The arrival of a serious film about a serious conservative presents liberal reviewers with a quandary. When the film trashes the conservative, that’s great – the slander in and of itself is good for at least a star on its own, and if the boom mikes aren’t looming in the frame and the actors don’t forget their lines you’re guaranteed at least a three star review if only in the name of socialist solidarity.

But if the movie, as some say happened here, refuses to take a position on its subject, then there’s a problem for the liberal reviewer. As we shall see, they tend to handle it by simply inserting their own limousine liberal insights into the review. Somewhere, sometime, someone must have lied to them and told them that the world gives a damn about the political views of guys whose job it is to discourse upon movies that feature singing chipmunks, space robots and/or Ashton Kutcher.

No one is really sure about what might happen in the third theoretically possible situation. It will be interesting to see how liberal reviewers respond if Hollywood ever makes a major movie biography about a prominent conservative that views him or her in a positive light.

The reviews for “The Iron Lady” are mixed, with Rotten Tomatoes giving it a 55 percent score by the critics.  Not surprisingly, the critics are having a tough time sticking to the substance. Many of them just can’t resist taking a whack at her – as if she had not spent her career being hit harder by better.

Roger Ebert, a reflexive leftist whose pinko opinions usually saturate his movie reviews, wrote a thoughtful review here. He objected not to the opinion the film held of its subject, but that the producers seemed too timid to offer any opinion at all:

Was she a monster? A heroine? The movie has no opinion. She was a fact. You leave the movie having witnessed it. Whatever your feelings were about Thatcher were before you saw it, you now have some images to accompany it.

Love him or hate him, that’s some sharp writing. If true, it represents a valid criticism and is the kind of keen insight one looks to a reviewer to express. But, of course, Ebert could not resist a long digression into lefty/peacenik silliness over Thatcher’s steadiness in the face of Argentine aggression in the Falklands which then morphs into a lament for her heartlessness:

Thatcher held office for an unprecedented three terms, bitterly divided Great Britain, and led her nation during the Falklands War, which seemed to be largely an exercise in hubris on both sides. Before the war (and now), no one frankly gave a damn about the Falkland Islands, and Thatcher’s foreign policy amounted to: “They’re ours and you bloody well can’t have them.” For this brave troops on both sides were killed, and those who cared to could deceive themselves that there was one small spot of foreign soil that, as far as Thatcher was concerned, would be forever British. (Footnote: The British didn’t consider it foreign.)

Of course, Argentina started the war by invading the Falklands, over which it had disputed Britain’s claim since 1833. You can’t say they didn’t wait long enough before taking action. And if Argentina mounted a military invasion, what could Thatcher do? She was compelled to defend the islands. The loved ones on either side who lost someone in that war must have been hard-pressed to understand why death was useful or necessary.

That wasn’t Thatcher’s concern. In a striking scene that takes place in her increasingly senile old age, she declares that ideas are more important to her than feelings. That seems to have been a governing principle in her life, allowing her to look with apparently limited concern at unemployment, hunger and homelessness on the domestic front.

Ebert’s feelings about British policy of the 1980s really aren’t the issue – we just want to know if “The Iron Lady” is any good. But like all liberals, Ebert seems to think we’re dying for his insights on politics when the important question is whether we should drop $40 for seats and popcorn to watch this flick.

Lesser reviewers likewise join in the Thatcher-bashing. You’ll be shocked to learn that Karina Longworth of the Village Voice resented Thatcher not being presented with horns and a pointy tail. Variety accepts the unexamined premises of the community it serves, showing why it is Hollywood’s own Pravda when reviewer Leslie Felperin fumes that “[m]uch is made of how Thatcher broke through the glass ceilings of gender and class on a personal level; rather less is said about how her policies disadvantaged the poor.”

While it’s no shock that Slate’s Dana Stevens thinks that it was Thatcher’s “policies of economic deregulation and union-busting that dismantled Britain’s social safety net,” I expect that British subjects taxed into poverty to support the bloated behemoth of cradle-to-grave socialism on that sinking island would be shocked to hear about this alleged “dismantling.”

