Really? There’s a right to free birth control through your employer? Liar.

But what Moore is doing here is what Obama and his media minions are doing. They’re turning a government mandate that violates the First Amendment into a “rights” issue.

What Obama is attempting to do to the Catholic Church is no different than creating a federal mandate that would require every Islamic-run business to provide pork rinds in their vending machines — because people have a right to equal access to fat free foods.

—-

Note all the Catholic Church-bashing Moore’s engages in. Where is that coming from and what does it have to do with this debate?

It’s just hate, pure and simple.

But I do think that all those involved made an error in using the film to gratuitously bash the Catholic Church. One of the few genres us Jesus freaks are still able to enjoy is the horror genre, especially as it relates to — say it with me — SATAN!, because for all the horror elements that might turn some social conservatives off (violence, etc.), our faith is at least accepted as a reality. For my money, “The Exorcist” is one of the most Christian films ever made. Bottom line: This Jesus freak loves getting the devil scared out him.

Thus, I purchased my ticket for “The Devil Inside” expecting heroic Catholic priests and the purity of Jesus Christ to be presented as the only antidote to a certain kind of evil in the world. What? Scientists can’t answer everything and fix everything? That’s not what PBS told me… with my tax dollars.

Thankfully, I can report that this marginal horror film that delivers only a very few tense moments does, in fact, star two heroic priests and Christ’s goodness. But for some reason these are “rogue” priests who work outside the church and trash it at every opportunity. You see, because the church is “hypocritical” and “bureaucratic” and “doesn’t care about people,” it no longer sanctions exorcisms, so it’s up to these two to risk excommunication and fight the devil outside the system.

This is Hollywood having its cake and eating it too. Obviously, this is an industry uncomfortable with the concept of God, Christ, faith and most especially organized religion, but by trashing the Catholic Church they can exploit our religion to make a buck and still feel as though they’re standing by their non-principles, non-faith, and deep-seated belief in nothing.

The rogue priest idea is actually a good one. You want your protagonists to be out there on their own. It ups the danger level through a sense of isolation. Story-wise I get that. But the reasoning is lazy and these moments of gratuitous exposition take you out of the story as you share one of those “there goes bigoted Hollywood again” eye rolls.

There are over a billion Catholics in the world. How does this make any sense?

Outside of the obnoxious, hostile politics, “The Devil Inside” has a number of other serious problems, chief among them a narrative that doesn’t create anything close to a sense of dread. Worse, you never feel as though the story is headed towards an inevitable confrontation that will be awful… and awesome. And the climax really isn’t. As our heroes fight the devil, we the customers fight the boredom.

Nikki Finke reports that the film is receiving a hearty “F” from the customers, so just about everyone is feeling duped. Instead of wasting your hard-earned money on “The Devil Inside” this weekend, let me recommend renting “The Last Exorcism” (my review), another found-footage, pseudo-doc that gets better with each viewing. There’s also “Paranormal Activity 1 and 2,” and the grandaddy of them all, “The Blair Witch Project.”

And doesn’t Leftist Hollywood’s refusal to take on Islam add up to a politically incorrect and culturally insensitive insult to Muslims? As Penn Jillette Tweeted so elegantly last week:

“I believe the most damning thing that can be said about Muslims is saying you’re afraid to say anything.”

Or as an agnostic friend of mine emailed last night: 

“Your headline needs to read, ‘Comedy Central Determines That Christians Are Nicer and More Tolerant Than Muslims’”

So I guess that means we Christians should take the announcement of what looks to be another tired, old, cliched, cinematic attack on our faith as a compliment, right?

Hayden Christensen has signed on to star in Snakes of a Plane/Cellular/The Final Destination director David R. Ellis‘ big screen adaptation of John Case’s thriller novel The Genesis Code.

And what is “The Genesis Code” about? As though you have to ask. From the press release announcing the film [emphasis mine throughout]:

The story follows a former national security expert, played by Christensen, who, while investigating the murder of his only sister and her young son, discovers that a religious sect called The Shadow of the Cross may be involved. With the help of his sister’s friend Ana, they follow the clues to a clinic in the mountains of Italy, where a terrifying secret experiment has been conducted – successfully. The results are so threatening to the foundation of the Church that they will do anything to keep it from being revealed.

From the filmmaker’s own description, at best the Church is portrayed as threatened by a truth they’ll do anything to keep secret. If that sounds vaguely familiar to another Catholic-bashing franchise starring our friend Tom War-of-Racism Hanks, you’re not alone. From a couple of rave customer reviews on Amazon:

I read a lot of thrillers, and I really enjoyed THE GENESIS CODE for the most part. This novel resembles the DA VINCI CODE in the sense that it’s a religious thriller, and the villains and assassins are far-right Catholics.

