John Sayles may be this country’s most idiosyncratic independent writer-director, though his personal films and novels often look suspiciously Sol Alinsky-ish. Many of Sayles’ films are of a left leaning historical nature and have ranged from early 20th century miner’s strikes (‘Matewan’) to the complexities of geographic racial identity (‘Lone Star’).

So it was with caution that I approached his new independent film ‘Amigo,’ very loosely based around 1901 events during the Philippine Insurrection in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War. The Philippine Insurrection was a kind of American Victorian Vietnam where issues of friendlies mixed in among foe, bolo knife ambushes and waterboarding interrogations (yes, it’s been around that long) reared their uncomfortable heads.

‘Civilize ‘em with a Krag,” the standard American military rifle of the period, was a lyric to a song popular with American troops of the time, and ugly racial epithets like “GuGu” were a common reference to the native Filipinos.

‘Amigo’ is not a bad film, and surprisingly nowhere near as Anti-American as one would expect.

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The Hollywood Reporter delivers an absolutely terrific and in-depth look at some of the maddening behind-the-scenes nonsense that ended, quite incredibly, with the History Channel’s cancellation of a $30 million miniseries, a move that likely cost its parent company, A&E Television Networks (and its owners Disney, NBCUniversal), millions already invested in production and marketing costs. This from the same network that broadcast a two-hour love letter to Howard Zinn. But it’s obvious the powers-that-be chose to lose a bundle in order to stay in the good graces of the Kennedy family (and therefore Hollywood) in the same way Disney appeases the Clintons by refusing to rerun or release on DVD “The Path to 9/11.”

In the middle of this political storm sat ”24″ producer Joel Surnow, whose only sin is his open conservatism and who obviously did everything he was asked of by every historian thrown his way in order to meet The Howard Zinn Channel’s lofty historical standards. In return, the goal posts were moved time and again until the inevitable came true. Here are some snips, but you’ll want to read the whole thing:

“They were down to specific words,” Surnow says. Producers, for instance, had wanted Jack Kennedy to go to Hyannis Port, Mass., before his father had a stroke, but the historians nixed that. “We had a magnifying glass over every line.”

Surnow reaches across the table, opens a computer and reveals an e-mail dated May 25 from Gillon to him, Koch and McKillop: “I have approved the latest version of episode one for historical accuracy. Congratulations.” Surnow has similar e-mails for all the other episodes.

But the fight wasn’t over. Even after shooting the miniseries in Toronto from June through September 2010, producers felt additional pressure over historical accuracy. After the project was canceled, The New York Times, citing anonymous sources, wrote that when History historians viewed the edited version of the miniseries, they complained that it still contained several scenes of questionable factuality, including depictions of the family’s sex lives.

“That’s not true,” Surnow responds. “The historians went through and asked us a couple questions, just crossing-every-t, dotting-every-i stuff, but they were just notes. Nothing of any historical substance.”

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Tom Shadyac was a movie director who was on top of the world in comedy, thanks to his frequent blockbuster collaborations with Jim Carrey. Starting with the two “Ace Ventura” comedies and moving on through “Liar Liar” and “Bruce Almighty,” with detours to make “The Nutty Professor” and “Patch Adams” in between, Shadyac appeared that he could do no wrong at the box office and applied his fortune to owning a 500-acre estate on the eastern edge of Pasadena.

But then in 2007, a double-whammy hit him when his “Bruce” sequel “Evan Almighty” became one of the biggest comedic box-office bombs of all time, and then he suffered severe head trauma in a bicycle-riding accident. The side effects included blurred vision and severe migraines that never seemed to go away, and Shadyac – who had been a lifelong Catholic – thought he was going to die.

Then suddenly, his life-threatening symptoms miraculously healed, and Shadyac decided to radically transform his lifestyle. He embarked on a spiritual and philosophical quest that took him around the planet while he explored the answers that the various world religions and most famous philosophers had to offer. And as a result, he wound up feeling that his wealth and extravagant professions were a form of mental illness in a world where millions of people go to sleep hungry every day.

