Oscar-winner Ben Kingsley’s script radar is far from perfect. If it was, would he have signed on to appear in “The Love Guru,”"BloodRayne” or “A Sound of Thunder?”

But Kingsley is dead on when he describes how Hollywood has lost its way.

The actor, out on the promotional circuit to talk up his latest film, “Hugo,” told an interviewer at The Huffington Post what he really fears about the changing face of Hollywood – and the movies the industry cranks out.

(more…)

Who wouldn’t want to read a story about how Fox News called those lovable Muppets communists?

Except the piece currently up at The Huffington Post is a lie. No one at Fox News called the Muppets communists – at least according to material quoted in the HuffPo story or via the link provided by the noxious Media Matters. Last time we checked, our dear friends on the left insist “liberal” does not equal “communist.” Did we miss a memo?

Yes, Fox News aired a segment in which the host and a guest called out “The Muppets,” the new film starring those felt and fur characters, for using an evil oil man as its go-to villain. Chris Cooper plays Tex Richman, an oil baron who wants to raze the old Muppet Theater to dig for oil.

In Hollywood, daring to cast a Muslim character can be considered a hate crime, but repeatedly casting businessmen, Christians and Southerners as villains is enlightened.

(more…)

JournoList scandal is back and prepare for it to be a driving force in the news for quite some time. The Daily Caller published an article tonight indicating they’ve obtained emails from the JournoList and the initial details are as damning as we expected when the list-serv, founded by the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein in 2007, surfaced with the Dave Weigel kerfuffle last month.

Snippets from the article below, but make sure to read the whole thing at the Daily Caller and return to Big Journalism early and often as we unpack the details that emerge and track the fallout from this seminal event in the history of left-wing media bias. It’s unclear exactly what the Daily Caller has, but there’s certainly no indication from this article they’ve already laid all their cards out on the table.

According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.” (more…)

In Hollywood, being a conservative is the kiss of death. — Jonathan Kahn

Today’s entertainment-industry conservatives can only wish they lived under the same type of blacklist practiced in the 1950s. As terribly misguided as that was, there was at least an honesty to it. There was an actual list and when you were on it you were told you were on it and understood why your phone had stopped ringing. This gave its victims something to fight against and better yet, no one tried to stereotype them as untalented, paranoid whiners for daring to mention its existence.  

Today’s Progressive Hollywood Blacklist is a much more insidious thing. By design it functions in a way that still punishes those who stray from the ideological plantation but like the elephant behind Jimmy Durante, remains hidden well enough in plain sight so that when you try to point it out, the progressive blacklisters can say, “What elephant?” even as they laugh in your face.

As we witnessed with Jonathan Kahn’s coming out in the Wall Street Journal last week, the Progressive Hollywood Blacklist is a system upheld with no small amount of help from the entertainment media. They are Leftist Hollywood’s professional character assassins specialized in the dark art of keeping the industry ideologically pure through the stereotyping of conservatives. (more…)

Steven Weber, who starred in “Wings,” is a contributor to that font of mainstream Hollywood liberal thought, The Huffington Post. And in keeping with almost every post on that site, Weber is dripping with rage over the way the leftist agenda is falling apart before his eyes. 

Is he mad at a president and a Democratic Congress that have bungled the greatest political opportunity for liberals in nearly a century? Oh, no. Weber directs his hate towards anyone who doesn’t imbibe the (heavily spiked) pink Kool-Aid as often as he does. More specifically, he’s shaking his tiny fist at the kind of people who contribute to and read this blog. 

Weber latest screed is titled: “What to Do (This Time, Sober).” We’ll have to take Weber’s word for his parenthetical clarification, because if this is a sober post, I’d hate to read Weber’s thoughts on conservatives when he’s on the sauce. 

