JAMES GARNER’S DAUGHTER OPENS TRIBUTE SITE TO HER AWESOME FATHER

The Mighty James Garner’s daughter, Gigi Garner (a successful talent manager in her own right), has opened a tribute website to her father. She seems to be updating it fairly regularly with a number of terrific family photos and excerpts from Garners’ new memoir “The Garner Files,” which I loved and reviewed here.

Please check the site out.

Anyone who’s been reading me for any amount of time (or who has seen my Twitter wallpaper), knows of my all-consuming affection for all things James Garner, most especially “The Rockford Files.” You can imagine how much this tweet meant to me.

Tell me how it gets any better than that. You can’t, because it doesn’t.

The only bad news is that if this photo on Ms. Garner’s site displays the actor’s real signature, that means I got robbed on Ebay.

Cue my well-rehearsed of-course-I-got-swindled-again Rockford face.

FINALLY: AN HONEST ASSESSMENT OF HOLLYWOOD’S BOX OFFICE BLUES

With all of Hollywood and most of their sycophant entertainment media blaming box office and DVD woes on everything but bad product, this is the rare break from that absurd narrative:

Basically, films aren’t the draw they once were. With streaming and cable and TV shows getting better and better, there’s a lot more competition now, and the longer studios ignore it and try to operate like they always have (releasing all their “smart” movies at the end of December, for instance), the more it’s going to continue to decline. Almost without exception, all the decent movies I saw this year were films that the distributors considered too niche for a broad audience and almost no one saw them, because they barely had a chance to. Meanwhile this week’s top three releases have a 2, 3, and 4 next to the titles, and all had concepts created in the 1960s or earlier. If films are going to compete long-term, they’re going to have to start giving the “niche” stuff that gets people excited about movies a chance to compete with the bland blockbusters that make money. There are only so many Dark Knights. The general public has a major ambivalence towards movies right now, and if it doesn’t get better soon it’s going to turn into a grandpa medium the way late-night TV has.

And let’s not forget Hollywood’s non-stop, 15-year assault against the 70% of their audience that isn’t liberal.

Goodwill is crucial to institutional brands and this industry has arrogantly worked overtime to squander almost all of it.

Chickens, meet the roost.

SIX MORE JAMES BOND FILMS FOR DANIEL CRAIG?

“Filming has gone very well so far and I’d love Daniel to surpass Roger’s record and do eight pictures,” Michael G. Wilson told the UK’s Sunday People. “Daniel’s been an absolute pleasure to be around because he takes the role so seriously. There’s really no one more passionate about making these films work than him – he’s a filmmaker’s dream.”

THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY TRAILER ONLINE TUESDAY AT 7PM PST

Gentlemen, start your nerdgasms.

I kid because I love.

EVA GREEN EYES ‘300: BATTLE OF ARTEMISIA’

Ever since her memorable turn as Vesper in “Casino Royale,” I’ve been a fan. Unfortunately, Hollywood seems to be more interested in girls than women these days, and the ridiculously sexy and womanly Green hasn’t been in much.

Hopefully, everything will work out. Not that I’ll need another reason to see this.

NEW YORK TIMES BLAMES ‘LOST’ FOR EVERYTHING BAD ON TELEVISION

This is just silly:

A similar process is under way in the post- “Lost” television world. The first three seasons of “Lost” may have approached the imaginative charms of the original “Star Wars” trilogy, but the next three were nearly as awful as George Lucas’s catastrophic prequels. You could easily picture the stumped writers of “Lost,” helpless in the face of an ever-growing pile of unsolved mysteries, madly skimming Wikipedia entries on space-time geometries and black holes.

The show’s finale was the crowning disaster, the Scooby-Doo ending to end all Scooby-Doo endings. After hinting for years that their nonsensical mess would add up to something, not only did the producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof fail to address a tiny fraction of the trillions of mysteries they introduced, but they threw out the Lostpedia with the bath water, scrapping all of those riddles for the equivalent of Lucas’s teddy-bear victory dance: a celestial moment with the survivors, hugging and holding hands in the afterlife.

This is all ancient history — or would be, if not for the fact that the implosion of “Lost” was like a dirty bomb that made the world unsafe for serial dramas to this day.

The writer then goes on to blame “Lost” for what he sees as the sloppy execution of “Homeland” and “American Horror Story.”

First off, I caught “Lost” on DVD and while some individual episodes lacked (especially during the writers’ strike), as a whole I found the series and the finale very, very satisfying. This, I think, is the best way to watch programs that work like the old movie serials from yesteryear. Waiting a week and a full summer between chapters is a completely different experience than sitting down and devouring it like a good novel.

I haven’t seen “American Horror Story” or “Homeland” yet, but I have seen enough of Kelsey Grammer’s Starz series “Boss” and FX’s “Sons of Anarchy” (two series released after “Lost”) to argue that television’s current golden age is alive and well. The writing, acting and overall storytelling occurring on the small screen these days makes life worth living.

BROADCAST NETS DOWN, CABLE UP IN 2011

The major broadcast networks continued to see an erosion of their audiences in 2011, while cable networks saw theirs expand, according to TVbytheNumbers.com. The website said on Thursday that while ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC saw their total household audience decline 3 percent this year, the audience for ad-support cable as a whole was up 3 percent and the top ten cable networks recorded a 4-percent gain.