Shadyac decided to take radical measures to change his life and his mindset, and wound up selling off his land and his house – as well as his private jet – and downsized to live in a mobile home at a community on the Malibu coastline. He gave away most of his wealth, but also spent $1 million of it to finance a highly personal documentary called “I Am,” which put his quest on film and offers a heady yet often compelling mix of insights and analysis into the meaning of life and whether there’s an afterlife.

“I Am” is playing in Los Angeles and New York City now, but will be rolling out to theaters around the country in coming weeks. It’s a compelling look at Shadyac’s big changes, and offers plenty of fodder for viewers to consider their own lives as well. However, be warned that a lot of his interview segments are with Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn and the like. They aren’t focusing on bashing America but talk about the excesses of wealth in the West.

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Never forget that the same History Channel responsible for dumping the $30 million dollar miniseries “The Kennedys” due to “accuracy concerns,” is and was behind an all-out effort to mainstream Howard Zinn, one of the most dishonest, anti-American historians in what is a long line of them. Using celebrities like Matt Damon, Josh Brolin, and the usual Hollywood suspects, the History Channel aided and abetted a glowing, much-publicized two-hour special around the old liar not long before he passed on to receive whatever reward he had coming.

Our contributors did a marvelous job documenting Zinn’s profane legacy and now, thanks to Josh Brolin, we’re reminded that we’ve arrived at the one-year anniversary of Zinn’s death:

By: Josh Brolin
February 2, 2011

It was a year this past January 27th that my friend, Howard Zinn, passed away in Santa Monica, California. …

The impact that Howard Zinn has had on the world of fair, conscientious people is profound, and the impact that he had as a friend will be forever felt by me and by all those that knew him with the deepest, most visceral tickle imaginable. He was mischievous, fun, childlike, and an appreciator of all things beautiful. My wife was so smitten with him and he knew, in that classy old-school way, how to sustain it. We had spoken about women and how we both felt that they are, ultimately, the keepers of all things good. He was a smart man, a gentle man, and a gentleman.

To admit: I still speak with him at times when I am alone. He brings that kind of solace. It’s not exclusive to crisis, no – it’s as a friend, as someone I could always have a laugh with, and as someone who could inspire with the simplest glance. He understood that to bring a smile to someone’s face was as important to our well being as was protesting the myriad issues that Howard did. His motive, how it resonated in me, was simply to carve a more loving life for our children and those to follow.

You are so missed dear Howard, but your smiles will always live on.

On background, someone told me Brolin’s original draft was written in longhand and that all the i’s were dotted with little hearts.

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Though based on a screenplay approved by their parent company A&E Television Networks (AETN), on January 7th the History Channel buckled to the demands of the Kennedy family and unceremoniously pulled the rug out from under the completed $30 million miniseries “The Kennedys.” Today, after weeks of what was likely a bruising scramble to outrun the tentacles of the Kennedys, in an exclusive, the Hollywood Reporter tells us the mini will air in eight parts on the ReelzChannel starting April 3rd. The channel is currently available in 60 million homes across the country and a big advertising blitz is planned to get the word out.

I’m not someone who believes in the magic of controversy to automatically drive people to watch something they normally wouldn’t, but there’s always been public interest in the Kennedy family and at the very least this uproar has upped the profile of the mini. You also have this built-in interest backed by respected talent with successful track records. “24″ co-creator Joel Surnow is the Executive Producer and there’s a number of high-profile, critically acclaimed actors in lead roles, including Greg Kinnear as President Kennedy, Barry Pepper as Bobby and Tom Wilkinson as Joe Sr. Furthermore, some real good can come out this and not just for the miniseries.