Another:

Science vs right-wing religion? Hmmm … haven’t we heard that somewhere before?

The good news is that Hayden Christensen’s been cast to lead the potential franchise. So if he’s as inept and over his head at undermining religious faith as he was at mythologizing Darth Vader…

We may not live to see the day, but eventually the truth will be told and the history will be written and it will not be kind to this Hollywood generation. Not kind at all.  They are not only on the wrong side of history, and this war, but they know it and rather than fight they have chosen instead to bow and scrape — to go morally AWOL. 

As the “South Park” censorship and the rest of this report proves, all the Big Talk during the Bush years from our artiste class about questioning power was just as we suspected: a bull shit fig leaf for partisan cowards.  

There are notable exceptions in 90210-Land, but for the most part and for the first time since the invention of this wonderful art form we call the motion picture, The Men Who Make The Movies are nothing close to men. They’re hardly even artists.

What we have instead is an industry infected with partisan Leftists; gutless appeasers of the highest order who at best have chosen to run from this fight and at worst have joined the other side.

NOTE: As always, I want to offer my insincerest apologies for breaking the well-known rule that only allows Hollywood’s big elite stable of butt-boy writers to speculate about an unseen film.

People whose opinions I respect have defended A&D as not being anti-Catholic. This is probably due to the end of the film which delivers a trumped up moment of warmth and reconciliation between Tom Hanks’ Robert Langdon character and the Church in the form of a new Pope.  From my perch, this moment is a subtle but devious cherry on top of a blisteringly unfair and wholly dishonest attack on the Church.

Serial adulterer Martin Luther King, Jr.

Serial adulterer Martin Luther King, Jr.

Serial adulterer Martin Luther King, Jr.

One way to dishonestly destroy someone or something is to repeat only the negative about that someone or something. DreamWorks has just announced a new film about the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. and were it to focus solely on King’s extra-marital affairs no one would argue that the movie was anything other than a propaganda tool produced with the goal in mind of assassinating his character.

Now, DreamWorks could do this and hide behind the defense of “telling the truth.” After all, there’s little doubt King was involved with women other than his wife.  But to focus solely on that aspect of King’s character without allowing for the full context of the great man’s life is pure, 100% character assassination.

The lie isn’t in what’s spoken – the lie is in what’s unspoken.

During my A&D screening I noted a hash mark each time an obvious swipe was taken at the Church. About 40 minutes in I had counted nine – most of them delivered by our protagonist played by Tom Hanks, some of them gratuitous and having nothing to do with the story. These criticisms included charges of the worst kind of intolerance, outright murder and what ends up being the film’s central talking point theme – a fear of scientific truth.  

Rather than get sidetracked, let’s just stipulate each criticism is accurate (though they’re not). But it doesn’t matter, because… None of the enormous good the Church has done over the last 2,000 years is ever mentioned. So even if the filmmakers are right on “the facts,” they’re telling no less of a lie. Intentionally omitting all the good the Church has done intentionally creates a false impression no reasonable person would get if the film provided the full story.    

In other words, all Director Ron Howard has to say is that Martin Luther King, Jr. was an adulterer.

Another cinematic sleight of hand used to affirm the negative is the fairly common device of putting the worst face possible on an institution by carefully crafting the character chosen to represent it. We’ve seen this a hundred times before with cold, calculating businessmen, yee-haw Southerners, overly-aggressive soldiers, wormy CIA directors…

A&D uses two characters this way.

The most notable is Commander Richter, played by Stellan Skarsgard. He’s a security officer whose zealous dedication to the Church is established immediately, and we know he’s the face of the Church because he’s the one charged with protecting it.

Naturally, he’s written and portrayed as a jerk – an intolerant, overbearing prig who’s not only unlikable, but so intolerant of outsiders like Robert Langdon it ends up interfering with how he conducts his job.

Howard only gives Richter a single opportunity to defend his Church, and here’s that lame attempt after Richter finally tires of Langdon’s unrelenting, snide comments [paraphrasing]:

“My church feeds and cares for millions, what does yours do? Oh, that’s right, you don’t have a church.”

Of course, Richter’s not allowed to say, “…and what does Harvard do for millions of starving people?” because that would actually make a pretty good point (Langdon’s a Harvard Professor). Instead, the line is used to show Richter’s holier-than thou attitude with a side order of intolerance towards non-believers.

Worse, Richter’s never once allowed the opportunity to reveal a generous spirit or moment of real humanity. For a reel or two we’re led to believe Richter might be the arch-villain, but when it’s revealed he’s not, he dies the same pious tight ass we were introduced to.  