A+ ‘EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE’ MOVIE REVIEW

The largest issue I had with this film was figuring out how to describe the effect it had on me emotionally. It’s a crushing film that will leave many moviegoers in a heap, but I don’t look at it as an overly sad movie even though the level of sadness on display is undeniable.

‘SURVIVOR: SOUTH PACIFIC’ WINNER REVEALED

This show is still on the air?

MARSHALL FINE’S ‘DRAGON TATTOO’ REVIEW

Is Fincher’s film better than Niels Arden Oplev’s? Not really. It’s different; it’s probably as good as the Swedish version. But better? Nope, sorry – which brings us back to the issue of the movie as a commodity, rather than an artistic vision.

I’m not impugning Fincher’s intentions; I’m just saying that, as good as his film may be, it’s redundant and unnecessary.

Is it entertaining and well-made? Absolutely. For the audience that would never dream of seeing a foreign film, this movie will be the last word in “Dragon Tattoo” movie-making. And they’ll get a quality product.

‘THR’ REVIEWS JOLIE’S DIRECTORIAL DEBUT

Jolie deserves significant credit for creating such a powerfully oppressive atmosphere and staging the ghastly events so credibly, even if it is these very strengths that will make people not want to watch what’s onscreen. All the director’s decisions were taken in the interest of heightened verisimilitude, from working in the Bosnian language (an English-language version is available as well) to using as many authentic locations as possible (some in Bosnia, others in Hungary) and having cinematographer Dean Semler employ a combat-ready style.

SHERLOCK RETURNS TO THE BBC: ‘HE’S DEFINITELY DEVILISH’

Superb series. Season one is, I think, still on Netflix.

There’s so much good television these days, you can hardly keep up.

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LAST NIGHT’S SCREENING

“A Christmas Carol” (1984) – Most people choose Alistair Sim’s 1951 version of “A Christmas Carol” as their favorite, and for good reason. But after watching the 1984 television adaptation again last night, I have to say that George C. Scott is my favorite Ebenezer Scrooge. The Academy Award-winner’s interpretation is the most human and down-to-earth, which gives an added impact to those classic lines of dialogue we all know by heart.

Scrooge’s redemption scene is especially poignant in this version, which was directed by Clive Donner, the editor of the 1951 film.

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SCOTTDS’ EPIC LINKTACULAR

‘THE DINGO STOLE MY BABY! — PART DEUX’

BRAD BIRD GIVES AN UPDATE ON HIS EARTHQUAKE MOVIE, 1906

RIDLEY SCOTT TALKS ‘PROMETHEUS’

FIRST PHOTO OF SYLVESTER STALLONE IN ‘BULLET TO THE HEAD”

‘HOMELAND’ SEASON 1 FINALE REVIEW

WILLIAM SHATNER IS COMING TO BROADWAY

‘DEXTER’ SEASON 6 FINALE REVIEW

PROFILE: PAM GRIER

‘IT TAKES A THIEF’: THE DVD DEBRIEF REVIEW

MAX VON SYDOW LOOKS BACK AT HIS WORK ON ‘FLASH GORDON’ AND ‘STRANGE BREW‘

RIDLEY SCOTT SAYS THERE WILL BE NO ALIENS IN PROMETHEUS

REAL-LIFE RUDY ACCUSED OF SCREWING INVESTORS OUT OF $11 MILLION

8 GREAT TV CHRISTMAS SPECIALS

NEW FOOTAGE FROM ‘THE AVENGERS’ IN GERMAN TRAILER

WHY ‘PERSON OF INTEREST’ IS A SUPERHERO SHOW DONE RIGHT

REJECTED GREEN GOBLIN MAKE-UP TESTS FOR SAM RAIMI’S ‘SPIDER-MAN‘

100 GREATEST JEWISH FILMS

TOP 100 CULT FILMS

10 GREAT PERFORMANCES IN BAD 2011 MOVIES

MEET THE NEW POP CULTURE, SAM AS THE OLD POP CULTURE

JOHN WILLIAMS: THE LAST MOVIE MAESTRO

6 AWESOME MOVIE AMUSEMENT PARK RIDES AND THEIR REAL LIFE LOCATIONS

TOP 15 JAMES BOND DEATHS

REVISITING THE ‘LETTERMAN’ EPISODE FEATURING ANDY KAUFMAN AND JERRY LAWLER

A LOOK BACK AT JOHN FRANKENHEIMER’S ‘SECONDS‘

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CLASSIC PICK FOR TUESDAY, DECEMBER 20

TCM:

12:30 PM  EST: Age of Innocence, The (1934) –  A young attorney risks his career for love of a glamorous divorcee. Dir: Philip Moeller Cast:  Irene Dunne, John Boles, Lionel Atwill. BW-81 mins, TV-PG, CC.

This is a rare opportunity to see the first film adaptation of Edith Wharton’s 1920 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about an aristocratic New Yorker who meets the only woman he’ll ever love after it’s too late. However, I only recommend this as a rare curiosity.

While many films produced during the same Production Code-era (like 1936’s “Dodsworth”) were able to tell stories that covered similar themes of adultery and divorce in a mature and dramatic way, 1934’s “Age of Innocence” is pretty lacking. For starters, Dunne is miscast and the overall production is stagy and surprisingly slow moving for an 81-minute film.

This is in stark contrast to Martin Scorsese’s beautifully realized 1993 adaptation that captures the longing and loss of its source material as well as any film ever could.

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Please send comments, suggestions and tips to jnolte@breitbart.com or Twitter @NolteNC.

NOTE: There will be no Call Sheet tomorrow. I am taking a vacation day.