The Kennedys | Movie Trailer | Review

The four-year old independent ReelzChannel now has an opportunity with a product they normally wouldn’t have been considered for, to break out and and make a name and brand for themselves. The more entertainment outlets not owned by politically-connected multi-nationals (AETN is owned by NBC-Universal, Disney, etc.), the better it is for our democracy. This is also an opportunity for 60 million people to see the mini. That might be a smaller pool than the History Channel has, but it’s more than double the number of HBO subscribers, a network that passed on the project.

The other good to come out of this is that now we know for certain that the The History Channel really isn’t The History Channel. The same network that said “The Kennedys” didn’t meet their standards is is the same network that attempted to mainstream that degenerate anti-American liar of a historian we call Howard Zinn. No institution with any kind of accuracy standards would do such a thing and so now we know they are The Left-Wing History Channel. (more…)

Recap: Radical funder George Soros’s $1 million gift to Media Matters, a left-wing character assassination machine, underwrites its campaign to stigmatize conservative ideas. For weeks Eric Boehlert of Media Matters attacked Glenn Beck because a disturbed viewer plotted to shoot up the offices of the left-wing Tides Foundation. The shooter, Byron Williams, failed, but in December when a fan of Media Matters, the late Florida school board shooter Clay Duke, wreaked havoc, Boehlert and Media Matters remained silent.

Soros is also bankrolling a documentary that celebrates left-wing terrorists who plotted to napalm Republicans at the 2008 GOP convention in Minnesota. Even worse, you too are bankrolling the film through your taxes.

A trailer for the left-wing film Better This World suggests that it depicts David Guy McKay and Bradley Neil Crowder as idealistic activists who, according to the official blurb, “set out to prove the strength of their political convictions to themselves and their mentor.” In fact McKay and Crowder are convicted domestic terrorists who manufactured instruments of death calculated to inflict maximum pain and bodily harm on people whose political views they disagreed with.

You can be sure that if it was right-wing terrorists who were plotting to attack the Democratic National Convention, whoever foiled the conspiracy would be immortalized in film, literature and song as a savior of democracy.

“If you flip the equation around and it had been a group of conservatives threatening to use force to prevent those on the Left from meeting, everyone would expect the government to infiltrate them and they would also expect the FBI to stop them and charge them with crimes,” said Brandon Darby, who helped the FBI thwart the planned attack. (Darby’s essay on political violence appeared on Big Government over the past weekend. Read it here.) (more…)

Don’t expect Matt Damon or Josh Brolin or any of the other celebrities and Hollywood producers behind the History Channel’s The People Speak to issue apologies for their celebration of leftist professor and author Howard Zinn in light of the release last week of file 100-369217 – the FBI’s decades long investigation into Zinn’s alleged communist activities.

Already, Zinn’s far-left sympathizers are poking holes, some more credibly than others, in the 430 pages of documents, and trying to draw focus away from Zinn’s alleged membership in the Kremlin-controlled Communist Party USA and onto the fact that a Boston University administrator turned FBI informant once plotted to have him fired in the 1970s.

To the radical left, trying to interfere with an extremist professor as he dutifully decries his country as a police state is a far more egregious crime than belonging to a political organization allied with and controlled by the sworn enemy of the United States.

It’s all about perspective… (more…)

As has been amply demonstrated by others, Howard Zinn was an anti-American secular humanist with heavily Marxist leanings.  As I have already written, teaching the Zinn Education Project in public schools likely violates the California education code.  It discriminates against particular races (namely, non-minorities) and all traditional religion (particularly with regard to its view of homosexuality).  Zinn himself called for violating the education codes wherever possible:

“Don’t obey the rules… you have to play a kind of guerrilla warfare with the establishment in which you try not to be fired… You have to depart from the curriculum… outside the lines that are set for us by the school administration, or the politicians.”

Zinn, Josh Brolin, Chris Moore, Matt Damon

 Of course, that doesn’t stop schoolteachers everywhere from teaching Zinn.  According to the Oxnard Union High School District, Zinn’s on the California Department of Education Recommended Reading List.   

