Former Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev celebrated his 80th birthday with a bash in London on Wednesday.  And celebrities were out in force to glorify the life of a dictator.  Tickets went as high as $160,000. Talk about surreal: the co-hosts were Sharon Stone and and Kevin Spacey.  Entertainment was provided by the aging rock bank The Scorpions. Sporty Spice of the Spice Girls (now Mel C) also showed up.

It was all wrapped around the theme “Mikhail Gorbachev: The Man Who Changed the World.”  The Moscow Times reports that Spacey and Stone were, err, “cheesy.”  Standing in front of neo-classical columns “decorated with pink curtains,”  the two co-hosts “continuously mangled various Russian names and concepts.”  Stone (who they described as “ditzy”) went through a number of dress changes and Spacey tried to crack a joke about perestroika that was, well, “mangled.”    In between The Scorpions sang their songs “Wind of Change”  and later “Rock You Like A Hurricane.” Spandex anyone?

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Ted Turner was given an award.  Then came a Russian pop group named Khor Turetskogo singing the old black spiritual,  ”Go Down Moses.”  Strange choice if you are celebrating the birthday of an atheist,  don’t you think? You can’t make this stuff up.

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The torture techniques described in this harrowing chapter from Exchange Alley (now available on Kindle for 99 cents) are true. Taken from the second half of the novel, this sequence dramatizes what happens to the rogue KGB agent, Egil Ekdahl (here called Vanya) as the Soviet spy agency first breaks him and then reconstructs him into a stone killer.

Not for the squeamish. Enjoy.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Sakhalin Island, USSR; 1984 

They never turned the light off. That was the rule.

There were many rules in prison. The way you had to sleep, for example. Only one position allowed, facing the light. The light, which was always in your eyes. How did they expect a man to sleep with this way? They didn’t. That was part of the punishment. That was part of the treatment. That’s how you made the New Soviet Man: by shining the light in his eyes until he finally saw it.

No matter how you tried, you couldn’t avoid the light. You couldn’t roll over during the few hours they allowed you to sleep. You had to lie on your back, facing the light; if you fell asleep on your side or on your stomach, the guards came in and woke you up, flipped you over, and made you observe the light, ponder it. There was no escaping the light, although it did give you, the prisoner, adequate radiance to illuminate your crime.

After a while, however, you got accustomed to it, used to the position, used to the lack of sleep, used to the light. The light was like the Almighty, drawing you nearer. Into the light, as if you were dead, shooting along the dark tunnel that was this earthly life into the eternal light of the next.

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My first novel, Exchange Alley, is now up on Kindle and can be yours for the special introductory price of just 99 cents. Such a deal — especially when used paperback copies are being offered on Amazon for up to $688.88.

The original hardback cover

A Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection upon its publication in 1997, and the recipient of a starred review in Publishers Weekly, Exchange Alley (for reasons that will become clear as you read) has become something of a cult novel. In it, I introduced the character of Lt. Francis X. Byrne, the hot-tempered detective who catches a grisly murder case that, literally, changes his entire world. Frankie became so popular with readers that I brought him back last year (and promoted him to Captain) in Early Warning, where he battles against a spectacular terrorist attack on Times Square, and I suspect he’ll turn up again in another novel very soon.

I first got the idea of writing Exchange Alley during my various trips to the Soviet Union, beginning in 1986 (I was in country when Chernobyl blew up) and continuing right up to its dissolution in 1991. At the same time, I was deeply fascinated by the Kennedy Assassination, which I recalled vividly from my boyhood. So, as writers do, I thought: what if? (more…)

Image Entertainment and Enduring Freedom Productions have released a new documentary for the 100th anniversary of statesman Ronald Reagan’s birth. “Ronald Reagan: An American Journey” is an inspiring and heartfelt look at who President Reagan was, and at the instances that made his legacy eternal. The film is packed with archival footage of Reagan at his best, capturing those transcendent moments in his presidency that made him great and keep him relevant today.

In 103 minutes, this documentary gives Americans, especially young ones like me who know little of Reagan’s presidency, a complete summary of the historic highlights of Reagan’s eight years in office within its national and international context. The film doesn’t shy away from mistakes Reagan may have made. It isn’t overly worshiping. It simply presents Reagan in his own words, honoring a man who changed the world.