The second face of Ron Howard’s Church is Camerlengo Patrick McKenna, played warmly by boy-faced Ewan McGregor. But this character is another classic trope in the Leftist propaganda film canon: the set up for the ideological sucker punch. At first we’re led to believe McKenna is an example of what the Church really is and all the things Richter is not: patient, tolerant, open, kind to outsiders, unafraid of modernity… That is until the final ham-handed twist when McKenna is revealed to be the arch-villain.

And what are his motives for planning and committing a number of horrible murders?

In a nutshell, McKenna is afraid of science.

This ideological sucker punch (positioned squarely at conservative Catholics) is that Our Guy – the only sympathetic face of the Church – isn’t really. Ron Howard twists McKenna into something horrifying in order to further a lie. And at this point in the film, Howard has effectively left the whole of the Catholic Church without even a single sympathetic representative.

From all of this, it’s reasonable to come to the conclusion that the filmmakers have an axe to grind with the Church based on science, but this is yet another Leftist head feint.

A&D isn’t about moving the Church towards a more pro-science position because the Church already is pro-science and the filmmakers know it — just like the Democrats and their allies in the media knew President Bush was pro-science. But just as it was with Bush, this charge of anti-science is not being hurled to convince the Church to become pro-science, it’s being hurled as propaganda to marginalize the Church outside the mainstream by convincing as many people as possible that this “superstitious” institution with an “indefensible history” would rather see them die young than give up outdated ideas and traditions.

Like Bush, the Catholic Church does not oppose stem cell research, they do, however, oppose embryonic stem cell research. This isn’t an anti-science position, this is a pro-don’t-kill-human-life position, and much more defensible than animal-rights activists who want to impede science to save bunny rabbits. But what the Democrats did to destroy Bush, Howard does in his cinematic attempt to destroy the Church: he intentionally morphs opposition to embryonic stem cell research into opposing “stem cell research,” giving himself cover to cry “anti-science.”

And so through the alchemy of half-truth and obfuscation the most effective kind of propaganda is created…

The kind that sounds just true enough.

Finally, to reaffirm his straw man really does exists, Howard tacks on a warm closing scene that portrays the Church as evolving into an institution more open and accepting of scientific truth.  

Some may have gotten the fuzzies from this moment, but the Church is already open and accepting of scientific truth and to say it could be what it already is… Well, let’s just say that if “Angels & Demons” was as clever at storytelling as it is at spreading lies, it might have been a watchable movie.

UPDATE: Responding to those who find cowardly refuge in the “It’s only a fictional movie” argument, a reader summed it up beautifully in the comments: “Fiction with an agenda is propaganda.” — I’ve also changed the title to reflect that perfect sentiment.

We could debate for a while whether A&D is really a movie at all or just a series of scenes with silly dialogue propelling an action filled scavenger hunt through Vatican City. Instead I will try to be as informative as I can about whether the movie is offensive, blasphemous, inaccurate, or just a joke; or all of those things like “The Da Vinci Code.”

Unexpected:
“Angels and Demons” is about a thousand times better than the “Da Vinci Code” as a film. Tom Hanks looks better and says less of those ridiculous revelatory lines at the end of every scene that make you want to punch him right in the character. It has its problems but it is not boring, doesn’t drag, and is a skillful mix of Indiana Jones type action set against a beautiful sacred backdrop. 

Unexpected:
The Faithful depicted in the film were not ridiculed. The religion was not trivialized in the usual Hollywood manner. Howard used the visual and ritual majesty of the Catholic Church to its fullest. Vatican City is an awe-inspiring place and the film did little to damage the notion that membership in the faith is a serious privilege. It’s one of those films that after seeing, if I wasn’t a Catholic, I would be very jealous of all we have.

Expected:
Trite myths about the Church are perpetuated, of course. The blanket assertion that the Church has routinely suppressed science is nothing but myth. It’s laughable to people who know the truth. Even the case of Galileo, when fully studied, shows that the Church did more to advance the study of most sciences, especially astronomy, than any institution at the time. For some mind blowing elaboration on this fact, check out the summary of Dr. Thomas Wood Jr.’s “How The Catholic Church Built Western Civilization.”

Expected:
Hollywood would not make a big film like this without a liberal message but even I couldn’t imagine Howard and author Dan Brown would go so far out of their minds to create this one. It’s amazing. The film starts with a Papal funeral celebrating the life of a “beloved progressive Pope.” The film then goes on to make the point that to avoid seeing the Church modernize, more traditional forces within the Church would torture and murder four Cardinals, kill about one million of the faithful, and destroy Vatican City.

That is the point of the story. The progressive Pope and the Godless Academic Robert Langdon are the heroes. The traditionalists (the enemies of change) are not just stubborn; they are murderous terrorists. It’s so outrageous it probably rises to the level of breaking both the First and Second Commandments. I don’t have the authority of absolution, but if I did. Howard’s penance would be to make a similar film dealing with “progressives” vs. “traditionalists” in the Muslim faith, and see how their modernizing is coming along when that film hits the streets.