He’s taught at the San Lorenzo Unified School District Re-Entry Intervention Program, which targets kids coming back to school after being expelled, students with ten or more days of suspension who are on track for expulsion, students coming back to school from Juvenile Hall – in short, the worst of the worst.  This makes perfect sense – after all, what better way is there to teach borderline-criminal kids about good citizenship than pillorying America and giving them delusions of victimhood?  (more…)

“[Howard Zinn] was a treasure and an inspiration. That he was considered radical says way more about this society than it does about him.” -  Bob Herbert 

Public school children are innocent victims of a radical “guerrilla warfare” being waged by the late professor Howard Zinn’s Zinn Education Project (ZEP), Rethinking Schools Magazine, and Teaching for Change. 

These anti-establishment educators’ mission includes curriculum-subversion in order to radically transform schools into centers of social justice wherein  students are trained to become global citizen change agents. 

Perpetuating Zinn’s revolutionary mission, his surviving business partners proclaimed: 

Howard Zinn, in honor of the marvelous victory of your life, we will act in defiance of all that is bad around us and attempt to spin the world towards justice. 

With the national spotlight on History Channel’s “The People Speak” and its ZEP curriculum — parents, teachers, school boards and administrators should beware of the celebrity-opiate being dealt to their schoolchildren by way of Zinn-doctrination.  (more…)

Last week, Howard Zinn passed away. It was only a few weeks after the History Channel had premiered the film “The People Speak” honoring his controversial book “A People’s History of the United States.”

Prof. Zinn never hid the fact that he wrote “A People’s History” not as a reference book to collect dust on the shelf but as a field guide for the re-making of our society.  In a 1988 interview with the University of Georgia, he summed up the legacy of his work better than anyone.

A quiet revolution is a good way of putting it. From the bottom up. Not a revolution in the classical sense of a seizure of power, but rather from people beginning to take power from within the institutions. In the workplace, the workers would take power to control the conditions of their lives. It would be a democratic socialism.

In the wake of his death, conservative commentators who had been critical of Zinn’s lifework were accused of “spitting on his grave” when responding to interview requests about Zinn’s legacy.  At Big Hollywood we have less interest in trashing Howard Zinn, the man, as we have in shining a light on what his actual beliefs and agenda were, and still are. (more…)

[Ed. Note: This is part two of a two-part series. You can read part one here.]

The Noble Redskin, or Blueskin stereotype that James Cameron’s Avatar shoves down historically ignorant sci-fi geeks throats is one of the most damaging myths in our country’s history today. Cameron’s Na’vi are definitely warrior-like and have geographic based clans, the mountain people, the coastal people etc., but there is no mention of previous inter-tribal warfare and inter-culture wounds to mend. The Na’vi are good, noble and courageous while the humans, American type humans at that, except for the scientists are greedy, selfish and bloodthirsty. Michael  Medved’s excellent recent book The Ten Big Lies About America quotes less then politically correct Harvard archaeologist Steven LeBlanc showing that genocides and land raids amongst regional and ethnic groups have always been the norm for native peoples, regardless of ethnicity.

Historian Elliot West’s award winning 1998 book The Contested Plains also points out that inter-tribal warfare before the white man hit the shores of North America claimed many more native lives then warfare between the tribes and Europeans. I guess Cameron’s Na’vi are just so much more evolved then our own real-life historical Indian tribes. That doesn’t even include the good old cannibalistic Aztecs who managed to make more then a few of the neighboring tribes part of their daily menu. Did you ever wonder how Cortez and his small band of merry Spaniards managed to make allies of almost all of the surrounding tribes? It wound up being pretty damn easy to do when the local bully has been using you and yours as a convenient Burger King for the last few generations. (more…)

Oliver Stone’s latest desperate grasp at relevance is a new cable series that, among other things, promises to finally place der Furher into der context.  Now, this is where I’m supposed to be outraged, but I’m just not feeling it.  Ollie, I know you’d like us to believe that this isn’t just a pathetic stunt, that this brainstorm was inspired by some peyote-spawned fire demon’s whisperings inside your drug-addled cerebellum and that if we’re truly edgy we won’t dare ignore your remarkable vision.  But I think you’re once again just trying to freak out the squares and this square, for one, is mighty bored.

