I’ll be getting into that in detail in another series of articles, but we’re here to talk about Hollywood. Hollywood was once a conservative town run by immigrants who believed in the American way. Many of the stars fought in WWII and acted in patriotic movies. But there was a labor struggle in Hollywood starting with the unions, which began to get infiltrated by communists and socialists in the 1930s. They made more and more demands of the studios that they didn’t like. In 1947, the studio bosses decided to take advantage of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), with which Senator Joseph McCarthy had no direct involvement despite misinformation to the contrary. The Hollywood studio bosses wanted to bust up the unions and the method they used was the HUAC investigations and the blacklist.

Instead of solving their problem, it created a backlash which fills many members of Hollywood with bitterness to this day. It created a whole mythology and a flawed rationale for some to reject all things conservative, even though conservative politics was not really the issue at all. A sort of ideological purge began to take hold in Hollywood. Those with conservative leanings were made to feel so unwelcome that to this day many of them keep their politics to themselves. As Charlton Heston often said, “There are more conservatives in the closet in Hollywood than gays.”

Former MCA/Universal chief Lew Wasserman was famous for his politics. Like many in Hollywood, he picked the Democrats as the party to favor in the hopes that they would favor his company. Like lemmings, the industry followed his example.

Small wonder Wasserman felt a natural affinity for Lyndon Johnson. Facing a relentless Justice Department investigation in the early 1960s, Wasserman discovered the river of power that flowed from channeling Hollywood money to Democratic candidates. LBJ’s 1964 campaign marked his elevation into the top ranks of Democratic fund-raisers. In The Power and the Glitter, his 1990 book on Hollywood and politics, Ronald Brownstein writes, “Wasserman, Hollywood’s toughest operator, eased into this rugged environment as if he were born to it.”

But Wasserman, unlike the left-wing Malibu Democrats, was never an ideologue, as evidenced by his 1968 support for Hubert Humphrey. From Johnson to Clinton, his cause was making sure that the film industry had a pipeline to a Democratic White House. In his equation of politics with business, in his understanding that money buys access, Wasserman was no different than the conservative Texas oilmen who bankrolled the rise of LBJ.

Wasserman was known for punishing those in town didn’t support the Democrats. When studio heads set such examples, the minions often follow suit. So many Hollywood people started supporting Democrats, not just in Washington but the state of California. They funneled millions into the campaigns of people like Jerry Brown, Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, etc. The state became bluer over time. When Hollywood darling President Bill Clinton closed a lot of military bases in California, it helped to push the state more into the Democrat column. And lax immigration policies favored by Democrats, who see illegal aliens as their future voters, hurt Republicans in the state even more. Especially when the Republicans tried to fight back against the huge costs illegal aliens placed on the state budget.

Progressives believe in the nanny state. They’ve ushered in a quasi-Victorian age where more and more things become banned. Where your every action is dictated to by the state. California keeps creating laws to micro-manage its citizens’ every move. And all of that bureaucracy costs money. As a result, the government has become increasingly voracious when it comes to taxes and fines. They fine people for anything they can think of and tax them when they’re not fining them.

This makes the cost of living in California too much for the working class and the poor, not to mention the rich who are tired of being soaked. Business and talent are flocking away from the state. Hollywood productions are forced to relocate to more affordable climes. Which means the city of Los Angeles, which has largely depended on the Hollywood cash cow for most of the last 80 years, is starting to feel the pain. Hollywood is a vast industry that employs thousands of people. It helps fund many more ancillary businesses from the restaurants to the gardeners to the baristas at the coffee shops. When the money in Hollywood dries up so do a lot of the businesses that employ people, like out of work actors and writers. And when that happens, things gets ugly.

The end result is the state of California is on a collision course with bankruptcy. Hollywood helped bring about the end of its own glory. America was once looked on by the world as a savior. It rescued millions from the oppression of the Nazis and Communism. But Hollywood started cranking out movies starting in the late 60s that “deconstructed” the American myths. More and more films portrayed the government as evil, the military as butchers, America as oppressors. Not surprisingly, anti-Americanism started to spread around the world.