The film begins by putting Reagan’s presidency in its historical setting: a nation pulled apart by warring liberals and conservatives; where Vietnam savagely cut America in two, Nixon’s Watergate had tarnished the GOP, and Carter’s foreign policy had left Democrats looking weak. Reagan brought the nation together by giving Americans a mission: to defeat a true opponent – the U.S.S.R. (more…)

Well, better late than never, right? Not to take anything away from Peter Weir, who is a fantastic director, but does this mean that 20 years after the War on Terror ends we’ll finally see Hollywood’s First Attempt to Portray the Islamist Threat? Our friends over at Powerline have seen the movie and have more. Main story below.

Anne Applebaum in today’s Washington Post:

“It’s based on a true story.” Or “It’s truth, but stranger than fiction.” Or even: “You couldn’t make it up.” When Peter Weir gets sent film scripts these days, most of them advertise themselves as “true.” That wasn’t always the case: Weir (who made “Gallipoli,” “Witness,” “Master and Commander”) dates the tilt away from fiction and toward “fact” back to Sept. 11, 2001, the day reality did suddenly seem “exactly like a Hollywood movie.”

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Communism is responsible for more deaths in the 20th Century than both world wars, yet liberals have defended it for decades. A new book by Grove City College professor and top Reagan scholar Paul Kengor – Dupes – documents this, showing how Communists used liberals to further their efforts in the U.S. This book masterfully documents dupes in the U.S. from the Hill to (my focus here) Hollywood.

Kengor’s strength is research (the book’s introduction alone lists 35 citations), and Dupes authoritatively identifies both dupes and true Communists in Hollywood, documenting them down to their Communist Party USA registration card numbers and how many times they wrote for Communist publications.

Take playwright extraordinaire Arthur Miller, for example. It is widely accepted that “The Crucible” is about McCarthyism. Beyond that, today’s educators have allowed what Senator Joe McCarthy and his “witch hunts” found to blend with the work of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In reality, they were entirely separate.

Kengor points out that the falsely titled “HUAC,” (a recent New Yorker article, which gives a good review of former Communist Elia Kazan, used the “HUAC” abbreviation too) which suggests the committee was the actual un-American organization, was chaired by Democrats for much of its existence, and it was attacked for its work by Communists regardless of who was in charge. (more…)

Leave it to Oliver Stone to come up with the idea of a miniseries to put the likes of Stalin and Hitler “in context.” Oh, and for good measure, let’s toss in Joe McCarthy, whose mission was to expose Communists in the U.S. government.

What makes him a natural for this kind of project is Stone’s admiration for Fidel Castro – his documentary  about the Cuban dictator (shelved by HBO – kudos to them) attempted to “portray the human figure” – and Hugo Chavez (whom he “warmly embraced” when on some kind of fact-finding tour of Latin America).

Do they share a wardrobe?

What is it with Hollywoodites and dictators? Michael Medved tries to explain:

“Many people in the entertainment industry feel guilty about their own wealth. They know that they earned it in an arbitrary way, not because they are so much better than someone who’s still working as a waiter in Beverly Hills, but they earned it out of luck. They believe that all capitalism works that way – that people have goodies showered on them not because of their own hard work or creativity, but because of good fortune and luck. That guilt produces this fascination with socialism.”

Feeling guilty, guys? Why not give that excess money to a worthy charity? Or you could decline the big-buck paychecks and ask for something a little more in keeping with what, say, someone working at a convenience store would earn. But I digress. (more…)

“Objectivity is impossible,” self-styled “peoples’ historian” Howard Zinn once remarked, “and it is also undesirable. That is, if it were possible it would be undesirable, because if you have any kind of a social aim, if you think history should serve society in some way; should serve the progress of the human race; should serve justice in some way, then it requires that you make your selection on the basis of what you think will advance causes of humanity.”

History serving “a social aim,” rather than chronicling the past in a detached manner, is what readers get in A People’s History of the United States. With any luck, “The People Speak,” the History Channel documentary based on the book that premieres this Sunday, will be, like so many Hollywood productions, unfaithful to the original. Given A People’s History of the United States’ infidelity to facts, this might be the only chance viewers have of seeing anything resembling an accurate retelling of history.