Stone’s scripts for Midnight Express and Scarface blew our collective minds with staggering violence and raw language.  Then he directed Platoon – an awesome film if you dig sophomore-level meditations on the duality of good and evil leavened with gunfire.  JFK came along and demonstrated that Kennedy was murdered not by the commie misfit who actually did it, but a conspiracy made up of big business, the government, the military, the Trilateral Commission, the Knights Templar, Prince Olaf of South Ruritania, and everyone else on Earth except Lee Harvey Oswald and JFK himself – or was he in on it too?  After that, Stone was ready to completely abandon the constraints imposed by concepts like “story,” “characters” and “coherence.”  Natural Born Killers was the result, the perfect Oliver Stone film – all controversy, great visuals, and nothing that made anything remotely like sense. (more…)

You have seen John Nolte’s countdown of the Top 25 Christmas Movies, but this list is something else – a list of movies worth watching that take place in or around Christmas but aren’t about Christmas itself.  They don’t necessarily embrace the spirit of the season – as to some of them, that’s putting it mildly – but each one is guaranteed to provide you at least a couple of hours blissfully sheltered from the mindless socialist rants of the health care demolition crew, from the lame excuses and transparent equivocations of the climate change scammers, and from Howard Zinn-scripted commie nonsense spouted by ignorant Hollywood nitwits.

Here they go, in no particular order:

10. Die Hard (1988): You’ve seen Die Hard probably a hundred times.  See it again, preferably uncut and not sanitized for TV.  Bruce Willis is a cop trapped alone while the incredible Alan Rickman and his band of fashion plate terrorists grab Nakatomi Plaza during the annual Christmas party.  The plot is simple, but the execution is simply awesome.  This movie is the archetype, the template  for a hundred subsequent movies that were pitched as “Die Hard in a (fill in the blank).”  For more fun, try my Die Hard-themed drinking game – take a pull on a Dos Equis every time something happens that creates or reaffirms a classic action film cliché.  Wisenheimer renegade cop who play by his own rules – gulp!  Lots of MP-5s and other (then) hi-tech armaments that fire a ton of rounds but rarely hit anything – gulp!  Villain who rises from the dead to be killed one last time – gulp!  You may want a designate a driver – cue Argyle, the streetwise sidekick in the limo (gulp)!   (more…)

You can see the possibility that small acts multiplied by the millions can merge into great movements of social change. — So speaketh Howard Zinn in summing up the theme of last night’s two hour History Channel telecast of “The People Speak.” But like all Leftists, Zinn’s using a t-shirt ready face, focus group-tested platitudes, and cherry-picked bits of American history to further a monstrous ideology that will ensure all but a few Matt Damon-esque elites lose their liberties to Big Government overseers.

If you think about it, taken at face value, that Zinn quote personifies the Tea Party movement, doesn’t it? But what do you think Zinn and his fellow celebucrats think of those everyday people? That question can be answered in two words: Sarah and Palin:

–

A large portion of “The People Speak” celebrates “everyday” women who came from nowhere to fight the establishment and have their voices heard … and yet here’s Matt Damon trashing the self-made reformer from Alaska who took on her own party.

It’s important to keep in mind that in Zinn’s poseur-infested world, some who believe democracy is not a spectator sport are more equal than others. (more…)

Below is Big Hollywood’s “People Speak” LiveBlog, brought to you by ScribbleLive.com.  Head over there and set up a user profile and picture.  All are welcome to participate, contributors and readers alike.

Also check out Stage Right’s “People Speak” podcast special on Blog Talk Radio.

