It would be ridiculous for a conservative to enter a production or university theater expecting it be a politically edifying experience on level with, say, a National Review cruise. The university has been a well-guarded outpost of the left since 1951 or 1964 or somewhere ‘round those parts; the theater, likewise, has generally cheered left-wing causes.

It is not ridiculous to expect that theater departments (especially at publicly-funded institutions) prioritize storytelling and, well, drama ahead of the strident promotion of pet political causes and the vilification of those causes’ detractors.

From my experience, this basic expectation is often given the Vaudeville hook at the University of Georgia. This past semester, I signed up for a Theater Appreciation course to “develop a working vocabulary … of the theater” (from the syllabus) and, much more importantly, earn my degree’s requisite credit in the fine arts. The class itself was well taught and politically benign, as any introductory theater class should be. Our professor was impartial and, where his opinions shone through, he encouraged students to think for themselves on the issues. If only the rest of the department was so tolerant.

I attended four plays as part of the course. My only exposure to drama coming into college was a handful of high school plays—wholly uncontroversial musicals like “Anything Goes” and “Seussical.” College productions, I thought, would follow that formula.

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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…)

A common refrain used by progressives against conservatives is a deconstructionist war against the concept that there even is such a thing as the Left: “There’s so much diversity and disagreement in ‘the Left’ that you can’t just call it ‘the Left.’”

This is just a defense mechanism the leftist employs to avoid having to actually examine their movement. Cult members need to have criticism of their cult obscured. It’s the equivalent of “The first rule of Fight Club is you don’t talk about Fight Club…”

There’s a grain of truth here, though. All leftists share core ideas – particularly hatred of conservatives and an infinite faith in big government – but there is a range of thought, not unlike denominations within religions. There are variations in doctrine and tactics between Marxists, Alinskyites, Mother Jones populist progressives, Nation socialists, Daily Kos Democrats, Counterpunch communists, and Dissent social democrats. Grouping them all together under the label “the Left” is no more inaccurate than describing Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, and Lutherans as Christian.

Today, thanks to the extraordinary journalism and research of Ben Shapiro for his must-read book Primetime Propaganda, the focus is on one “church” in particular: the Hollywood Left. (more…)

There’s a theory that in order to ensure you never get hassled again, you walk up to the biggest guy in the room and knock him on his butt.  If you win, no one will ever mess with you because you knocked the biggest guy in the room on his butt.  And even if he gets up and pounds you into the ground, people will still avoid messing with you because you were crazy enough to try to knock the biggest guy in the room on his butt.

In the battle for the soul of our country, popular culture is the biggest guy in the room.  And it’s time that conservatives took a swing.  The Powerline Prize contest is a potential haymaker in one of the most important battles of our campaign.

Here’s how it describes itself:

The Power Line Prize of $100,000 will be awarded to whoever can most effectively and creatively dramatize the significance of the federal debt crisis. Prizes will also be awarded to the runner-up and two third-place finishers. Anyone can enter the contest—individuals, companies (e.g., advertising agencies) or any other entity, as long as the contest rules are followed. Any creative product is eligible: videos, songs, paintings, screenplays, Power Point presentations, essays, performance art, or anything else, as long as the product is unique to the contest and has not previously been published or otherwise entered the public domain. Entries may address the federal debt crisis in its entirety, or a specific aspect of the debt crisis, such as: the impact of the debt crisis on the young; the role played by the “stimulus” (Where did the money go? Why didn’t it stimulate?); how entitlements drive the debt crisis; the current federal deficit; how the debt crisis impacts the economy; or any other aspect of the debt crisis. The contest is non-partisan. Its purpose is to inform the public about the federal debt crisis.

Conservatives often dismiss the world of art as a milieu of posing half-wits seeking government subsidies for the unsellable, ridiculous and boring crap they churn out for the benefit of goateed posers and other suckers.  This is because an enormous amount of what is today labeled as “art” is manufactured by   posing half-wits seeking government subsidies for the unsellable, ridiculous and boring crap they churn out for the benefit of goateed posers and other suckers.