Cole Smithey (“The Smartest Film Critic in the World”) sugarcoats it by labeling Thatcher one “of the Right’s most reprehensible examples of absolute power corrupting absolutely,” raising the important questions, “Who is Cole Smithey, and why should I give a rat’s ass what some hipster doofus with a website and a subscription to The Nation thinks?”

He also asserts that “Thatcher contributed to the world’s current economic collapse with a cunning brand of daring cruelty that defies logic and reason,” forgetting that the lefty Labor Party had some small part in running Britain after Thatcher stepped down in 1990. I particularly enjoyed his characterization of how “Thatcher’s heavy-handed military response in the Falklands rightly paints her as a warmonger.”

He seems to have forgotten that Argentina invaded the Falklands, not vice versa, but then he seems to have grown up in an age where wussy school administrators suspend both the kid who starts the fight and the one who fights back. Smithey opines that “[h]istory will not be kind to Margaret Thatcher,” a threat I would find more chilling if Smithey’s comments betrayed any familiarity with history.

With all the hyperventilating about the subject of the film, it’s hard to get a straight answer to the only question we really want to hear these critics answer – should we pay to see the movie?  We still don’t really know.

The studios might be able to bait us into turning something like “The Green Hornet” into an opening weekend hit, but unlike anytime in my life, walking out of a theatre wanting to see “that” movie again is now the rare exception as opposed to the rule.

With video delivery technologies emerging in ways no one expects on an almost daily basis, there’s no silver bullett to solving the very serious DVD sales problem. But something that most certainly would help would be to make more films we’re actually excited about seeing again and again. 

Variety:

Consumers keep spending less on DVD as they switch over to Blu-ray, streaming services like Netflix and VOD, with the aging disc format earning 44% less last year than it did in 2009, despite strong sales for Fox’s “Avatar.”

The wholesale value of 415 titles released on DVD in 2010 fell to $4.47 billion from $7.97 billion in ‘09, a new report by SNL Kagan reports.

Of those titles, 226 million units were shipped, another 44% less than in 2009, signaling a declining interest in retailers to carry the discs, as consumers build fewer DVD libraries at home.

On average, films shipped 545,000 units and earned $10.8 million in wholesale revenue, off 52% from the average in 2009.

DVD’s demise is still hard to ignore, considering it has generated most of Hollywood’ homevideo sales for the past decade. Digital distribution has yet to make up for the decline in DVD sales.

At the same time, Blu-ray also continues to grow, with the format having generated $2.3 billion in sales last year, a growth of 53%, over 2009, according to the Digital Entertainment Group. Consumers spent another $2.5 billion on digital downloads, DEG said, a gain of 19% over 2009.

I’m a movie-lover. A healthy industry means Hollywood is satisfying its customers and I’m a customer who enjoys being satisfied. That’ just not happening anymore and hasn’t for going on a decade now.

Much of the great writing, acting and directing has moved to television, proving that the Hollywood talent is still there. Right now, it’s just not in the movies.

By raw statistics, that would indicate over a quarter of the entertainment business is Republican. Now it could just be that Republicans are more generous.  Democrats are notoriously cheaper than a Barney Frank ferry ride. Al Gore spent more money on harassable masseuses than he gives to charity. Bill Clinton’s idea of charity is giving away used underwear (though in fairness, some of the clothing he soiled is now considered museum quality). Joe Biden spends more on polishing his tooth marks out of his shoes than he routinely gives away.

Democrats are as hypocritical as Leonardo DiCaprio’s private jet. They talk all the time about the uncaring rich not helping the poor, but come tax time, the charitable giving recorded on their Schedule As is dwarfed by their mortgage interest on their luxurious abodes. Democrats think their public service and undying support of a powerful state is tantamount to charity.

Perhaps showbiz Republicans give more, since their money says the words they can’t speak at work. When you have to put in eight-plus hours alongside people who can’t hold back their opinions about the ignorant bigoted tea-bagging Republicans, you’re bound to come home and take revenge with your checkbook.

Or maybe we just have more to spend. Usually people don’t discover Republicanism until they’re in the upper tax bracket. It’s strange how money looks from the other side of the fence. I know a comedian who once had a line about nobody needing more than three million dollars a year, that any dime you make above three million should be confiscated, because if you CAN’T make it on three million dollars a year, you’re an idiot and don’t deserve it anyway.