Conclusion:
In “Angels & Demons,” Hollywood has embraced a lot of the beauty and reverence of the Magisterium of the Catholic Church but not the Magisterium itself. It has decided a new direction for the Church. Hollywood would like to make the Church into something acceptable to Hollywood, which is not surprising considering what Hollywood thinks about its role in shaping culture.

They are the wise. They will show us the way. If we listen, we can be Catholic AND popular in Hollywood. It’s the best of both worlds, right? Wrong. The well catechized know we must choose one or the other.

Solution:
If more films were made about the lives of the saints, heroic stories could be shared and everyone inside and outside the Church would be exposed to truths and virtues that would make this progressive vs. traditionalist divide a non-topic.

Have at it.

Discuss. Debate. Write your own review…

Big Hollywood’s review can be found here.

The Pope is dead and to elect the new Holy Father, the ancient ritual of the Conclave is set to begin when the four Cardinals most likely to be chosen, the preferiti, are kidnapped. An ancient brotherhood known as the Illuminati takes responsibility. They have no demands and only wish to teach the Church a lesson for a violent purging of their scientific “free thinkers” hundreds of years ago and to do that they have promised to violently kill one Cardinal an hour, each in a different location, with the grand finale being the complete destruction of Vatican City with an anti-matter bomb stolen in the film’s opening scene.

The only clues offered that might save the day are also meant to further the Illuminati’s pro-science stance. Each clue is based on the four altars of science: earth, air, wind, and fire and to help unravel these symbols, Harvard Professor Robert Langdon is called in. Joining him is Vittorio Vetra (Ayelet Zurer), the gorgeous Italian scientist who helped create the anti-matter and the best hope to disarm it.

Before the story even has a chance to get going, “Angels & Demons” seals its fate as an episodic snoozer. For the first forty minutes, using awkward asides and clumsy exposition, the Langdon character uses every opportunity (and creates a few of his own) to chastise the Catholic Church for its historical secrecy, hatred of modern art, book burning, anti-science posture and a violent past borne of intolerance and fear of truth. Now, I’m no historian, so all of this might carry some credibility (or not), but I also understand that another word for Leftist Kryptonite is “context” and that never once is the overwhelming good the church does given a hearing (other than a single sentence tossed off by an unsympathetic character). The result of this relentless demonizing is to completely undermine the story’s tension and suspense. In other words: Why should we care whether or not this horrible institution survives? This may be the first mainstream Hollywood thriller where our protagonist isn’t racing to save something worth saving.

Make no mistake, the filmmakers here are smart professionals who have been around a while and who fully understand that in order to tell a compelling story the audience must be emotionally invested in the outcome. Unfortunately, with their relentless stream of (at best) out-of-context Catholic bigotry, they’ve made the conscious choice to undermine our sympathizing with the very institution in danger, and this is done at the expense of telling what could have been a much stronger story. You might as well make a film with someone in a race against time to save Charles Manson.

To qualify “Angels & Demons” as a movie would be naïve in the extreme. What we have here is a big, clumsy cannonball in the culture war launched, not by filmmakers, but by ideological warriors who know how to use film.

But even if Howard and company had wanted to tell the best story they could, A&D would still have its problems. Having one Cardinal executed each hour in the grisliest of fashions with the promise of a big boom to top it all off may sound like the perfect way to structure a thriller, but Harvard Symbologists are a long way from Indiana Jones.

Hanks must have been bored stiff.  Langdon is all about the wash – rinse — repeat, but it goes like this: Puzzle to solve — furrow brow — light comes to eyes — point somewhere with authority – speak in academic tongues – dash off screen-left – jump in car – drive through ridiculously busy streets but still arrive barely in time in a way only Jack Bauer could relate to. But to the hero of “24’s” credit, with only an hour between murders, he’s never stopped to wash up, change clothes, enjoy a refreshing cup of coffee and chat up the help like Langdon does in a truly surreal moment.

As far as the most awkward moments, it’s hard to choose between the awkward stem cell debate between protesters the camera thrusts us into or the awkward shoe-horned shot at the energy industry near the film’s end.  There might have been PETA posters on the Vatican walls but Howard likes his cinematography dark, so it was hard to tell.

Too much of the suspense is as contrived as these political moments trying to disguise themselves as a theme. Langdon’s a College Professor, Vetra’s a scientist, and yet the Vatican police sure do leave them alone in the most dangerous of circumstances an awful lot. But even then you never feel Langdon’s in any real danger. I counted at least three times where the killer could’ve easily offed him and didn’t.

For a PG-13 film, A&D is loaded with a surprising amount of graphic violence and the performances vary. Armin Mueller-Stahl comes off best as a senior Cardinal whose motives remain in doubt until the very end, Ewan McGregor enjoys some good moments until a preposterous climax undoes all his good work, Hanks is Hanks, and the fetching Zurer just doesn’t have a whole lot to do.