Through Zinn’s looking-glass, Maoist China, site of history’s bloodiest state-sponsored killings, transforms into “the closest thing, in the long history of that ancient country, to a people’s government, independent of outside control.” The authoritarian Nicaraguan Sandinistas were “welcomed” by their own people, while the opposition Contras, who backed the candidate that triumphed when free elections were finally held, were a “terrorist group” that “seemed to have no popular support inside Nicaragua.” Admitting some human rights abuses, Zinn writes that Castro’s Cuba “had no bloody record of suppression.”

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The other day I was asked if I thought I would ever come face to face with writer’s block.  I had to laugh.  Inasmuch as I generally write about things that annoy, frustrate or just plain drive me nuts, running out of material or losing the impulse to complain in print are among the very least of my worries. 

When you factor in that Barack Obama is my president, Joe Biden is my vice-president, Nancy Pelosi is next in line, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer are my senators, Brad Sherman is my congressman, Antonio Villaraigosa is my mayor and Jerry Brown is lurking in the wings to be my governor, do you really think I’ll be turning my pen into a plowshare anytime soon?    

But at least now you might have a better handle on why I look back so fondly on what I have come to regard as the good old days when an American’s major complaint was that he had taxation without representation. 

On top of everything else, I live in Los Angeles and have spent most of my adult life laboring in Hollywood, a place that some people regard as less an actual location than a state of mind.  I agree it is a state of mind in the same sense that paranoia and schizophrenia are states of mind.  (more…)

In a recent New York Times column, David Brooks described a 1975 Bruce Springsteen concert as the start of his “other education,” not the intellectual one from schooling but the “emotional education” from the popular culture. 

Brooks is a superstar pundit.  A featured journalist at The Weekly Standard, in 2000 Brooks was author of “Bobos in Paradise,” a smart look at “bourgeois bohemians,” the educated, “counterculture” crowd that had become America’s new blue state power elite.  Brooks went on to occupy the house conservative Op Ed position at the liberal mainstay New York Times and the equivalent chair on PBS NewsHour’s version of crossfire, with ever-apologetic Brooks pitted against the always garrulous lefty Mark Shields.  These two roles established Brooks as the left’s favorite conservative, a position he solidified as one of the Obamacons, prominent conservatives who supported Obama, believing him to be a moderate centrist, or in Brooks’ case, even a closet Burkean conservative. 

Last week Brooks went with his 15-year-old daughter to see a Springsteen concert in Baltimore and witnessed her joyous astonishment.  Her arrival at utter abandon echoed the exhilaration, the emotional learning, Springsteen had long ago imparted to Brooks, the depiction of a world of “teenage couples out on a desperate lark, workers struggling as the mills close down, and drifters on the wrong side of the law,” tales told with a jolt for “10,000 people in a state of utter abandon.”   

Brooks fondly describes the artistry and stories of Springsteen’s universe, “a distinct map of reality” seen on an epic and anthemic scale, in which “losers” always retain dignity and their choices have immense moral consequences, with emotions like stoicism, seen through veils of exaltation and nostalgia.  (more…)

 When the second plane flew into the World Trade Center, our family friend, Albert, who was watching the attack on TV in Armenia, had a major heart attack. His sister was working in the second tower. Three hours later, she called him. Her voice was trembling; she had a nervous breakdown but she was uninjured. My friend heard the good news in the emergency room. He died two weeks later at the age of 54. 

Albert was the last casualty of 9/11 that I know of. Although, I am sure there are more people who were indirectly impacted by the attack to some serious and even fatal degree. 

Albert was also famous for his devastating sense of humor, so when I read about the highly heralded eco-melodramatic documentary “No Impact Man,” I vividly imagined Albert ripping this self-righteous excretion of bored urban utopians a new one. (more…)

An extraordinary film just came out on DVD which couldn’t be more timely.  It’s about a fiercely outspoken, beautiful woman trapped in a country rapidly descending into socialism, with the government steadily ratcheting up control over all aspects of life.

No, it’s not The Ann Coulter Story.