The last time I saw him joking about a maximum wage I knew he had made good, because he was now claiming that nobody needed more than $150 million a year. I’m glad that he’s doing well for himself, and he’s learned that three million dollars is not as much as a starving artist might imagine. Especially in show biz, where 25% is taken straight off the top, before the IRS and the State of Wherever-You-Unpack-Your-Suitcase get their share.

But I truly suspect that the amount of Republicans in the industry is far underestimated. Democrats just tend to be louder so it appears like there are more of them.  Here at Big Hollywood, there are only a handful of showbiz types who have revealed themselves. I think more need to come out of the attic, at least for the inner peace they will find. It isn’t healthy for everyone to keep their opinions locked up inside.

I say come out of your hiding places everyone. I think there are more of us out here than anyone can imagine. It’s really liberating to no longer pretend that the economy is in great shape, and the President is competent. And the next time your co-worker claims that at least He’s not as bad as Bush, remind them that a four percent unemployment and a deficit under a trillion dollars would be a welcome relief right about now.

Their keystone attraction was Broken Blossoms (1919), a then sixty-year-old silent film. The Museum, as it happened, possessed the only “original tinted nitrate print” known to still exist in the world. This precious and brittle jewel would be projected at the Exposition for the last time, before being tucked away into temperature and humidity controlled storage (from then on, future screenings would use copies of the original). For its last hurrah, this ancient print would be accompanied by a full, live orchestra, like in the old days. And to cement the evening as a particularly notable occasion, the movie’s eighty-four-year-old star, Lillian Gish, “would be presented following the screening.”

To average 1978 filmgoers drunk on Star Wars, all this was doubtless of little significance. To others, the announcement carried momentous power. Broken Blossoms had been hailed in its time as a film of startling beauty, a virtual kaleidoscope of color and light and emotional resonance. But in the decades since, the only way to see it had been through degraded 16mm black-and-white dupe prints, with all of the film’s tinted luminance — and thus much of what made it so beautiful — lost. The chance to see the only remaining 35mm print with the original tints intact, accompanied by a full orchestra, and with the film’s sole surviving star in attendance — well, one’s twentieth viewing of Star Wars could wait.

New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) was justifiably proud of bringing this rare print to Los Angeles. Their Department of Film was established in 1935, at a time when movies — powerful and popular as they were — were nevertheless seen as disposable. Most of the original silent studios were long gone, their archives sold off or destroyed. Any copies that remained were left moldering in ill-kept warehouses and collections scattered across the globe. Countless thousands of prints were tossed into the trash. Even those films lovingly collected and preserved by fans degenerated with each viewing until most became pale shadows of their former glory.

Iris Barry, a popular writer and movie critic from Great Britain, became the first curator of MoMA’s film department. It was her assertion that film was much more than entertainment, it was Art — the first utterly new art to come along in centuries. As such, it was important to preserve old motion pictures so that they could be “studied and enjoyed as any other one of the arts.” To that end, she embarked on an ambitious goal of saving as many old films as she could before it was too late.

To jumpstart the MoMA archive, Barry traveled to Hollywood and begged for cooperation from studios and filmmakers in preserving their own heritage. To her delight, most people proved only too happy to help. Silent-era stars, directors, and production wizards were still in town, and many kept old prints of their work squirreled away in garages and storage sheds.

There were setbacks, of course. Early nitrate prints easily decomposed in poor conditions, rotting away like unembalmed bodies, and many times MoMA’s archivists would open a prized film can only to find a rust-like powder caked within. But by the end of Barry’s stint at MoMA in 1951, she had saved thousands of titles, and her department was using new triacetate stock to make copies tough enough to survive into our modern era of computers and digitization.

For most of the movies that made up America’s early cinematic heritage, however, it was too late. Over 80% of all films from the silent era, some of them quite famous and revered in their day, have now vanished forever. We owe it to Iris Barry and the good people at MoMA that Broken Blossoms did not become one of those grim casualties.