Try being Bob Denver and walking into an audition.

“Hey, Gilligan!” “Where’s Thurston Howell, heh heh.”

Kelsey Grammer may have found the role to make us forget, if for a moment, his superlative work as the stuffy, cerebral Dr. Frasier Crane on both ‘Cheers’ and his eponymous sitcom.

Grammer’s new series ‘Boss,’ debuting at 10 p.m. tonight on Starz, is getting the kind of reviews the actor’s mother might pen. The latest rave comes courtesy of Politico,

Fans of the actor’s work won’t be surprised. He’s proven his range over time – he even donned blue fur to play the hirsute Beast in ‘X-Men: The Last Stand.’ But when you’ve created a character as indelibly etched into pop culture as Frasier, you’re bound to be overlooked in some quarters.

That may not be the case much longer, especially since Starz has picked ‘Boss’ up for a second season before the first episode even aired.

The drama, which seems to have the “it” factor from the opening credits, has the potential to be a game-changer for the pay TV network, THR TV critic Tim Goodman writes.

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You can look back at the history of any number of storied cable channels and pick the series that truly set them on the right course — the series that made them players. For HBO, it was The Sopranos; for Showtime, it was Dexter; for FX, it was The Shield; and for AMC, it was Mad Men.

Other series might have received as much critical acclaim, and still others would get higher ratings. But those were game-changers. And now Starz has its channel-defining series in Boss, a wholly impressive new drama that comes out of the gate with gravitas, swagger, originality and intrigue. It’s the kind of series that truly puts Starz on the map (and if it makes two or three others, it will be a highly competitive three-way race in the pay cable field).

Boss is full of revelations. It stars Kelsey Grammer in a stunning, eye-opening dramatic turn as Tom Kane, the ruthless mayor of Chicago — a modern King Lear with a crushing secret. The last time an actor known for sitcoms took the television world completely by surprise was Bryan Cranston, and he went on to win three consecutive Emmys for best actor and turn Breaking Bad into a show everybody talked about and fawned over.

Grammer is in nearly every scene of Boss, and he’s superb in all of them. The other main revelation is the arrival of Farhad Safinia, who created the series and wrote the first two episodes (here’s hoping he writes a lot more). Safinia announces himself here in much the same way Matthew Weiner and Vince Gilligan did with Mad Men and Breaking Bad, respectively. Safinia co-wrote the 2006 feature Apocalypto and has two movies in production.

Full piece here.

Unfortunately, they chose to fight for the other side.

If our history is written by honest brokers, this generation of Hollywoodists will be remembered as those who openly enabled evil and spent hundreds of millions of dollars making bombs for the enemy — box office bombs. Over a dozen of them, specifically engineered with equal parts lies and hate and propaganda to undermine morale at home and on the battlefield in the hopes that we would lose this war.

Never forget the crime committed in New York, Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon on that terrible day.  And never forget  how Hollywood turned on your country.

There were some exceptions, however, and chief among them was Joel Surnow, the co-creator of “24.” Each week, for eight seasons, he gave this country a hero who openly loved America, did what was necessary to protect her, and who was willing to pay a terrible price for it. ”24″ also delivered the goods. Cathartic, exciting and righteous without being self-righteous, the addictive adventures of Jack Bauer became an oasis in a cesspool of Hollywood product delivering the exact opposite message.

As the face of the program, Surnow paid a price for his apostasy and because he’s a smart man who knows how the world works, my guess is that he knew that someday he would. We all watched as some of the biggest forces in the world of entertainment and politics ganged up to exact their revenge with “The Kennedys.” Don’t believe for a second that wasn’t a form of payback.

For whatever it’s worth, we thank you, Joel Surnow.  You can’t imagine what it meant to millions of us  to have something to count on over those weeks and years — something that told us we weren’t crazy and we weren’t alone.

And thank you to the subversives who used their art and magnificent artistry to take our side through thinly veiled allegory. Thank you Frank Miller and Zack Snyder for “300.” Thank you Christopher Nolan for “The Dark Knight.”

There were others. Men like Gary Sinise who tirelessly support the troops and David Zucker who took the fight directly to that anti-American pig Michael Moore. There is also Robert Davi, Jon Voight, Kelsey Grammer, Michael Moriarty and those like them who have bravely and eloquently spoken out against the talking points issued by their Hollywood Overlords.

For fear of missing one, I won’t attempt to name everyone in Hollywood who did the right thing, who openly supported our military and refused to participate in the resume-enhancing undermining of our country. Within the context of the whole of the entertainment business, however, they make up a heartbreakingly short list. But you know who are and we know who you are and we thank you.

The rest of you can burn in Hell.

Troopathon brings together famous celebrities from radio, television, the movie, musicians, journalists, and more to create a one-of-a-kind event with one purpose – to support our troops on the front lines in the war on terror and honor their service and sacrifice for our nation.  Guests include: Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, Mark Levin, Kelsey Grammer, Former President George H.W. Bush, Gary Sinise, Dennis Miller, Former Ambassador John Bolton, Greg Gutfeld and many more!

Click here to send your care package or call 866-866-6372.