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Los Angeles Times:

While reading your new book, “The Secret Knowledge,” I thought, My God, in crucifying liberals, this guy is going to infuriate a huge chunk of the people who pay money to see plays. Are you concerned that you’re alienating your public?
I’ve been alienating my public since I was 20 years old. When “American Buffalo” came out on Broadway, people would storm out and say, “How dare he use that kind of language!” Of course I’m alienating the public! That’s what they pay me for. …

Don’t you have to denounce your early, anticapitalistic work then?
Of course not. At that time in my life I didn’t have a penny, and I was glad to be working at entry-level jobs. Having lived for quite a while longer, I see life from a different perspective. What am I going to do, go on denouncing capitalism all my life? …

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In a celebrated 2008 essay for the Village Voice, David Mamet made the startling announcement that he was “no longer a brain-dead liberal.” I think it only fair to mention here that I rejoiced. Mr. Mamet is a terrific playwright, maybe even a great one (“American Buffalo,” “Glengarry Glen Ross”) and a screenwriter of the first rank (“The Verdict,” “The Untouchables”). That a writer of such talent and stature had become a conservative seemed to me to promise some relief from the soporific political conformity of the American arts.

So I rejoiced—and I also sympathized. Breaking free of leftism while working in show business is like escaping from “The Matrix” only to find oneself in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” You wake to a risky but bracing new reality of individual liberty, limited government and free markets and are instantly beset by zombified statist dreamers determined either to make you rejoin their ranks or to destroy you. Mr. Mamet reports that a certain prominent left-leaning newspaper actually panned his first openly conservative play not once but twice for good measure. (Libertarian humorist Greg Gutfeld has introduced a “Mamet Attack Clock” on his late-night cable show to measure just how fast critics will now downgrade their opinions of the playwright’s work.)

Under such circumstances, it is natural that Mr. Mamet would develop the urge to cry out, like Kevin McCarthy in the famous last scene of “Body Snatchers”: “Listen to me! Please listen!” From that urge, no doubt, arises Mr. Mamet’s new work of nonfiction, “The Secret Knowledge.” It is his attempt to explain and disseminate the thinking behind his conversion to the right.

“Liberalism is a religion,” he writes. “It affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost. Central to this religion is the assertion that evil does not exist, all conflict being attributed to a lack of understanding between the opposed. Well and good, but this does not accord with the experience of anyone.”

Full article here.

You can purchase “The Secret Knowledge” here.

Playwright, screenwriter, novelist, and Pulitzer Prize Winner David Mamet has a book of essays coming out June 2nd, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture. The fact that Amazon recommends it next to Ann Coulter’s upcoming “Demonic” and Breitbart’s “Righteous Indignation” says a lot. In an absolute must-read, Andrew Fuerguson’s outstanding Weekly Standard profile of Mamet goes into greater detail about both the book and the man. 

Weekly Standard:

[David] Mamet had been brought to campus by Hillel, and the subject of his talk was “Art, Politics, Judaism, and the Mind of David Mamet.” There wasn’t much talk of Judaism, however, at least not explicitly. He arrived late and took the stage looking vaguely lost. He withdrew from his jacket a sheaf of papers that quickly became disarranged. He lost his place often. He stumbled over his sentences. But the unease that began to ripple through the audience had less to do with the speaker’s delivery than with his speech’s content. Mamet was delivering a frontal assault on American higher education, the provider of the livelihood of nearly everyone in his audience.

Higher ed, he said, was an elaborate scheme to deprive young people of their freedom of thought. He compared four years of college to a lab experiment in which a rat is trained to pull a lever for a pellet of food. A student recites some bit of received and unexamined wisdom—“Thomas Jefferson: slave owner, adulterer, pull the lever”—and is rewarded with his pellet: a grade, a degree, and ultimately a lifelong membership in a tribe of people educated to see the world in the same way.

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So a couple of years ago, legendary playwright David Mamet wrote a scathing piece in the Village Voice, on his journey from a well-meaning lib to a contemplative conservative.

If you aren’t familiar with his work, he also wrote movies like The Untouchables, The Verdict and Glengarry Glen Ross.

His new book, “The Secret Knowledge,” elaborates on this journey, condemning the left in devastating fashion.

What happens to people who do such things?

My prediction is that Mamet, if he isn’t disowned by his industry already, will be.

The break will be ugly, but clean.

He will be dismissed as a bitter crank who probably sucked to begin with.

All those awesome plays and films once praised by critics and celebs will now be reassessed.

As crap.