Even so, celluloid is more durable than flesh, and by 1978 that fragile print of Broken Blossoms had outlasted almost all of its creators. The picture’s pioneering cinematographer, Billy Bitzer, was felled by a heart attack way back in 1944. Thomas Burke, author of the short story on which the film was based, followed Bitzer into Hades a year later. The movie’s legendary director, D. W. Griffith, succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage in 1948. One of the three stars, actor Richard Barthelmess, died in 1963. Another, Academy Award-winner Donald Crisp, lasted to the ripe old age of 91 in 1974. And between these last two came the death of Hendrik Sartov in 1970, the man whose experiments with diffusion glass popularized glamorous, soft-focus photography in Hollywood fare via Broken Blossoms.

Only the third star of the film, actress Lillian Gish, was left to represent the original filmmakers at the historic 1978 occasion.

On the day of the screening, almost 1400 people showed up. The issue of Variety for May 3, 1978 reports that the aged film only snapped a single time, necessitating a quick-splice repair job, and that at the end Lillian Gish received a standing ovation. “I am deeply moved by your applause,” she said to the assembly. “just as I was deeply moved by this film. It’s as if it had nothing to do with me. This film really had everything to do with a man named D. W. Griffith.” As usual, Gish was the essence of graciousness when thanking her long-dead mentor, a man for whose reputation and legacy she proselytized via books, interviews, and events such as this.

I wonder what that audience was thinking as it viewed that film in the dark, the print covered in scratches and the grime of decades, the actors engaged in a forgotten language of pantomime as frustrating to modern eyes as Shakespeare’s English is to modern ears. Actor James Mason aptly describes the typical silent movie effect in his narration for the epic 1980 documentary series Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film: “Jerky, flickering, a little absurd. Moving at the wrong speed, with that tinkling piano.”

Audiences of the distant past, though, saw the best silent movies as the height of entertainment and emotional engagement. Our great-grandparents experienced Broken Blossoms in opulent movie palaces glittering with gold fixtures and crystal chandeliers, and manned by armies of fresh-faced, well-trained ushers. In the best cases, a full orchestra was on hand to play along with the action, giving these pictures a splendorous sonic accompaniment rivaling today’s THX-certified digital systems. It was a major event and spectacle, the equivalent of getting dressed up today and attending the latest Andrew Lloyd Weber musical at a tony Broadway theater.

For most of us today, on the other hand, silent movies are too often chores to be slogged through, distant and old and more than a bit weird. And then there’s the distorting lens of political correctness to consider. A February 2, 2009 piece in The New Yorker by Anthony Lane announced a MoMA screening of Broken Blossoms this way:

D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms, which screens at MoMA on Jan. 29, is ninety years old, and in some respects the film is looking its age. . . As for the printed titles, you don’t know whether to snicker at the late-Victorian moralizing or wince at the racial nomenclature. Yet there is something in the tenderness of the telling, and the grace of the compositions, that stills the urge to jeer.

Snicker? Wince? Jeer? Back in 1919, Broken Blossoms was hailed by critics writing for another big-city publication, The New York Tribune, as

The most beautiful motion picture we have ever seen or ever expect to see. . . For the last two years we have seen at least one picture a day, yet with Broken Blossoms we sat on the edge of our seat, one hand grasping the arm, the other crushing a wet handkerchief, and trembled and grew hysterical over what we saw before us.

This was hardly an isolated reaction. Audiences of the time describe being swept away by the cinematography, the music, the tragic Romeo and Juliet cast of the tale, the poetry of the title cards. Even a decade later, movie magazines were still calling it the “highest example of screen realism” the pictures had yet seen.

The disconnect between this view of the film and the one expressed in that 2009 issue of The New Yorker is enormous. Have we really changed so much? Are the overwhelmingly positive and heartfelt emotional reactions elicited by Broken Blossoms in 1919 impossible for us to ever experience or understand today? Is our only recourse to declare it racist/sexist/dated (“painfully dated,” according to Roger Ebert) and join critics in their “snickers,” “winces,” and “jeers”?

To find answers to these questions, we must hop into Big Hollywood’s Hot Tub Time Machine and journey with Lillian Gish way back to the year 1919, when the father of filmmaking was pushing this nascent craft as far as it would go, lifting “flickers” out of the crowded doldrums of cheap Saturday afternoon entertainment and into the realm of true art.

Next week in For Conservative Movie Lovers, the genesis of Broken Blossoms.

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Iris Barry 1895-1969. Some solid biographical information about this unsung hero of early film criticism and preservation.