Big movie. Big stars. Hard to stay away. I get that. But if you remember that “Angels & Demons” wasn’t conceived with the goal of telling the best story possible, you won’t be as disappointed.

I’m a fan of Ron Howard. I’m also a Roman Catholic. So when Howard recently defended his upcoming film, Angels and Demons, on the Huffington Post from criticism leveled by William Donohue of the Catholic League, I sat up and took notice.

Here’s an understatement for you: Not everybody likes William Donohue. Whereas some admire him as a passionate defender of the faith, others view him as a hectoring, self-righteous censor, with a tendency to get red-faced and a bit shouty when locking horns on one of the ubiquitous news talk shows.

Howard, of course, is always calm and collected. Besides, he’s Opie; and who doesn’t like Opie? So I enter this fray with the greatest trepidation, fully expecting to regret every minute of it.

Howard’s panoply of defenses included that familiar old warhorse: don’t knock it if you haven’t seen it. Ordinarily I have a lot of sympathy for such an argument. In this case, however, Howard’s new film is based on a novel of the same name first published nine years ago. And it was written by Dan Brown who also penned The Da Vinci Code, which Howard rather faithfully (no pun intended?) adapted into a movie with the same star (Tom Hanks). So, score one for Donohue.

But this isn’t about Howard vs. Donohue, as entertaining as that MMA match may be. It’s about Angels and Demons, alighting in a theater near you May 15.

A few years ago, intrigued by the fuss surrounding The Da Vinci Code, I read Angels and Demons. Why? Code was still in hardback, and Angels was only $7.99. I wasn’t about to give Brown the satisfaction of my $24.99 — not that I think his bank account noticed.

Later, I watched Code on cable (once again, not eager to give my money to an arguably anti-Christian work. So I think I’ve got sufficient standing to comment.

Reading Angels and Demons, I wasn’t so much struck by the work’s bigotry as by how badly it was written. The cliched style is the literary equivalent of cotton candy. And for someone with so much animus toward religion, Brown employs the deus ex machina more frequently than the Old Testament.

But more disturbing is Brown’s commingling of fact and fiction disguised as fact, aimed at convincing his readership that the Catholic Church is vehemently, even violently anti-science, and therefore anti-progress and anti-reason.

By fiction disguised as fact, I don’t mean standard historical fiction techniques like creating new characters against a backdrop of actual historical events. I mean massively altering or fabricating historical events and chronologies. For instance: virtually every historical fiction writer fudges dates a little, but Brown shifts key timelines by more than a century.

Perhaps Brown counts on most of us to be too lazy or obtuse to fact-check his work on the Internet. And judging from his hordes of unquestioning fans (and, usually, myself), he’s probably right.

[SPOILER ALERT: The rest of this article contains spoilers. If you don't like spoilers and haven't read or seen Angels and Demons yet, then you shouldn't read further. On the other hand, maybe you should read on, because at least you'll be armed against the falsehoods that pervade Angels. It's up to you.]

So, I got off my duff (a matter of speech — I actually sat on my duff throughout this ordeal) and actually (gasp) looked up some of the claims Brown makes in Angels and Demons.

Here are just a few inaccuracies (hardly an exhaustive list) I picked up in several exhausting minutes on the Web:

Brown claims: Copernicus was murdered by the Catholic Church.
Fact: Copernicus died quietly in bed at age 70 from a stroke, and his research was supported by Church officials; he even dedicated his masterwork to the Pope.

Brown claims: “Antimatter is the ultimate energy source. It releases energy with 100% efficiency.”
Fact: CERN, the lab which plays an important role in his story, actually debunked this claim on their website: “The inefficiency of antimatter production is enormous: you get only a tenth of a billion of the invested energy back.”

Brown claims: Churchill was a “staunch Catholic.”
Fact: Any history buff could tell you that Churchill wasn’t Catholic, he was Anglican; nor was he particularly religious. The only things Churchill was staunch about were cigars, whiskey, and defending the British Empire.

Brown claims: Pope Urban VII banished Bernini’s famous statue The Ecstasy of St. Teresa “to some obscure chapel across town” because it was too racy for the Vatican.
Fact: The statue was actually commissioned by Cardinal Cornaro specifically for the Cornaro Chapel (Brown’s “obscure chapel”). Moreover, the sculpture was completed in 1652 — eight years after Urban’s death.

Brown claims: Bernini and famed scientist Galileo were members of the Illuminati.
Fact: The Illuminati was founded in Bavaria in 1776. Bernini died in 1680, while Galileo died in 1642 — more than a century before the Illuminati were first formed.