Various Hollywood professionals who support the military like actors Robert Duvall Jeremy Renner, Kelsey Grammer, Rick Schroeder, Glenn Close and JAG’s Karri Turner, as well as directors and producers like Ron Maxwell and Lou Reda, are often in attendance. CSI: New York and Forrest Gump’s Lieutenant Dan,  Academy Award-nominated Gary Sinise, will host a reception for Congressional members who have served, or who are currently serving in the U.S. Military. With veterans on both he and his wife’s side of their families, Sinise has been an active supporter of the festival since its inception, as he has of so many other pro-military causes. This year actor William Devane will premiere the drama Flag of My Father at the festival’s Hollywood Patriots Night and a salute to International Warriors will host military films from several other countries.

Last year at I wrote a piece for Big Hollywood highly critical of box-office and morale-killing Hollywood military films like The Green Zone that have dominated movie screens. Well, the G.I. Film Festival has been out front in the battle for positive depictions of the military since it started back in 2007. Festival creators, husband and wife Brandon Millett and Major Laura Law-Millett, first created the festival to combat the continuing inaccurate and negative stereotypes that Hollywood has so often fostered about the United States Armed Forces. In an interview with the Washington Post during the launch of the first G.I. Film Festival, Major Law offered up that, “In movie after movie all you see then was soldiers raping and killing. We want to show something more positive.”

Her husband Brandon emphasized that, “We wanted to do something to focus public attention on the courage and selflessness of the American soldiers.”

The chairman of the festival, former naval officer Steve Bannon, is also an award-winning filmmaker, successful entertainment company president, and proud father of a West Point graduate who is currently serving her country as a lieutenant in the 101st Airborne. “It was a spark of genius when Brandon and Major Law-Millett started this festival five years ago. They saw the need and said, ‘We just have to do this.’ Every year they personally go out of their way to find the best films.” Bannon told me a few days ago.

Bannon points out knowingly, “In the 242 years of our history, this is only the second time besides World War II that this country has been involved in two wars at the same time. The G. I. Film Festival works against the Hollywood fads because telling great stories about the American fighting man, their families, their triumphs and their tragedies is never out of fashion.”

On Friday May 13th Bannon will share his considerable film industry knowledge in a day long filmmaker’s “boot camp” that will also feature other experienced film industry professionals. “We’ve got young G.I. filmmakers and older vets, as well as pro-military filmmakers who have never served. They’re all trying to find their voice. We want to provide access for them so they can learn their craft and get their films out there.” Says Bannon. “With the technology available today, it doesn’t matter how old or young you are. We can find you technical people for support to help them out.”

The festival has grown from 22 juried and selected films its first first year to 31 top quality films this year selected from over 200 submissions. Over the last five years a handful of the best military-themed projects have received such high praise and notice that they were rewarded with theatrical distribution deals. Excellent military themed films like Operation Homecoming, The Last 600 Meters and Brothers at War made it onto theater or television screens, in no small part because of their positive reception at the G.I. Film Festival. Recently the festival signed a deal with Discovery’s Military Channel to feature the top festival films on that popular cable military channel.

“We want to get these films and filmmakers the broadest possible exposure and our arrangement with Discovery’s Military Channel does just that.” Says Festival chairman Bannon.

Stand by at Big Hollywood over this week for reports on some the G. I. Film Festival’s best films and featured events.

Before we get into their outward expressions of anger and disdain, along with the associated hypocrisy and contradictions, we need to understand why they are so mad.  In the world of the left, domination of the airwaves is not a battle of ratings but rather an ideological jihad they are attempting to perpetrate.  That is why they get so unhinged whenever something that would get a smile out of Charlton Heston tries to take hold in the media.   Liberals lost the radio war so badly that they now want the government to legislate a victory for them by making the free market of political thought on the AM dial illegal.  That is what the “the Fairness Doctrine” is all about.  Also, most of the “Hopey/Changey” crowd is either apoplectic about losing the cable media war to Fox News  or are still in the same sort of denial about it that keeps Britney Spears thinking that she is a dominant force in the music industry.

While being forced into whatever the media equivalent of “tapping out” is on these two fronts, they are violently opposing the RightNetwork; a cable channel aimed at the vast audience of people who have come to the conclusion that Hollywood hates them.  The visceral reaction to the RightNetwork by the left tells us everything we need to know about them, their feelings about free speech in the marketplace of ideas, and what they think about the viewing audience in general.  

The RightNetwork hasn’t been around long enough for the bubble wrap to be off their office furniture yet.  This didn’t stop Keith Olbermann from bad mouthing them to all three of his viewers.  Last April, months before the network was set to launch, Mr. Olbermann was trying to do to the RightNetwork what the Chinese government does to a woman’s second pregnancy.  He claimed that they lied about their association with Comcast and declared the bunch at the RightNetwork, collectively, the “Worst Person in the World”.  

The fact that Keith got confused because Edward M. Snider, the chairman of Comcast-Spectacor, is a personal investor in the new network didn’t seem to matter.  He couldn’t separate Mr. Snider’s personal business dealings from his duties with Comcast, and tried to punish the RightNetwork for his own sloppy research and reporting.  Olbermann wasn’t alone.  The hounds of leftist intolerance were out in force and having a go at the RightNetwork at every opportunity.  That same April, Joy Behar and Lewis Black were talking on her show about the RightNetwork and how they believed there is too much conservative speech in the media.   

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Chris Burgard, a producer for the Right Network had the following to say about their coverage in the media: 

“I  have been absolutely floored that  out of all the MSM coverage of Running, it seems that no one actually took the time to see the show. They simply regurgitated the original AP report: ‘RightNetwork, whose first series, “Running”,  follows the fortunes of a couple of Tea Party-backed candidates for public office…’  This sentence was repeated verbatim in almost 33,800 Google links.  It’s pretty nifty that as the host and producer on the show, they haven’t talked to me or Kip Perry, the executive producer. None of the articles ever mentions how many of our candidates have won, or by how much or about Nancy Pelosi having to face John Dennis. But I guess that is today’s state of journalism. As far as I have seen, only the Christian Science Monitor and less than a handful of bloggers even took the time to actually watch “Running” before reviewing it.” 