Iris Barry at the British Film Institute website. A look at not only Barry, but the genesis of film criticism in England.

At their own expense, the Vandals had the cover replaced with one that didn’t use the offending font. Everything was hunky-dory until March 24th when the Vandals were hit with a lawsuit filed in the Delaware courts. According to The Wrap, Henry Horbaczewski, counsel for Variety’s owner said: “We sued them, and they accepted a settlement agreement in which they promised to stop misusing our mark, because we wanted to stop the misuse, not their money. They then ignored their agreement.”

Here’s the problem, the Vandals changed the art. But copies of the old cover art are floating around somewhere on the net, which is nigh impossible to redact. In fact, the very article I linked to shows the old and new covers. Variety isn’t willing to reveal where this infringement took place. So this is essentially a nuisance/intimidation suit, the kind meant to squeeze money from some soft targets who can ill afford an extensive legal battle that they would probably win. Since lawsuits are usually unpredictable, most people settle. Which is something sue happy sharks have known for years. That’s why there are so many frivolous lawsuits in the land. Usually it’s individuals going after companies for some coin.

But here we have a corporation like Variety, which for years served as a press release organ for major media companies, shaking down the little guy. Why? Consider that the newspaper business is seeing major declines across the board. As of last year Variety only had a circulation of around 24,000. Ad revenues are way down as Hollywood trims its spending. And ad revenue is the biggest share of income a circulation like Variety has. So they’re looking for easy marks who can help them get through a tough quarter. Why not cook up some trumped up excuse to sue a rock band?

The desperation here is almost worthy of a movie of the week, if anyone cared about Hollywood suicide rituals. It’s bad enough when a big company picks on the little guy, but when it’s from a paper that proudly boasts about Hollywood movies where evil corporations are ridiculed and demonized on a daily basis, it becomes the kind of pathetic sideshow you’d expect from the land of spectacle and cheap thrills.

Their lawsuit has no real merit. But that’s not the point. In Hollywood, you have to show what a big shot you are. Unfortunately for Variety, they just made themselves look weak.

Ed. Note: Vandals’ bassist Joe Escalante has contributed to Big Hollywood.

Apparently, Variety is in serious trouble.  On March 24, 2010, the sinking publication filed a lawsuit against the punk rock band The Vandals [Ed. note: Vandals' bassist Joe Escalante is a BH contributor]  for allegedly using their trademark in an album cover some years back.  There’s only one problem – that issue had already been settled back in 2005, with The Vandals agreeing not to use anything similar to the trademark.  Since then, The Vandals haven’t used the trademark in any way, shape or form. 
 
So what’s a struggling publication to do?  How about finding random websites in different places, then accusing The Vandals of having posted the old trademarked material there and leaving it up purposefully, without any evidence to back up such claims?

In Variety’s complaint, they cite exactly two incidents of a website under The Vandals’ direct control promoting the original album cover.  Both times, the mistake was quickly rectified by The Vandals, well within the 30-day cure period envisioned under the original settlement agreement.

Variety also cited Amazon and YouTube as sites using such imagery.  Naturally, The Vandals don’t own Amazon or YouTube or control them, so they have no control over those websites.  They have already demonstrated good faith in their attempts to have such material removed in any case, asking their fans to turn in instances of trademark misuse so they can work on getting such material removed. 
 
Wonder why Variety is so upset about a few third parties out of The Vandals’ control using old images?  They’re not – if they were, they’d try to get ISPs or websites to take down the material.  They haven’t done any of that, if their complaint is complete. 

Instead, they’ve sued The Vandals to the tune of $75,000. 
 
Don’t scoff.  This is going to become more and more common as Hollywood feels the economic pinch.  They’re not interested in stopping infringement – they’re interested in exploiting it for big cash.  It’s unconscionable, and Variety’s attorneys should know better.

Of course, I’m hardly Rosie’s daily television show target demographic.  I work for a living instead of sitting at home staring slack-jawed at the succession of Sham-Wow commercials and ads for shyster lawyers promising big payouts for the imaginary injuries of their deadbeat clients that fill the time between inane segments of mindless yak.  And while the social parasite demographic seems to grow larger after every freebie, hand-out and pay-off the Administration and its Congressional flunkies issue in favor of their employment-averse constituents, Rosie O’Donnell still seems like a bad economic bet.