This last falsehood bears further examination, because the Illuminati are so integral to the plot of Angels and Demons. The great Baroque artist Bernini is also a central figure in Brown’s tale.

It may seem like a small “white lie” to change the timeline so drastically, and to make Bernini a key player in an Illuminati plot against the Catholic Church. But Bernini was an extraordinary Baroque artist who deserves better than Brown’s treatment.

Imagine that someone made a film that portrayed Steven Spielberg as a closet anti-Semite and Holocaust denier. Movie fans would be justifiably outraged.

But Dan Brown wrote a book (soon to be a movie!) identifying another great artistic virtuoso, Bernini, as a secret atheist who hated the Catholic Church. In reality, though, Bernini was a devout Catholic who went to mass every day and pursued the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius, which include up to five hours of daily silent meditation.

In one of the movie trailers (since taken down — I wonder why?), Tom Hanks chastises Vatican officials — “You guys don’t even read your own history!” — for not knowing about “La Purga,” the branding and execution of four Illuminati scientists in 1668.

The irony’s so rich, it could pay off the national debt. Because, you see, it’s Hanks’ character who doesn’t know his history. Repeat after me: there were no Illluminati before 1776. (Of course, that’s just what they want us to believe! Mwu-hahaha!)

Most of Brown’s historical misrepresentations tend to malign Christianity or the Catholic Church in particular. If these were just haphazard mistakes, you’d expect roughly half to be positive. But the book’s agenda clearly is to tarnish the Church’s image.

Some might argue that the Church has done a good enough job of that on its own, what with the Crusades, the Inquisition, the child-abuse scandals, and other shameful episodes in its past. Brown is like the cop who plants evidence on a suspect because he thinks he’s guilty. If his case against the Church is so strong, why make things up?

Nevertheless, Ron Howard encourages William Donohue to see the movie version of Angels and Demons for himself. The only reason that could make a difference is if the movie tones down some of the anti-Catholic aspects of the novel. So perhaps that’s a kind of acknowledgement that the book was too harsh, and the movie will, indeed, be different.

Well, there is one area, apparently, where we already know the film will stray from the novel. One of the bad guys is the Hassassin, whom Brown described as a “mahogany-skinned,” misogynistic Middle Easterner. According to the movie’s IMDb page, however, the actor portraying this character is… Danish.

His character name is altered from Hassassin (related to the Persian term for a Muslim sect) to the more generic-sounding Assassin. Some on the IMDb message boards suggest that the filmmakers changed him from a Middle Easterner because they were afraid of potential controversy.

So let’s get this straight: It’s okay to bash the Catholic Church as a violent institution opposed to reason. But don’t you dare make one bad guy (out of several) a Middle Easterner.

Why? Because Catholics may gripe, write letters, boycott, even sic William Donohue on you. But they won’t riot. And they won’t behead anybody.

To quote one of my favorite movies, “How do you like that? I buried the lead.”

Part II to come later…. Maybe….

In a fiscal conservative’s utopian dreamworld, there would be no federal funding for the arts (or so many other government agencies or programs for that matter).  This has been our position since the inception of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in the early 1970’s.  We’ve been saying that if elected, we would abolish these misguided programs and departments and bring our government back to the bare-bones constitutionally described role that it has and leave everything else to the states.

We’ve held the influential bully pulpit of the presidency for twenty of the past twenty-eight years, and what has happened to the NEA?  It has grown.  While we have stood on principle,  we have also stood on the sidelines.  The founding fathers would be outraged that the federal government is funding art with taxpayer money, but because we are on the sidelines standing on our principles, all of that money is going to the people creating art with messages that undermine our very existence.

But, I will also say that as long as the NEA exists, and as long as art is to receive funding by the government, we conservatives are on the wrong side of the argument.  There is no way to combat the perception that we are “anti-art” or in favor of closing down the local museum by taking away its funding.  I know, there ARE logical arguments to combat that perception, but again I ask:  How have those arguments been working out for us?

The “Fairness Doctrine” for arts funding.

At the risk of enraging my fellow conservatives and all of you libertarians, I propose that we re-think our position on the NEA given the realities of the past 35 years.  The NEA is here and it’s not going anywhere in the near future.  And instead of ceding the cultural ground in our country to the leftist voices and artists who have won the lion’s share of all of that funding over the past three decades, it is time for conservatives to get our asses into the game.  It’s time for a “fairness doctrine” of sorts when it comes to arts funding.

It’s the stated policy of the NEA to not discriminate due to the content of the art, so I say we make them put OUR money where their mouth is: Start doling out grants to playwrights and organizations who speak to so many Americans who are disenfranchised at the theatre.