More recently, the website thenewcivilrightsmovement.com defined comic irony by describing the RIGHTNETWORK as “Bad for America.” Their September 8th article about the new network stated that “The Right Network is a media attempt to give credibility to right-wing hate and fear-mongering, conservative bigotry, and Republican talking points.”  Apparently the folks at the “New Civil Rights Movement” are unclear about what the term “Civil Rights” actually means and believe that some Americans should have more civil rights than others. 

Of course the Huffington Post has come out against them and the leftist site, CrooksandLiars.com is currently cyber-stalking the investors and publishing what personal information they can about people who did nothing more than legally invest in a new cable network.  Never mind that these folks have free speech rights and the RightNetwork will create jobs.  Liberals fear it; therefore they must do what they can to destroy it.  Is this new?  No.  I could easily fill a 60,000 word book with all the hate that the lefties have aimed at the RightNetwork.  They seem to be wasting a lot of airtime and ink on something they are trying to depict as irrelevant.  The fact that they happily, eagerly want to deny those they don’t agree with their basic, free speech rights says volumes about the modern liberal.  But what has this whole situation said about what they think of Americans as a whole? 

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Not so long ago another controversial cable television network was founded.  When Viacom launched its gay lifestyle offering, LOGO, the response was quite different.  We needn’t chronicle all the praise this network got in the media, but adjectives like “courageous,” “bold,” and (of course) “fabulous” were liberally applied to this cable channel throughout the mainstream media. .  The New York Times wrote puff pieces about the new channel and industry publications such as “Business & Cable” praised everything from the networks platform to the stunning choice by Viacom of choosing a television novice to run the day to day operations of LOGO.  Rarely in the conservative media did anyone write headlines such as “LOGO: The Network that Launched a Thousand Glory Holes.”

Even when people did oppose the channel on the identical ideological ground that the RightNetwork critics have staked out, the same people who are saying that there should be a limit to conservative speech were decrying LOGO’s critics as bigots.  Once again, this is no surprise to anyone.  We all know the Bill Maher types have one set of rules for themselves and a far stricter set of rules for their conservative opponents.  The interesting bit is that a number of publications that cited the publications that cited the popularity of shows like “Will and Grace” and “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” as proof that there was a market for a gay oriented cable channel.  And they were absolutely right.

Yes, there is a market out there for LOGO.  All politics aside, LOGO has a built-in audience, and there is obviously a buck to be made here.  In the United States they have every right to go after that market and enjoy the profits that come from it.  In its best years (2000 and 2001), “Will and Grace” was drawing a little over 17 million viewers.  :Queer Eye” was attracting approximately 3.5 million viewers in its first season.  While these numbers were often bandied about as proof that there is a mainstream audience for LOGO, rarely do we see that argument being made in favor of the RightNetwork. 

According to the Washington Post, Time Magazine, and MSNBC, the audience for Rush Limbaugh is between 20 and 30 million. Glenn Beck draws over 2 million viewers per day, and Bill O’Reilly is over 3 million.  If the numbers for “Will and Grace” and “Queer Eye” have been offered as a proof that the climate is right for a Gay and Lesbian cable channel, then the numbers from Rush Limbaugh alone should be considered a national mandate for the RightNetwork.  That is not an argument that the Keith Olbermann’s, Joy Behar’s and Bill Maher’s of the world will ever make or accept because people who like programs such as those don’t count in their world. 

In the leftist media world that is clinging to a shrinking empire, the audience for Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck (which is most of this center-right nation) are persona non grata.  Liberals boycott the advertisers of these programs because somebody who has something to sell should not be allowed to profit from Mr. Limbaugh’s or Mr. Beck’s audience.  Their opinions and the ratings they generate are considered more irksome than meaningful, and new cable channels like the RightNetwork should not be able to tap into this vast audience.  In short, liberals consider this audience to be second-class citizens.  Seeing as most of the country is in the Limbaugh demographic, this is what they think of the majority of us. 

The RightNetwork is a scary proposition to the liberal media empire because what they are creating will probably be attractive to large percentage of the television audience.  According to CEO and Founder, David Jaget: 

“We are not a show for the Republican party.  We are an entertainment network and we are going to have people who are proud to be Americans who come from the left, and are part of the Democratic party as well as those from the right.  We are about right lifestyle, not right politics.” 

In the final analysis, liberals don’t like most of the country because when offered a choice, we tend not to pick them.  The AM dial is dominated by conservative talk.  Conservative books take the top spots on the best seller’s lists.  The dominant FM radio formats in the nation are country, Christian rock, and Christian teaching.  Cable news is dominated by Fox News.  All the liberals have left is entertainment.  If conservatives get a foothold in that as well, the MSNBC anchors will be reduced to cave paintings to get their points across.

In all the years I’ve been writing about Hollywood, I have never written one of those Hollywood Is Doomed pieces. For those of us legitimately frustrated with an industry driven less by profits and more by an insidious need to marginalize who we are and undermine our country, such a statement would be nothing more than wishful thinking. We may loathe Hollywood but the market will always be there because we will always love being told stories through the magic of the motion picture. Furthermore, the institution presently making movies is nowhere near as easy to replace as the mainstream news media.

