, in a morally relativistic world, meaning doesn’t matter. Only the end result. Infamy is an “extremely bad reputation, public reproach, or strong condemnation as the result of a shameful, criminal, or outrageous act.” Fame is gained through merit. Infamy through shame. Fame and shame. But both lead to celebrity and, so it is thought, to Stardom.

With the assault of posts on Twitter, Facebook, Digg and more, we have lost not only our ability to focus, but on the meaning and stature of hard work, merit and heroic ordeal. One must ask onself: In today’s world, would Ulyssess feel obliged to Twitter his bathroom breaks?

We have lost the distant mystery of the stage. Looking up at our heroes, we sought their thoughts and inner secrets, their interests an tod experiences. Mysteries that we wanted to unravel, discover, and unravel again and again. But no more. My friend’s grandfather laments the downfall of newspapers due to the Internet, but I remind him that the crushing of the candlemakers by light bulb manufacturers was equally tragic. Both are the forward rush of innovation. We cannot turn back the clock to the past’s delivery of the epic but we can adjust our targets for the new media world.

Story.

When all is said and done, the story makes the star. The Journey of a thousand leagues gives them the adventure, ordeal, the mettle of a tested battle. And it is within our grasp once again. The cameras, equipment and computers available now to the filmmaker are creative, inexpensive and flexible. The early cameras were no more than a box with a lense, requiring a sunny day to get exposure on film with an ASA of 8. And as Chaplin once said for writing a movie scene, ‘Give me a pretty girl and a policeman.’  Drama ensues.

So as the Stars plummet to earth, the Creator may once again become a King of storytelling. Forget the Stars. Concept is key. Heed the Call to Adventure. Accept the Ordeal.

Return with Your Reward.

“Julie & Julia” follows the amusingly parallel lives of chef Julia Child (played by Meryl Streep), who achieved worldwide fame while revolutionizing the art of cooking starting in the ‘50s, and Julie Powell (Amy Adams), a young New York City woman searching for identity in 2002. Powell longs to be a successful writer like her friends and yet is trapped processing insurance claims from victims of the World Trade Center attacks.

Yet two things keep Powell happy: her loving and supportive husband, played by Chris Messina, and her passion for cooking. When she hears her friends talking about launching blogs, her husband convinces her to launch her own blog about cooking. Julie rises to the challenge by deciding to cook every recipe in Julia’s landmark tome “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” within a year – meaning she’ll have to cook 524 exquisite recipes in 365 days and live to blog about it daily.

As she embarks on this culinary quest, Julie learns more about Julia’s own personal life and her parallel loving marriage to her diplomat husband Paul (Stanley Tucci). Julie also gains confidence even as the strain of finishing her goal adds occasional strain to her marriage.

“Julie & Julia” deftly moves between the past and the present in a true screenwriting feat that draws one parallel after another between the two women separated by both an ocean and five decades of life experience. Ephron’s dialogue is crisp and fits both time periods to a T, while its depiction of two happy marriages in which no one’s secretly gay or committing adultery must set a Hollywood record for the modern era.

The film’s traditional moral values (not only is this a movie you could take Grandma to, she’ll likely wind up taking you) carry over into its traditional filmmaking qualities with sterling performances from the four lead actors (Streep could get a Supporting Actress nom, while this could lead to star-making roles for the previously little-known Messina). The exquisite cinematography by Stephen Goldblatt makes dozens of dishes spring to vivid life on the screen, and is sure to leave viewers craving a hearty meal after they leave the theater.

“Julie & Julia” isn’t hip or edgy, but viewers of all ages will appreciate a solid and sterling main course of a film over the quickly forgotten appetizers offered by the much weaker fare to be found in this summer’s multiplexes.

A digital war has broken out, and the conservative movement is losing. Read the comment sections of right-leaning blogs, news sites and social forums, and the evidence is there in ugly abundance. Internet hooligans are spewing their talking points to thwart the dissent of the newly-out-of-power.

We must not let that go unanswered.

Uninvited Democratic activists are on a mission to demoralize the enemy – us. They want to ensure that President Obama is not subject to the same coordinated, facts-be-damned, multimedia takedown they employed over eight long years to destroy the presidency – and the humanity – of George W. Bush.

Political leftists play for keeps. They are willing to lie, perform deceptive acts in a coordinated fashion and do so in a wicked way – all in the pursuit of victory. Moral relativism is alive and well in the land of Hope and Change and its Web-savvy youth brigade expresses its “idealism” in a most cynical fashion.

The ends justify the means for them – now more than ever.

Much of Mr. Obama’s vaunted online strategy involved utilizing “Internet trolls” to invade enemy lines under false names and trying to derail discussion. In the real world, that’s called “vandalism.” But in a political movement that embraces “graffiti” as avant-garde art , that’s business as usual. It relishes the ability to destroy other people’s property in pursuit of electoral victory.

Hugh Hewitt’s popular site shut off its comments section because of the success of these obnoxious invaders. Breitbart.com polices nonpartisan newswire stories for such obviously coordinated attacks. Other right-leaning sites such as Instapundit and National Review Online refuse to allow comments, knowing better than to flirt with the online activist left.

During the Clinton impeachment scandal, a new group out of California called MoveOn.org employed a plan to get its members to dial into right-leaning talk radio shows with scripted talking points falsely claiming that they were Republicans. They said they would never vote for the GOP again if the case against Bill Clinton was pursued.

Rush Limbaugh was the first to isolate these “seminar callers,” whose mission during the Lewinsky mess was to fool the listening audience into believing they were outraged conservatives willing to cut their ties to the Republican Party if the GOP-led Congress continued

Eleven years later, “seminar callers” abound and call screeners are trained in the art of weeding them out. But the filtering does not always work. down the impeachment path.

You can read the column in full here.