The movie is We The Living, based on the Ayn Rand novel of the same title.  Rand said that We The Living “is as near to an autobiography as I will ever write.”

Conservatives and libertarians have long lamented the scarcity of movies that depict the evils of communism.  Let’s see, there’s Doctor Zhivago, The Killing Fields, The Lives of Others, and… and, well, now there’s We The Living — a long-lost classic filmed in 1942, and now available on DVD for the first time ever.

WTL takes place soon after the Bolshevik takeover of Russia (which Rand experienced as a young woman).  The stunning Alida Valli plays Kira, a fiery college student who detests the communists ruining her country.  (Valli is perhaps best known to American audiences for her indelible performances in The Third Man and The Paradine Case.) (more…)

Like everyone else driving along Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park last year, I couldn’t help but notice the now-iconic Shepard Fairey “Hope” poster of candidate Barack Obama emblazoned 20 feet high on the side of a building near Dodger Stadium.  As a piece of advocacy, it was tremendously effective – Obama the visionary, gazing bravely into the middle distance and the distant future – even if it did turn out to be a shameless rip-off of an Associated Press photograph.

That image is now once again front and center in the wake of the revelations that the National Endowment for the Arts has apparently been colluding with the White House’s Office of Public Engagement and the president’s United We Serve “call to action” to enlist sympathetic artists in the furtherance of the administration’s political goals, in defiance of tradition and perhaps, as George Will has suggested, the law.  Having served myself on both the NEA’s Opera-Music Theater and Oversight panels in 1985, I find this news to be profoundly depressing. (more…)

“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!” – Michael Corleone, Godfather Part III

True story:  As a young man just out of law school, I was consumed with politics.  I even went to work on the Hill (Capitol, that is, Washington, DC) and in journalism.  But at some point in the ’90s, my interest faded away.

Francis Fukuyama wrote a then-notorious book called The End of History, published in 1992, shortly after the Soviet Union’s collapse.  He argued that the age-old ideological struggles over what constitutes the best form of government were over, and the undisputed universal champion was Western liberal (in the classic, free-market sense) democracy.

I grew up during the latter stages of the Cold War, when the existential threat of nuclear war hung over and colored almost everything.  It made politics seem vital to one’s very survival.  And I found the debate between capitalism and communism hugely compelling. (more…)

The news is really unbelievable these days. All that I once thought were core American values and traditions are now being washed away in a sea of propaganda and political attacks from the radical Left, which now rules supreme and knows it. The Left in power is now waging an ideological war not only against conservatives, but any dissenting Americans who get in their way. Worst of all, they are using the full machinery of the government and their Lefty media lapdogs to do it all, and in the same fashion as Ahmadinejad’s government is demonizing the Green protesters in Iran.

It is chilling to witness, in the United States of America of all places. Civil political discourse is a thing of the past. You cannot oppose ObamaCare without being a swastika-waving corporate Nazi stooge. Never mind the fact that no one will tell us exactly where all the hospitals, doctors, and nurses to treat 50 million new patients will magically materialize from, or how it will all be paid for.
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I’m doing standup in Denver. Shelley is driving me from radio to radio to TV as I do the monkey dance at each station promoting the show, selling tickets. I don’t like this part of the job. I must answer the same 10 questions about Saturday Night Live and try to explain where I’ve been for the last fifteen years. All the DJ’s want are some juicy stories about celebrities. I don’t really have that many. I’m booked at two political talk stations, a rock station, a country station, and two local TV shows.  I guess that’s my demographic! Everyone! I ask Shelley why I’m booked on the political stations. She shrugs, “Well, we didn’t really know…isn’t that what you are doing now?” The first stop I’m told is a “just right of center” show, so I feel free to share my newest shocking information that the White House is asking us to “snitch’” on our friends and family. To report anything “fishy.” This news is so abhorrent to me that I could barely sleep the night before. I immediately emailed Andrew Breitbart to see if it was true. He said yes. I searched the hotel computer web to see if the big shots, the smart people have gotten on this. They were just starting to fight back. The news was so new. Well, at least this administration is entertaining…in a bad way. I’m watching a horror movie every day.