East Coast and West Coast threads after the jump. (more…)

In a classic episode of the Sopranos, Tony tries to excite his two children about their Italian-American ancestry and the upcoming Columbus Day parade.  Tony’s son A.J., eager to show up his fuddy-duddy dad, invokes Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States as proof that Christopher Columbus was bad.  “My teacher told us that.  It must be true,” he says.  “You finally read a book,” Tony fires back, “and it’s all [baloney].”  Only he didn’t say “baloney.”

What Tony Soprano knows the History Channel doesn’t.   Howard Zinn isn’t a great historian.  He’s not even a good one.

How, then, to explain his widespread popularity, and the History Channel’s willingness this weekend to give Zinn an even larger megaphone?  After having visited scores of K-12 schools and working with thousands of history and social studies teachers in national civic education programs, one of which I direct for Hillsdale College, I have concluded that Zinn is popular because he tells a great story.  The only problem is that his story is not true.  This inconvenience has not stopped school administrators from commending Zinn to their teachers.

Several years ago, in a meeting of the Ann Arbor public school system, home to Michigan’s largest high school, the superintendent, distressed at his district’s lack of progress in closing the racial “achievement gap,” held up a copy of A People’s History.  “Have you heard of Howard Zinn?” he asked the throng of thousands of district teachers and employees, gathered for a large “in-service” assembly.  In fact, they had, and many teachers already taught from the text the administrator prescribed as the cure for what ailed the district. Instead of helping, many teachers told me, the book had contributed to the malady, for Zinn’s basic message is one of division, not unity. (more…)

“Howard Zinn believes George W. Bush bringing democracy to the Iraqis is like Christopher Columbus bringing Christianity to the Indians.”

This 2005 video is just more proof that Howard Zinn is nothing more than a historical cherry-picker. Out of context and with a scope of vision no broader than what you see through a soda straw, Zinn cherry picks moments and events from here and there to create the narrative of America he’s pitching to keep his star rising amongst Hollywood’s Marxist poseurs and leftist academic grievance mongers desperate for an excuse to explain away their inability to succeed in the real world. (more…)

So anyway, last week I was asked to review the accompanying CD for tonight’s upcoming The People Speak documentary. Mindful of my journalistic duty, I immediately emailed the good folks at Verve Music Group asking for a review copy. Alas, they never got back to me. Thus as I certainly wasn’t going to spend any of my own ca$h on something that featured knuckle-headed dullard Eddie Vedder (the Sean Penn of the rock music world) covering Dylan, I was forced to review the 25 second previews on Amazon instead. So here goes:

Track 1: Do Re Mi by Bob Dylan: I used to have the Woody Guthrie version of this song on my iPod. After about three years I noticed I had played it twice, so I swiftly deleted it along with the rest of the incredibly tedious ‘Pastures of Plenty’ CD. From the brief snatch I heard of Dylan’s version he’s rasping away as usual, but it still sounds better than the original, which is rotten.

Q: Didn’t Dylan explicitly distance himself from this whole protest thing in his memoir published a few years back?

A: Yes he did. (more…)

A from the New York Times, September 9, 2008:

The actor Viggo Mortensen has apologized to Canada after inadvertently accusing the country of policy misdeeds for which he meant to chastise political leaders of the United States. The go-round occurred Sunday night at a Toronto International Film Festival panel discussion introducing ”The People Speak,” a documentary about dissent and resistance to power based on the book ”A People’s History of the United States” by Howard Zinn. Mr. Mortensen wore a T-shirt that read: ”Impeach Remove Jail.” By way of explanation Mr. Mortensen, in Toronto to promote the movie ”Appaloosa,” began a plaint about things ”that have been happening in the last eight years in this country.” He was checked by the moderator, Tom Powers, the festival’s documentary programmer, who asked if Mr. Mortensen was referring to Canada. ”Ladies and gentlemen, the angry left,” said a laughing Matt Damon, who was joined on the panel by Josh Brolin and Marisa Tomei, among others. Mr. Mortensen allowed that Canada may have committed misdeeds of its own, without leveling a specific charge against either country. ”My apologies,” he concluded. (more…)