This is no longer the same country as it was back in 1999 when Rosie was honchoing her first daytime gabfest and hassling Tom Selleck over his support for the Second Amendment of the Constitution.  It’s not even the same country as it was in May 2007, when the former “Queen of Nice’s” anti-conservative bile culminated in her slandering American fighting men and women as terrorists on The View:

ROSIE O‘DONNELL, HOST, “THE VIEW”:  655,000 Iraqi civilians are dead.  Who are the terrorists?

ELISABETH HASSELBECK, “VIEW” CO-HOST:  Who are the terrorists?

O‘DONNELL:  655 Iraqis—I‘m saying you have to look—we invaded…

HASSELBECK:  Wait, who are you calling terrorists? 

O‘DONNELL:  I‘m saying that, if you were in Iraq, and another country, the United States, the richest in the world, invaded your country and killed 655,000 of your citizens, what would you call us?

She also takes particular pleasure in attacking the Catholic Church and seems to consider anyone not buying wholesale into her radical agenda against traditional marriage and adoption as a contemptible bigot.  And let’s not forget her equally insightful foray into that moronic twilight zone known as 9/11 trutherism; it completes her personal trifecta of idiocy.  

Rosie’s backers for the new show seem excited at the chance to pick up Oprah’s viewers, whose departure will apparently leave them without a reason to live.  “Those 4, 5, 6 ratings points have to go somewhere,” one told Variety. “Something’s going to come in and fill that vacuum.”

But with the President’s approval ratings in freefall, and with Congress envying the polling numbers achieved by such public favorites as Kim Jong-Il, Vanilla Ice and syphilis, it is a new world.  Rosie’s kind of aggressive, grating, in-your-face liberal stupidity may well serve to alienate a substantial part of today’s potential audience.  Her partners seem to know it too, assuring Variety that:

“If Rosie wanted to just have a platform for her causes, she would go get a show on cable news . . . .  She’s a comedian, not a political pundit.”

Except no one is laughing – her Rosie Live! variety show was cancelled the first night after scoring an anemic 5.25 million viewers, though the presence of such hip, relevant and cutting edge guest artists as Alanis Morrissette and someone/something called “Ne-Yo” probably didn’t help. 

The fact is that Rosie O’Donnell is an unpleasant, smug and actively dumb woman who is unlikely to garner anything like the following she once had before embracing her personal jihad against the most deeply held and sincere beliefs of a significant majority of the country.  The stay at-home mommies I know are too busy to sit and watch television without a very good reason, and being bitched at by a sanctimonious harpy isn’t one of them.  Oprah likes Barack Obama, but (I assume) she doesn’t spend an hour a day telling her audience that they are the scum of the Earth for not agreeing with her.  Rosie probably couldn’t resist – and watching her show would probably make the Bataan Death March look like a week at Club Med.   

So, there are two possible reasons behind the resurrection of Rosie as a daytime talk show hostess.  The first is that the producers think they can make some money by harnessing what they believe to be her undeniable audience appeal.  Perhaps that’s true, but that seems like a triumph of hope over recent experience considering the unbroken track record of audience alienation and failure that has haunted her since she left her original talk show back in 2002 as well as the increasing polarization of the American public into liberal and conservative camps.  Does it seem smart to invest in a show that at the threshold flips the bird to at least 50% of the people who might be enticed to watch it?

The other possibility is that Rosie’s aggressive lefty political stance is a net positive for her backers, and that they believe she would provide a valuable, if only intermittently coherent, liberal voice in the vast wasteland that is daytime television.  And they may be willing to suck up the potential losses in order to let that obnoxious voice be heard.

The truth is probably somewhere in between.  It’s not unknown for Hollywood to try to mix business with leftism (*cough* The Green Zone *cough*).  Of course, that doesn’t always work real well. (*cough* The Green Zone *cough*). 

Will Rosie O’Donnell succeed with her career resurrection?  No one can know for sure, but just in case, I’m keeping a crucifix and some garlic handy.

