Woody Guthrie: hero to the left for decades. Writer of folk hits like ‘This Land Is Your Land.” Member of the Communist Party. But because he was part of the “Greatest Generation” that went through the Great Depression and World War II, his basic sensibility and outlook are still miles away from the spoiled brats of the Occupy Movement. Here’s proof …

Take a look at his 1942 New Year’s Resolution and see if it doesn’t bring a smile to your face, with cute cartoons and common sense goals. Seems to me that almost all his goals are really things that seem almost – dare I say it? – conservative in today’s world.

Keep clean. Save money. Work hard. Take care of your kids. Love your parents. Help the country win the war. (more…)

Did you hear the news? Chuck Woolery came out of the closet! No, not that closet. Coming out of that closet in Hollywood gets you applause for your bravery. Instead, Woolery came out recently to admit that he is a … wait for it … conservative!

If you have not read “Primetime Propaganda” by Ben Shapiro or Andrew Breitbart’s “Righteous Indignation,” I suggest adding both of them to your fall reading list. Both books do a great job of explaining how we got to this point in, supposedly, the most tolerant and accepting nation in the history of the planet, where the one thing that will not be tolerated in Hollywood is admitting you are a conservative. As someone hoping to one day make a living as a working actor, I know I have a difficult road in front of me due to my political views.

So why is it newsworthy when someone in Hollywood admits they are, indeed, a conservative? Everyone knows that Kelsey Grammer is a conservative, yet he still works regularly. His former co-star, Patricia Heaton, also has another hit series despite her apparent drawback. It is news because, at least until now, they have been the exception. It is news because the Hollywood power brokers have set up a system that, until now, has kept conservatives too afraid to admit their true political views for fear of being ostracized from any future work in “the business.”

There’s also the fact that conservatives do not feel the need to spout their political views at every opportunity the way liberals in Hollywood do. I’ve never understood why someone who relies on reaching the largest audience possible to view their work would alienate half of their potential fan base. Granted, not every Hollywood liberal has called Tea Partiers racists, but enough of them have to affect their box office numbers. According to Box Office Mojo, the 2011 box office take is down 4.2 percent compared to the same point last year. That is hundreds of millions of dollars. Sure, the down economy is having some effect on movie going, but it is not the only reason people aren’t going. I, for one, have stopped going because I don’t want to give my hard earned money to someone who thinks so little of me.

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Click here for Part 1 and here for Part 2.

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

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

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

Recently I was lucky enough to attend a political fundraiser featuring a new breed of documentary that looks, sounds, and smells like a real Hollywood movie.  I Want Your Money fairly summarizes the ideological battle currently playing out all over this country between big government liberalism and small government conservatism.  The movie is ultimately a teaching tool to encourage a return to the conservative constitutional principles that the Tea Party and true conservatives espouse.  It’s political evangelization, if you will.

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Bias alert: I am a member of the Eeeeevil Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, and have been since I was old enough to understand politics.  I realize I like the movie because it gives voice to facts and principles that animate conservatives — facts and principles that are ignored or omitted by the Make-Believe Media and Hollywood.  Many hardcore leftists will hate the film because they will hate the advocacy for limited government.  Predictably, they will call the director every name in the left-wing play book and pooh-pooh the film’s style; however, I challenge them to actually address the film’s facts without using name calling. 

I Want Your Money does the near-impossible: it makes politics entertaining.  The documentary combines historical clips and quotes with interviews of today’s conservatives, and lampoons prominent politicians from Nixon to Sarah Palin, Bill Clinton and, of course, President Obama using CGI cartooning.  My favorite bit was counting how many times Hillary got to slap a womanizing Bill Clinton.  There were many moments where the crowd of about 50 die-hard conservative Tea Party-types laughed out loud.  The director Ray Griggs has proved the adage, “you gotta know your audience.” (more…)

A curious aspect of the Bond legend is that Ian Fleming’s socialite wife despised the character. She went so far as to host upper-crust parties at which she and her lettered friends — literary giants such as Cyril Connolly, Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, Malcolm Muggeridge, and Evelyn Waugh — cattily disparaged her husband’s popular creation as embarrassingly lowbrow, the English equivalent of American pulp fiction (and thus the modern heir to the “Boy’s Weeklies” of Orwell’s famous essay). “Utterly despicable,” was Muggeridge’s quoted verdict in Time magazine soon after Fleming’s death. “[Bond is] obsequious to his superiors, pretentious in his tastes, callous and brutal in his ways, with strong undertones of sadism, and an unspeakable cad in his relations with women, towards whom sexual appetite represents the only approach.”

During the same period, various Leftist writers began penning spy stories of their own in reaction to Fleming’s potent brew of unapologetic clubhouse masculinity (smoking, drinking, gambling, golfing, seducing) and unqualified patriotism, favoring a more, shall we say, morally nuanced look at the Cold War. Author John “The United States of America has gone mad” le Carré, then finding fame with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963 — good guys die, bad guys win, yay!), considered Fleming’s books “cultural pornography,” and mused that in the real world Bond’s “misty, patriotic ideas” would hardly prevent him from betraying his country at the first opportunity. “Because if the money was better,” le Carré snickered with certainty, “the booze freer, and women easier in Moscow, he’d be off like a shot.”

Into this maelstrom of anti-Fleming derision came a little volume called The James Bond Dossier (1965), penned by a more notorious member of the English literati, academic-cum-novelist Kingsley Amis. A savagely witty writer, a world-class drunkard, and a conflicted serial adulterer (all qualities shared, you may recall from our previous installment, with Bond’s creator), the overarching critical statement of his book was simple enough: “Inside that conservative dark-blue worsted suit and under the same skin as a bearer of the hard-earned double-o prefix there lurks an intruder from another age,” a “Byronic hero,” who “is lonely, melancholy, of fine natural physique, which has become in some way ravaged, of similarly fine but ravaged countenance, dark and brooding in expression, of a cold or cynical veneer, above all enigmatic, in possession of a sinister secret.” (more…)

[ed. note: a number of you have written requesting I invite T. Coddington Van Voorhees VII back for another analysis of the sad state of the conservative movement. After some cajoling and a bottle of VSOP, he agreed.]

T. Coddington Van Voorhees VII
Editor, the National Topsider
Membership Chairman, The Newport Club

Much has been written about the fate of the conservative movement in the months since last I corresponded with you. I won’t belabor the barrels of ink expended in the printing of its obituary, nor will I bore you with further reading of its entrails. Suffice it to say the grand old ship is in the doldrums, adrift in the electoral currents, with nary a harbor on the horizon. But it is time we leave such map room mopery aside and navigate a bold new course for the conservative armada. One needn’t have a 400-year old heirloom scrimshaw sextant for this task; but, fortunately, I do. (more…)