The ESTABLISHMENT is the vast network of institutional theatres who have been living high on the hog in their publicly owned “Performing Arts Centers” or “Civic Theatre Complex” and managing their multi-million-dollar budgets under the guise of the altruistic and benign mission statement of “Bringing theatre to the community.”  The Lincoln Center Theatre and The Public Theatre and the Center Theatre Group and the Seattle Rep and The Arena Stage and the Goodman theatre… those guys are “The Man” and I’m tired of “The Man” keeping my people down!

A few decades ago, there was a perceived crisis in the American Theatre for the lack of “voices” from black playwrights, Asian playwrights, female playwrights, Latino playwrights and gay playwrights. Almost every single college and major non-profit theatre dutifully set up specific, targeted programs to nurture these playwrights from these target groups, in the name of diversity.

Well my friends… what voices are missing in non-profit, regional theatres today?  OURS!  We need to demand a full-throated, passionate and intelligent depiction of the conservative “experience” in America.  Also, don’t tell me that a revival of “Carousel” counts as a production reflecting “traditional American values.”  The crises the theatre community in America faces today is not that there are not enough revivals.

The Audience is staying home.

Go back and look at the comments from my first post on this subject.  You will hear from many people who say they are no longer going to the theatre.  And, unlike the conventional wisdom we’ve been hearing at non-profit regional theatres for the past thirty years, it is NOT because of a lack of arts education in the schools.  It is NOT because theatre is too inaccessible.  The people are choosing not to go to the theatre because of WHAT is being produced.  Because, believe it or not, my liberal friends, an adult person does not like to spend over $50 to sit in the dark and get yelled at or called names for two hours.

Unlike any other business, the theatre people who inhabit your local non-profit regional theatre do not look at their PRODUCT and wonder why people are not buying it.  They first wonder what is wrong with YOU.  I wonder how many folks in that regional theatre in your downtown actually reflect on the content of the plays they are producing and wonder if perhaps the answer to their “audience development” needs lies in the simple fact that about half of the people who live in their area are not interested in hearing the preaching contained within the stories they are telling, no matter how talented the people are in telling them.

For those of you who still find yourselves patronizing the regional non-profit in the major metropolis near your home, I bet you experience something like this:  You get to your seat and open your program and three or four pieces of paper fly out.  One is an envelope suitable for a donation.  One is a letter from the development department or artistic director decrying the current state of funding for the arts.  Maybe it mentions that audiences are declining because of the lack of arts in the schools.  Another sheet is a survey they want you to fill out (they never give you a pen or pencil).  The survey asks questions about your race and age and income and TV or film habits.  You look around…. all of these pieces of paper are littered about the floor under the seats around you.  Clearly part of the theatre’s green initiative.

Then the house lights dim to half and the excitement builds, it’s curtain time… get ready for the magic of theatre…  I love the excitement of that moment, here comes the…. pre-show curtain speech?  Oh no!  The artistic director or a board member or someone from the theatre staff bounds onto the stage and starts the spiel.  First, they describe all of the items that just dropped out of your program and they beg you to read them, fill them out and stick a check in them.  These days they throw in a line like: “Thankfully, we now have a president dedicated to supporting the arts and theatre, but we still need …. blah blah blah” – It never occurs to these folks that half of the people in the seats didn’t vote for President Obama.  And they often say in their speech some patronizing line like, “We are your theatre, we are a part of this community, we want to hear from you, please give us your feedback, theatre is a living breathing art form and your participation is vital to our growth…”

But, I have a secret to reveal to you:  They don’t really think that.  Oh, they want you to participate, by subscribing and donating, but it ends there.  If you want to meet with someone and express your distaste with the artistic choices, good luck.  If you want to complain that too often they bring left-wing politics onto the stage, you’re given lip service.  Send a letter asking for an uplifting play that reflects the good in America or perhaps the heroic deeds of our military or perhaps a play reflecting on the negative consequences of the misogyny and patriarchy in the hip-hop culture, and the letter will be treated as a joke from a right-wing wacko bigot.  Sometimes the letter is shown around the office and laughed at.  They don’t really want to hear from you unless you are calling to make a donation or to tell them how great they are.

If it ever crosses the minds of the artistic decision makers at the major non-profit regional theatres that there may be something about the content of their plays that is negatively affecting their subscriptions or their single-ticket sales, they never consider that it might have to do with the overall message or themes of their plays.  They think it’s because they are choosing plays that are risky or edgy and the older, conservative folks out there are just not ready or sophisticated enough to appreciate it.  And then they dig in and take an artistic stand.  But the problem with the plays has more to do with the themes and the political message they are trying to communicate, not with the edgy characters or nudity or cursing.