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The first thing you need to know about “Race,” the new play by David Mamet currently running at the Barrymore Theatre on Broadway, is that it isn’t really about race.  Well, not entirely about race.

The setting is a conference room of a law firm.  Henry Brown (David Alan Grier) and his white partner Jack Lawson (James Spader) are interviewing a prospective client (Richard Thomas).  The client, a wealthy white man, is standing trial for the rape of a black woman.

Two expert attorneys interviewing a prospective client is the perfect device for Mamet to not only inform the audience of the facts at hand and the idiosyncratic personalities of the characters we will spend the next hour and a half of our lives with, but it also serves as a perfect showcase for the playwright’s legendary use of dialogue, timing, over-lapping speech patterns and no-holds-barred language.  For a Mamet addict, this is heroin.

It is a chance to watch a conversation that anyone outside that room was never meant to hear.  And the language the characters use reflect the comfortable and brazen style reminiscent of Glengarry Glen Ross and Speed-the-Plow, the unique vernacular often referred to as “Mamet-Speak.” (more…)

Last night, David “I’m No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal” Mamet’s “Oleanna” opened on Broadway.  The production (a transfer from Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum) stars Bill Pullman and Julia Stiles.  As discussed on these pages Friday, this play was originally produced off-Broadway 18 years ago and is now receiving its first, official Broadway production. “Oleanna” and the upcoming “Race” are two opportunities for Mr. Mamet’s work to be evaluated by the heavily-left-leaning theatre critics.

The play received quite positive reviews.  Here are some interesting things I read in the reviews…

In Elysa Gardner’s positive review in USA Today, she refers to the contrasting times in which the play is now produced versus the original production:

When David Mamet’s Oleanna premiered in 1992, it was widely perceived as a response to the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in which Thomas was accused of sexual harassment by former assistant Anita Hill.  It has been 18 years since that real-life drama played out. But as the very different controversy now surrounding David Letterman reminds us, the debate over what constitutes an abuse of power between a male authority figure and a female subordinate isn’t going away. (more…)

“I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.” – David Mamet

As I discussed in my very first post here at Big Hollywood, many in the theatre world were surprised to read David Mamet’s amazing article, “Why I am No Longer A Brain-Dead Liberal” in the Village Voice.  In my post, I used the play “Oleanna” as an example of a conservative lean that I recognized in Mamet’s work when it premiered off-Broadway in 1992.  I concluded with a couple of questions: (more…)

Summer is the slow time on Broadway as theatre pros recover from their Tony Award hang-overs and try to rush out to the Island for a few days of R & R before the new season begins.  This year it seems there are a few plays aiming for early fall openings hoping to ride a crest of popularity into the always-lucrative holiday season.

Just as last season brought a record number of plays as well as stellar gross sales (despite doom-sayers in the industry) this season already looks locked and loaded with a huge number of shows scheduled to open between October 1st and the first week of May (the traditional Tony nomination cut-off).  So to help the readers of Big Hollywood plan their trip to the Great White Way (we can still say that, can’t we?), I submit the top 10 things to look for from the center/right perspective:

10.  ”Superior Donuts” – A transfer from Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre (one of my personal favorite regional houses in America), the play stars “Spinal Tap”’s Michael McKean as an aging hippie who owns a donut shop in a largely black neighborhood and Jon Michael Hill (do all young Broadway actors HAVE to go by three names now?) as a 21-year-old from the neighborhood who talks his way into a job at the shop.  From the New York Times review:  ”In one of the play’s most amusing exchanges Franco challenges Arthur to name 10 black poets. Arthur names a few, then stands dumb, a look of deep concentration on his face. “It’s like watching George Bush on ‘Jeopardy!’ ” Franco cracks.” (more…)

In March 2008, Pulitzer Prize winning playwright David Mamet, author of “Glengary Glen Ross” and the man many consider America’s greatest living dramatist, wrote an essay for The Village Voice titled “Why I am No Longer A Brain Dead Liberal.”  This essay was a thunder clap in the arts community, leaving, as Dinesh D’Souza put it, the “left-leaning literary and cultural intelligentsia…in shock.”

