1. The Crazed Vietnam Vet. It started in the 1970s when Hollywood wanted a character whose violence could be excused as the work of the government. The original “Rambo” movie was actually this very cliché.

Far more interesting is the character Noah, played by Chris Klein in “The Valley of Light,” about a World War II hero who comes home to find the family farm sold off, his parents dead and his brother is in jail. Very quietly, he puts to great use the maturity he had tempered in war, and the movie (spoiler alert) ends with him letting the catfish go.

I have had the pleasure of meeting a few real-life Noahs. I haven’t met a Rambo yet.

2. The Professional Bitch. Hudnall pointed out that successful people in business are not divas, but rather charming and witty. Outside of show biz, divas don’t make it. But it is difficult to write dialog for charming and witty people when you are neither charming nor witty.

In real life, these women wind up as Bill Lumbergh, never quite rising above entry-level management.

Nancy Marchand as Margaret Pynchon on “The Lou Grant Show” came the closest to being a humanized woman in power. I suggest Hollywood writers spend a few hours watching Marchand.

3. The Evil Christian. Wrote Hudnall: “Christians are always shown to be hypocrites and phonies. They’re never good people. They’re exposed as pious frauds when their ‘true colors’ are revealed.”

Amen. Except for a few old “Davey and Goliath” episodes and of course, the excellent “Miracle Of Our Lady Of Fatima” movie, Christians get a worse stereotype in Hollywood than Indians did in those old cowboy movies.

Strangely enough, the fairest TV show to Christians these days may be “The Simpsons,” who still go to church on Sunday — even Super Bowl Sunday — and who live next-door to the annoying but sincere Ned Flanders. His backstory of being the spawn of beatniks who spanked him continuously for a year, is in itself a denunciation of permissiveness. Also, underneath those sweaters, he is a hunk.

4. The Stupid Dad/Male. Yes, it is time to give Homer Simpson a few IQ points. After all, the man is supposed to be a nuclear engineer, although he never quite made it to college.

Andy Griffith as Andy Taylor succeeded because Andy Griffith grew up around plenty of Andy Taylors. Griffith and Don Knotts and their writers fleshed out great characters that were based on real life, not something they saw in the cinema.

5. “The Magic Negro.” Spike Lee is credited with coining this phrase. The problem is two-fold. First, why does the storyline need a magical human to begin with? The fairy godmother is a lame plot device.

The second problem is that the story is written by some white person who probably has no contact with black people and is afraid of being offensive. The result is another stereotype. Here’s an idea: Spend more time with people who aren’t like you.

6. The Pedophile Priest. Well, they exist. But so do pedophile rock stars and pedophile liberal talk radio hosts. Or how about that atheist clown, John Wayne Gacy?

If Hollywood is going to take on pedophilia, how about taking on NAMBLA? Or Jeffrey Dahmer? Otherwise, it is just more anti-Catholicism.

7. The Traditionalist Hypocrite. Everyone is tired of this. How about the hippie liberal who’s a closet racist? There was one such character in “Hair,” wasn’t there?

8. Evil Republicans. I tried to think of one movie that cast Republicans in a good light in the last 30 years — 20 of which had a Republican in the White House. All I could come up with is Reese Witherspoon as Elle Wood in “Legally Blonde.”

Unfortunately, in the sequel, she became a dime-a-dozen liberal. Originality is punished in Hollywood. As in any other company town, those in Hollywood must conform, conform, conform.

9. Wise Trashy People. Hudnall is no fan of “Good Will Hunting,” or “Down and Out in Beverly Hills,” and so on. The last honest portrayal of bums on TV may have been Arte Johnson as the Dirty Old Man on “Laugh-In” — oh wait, I forgot Damon Wayans as Anton Jackson on “In Living Color.”

10. Flyover Losers. It is pretty difficult to get people to see a film when you brand them as losers.

And yet, their promises hang on awkwardly out there in the Internet, in Google Caches of Shame, forever contradicting their (lack of) action. You would expect some embarrassment on their part; you would be wrong. Blagojevich and his hair is out there jogging with a smile (have you ever seen a jogger smiling?) and when confronted with a media question that actually isn’t rhetorical, Hillary goes into her I-see-into-the-back-of-your-skull® look. And Reid, poor fellow, twists the English language into merely horrific shapes to explain himself.

Obama surely must be the ne plus ultra example here, a man reflecting back whatever the voter wishes to see, despite Obama’s record of…well, his record of…something.