Example:  A theatre produces “Angels in America” and receives complaint letters about the content.  The powers that be at the theatre write it off to homophobia or gay-bashing or just some intolerance from the religious right and they are emboldened with the knowledge that they have made a bold artistic choice and brought this fresh and daring message to their community.  But the objection to “Angels in America” that I have and that I’ve heard from others is not that it is fresh or daring, it’s that it’s the same old “Reagan did nothing about AIDS” and “Ray Cohn was an evil closet-case hypocrite” and “Mormons are repressed homophobes” kind of story that we’ve been hearing for years.

But, what if a theatre commissioned a play about the life of the heroic writer Randy Shilts?  Shilts was an openly gay journalist who wrote “And The Band Played On” which chronicled the early days of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco.  He rightly campaigned for the closing of gay bath houses as a logical way to help stop the spread of HIV and he was very vocal in his opposition of the trend to “out” prominent but closeted gay and lesbian actors and politicians.  For his efforts he was spat upon on Castro Street.  Bob Ross, editor and publisher of the Bay Area Reporter, described Shilts as a traitor to his own kind.  This would be a play that deals with the same subject matter as “Angels” but it would take a different political perspective.  Most of those conservatives complaining about “Angels” would not complain about this play, I guarantee you that the vast number of complaints would come from the LGBT community and GLAAD and all of those other acronym agencies paid to say the same thing.

Trouble is, this play does not exist.  Nor does a play exist about the fall of the Berlin Wall, the single most significant international event in the past fifty years.  Nor does a play exist about the heroism of our military fighting in Iraq, or about the negative repercussions of abortion in America over the past thirty years.  Nor is there a play written in the past twenty years in America showing a member of the Catholic clergy in an unambiguously positive light (unless a drunk priest is there for comic effect).  These plays don’t exist because the environment in the artistic corridors are not interested in telling these stories.

******

I promised a solution to this problem in my last post, and I have a few humble suggestions.  I’m looking forward to the next round of comments, e-mails, and Facebook messages with your ideas:

A Modest Proposal

I maintain that at the root of this problem is a problem of equal employment.

I remember attending a symposium where a bunch of theatre professionals were getting together to talk about how to get a new audience or keep their existing audience and it was all about educational programs and free tix for children and adding more writing programs for African-American playwrights and I wanted to get up on the stage and say:  “Please stand up if you voted Democrat in the last presidential election”…  I had no doubt most of the room would stand up… Then I would say… “Look around you… the last presidential election (it was Bush/Gore) was almost exactly 50/50.  Now, one of two things is happening here… either your organizations are not ideologically inclusive  and that is reflected in your programming and how you represent yourself to your community of ticket-buyers, or some of you are afraid to sit down right now and reveal yourselves as Republicans… either way, we have a BIG problem!”

How can we truthfully say that we are a part of a community and we reflect the sensibilities and tell stories that emotionally move the members of that community when our organizations are staffed with people whose views only reflect half of the community?  We can’t, and we don’t.  And the results are affecting the bottom line.

Theatres should consider creating a special position, an “ombudsman,” who speaks for that 50% who might have a problem with the message the theatre is putting out.  They can also respectfully and sensitively respond to the complaints that might come in and then actually communicate those complaints effectively to the powers that be at the organization.  They could also set up after-show dialogues with the writers and encourage people to voice their annoyance at the preaching they are receiving from the stage.  I guarantee you that after about a year after the silently suffering patrons are empowered, programming changes will begin to take effect.

Another crucial role for the “ombudsman” would be to solicit plays from a conservative point of view, identify a handful of them that are worthy of development and work with those playwrights to have, at the very least, a main-stage staged reading open to the public so that the artistic decision makers could actually see these plays up on their feet and in front of an audience.  Put them in the position where they must justify why they are not producing these plays so we no longer hear quotes like this:

André Bishop, artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater for 16 years, said he reads about five plays a week, and from thousands over the years he could not think of a single one that would fall on the right end of the spectrum. “I’m trying to think if I ever read a play that I would call conservative,” he said, pausing a few moments. “I don’t think I’ve come across one.”

Mr. Bishop, if you agree that this is a problem, hire someone to actively find and nurture these plays.  If you had gone two decades without ever seeing a gay play or a black play or a Latino play or a feminist play it would not have been acceptable.  So, now what are you going to do about us conservatives?

The Artistic Director and the Board President should introduce this conservative watchdog with their arms around him saying “this is our guy and a valuable member of this team.”  The Jackie Robinson of conservative theatre could emerge hence.

The above concept is modest because it really amounts to token change, but, it’s more than we have now and it’s pretty easy to achieve.  The ideal situation would be to achieve a little more than just an evening of staged readings with the hope of getting a full production.  Ideally, the plays in question would be developed and mounted in full production from the get go.

******

So, beyond my “Modest Proposal” I also have a “Not-So-Modest Proposal” and I have “A Guargantuan Proposal.”  Looks like there’s gonna be a Part 3!

Stage Right is on Facebook.