Telling a compelling story through a medium that uses most every art form known to man – performance, music, design, writing, photography – requires an enormous amount of skill and training, not to mention that certain something — like a Major Leaguer capable of hitting .275 — very few people are born with.

So this is not a Hollywood Is Doomed piece. But I have to say – and this is not altogether bad news — that as things stands today, Hollywood has cornered itself into much more trouble than I ever expected them to. I’m no insider, number cruncher, or professional analyst, but from my perspective what I am seeing is an industry vulnerable to revolution – an industry as out of touch and unwilling to admit it as the studio system of the 1960s.

The Movie Star is Dead:

Sure, there’s Will Smith, Denzel, Sandra Bullock, and Adam Sandler, but there’s no getting around the fact that the era of a “name” putting butts in seats to the degree that they once did is over. The net effect of this has been to all but kill off most any movie that can’t be sold though a high concept or built-in brand. This is why everything seems to be a tired sequel, reboot, or franchise. The compelling low to no-concept stories that aren’t being told on screen for this reason must be legion. Once upon a time studios could count on the draw of the star to give something fresh and bold a chance at profitability. Without that insurance today, studios are much less likely to take the gamble and instead rely on familiar spectacle and temporary fixes like the gimmick that is 3D. As a result, movies are becoming heartless, meaningless videogames and I’m not sure that’s a sustainable business model.

And there really is no solution to the movie star problem. With the end of the studio system came the unattractive self-actualizing of the actor. It took a couple generations, but as of today too many actors have completely deconstructed themselves and as a whole we simply don’t like them anymore. That’s not going to change, either. It’s only going to get worse. Besides, studios love not having to deal with stars and the back-end deals that frequently accompany them so they’re likely to ride the Sam Worthington train for as far as it will go. If audiences ever tire of spectacle and yearn once again for great stories driven by familiar, likable personalities, this could be as short-sighted a decision as the industry has ever made. There’s no one on-deck.

Who?

 The Adult Drama is Dead:

Not only is the adult drama dead due to the lack of movie star goodwill necessary to sell enough tickets to give them a shot at profitability, but over the last five years the genre itself has become so off-putting as a whole that my Pavlovian response has been to grimace at the very thought of sitting through the latest critical darling. With their repressed emotions, nihilistic worldview, ironic distance, left-wing politicizing, and clichéd “edginess,” Hollywood’s betrayed their own barren soullessness through these films but they’ve also driven away their customer-base – the everyday adults looking for something more mature than fighting robots. These folks used to help create a few sleepers a year but today they’ve grown tired of stories that relentlessly insult their values and in the end make them either feel nothing or suicidal.

The solution is obvious: uplifting films with faith in the human spirit. There’s a huge market there, but the problem is that a successful story filled with sentiment, meaning, and hope is much harder to make than one dwelling in irony, hipster edginess, and despair, and I’m not sure our current crop of filmmakers are even capable of something so foreign to who they are. Also, most filmmakers leaping into the adult-drama arena do so with Oscar on their mind. This means pleasing critics, most of whom love the bleak, nihilistic films that confirm their own godless worldview. Critics may not have any sway in what drives the public into theatres, but they have an enormous impact on the kinds of films that get made.

Basically, we need more conservative-minded critics immersed in the medium they’re covering and in love with its possibilities, and not just movies, but also television, music, novels, and art.

DVD Sales Have Plummeted:

No doubt some smart human calculator could explain away why we’re not buying as many DVDs as we once did, but speaking only for myself, I’m not buying as many because there just aren’t that many movies out there I want to sit though again. Am I alone? Is that merely anecdotal? Hollywood can shorten release windows, create new formats like Blu-ray and add all the special features they want. The bottom line for me is whether or not I want to re-enter that world again and again, and lately the answer has been “no.” I’ll watch my ten year-old “Matrix” DVD for the 24th time long before I ever sit through a second helping of “Clash of the Titans” or the latest from the emotionally sterile indie world.

Things aren’t looking much better in the rental world, either. Thanks to Redbox and NetFlix, people (like me) are no longer willing to pay $3.50 to rent a movie and those who charge that much, like Blockbuster Video, are going out of business. This kind of price-pointing has all but destroyed the music industry. (And you wonder why Hollywood hates capitalism.)

Reality Programming:

There’s a lot wrong with today’s reality television, especially celebrity reality shows on a mission to convince your children that narcissism is one of the four major food groups. But there’s also a lot of positive programming out there that’s been successful and profitable all without expensive stars and soundstages. On top of that, these shows can be a wonderful alternative to a lot of the hyper-sexualized, male-bashing we’re seeing on network television. For instance, hits such as “Dirty Jobs” and “Deadliest Catch” are wonderful portrayals of working class men that offer real human drama and even a lot of heart.

Tired of scripted police procedurals like “Law and Order” infusing political correctness and left-wing sucker punches into every episode, years ago I turned to the true crime documentaries that seem to be everywhere these days. The fact that truth is always stranger than fiction makes for excellent storytelling and most times the good guys win, justice is served, and political correctness is nowhere to be found. In other words, NBC can kiss my ass reality television is no longer the red-headed stepchild it once was.