The Saul-like conversion of Mamet has produced reams of commentary from both the left and the right, but it is the reaction of the left that is especially interesting.  Many in the liberal “intelligentsia” have greeted the news by openly wondering whether such a political shift will result in the loss of Mamet’s famous creative powers.  A “depressed” Michael Billington, for one, writing in The Guardian, is fearful of what Mamet’s conversion portends for his work because, “the precedents for a shift to the right on the part of creative artists are not exactly encouraging.” (more…)

In what is becoming an annual rite of self-destruction, Broadway has once again chosen to snub many of the big-name stars who have put their film careers on hold to trudge onto the boards eight times a week, take a significant pay cut, and run the risk of being ridiculed for being unable to cut the mustard as a theatre actor  (As Alan Swan famously said before having to appear on live television in “My Favorite Year”:  ‘I’m not an actor, damn you, I’m a movie star!’).  This week’s announcement of nominees for Broadway’s top prize, the Tony Award, was more newsworthy for the names left off the list than for the relatively unfamiliar names singled out for the honor. 

Nathan Lane and John Goodman are selling tickets hand over fist for their revival of “Waiting for Godot” but neither received the honor of a nomination.  Same with David Hyde Pierce, Frank Langella, Mary Louise Parker and Matthew Broderick. 

It was no surprise that Jeremy Piven was included out of the Best Actor category after his famous sushi defense for missing performances in David Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow,” but not honoring John Lithgow’s brilliant turn in “All My Sons” in the same category is a crime against humanity!  It ranks up there with the snub of Dustin Hoffman as Willy Loman in the 1984 revival of “Death of a Salesman.” Brian Dennehy was honored with the Best Actor award when he did Willy Loman in 2000, but that goodwill did not anoint him worthy of a nomination this year for his turn in “Desire Under the Elms.”  (more…)

Meeting Ron Silver humbled me. Never have I been more wrong in assessing a person before knowing him.

Until I met him, he was just another Hollywood liberal loud mouth.

Yes, he was an award-winning actor and prolific film star. And, yes, he had strong political opinions. (The net sum of his positions added up to no partisan’s delight.)

But Ron Silver was also astoundingly intelligent. Ask anyone who knew him. He spoke fluent Mandarin Chinese and Spanish to go with having a Master’s Degree in Chinese History.

These facets combined to make Silver a most compelling public person, a natural leader and the type of man who automatically commanded respect and admiration no matter the social or vocational circumstance. (more…)

You are what you eat, I guess. 

It was the performance of Jeremy Piven’s life. Last week, he tearfully persuaded five fellow actors that he was deathly ill from mercury poisoning due to his lifelong love of sushi – and not merely slacking off with Britney – when he abruptly walked away from the Broadway production of “Speed-the-Plow.’’ I predict future actors will have “no raw fish” clauses attached to their contracts. Entire A-list restaurants will tremble at the loss of high-profile business. On the bright side, fish will live.

Piven dodged a financial bullet by pleading his case to a grievance committee of Actor’s Equity. He could not escape the hilarity that ensued over his fishy tale. As “Plow’’ playwright David Mamet joked to the New York Post’s Michael Riedel, “My understanding is he is leaving show business to pursue a career as a thermometer.’’

This is why Piven is my latest “Celebutard of the Week,’’ in keeping with my new book, Celebutards: The Hollywood Hacks, Limousine Liberal and Pandering Politicians Who Are Destroying America. (more…)

The Academy Awards for 2008 have been handed out, and the “popular kids” have Oscars on their mantles, but the dirty little secret about winning awards is that you’ve gotta campaign for them. Thousands of dollars were spent by the distributors and filmmakers behind Slumdog Millionaire (Fox Searchlight), Milk (Focus Features), The Reader (Weinstein) and other assorted winners and nominees, but not all performances received that sort of big money backing.

I am an unabashed lover of the acting craft. I see virtually every movie, large and small, that passes through the US marketplace, and, taking nothing away from Sean Penn, Kate Winslet, Penelope Cruz and Heath Ledger, not all of 2008’s best performances have been recognized. I’m not going to be obvious here. Clint Eastwood was snubbed for Gran Torino, but he received lots of acclaim for the role including being named Best Actor by the National Board of Review. My goal is to highlight 10 performances from last year that have received virtually no acclaim in the US. Many of these roles can be found in hardly-seen, under-appreciated movies that came and went without much notice. Each and every one of these movies deserve a spot in your Netflix (or Blockbuster) cue. (more…)