As I share the shocking information that our Freedom of Speech is being attacked, the radio host across from me, his face, it looks like he just ate a lemon. It’s all scrunched up like…he hates me. He abruptly cuts me off and ends my interview. I’m stupefied at the reaction of people who “just can’t handle the truth.” My driver Shelley is a liberal. She doesn’t say anything. As we get in the car I try to apologize, “Well, he asked me why I was a new political activist.  I guess I should just tell jokes.” I mean I have been hired basically to sell tickets to a bar where people will spend lots of money on alcohol. And, I do need to make some money. My husband is a cop. (more…)

Well after its phenomenal success of eight Oscars, four Golden Globes, seven BAFTA’s, and $350 million at the boxoffice, “Slumdog Millionaire” has managed to stay alive. As much an amazing longshot victor as its hero, an urchin from the Mumbai slums cum tea server at a phone call center who wins a fortune in an Indian version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?,” “Slumdog” has kept making news in ways deeply rooted in its own depiction of the world.

Recently the film’s British director Danny Boyle, serving as jury president of the 12th Shanghai Film Festival, confided during a panel discussion that on “Slumdog” he had shed the patronizing, “imperialist” mentality, relying heavily on a local Indian crew. Boyle also observed that while it was “regrettable” that Beijing imposed censorship restrictions on its filmmakers, he’d nonetheless love to work in China, as it would be a “challenge learning Mandarin.” Boyle neglected to mention that on “Slumdog” he’d skipped the challenge of learning Hindi, necessitating an Indian co-director, and also skipped the patronizing practice of paying Western wages, and the low pay for local child actors would fuel most of the subsequent controversies. (more…)

During the Cold War, a slew of movies came out that dealt with the possibility of a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. This is not surprising since the atom and hydrogen bombs were the most powerful weapons ever devised by man. Well, almost.

I’ll get to that somewhat nervy assertion in a bit, but first a little background.

Among the cinematic slew released during those years of cold, are two of my favorite films, Dr. Strangelove and Fail-Safe. Both dealt with strikingly similar themes, unintentional nuclear holocaust, yet in entirely different tones.  But cold war themes weren’t that varied by their very nature, since inevitably the worst case scenario was the best case plot device and nothing brings down the house like bringing down the house.

With that said, still, there’s so much similarity between the two stories that law suits were indeed filed and production schedules slowed. This worked out to Stanley Kubrick’s advantage as his Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was released almost a year ahead of Sidney Lumet’s Fail-Safe. In my opinion Kubrick’s is a better film than Lumet’s and not due to slowed schedules, either. But both are magnificent, and because of their approaches to the topic, very different  and essential part of the genre. (more…)

“Wax on, wax off.” “He slimed me.” “Fortune and Glory, kid.” “I’ll be back.” “Don’t get him wet. Keep him out of bright light. And never feed him after midnight.”

It’s hard to believe that a quarter century has passed since that magical movie summer of 1984. The calender year of George Orwell’s dire dystopian nightmares had arrived, but instead of a nation writhing in servitude to Big Brother, America was delighting in the prosperity engineered by Big Gipper. Throughout the summer of ‘84, the greatest president of the twentieth century was cruising to the single largest electoral total ever amassed by a presidential candidate in our history, and “It’s Morning Again in America” commercials were playing on TV’s across the land to widespread approval. (more…)

Return with me now to the days of yore, when frothing left wing loonies exhibited some semblance of knowledge and didn’t just spew bizarro diatribes, as exhibited in the recent Garofolo rant. I hearken back to an era of bi-polarity (no, not the mood swing/disorder, lithium kind) but to the 1980’s, when the Good Guys (USA and western society) and the Black Hats (the Soviet Empire and their captured lackey governments) squared off to contest ways of life and global spheres of influence. 

It was a simpler time. Our external enemies were easily identifiable: they were blatant in railing against capitalism, freedom of speech, belief in God, individual accountability, and love of country, while pleading, teary eyed, for pro-government wet-nurse-ism (Soviet-style socialism). Their domestically deranged fellow travelers, the unhinged adversaries of the Founder’s Constitutional principles, were relegated (correctly) by voters to minority political power status, and were as effective as a brace of quacking ducks.  (more…)