It’s not like Republicans are exempt; they too have played their roles. It took the Democrats’ 2 trillion dollar bailout to finally eclipse the Good Ol’ Profligate Party’s spending record after 8 years.

Anyway, I suppose we have a media of sorts to point out such unkept promises – and when I say “of sorts,” I mean hardly at all. The media’s last election cycle performance frankly belonged in the Walletjes Red Light district of Amsterdam; but the tipping did help produce a White House occupant.

This approach by the media tends to leave a bit of a gap in reporting for, say, half the nation. Into this same gap has gone the film industry, matching the MSM in outlook. This outlook results in anti-American films like “Redacted,” “Rendition,” and “Lions for Lambs” that directly share the MSM view of America. It’s a free country (still), so go ahead and make your point of view in whatever media form you wish. But expect that other half of the nation to have their say economically and politically.

Today, you can pick your teeth with Time magazine, and as newspapers are finding out, it’s hard to build a Fourth Estate on Fifth columns.

They adjusted their marketing plan.

This was before the Left Behind movies sold a few million DVD’s and The Passion of the Christ opened to over $100 million despite being set 2000 years ago in a dead language. Now every studio in Hollywood is looking for “faith-based” projects, especially because this year’s highest-grossing independent film was Fireproof, produced by a church for about $700,000 and which grossed over $30 million. Several studios even have faith-based divisions.

So has Hollywood found religion? Hardly. While it’s certainly a good thing that the studios are finally aware that Christians exist, they still don’t understand them, nor do they really want to try very hard. To be fair, Christians as a whole don’t exactly make things easy for Hollywood, as usually the only time that Hollywood hears from the Christian community is when they complain about or boycott their product. But that’s also been true of other people groups such as blacks, gays, and lobbyists for various nationalities or causes, and Hollywood has spent considerable effort to understand them while the media has done countless stories on the lack of accurately portrayed minorities.

But if there are faith-based divisions in Hollywood, what’s the problem? The problem is the divisions themselves; they are set up to acquire already financed or partially financed films from independent Christian producers and spend as little money as possible. They will occasionally bring in a Christian publicity firm to drum up some grass roots support, but the primary strategy is to release a film cheaply and hope the core Christian audience shows up. If they do, they make a killing; if they don’t, no harm done because so little was spent in the first place.

Once in a blue moon (full disclosure—I don’t know what that means), a studio will release a big budget film that’s story was generated from the Christian community, such as Chronicles of Narnia, or…um, I can’t really think of another one. Maybe The Nativity Story, but that was a half-hearted and boring attempt to capitalize on the Passion craze. But even in the case of Narnia, they chose a film that was safe and wouldn’t feel like a faith-based film to mainstream audiences, so as not to risk turning anyone off. When Sony Universal released Brokeback Mountain, they didn’t shy away from a few explicit gay sex scenes, as that would have been compromising; one wonders if they would extend the same treatment to explicit prayer or churchy scenes in a faith-based film that had a budget above $5 million.

So the faith-based film spectrum includes explicitly churchy cheap movies on one end, safe and moderate expensive movies (albeit very few) on the other. There is no in between. Movies like Chariots of Fire, The Mission, The Apostle, or A Walk to Remember, quality films of subtle power that address in an explicit and accurate way the issues of faith that most Americans experience, just aren’t made anymore. If these films were pitched to a studio today, they would either be shuffled to the faith division, dumbed down, and made for $2 million with no stars, or they would be beefed up and done expensively but have all the faith stuff thinned out. The Mission would be called The Journey, and it wouldn’t be about a missionary preaching to a third world tribe, it would be about an environmentalist preaching to a wrong-intentioned missionary.

The result? The majority of Americans miss out on films that reflect a large segment of the populace and an important part of our life experience. 90% of Americans believe in God, but how often do we see Him discussed in a mainstream film? Over half the country goes to church on a regular basis, but how often do we see church or clergy in a mainstream film? Or any Christians at all for that matter? Most Americans pray; have you seen prayer on screen in awhile?

There’s no question that Christians need to do a better job of making films and becoming world-class filmmakers who will deserve the ear of Hollywood executives. But even when we do, we often face the fate of famous screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, who recently became a Christian and is desperate to make a faith-based film. He pitched a script that executives thought was brilliant, but they didn’t want to make a “Christian film” unless it was cheap. The quality of the film matters less than which category they can fit it in to. In a vacuum, this isn’t abnormal or bad, as all entertainment is usually about marketing and finding categories. The problem in this case is that neither category is a good one.