Insurgent Competition:

It’s been a painfully slow march but we are finally starting to see the left-wing monolith that is the dominant entertainment industry face a very real insurgent campaign from the political right. Conservatives have started a small but profound migration into the entertainment world and those who were already there – like Kelsey Grammer – are no longer in hiding and, using both their financial resources and enormous talents, are becoming every bit as activist as their left-wing counterparts. This was always going to be the first step and now that it’s starting to happen we also see the Christian community getting their act together when it comes to the serious and hard work of learning their trade.  

Obviously the Internet and inexpensive digital technology have gone a long way toward making this possible, but the best news is that the last remaining wall between a creative right-of-center revolution and the American people is starting to crumble…

Digital Distribution:

For decades, entertainment industry leftists have been able to keep ideas and values they disagree with off of our television sets and movie screens though a choke-hold on the various distribution pipelines. No matter how good your product, if you didn’t own a television network or a chain of movie theatres you had no way to get it out to the public. Self-distribution, the renting of movie theatres, is prohibitively expensive, and even if you spent the money necessary to put your product on DVD or CD you still had to convince merchants to give up valuable self space.

This is changing faster than even I imagined it would.

Today, people are perfectly comfortable watching new movies on their own home theatre systems and because what you watch at home will all soon stream from the Internet, a creator of entertainment content no longer needs an ABC or Sony Pictures to give America access to it. Pretty soon, when we’re all getting our programming from the Web, all you’ll have to do is upload your film or television show to the Internet and whatever you created will be as easy for everyone to access as anything produced by the big boys. In many ways, this is already a reality.

Just as it is with music and the self-published novel, amazingly, distribution is about to become the least expensive part of producing content for television, including films.

Obviously I’m presenting an over-simplified view that doesn’t address complex issues such as monetizing your product or advertising. But in the past those problems used to be called “luxury problems,” because first you had to get through the Old Guard leftists who stood between you and your audience and who are so politically corrupted they wouldn’t distribute “The Passion of the Christ” and still refuse to release “The Path to 9/11” on DVD.

Hollywood will always be with us. It’s not going to go the way of the MSM or even the decimated music industry. But the dwindling advantage of their increasingly irrelevant spokespeople (the stars), inability and unwillingness to tell great stories, and the inevitable loss of their vertical distribution monopoly is a near-perfect storm for those who have done the hard work to be prepared for this moment.

Again, I don’t want to puff myself up as some kind of expert. This is just how one guy sees the lay of the land, and right now I’d rather be us than them.

Texans and the rest of America seemed to dig the film. Hollywood? Not so much. 

After sixteen states on the promo tour, countless packed theatres, great reviews and two screenings for Congress, I had yet another audience member grab my arm and ask “When is Hollywood going to make more films like this? Can you tell them to make movies that we want to see?” 

—–

“Ma’am,” I would explain, “If Hollywood wanted to make more films like Border, right now I would be in the middle of a three picture studio deal instead of on a bus tour of the South Eastern United States. I’m sorry but I don’t have an answer for you. “ She was a very nice lady. I hated to disappoint her. 

So last fall I’m kicking back in the barn, flipping through the ranch real estate section of Farm and Ranch magazine when the phone rings. It’s Kip Perry, co-owner of Echo Entertainment. Echo had been around for 23 years. They had cut their teeth on movie trailers for Disney and sports shows for ESPN. They had done a few TV series, and now Kip wanted to take me out to lunch. 

Lunch was good. Small, but good. We went to a very trendy Hollywood European style restaurant where everybody has the option to sit with strangers and get their food on a board. I loved the spread. It was tasty, cute and very petite. Just as Kip was about to go into his pitch, I had to stop him: “Dude, I’m sorry. This food tastes great, and looks even better, but I’m still hungry. I need to order another lunch.” 

The fact that the meeting didn’t end right there and that he actually laughed was the first sign of how much I was going to enjoy working with this guy. 

“We’re going to do a show about rookies, people who have never run for political office before. Every day citizens who have said that enough is enough! People who feel that they need to make a difference. We are going to follow them for the next year as they give up their regular lives and make their political runs for the US Congress.” Kip said, as I put down my second board of prosciutto and Brie. 

“Sounds hot, is that the kind of show your company usually does?” I asked. 

“I’m starting a new company.” He said. 

“Oh. Okay, but I highly doubt that you are going to get a network to pick up a series about grassroots conservatives wanting to make a difference.” I said. 

“We’re going to start a new network too.” 

“Really?” Now he had my complete attention. 

I could feel the schpiel approaching: “Yep. It’s going to be a three-platform media company: web, mobile, cable and satellite VOD. We are going to build programming around the core values and beliefs upon which America was founded. Then our viewers can jump on our social networking sites and participate in the kind of national conversations that are currently being dominated by only one side. We will make programming for all Americans. We are calling it “RightNetwork.” 

The guy was pretty winded and he wasn’t even a smoker.                          

Last December we started filming “Running.” It has been an adventure and an inspiration. There is a hunger in this country and watching regular folks put everything that they have on the line to be a part of the national political process has been simply stellar. 

                       
—–

As in any start-up company, we get to wear many hats. I dug working with Kip so much that we got to create more shows together: 

“Politics and Poker”….every week Tom Wilson has four VIP guests come to his fake TV house, with his fake TV wife, Julene, to talk politics and play poker. Remember, this is not a politically correct network. If our guests want to drink beer or scotch while they play, then they drink beer or scotch. The winner gets a check for his favorite charity and the producers get to have a ball. I don’t know what I like more, seeing national security experts and counter terrorism agents critiquing mis-en-scene in the latest box office efforts or having leggy blonde models extol the virtues of marksmanship and the importance of gun ownership.  The humor and chemistry of this show lets us go places where no one else is going on TV. Think “I Love Lucy” meets “This Week.” I am really excited to see what happens. 