Hasn’t it occurred to the overpaid and over-educated studio execs that the rest of America, minus the liberal bastions of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco, would probably pay to see Americans be the good guys again? Jerry Bruckheimer has a great Afghanistan War project called Horse Soldiers based on Doug Stanton’s incredible non-fiction book about the first teams of US Special Forces who led the Northern Alliance to victory over the Taliban – on horseback. With Bruckheimer behind the project it will have high potential for box office success, if Disney lets it see the light of day.

Producer Chris Godsick has been trying to get the World War II version of Horse Soldiers about the last combat charge of horseback US Cavalry made for a number of years. Colonel Ed Ramsey who led that heroic charge of the 26th Cavalry against the Japanese is a good friend of Godsick’s and an acquaintance of mine. I’ve actually filmed several hours of in-depth interviews with Colonel Ramsey for a possible documentary, yet we can’t get The History Channel to bite, “We aren’t doing those kind of shows any more.” No kidding, Ice truckers, pawnbrokers and UFOs are The History Channel’s stock-in-trade now. Ramsey is 94, a still sharp and vital 94, but Chris and I both would like for him to see he and his men’s real life courage celebrated on film before he goes off to Fiddlers Green, the cavalrymen’s Valhalla in the sky.

America — you know, all the rest of America out there in Oklahoma City, Denver, Houston and Nashville, Albuquerque and Sacramento — wants to see heroes, American heroes and not just comic book heroes. Successful political thriller author Vince Flynn, Extreme Measures and ten other extremely well written “war on terror” centered novels gets this. On the Glenn Beck show recently, Flynn described his Mitch Rapp, CIA counter terrorism hero as a CIA version of Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry. Rapp is a take no prisoners, break any law necessary and take any risk necessary to protect America kind of guy.

At least six of Flynn’s novels have made it to the New York Times Best Seller list, and he’s now made the number-one spot there as well. The amount of in depth research and his own innate understanding of the world his characters inhabit actually brought him under temporary scrutiny by the Secret Service and other top-level government security. Now the same government law enforcement and intelligence types are huge fans and often appropriate sources.

In a telling scene from Flynn’s Protect and Defend an enlightened but fictional centrist Democratic President tells Mitch Rapp:

“There are too many people in my party who think that violence is never the answer. It’s a very enlightening and alluring argument when made in a civil society that has a relatively efficient justice system. Even more so when unchallenged in the lecture halls of academia, but in the real world it’s a bunch of bullshit.”

Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura has the rights to Flynn’s Mitch Rapp character, but now according to Daily Variety no studio is going to want to make these films. Flynn himself has said that in most of his Hollywood meetings the first thing the studio execs want to do is change the bad guys from Muslim extremists to something far more politically correct. His books deal with the intelligence, front line and political war on terror today, who the hell do they think the antagonists are supposed to be, a twisted Santa Claus and a group of demented elves! It doesn’t mean Flynn or his hero hate Muslims, in fact there are often sympathetic and even heroic Muslim characters. It’s the extremists who are in Mitch Rapp’s gun sights. Lorenzo di Bonaventura gets Flynn and his hero, so there is hope. If the no-nonsense Mitch Rapp is cast right the film could make a fortune, but will the studios bite?

Vince Flynn

In the 1987 action thriller Wanted Dead or Alive Rutger Hauer’s former CIA operative, now a bounty hunter, catches a murderous Muslim terrorist played by Gene Simmons just before he sets off a bomb that would produce a poisonous gas cloud that could kill tens of thousand of Southern Californians. Simmons has also brutally killed Hauer’s police detective best friend. The bounty hunter leads out the terrorist with his hands bound and a live grenade shoved in Simmons’ mouth, the pin of which Hauer now has his finger through. Hauer tells the government types to send the reward to his late-friend’s family and he’ll keep the bonus for bringing in Malak Al Rahin alive. Then he has a change of heart and says, “Fuck the bonus,” pulling the pin on the grenade and exploding Simmons’ head in a ball of flame. It’s an incredibly satisfying film moment.

If studio execs today want to attract audiences they should think about more Rutger Hauer and Mitch Rapp-type heroes in their movies instead of corrupt Americans, bleeding hearts and left wing actors.