One can hardly get past the first sentence without a hearty guffaw. Weber writes: “It’s time to tear the mask from their smug, stupid faces.” Let’s just say Weber, in the role of his dreams, is pulling apart the buttons from his shirt and dashing down the street to reveal a giant blue “S” on his chest for “Smug Man.” Or is it “Stupid Man.” You can decide, as you read on: (more…)

Late last spring, through the auspices of a mutual friend, I spent an afternoon visiting with eighty-nine-year-old author Ray Bradbury. Walking upstairs to his den, I found the genial (and, for the record, fairly conservative) writer dressed in a rumpled shirt and boxer shorts, surrounded by a sea of awards and papers and memorabilia of every description, and happily watching Turner Classic Movies on a big-screen TV. “Isn’t this channel great?” he enthused, telling me how excited he had been to guest host there a year earlier. We spent the next hour talking about films — his early days as a local boy visiting the studios on roller skates and asking stars for autographs, his long friendship with special effects maven Ray Harryhausen, his experience writing the screenplay to Moby Dick (1956) for director John Huston.

And all the while TCM played in the background, like an old friend.

I’ve since reflected on how Turner Classic Movies has grown over the years into one of the most universally admired cultural forums in America. It’s a familiar presence in households of all political persuasions. If you like old movies, you like TCM, period.

That’s why the mini-uproar here at Big Hollywood last week was so disheartening. For those of you who missed it: during an on-air introduction to the 1957 movie A Face in the Crowd, TCM host Ben Mankiewicz gave legions of conservative viewers a collective poke in the eye, by way of a not-so-veiled sneer at talk-show host Glenn Beck. You can see the sad spectacle for yourself by clicking over to the TCM website, but here are the money quotes: (more…)

Stop the servers!  Jackson Williams at the Huffington Post has a newsflash:  Actor Matthew Marsden Hides His Right-Wing Political Views.

This raises a couple of questions.  The first is, “Who is Mathew Marsden?”  Well, he was an up-and-coming young English singer and actor with athletic roles in Rambo and Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen.  Which leads to the second question – why would writer Jackson Williams be so giddy about the revelation that Marsden apparently does not hew obediently to the Hollywood left’s party line?

Well, it sure isn’t because he’s interested in giving Marsden’s career a boost.  Like the grinning little snot in every elementary school class who gets off on the high of narc-ing out the other kids to the schoolmarm, Jackson’s purpose was to tattle to every producer, agent, actor and other Hollywoodoid that Marsden had been a bad, bad boy.  He exercised his right to think for himself. Maybe Jackson should wear a sash:  “Political Hall Monitor.”  But it’s clear that his article is simply a nomination of Marsden for a spot on the New Hollywood Blacklist. (more…)

Wait till you see me with gold chains…

There’s no way this is real. It can’t be. The Huffington Post needs to start an immediate  investigation to find the right-winger who falsely submitted this Ode to Child Rapist under Levy’s name in order to discredit French philosophers everywhere: 

I am mostly thinking about him: Roman Polanski whom I don’t know but whose fate has moved me so much. Nothing will repair the days he has spent in prison. Nothing will erase the immense, unbelievable injustice he has been subjected to. Nothing will take away the hysteria of those ones who have never stopped pouring contempt upon him, hounding him through hatred and asking for his punishment as if we were living the darkest and most ferocious hours of the McCarthysm [sic] era all over again.

(more…)

Since I turn 50 next month, I’m focused on my Bucket List.  There are only 2 things left I haven’t accomplished.  1)  I’ve always wanted to be “an airhead on a sitcom.”  Of all the roles I’ve played, many of which I wasn’t suited for, strangely, this one has eluded me.  2) Attend a weekly Bible study.  So, I am now in a Bible study group on Wednesdays and the rest of the week I pursue airhead roles, which basically means I wait…for an audition.  I get about one a year.  This year I got an audition for American Pie IV, but I turned it down because of the sexual content.  

At my Bible study group this week I was sitting between Mavis and her Chihuahua named Pedro, and Sonia, an Iranian who lived five years in Russia, where she waited to receive her legal U.S. citizenship.  I asked Pastor Joel “Why does the Bible say Jesus was from the lineage of King David, if he had no blood from his father in him, since he was born of a virgin?  Pastor Joel excitedly replied, “Oh, well turn to Matthew 1 and Luke 3!  Mary and Joseph were both descendants of David as you can see by these genealogies.  So, the Old Testament prophecy was fulfilled that said the Messiah would be from the priestly (through Nathan) and kingly (through Solomon) lineage of David.  The blood of Mary which was from David ran through Jesus.  Oh. I always wondered about that.   (more…)