—–

“Kivi TV”….Kivi Rogers is awesome. I darn near peed in my pants when I first saw his stand up routine about roller skates. This guy gave up a steady gig as a successful aerospace engineer for a shot at a stand up career. On the way he had time to make six kids and do eleven USO tours.  He brings the kind of …”it’s okay to laugh at ourselves” humor and hip common sense to the table that just might get us to remember that we are all Americans again. 

 —–

I gotta tell you, I love going to work every day. We are always creating something. But maybe one of the best jobs that I have been able to do is find great independent films to license that Hollywood and the mainstream media won’t show. 

To be able to pick up the phone and talk to another filmmaker and say, “Hey how would you like millions of people to see your film,” is cooler than hell. 

To be able to have an idea on Monday and in the can, cut and delivered by Friday, rocks. 

Even though we had never released even one public sentence about RightNetwork,  the MSM got wind of us last April. By mid-morning the Huffington Posts and Politicos articles had thousands of posts on us. 

Joy Behar spent a good portion of her show railing against us with Lewis Black. 

Keith Olberman gave us a “Worst Person In The World Award”…even though we had never met him. 

But I think my favorite was a comment from a Huffy deriding Kelsey Grammer as a spokesman for what they thought was obviously going to be a homophobic, racist network.  The irony of the fact that Kelsey was currently starring in La Cage Au Folles on Broadway, seemed to be lost on this particular blogger. 

RightNetwork launched today. We will be on computers and phones across the country. We will be available on 4 million television sets, with millions more to follow.

We will bring America the unexpected. We are proud Americans who want to step forward to bring all of America into the conversation. 

We want to create a place where Americans can be inspired and entertained. 

We want to make a difference.

Hank is the first of two family-oriented comedies ABC is running back-to-back on Wednesday nights beginning at 8 p.m., with each show featuring a big former sitcom star.

Most TV sitcoms, and that goes double for ABC, are largely about what the great filmmaker and satirist Preston Sturges referred to as Topic A. That is because Americans presumably have nothing else on their minds–other than being murdered or having to go to the hospital, the subject matter of most TV dramas.

Hank bucks that restriction, attempting to mine humor from family relationships, romantic love, and social conditions–which used to be the central subjects of Anglo-American comedy before the relaxing and eventual discarding of social and cultural restrictions on discussions of sex freed Hollywood to parade its inner sex maniac with impunity and in fact great financial success.

The concept of Hank is this: newly fired big-business CEO Hank Pryor—played by Kelsey Grammer—moves his family out of their now-unaffordable Manhattan apartment and goes back to his hometown, River City, to start over.

Without money and servants to take care of them, the family members have to live like actual human beings. And without a job at which to hide out, Hank has to deal with his family. Those are reasonable ideas on which to build a comedy. Unfortunately the pilot episode does not try to go for many really amusing jokes, and the second episode is funnier but definitely does not conform to the contemporary trend of trying to mine as many laughs per episode as possible.

If the standard for judging a situation comedy is simply the number of laughs per episode, Hank will not do well. However, that is not necessarily the best way to look at the genre. Older classics such as The Honeymooners, The Andy Griffith Show, and Cheers were actually short dramas with varying amounts of humor deriving organically from the characters and situations, instead of cardboard characters and merely skeletal plots on which to festoon a string of double entendres and outright sexual references intended to be funny by virtue of their exceeding public vulgarity.

One could even argue that Seinfeld, far from being a “show about nothing,” did a fine job of showing the rootlessness of ‘90s America and the dismaying results of the lurch into relativism.

Thus one can surely make a case that the situation comedy can be more than just jokes—and perhaps that it should be. Hank attempts to do just that, affording some insights into the characters and their situation, in particular the title character. For example, Hank’s attempt to connect with his family, as he has never done before, rightly suggests that overcoming one’s selfish impulses is essential if one is to have a truly satisfying life.

A scene in which Hank awkwardly tries to connect with his son in the pilot episode illustrates this theme and is both funny and touching in the odd way the best TV sitcoms often manage such scenes, and it shows the series has the potential to be effective.

In this fish-out-of-water scenario, Grammer’s Hank becomes the type of clueless, would-be Autocrat of the Breakfast Table character made famous by William Powell (Life with Father) and Clifton Webb (Cheaper by the Dozen, etc.) and reiterated by countless sitcom actors since then.

Like those predecessors, Hank also has a wholesomely attractive, smart wife who keeps the household running, and a pair of intelligent, quirky children who continually point out his personal shortcomings.

In addition, Hank’s attempts to get back on his feet and start up another business, suggested in the first two episodes, are both ripe for comedy and, if developed, will be a welcome treatment of an essential and characteristic aspect of American life which is all too seldom given positive attention by Hollywood: entrepreneurship.

Hank ultimately supports bourgeois, middle-American values, which is rather unusual for both ABC and contemporary TV sitcoms. As such is it quite refreshing. Mainstream critics, however, will not like it, for it does nothing to contribute to the devaluation of all values and the effort to transform the United States into an oversexed socialist paradise.

Quite the contrary. Hank doesn’t try to break any new ground, and it doesn’t grasp for too many memorable jokes. However, the characters are largely likable, and with Grammer leading the way, the show might survive if ABC gives it time.

But that’s a big if.