At least Bill Maher didn’t wish rectal cancer upon us. But The Least Self-Deprecating Man On The Planet does use his unlimited supply of smarmy circular logic to suggest we conservatives stop criticizing Hollywood, especially during the Oscars. His reasoning? Well, in his mind, it has something to do with liberals being smarter than us because they don’t elect unqualified celebrities to national office…or something. And how he manages to summon enough denial to spend a few hundred words on the subject of unqualified celebrities holding elected office without mentioning the words “Barack” or “Obama” is beyond me.

In order to hold tight to this theory, Maher has to dismiss Ronald Reagan as “Bonzo’s buddy” and Sarah Palin as “Miss Wasilla.” Someone might want to remind the former comedian that in order for jokes to be funny they should illuminate truth not attempt to hide it. But here are a couple of my favorite lines from his Variety article, the ones that reveal so much about their author:

Politics has become the safety school for show business washouts who are just looking for a way to stay in front of the camera[.]

Maher thinks he’s talking about people like Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger who seek elected office. What he’s really doing, though, is engaging in the art of projection. Unfortunately, Bill Maher doesn’t have a fraction of the self-awareness necessary to realize how well that statement describes him and his. After all, where would Maher be if he hadn’t turned into a nasty leftist politico — if the show business washout hadn’t become just another Hollywood Frat Boy who turned to politics in order to — how did he phrase it? — oh, yes: stay in front of the camera.

Whether it’s Harrison Ford waxing his chest, Janeane Garofalo and Rosie O’Donnell spewing as much stupid as they can summon, or any number of pathetic celeb-wannabes spouting off on issues-n-stuff, at least Reagan, Schwarzenegger, Fred Thompson, George Murphy, and Sonny Bono showed some real courage by choosing to step into the battle arena of elective politics where they would no longer be comfortably and forever surrounded by what one might call a trained-seal audience.

Whether it’s Al Franken or Fred Grandy, jumping into elective politics is a personal risk that requires grit and courage. On the other hand, the Maher Way of spouting off BusHitler jokes in the Happy Bubble of Tinseltown is not only the laziest most conformist way to hold on to some scrap of relevance, it’s also about as courageous as, say, taking Hollywood’s side against conservatives in Variety. 

Moving on…. Check out Maher’s Epic Whopper concerning the film industry and government handouts:

Last year, Hollywood set a box office record: $10.6 billion. Sixteen billion worldwide. Not bad for a bunch of socialists. You never see Hollywood begging Washington for a handout, like corn farmers, or the auto industry, or the entire state of Alaska.

I know it’s hard to read a newspaper in the grotto but maybe someone should consider replacing just one Yes Man with a fact checker:

• Hollywood may benefit from U.S. bailout: LA Times
• Arnold Schwarzenegger gives Hollywood tax incentives
• Pork for Hollywood? Obama Stimulus Package Includes Film Tax Write-Off
• Build It With Tax Incentives, and Hollywood Will Come
• Hooray for Hollywood tax breaks
• March 4, 2010: Tax Credits For Hollywood
• Hollywood Tax Credits? The Shows Are On The Road

You can’t blame Maher for not being aware of Google. It’s a tool created for those who are capable of feeling embarrassment and want to be saved from it.

Politico reports that Rush appears to be having the time of his life as a judge for the Miss America pageant:

On Thursday night, in between rounds of competition, the judges competed for their own crown: “Judge of the Night.” 

While competing in the dance-off, Limbaugh stood up and boogied to Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” alongside fellow judge Vivica A. Fox. 

“Rush Limbaugh has exceptionally impressive fist pumping skills,” tweeted Miss America Live. 

Limbaugh’s moves won him the “Judge of the Night” title. His prize: a “Mr. New Jersey” sash bestowed upon him by the host, Miss New Jersey 1995 Dena Blizzard.

Naturally, Variety’s Wilshire & Washington (which, months ago, should’ve been renamed The Interminably Uninteresting All-Things Gay Marriage Live-Blog)  puts on a bit of a scold with the headline…

“The Pageant’s Political Tinge.”

Wow! Is hand-wringing over the possibility of politics entering into entertainment a new concern with the Hollywood left?

Finally … common ground.

Let us go forward, arm in arm, and sound the warning over potential “tinges” of the Oscars, Grammys, Emmys, primetime television, cable television, pay cable television, novels, comic books, children’s programming, theatrical films, music, concerts…

Or are some “tinges” more equal than others?