The irony of progressives is they attack the very government they created. The oppressive government which spies on our every movie in Hollywood films is less the product of the cold war conservatives and more the product of big government-loving statists. And that’s a progressive ideology. Not a conservative one.

The cost of running a government the progressive way is too expensive to take care of anyone well. It only exploits and robs revenues the citizens as much as inhumanly possible. The people are given inferior benefits as a bribe for their acceptance. They’re bribed with their own money or the money of those who could have given them a good job, if the state wasn’t bilking them first.

If Hollywood wants to return to its former success, it needs to stop deluding itself and start supporting those who would make the business climate good for them again.The leaders in California that the progressives support are not helping little guy. They are making them destitute. And if Hollywood doesn’t get smarter fast, they will meet them on the way down.

That it felt it necessary to do so was in reaction to its declining share of the entertainment market against the little box, television, where you could see things for free and in the comfort of one’s own home. 

Hollywood assumed an adversarial stance against television right from the beginning, doing everything from encouraging stars under its control to stay off TV to changing the aspect ratio of movies so that they no longer matched the dimensions of the television screens.  Yet think of how different things might have been, for television and for the Hollywood studio system, had the moguls of the 1950s decided that television represented not a threat, but a new outlet, a new source of profits in which everyone would have a chance to wet their beaks. 

But they didn’t.  They put more value on the short-term loss than on the potential for long term gain – and an already teetering studio system crumbled.  And, after the ground finally stopped shaking and thanks to folks like MCA’s Lew Wasserman - the studios found themselves in the television business anyway.  But they had to learn the lesson the hard way. 

So you might think the next time the opportunity arose to tap into an emerging market that had the potential for big revenues, the studios would be the first ones in line.  Guess again.  As we all know from the famous “Betamax” case, the folks who produced movies and television entertainment were so concerned about the potential for abuse that they tried, essentially, to put a stop to home video recorders while overlooking the enormous profits to be made in movie rentals. 

Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me.  But fool me a third time?  The studios still seem to think that new technology, rather than being a source for additional profits, remains the enemy.  Case in point: RealDVD, a product from Real Networks, the same folks who gave us Real Player and other interesting media applications for our computers. 

As the company puts it, RealDVD is “a cool new product that lets you save your DVDs to your PC or laptop,” a way to get additional value from the DVDs you have already purchased.  RealDVD is, in essence, a convenience in much the same way cassette tapes (remember them?) were a way to listen to the music contained on the LPs (remember them?) you had purchased while driving in your car. 

RealDVD is not, at least according to RealNetworks, a tool for pirating media.  The company says it has stringent protections embedded in its software to prevent piracy and illegal copying.  And, truth be told, anyone interested in breaking through the piracy protections encoded into today’s DVDs so they can rip free bootlegs has more than enough shareware to choose from already that they don’t need a program developed by a for-profit company to make things easier for consumers. 

But, just like they did with television and with home video recorder, the big studios have reacted with horror to the idea that something that might make it easier for consumer to get more life out of products, in this case DVDs, which consumer have already purchased, that they brought suit against RealNetworks to shut things down. 

There are certainly real issues involved here.  The protection of intellectual property is a very real concern, for producers and consumers alike.  As is the matter of the assignment of rights for duplication, the definitions of personal use and the distribution of revenues that might be generated from what one can assume would be the increased sale of DVDs. 

But the fact remains that the technology companies, RealNetworks among them, are looking to the future while the studios remain grounded in the present or, even worse, the past.  DVDs will eventually go the way of the LP, becoming an anachronistic storage device of interest only to serious collectors.  The Internet, and downloads, is where the future lies.  Programs like RealDVD are part of the transition and it makes little sense to trying and keep it shut down.  The smart move, from a business perspective as well as a technological one, is to follow where it leads.