Conservatives in Hollywood?!

Brian C. Anderson

It was hard to parody Hollywood’s loony limousine liberalism this summer. “I’m coming out,” trumpeted actress Jane Fonda about her plans for an anti-Iraq-war bus tour (thankfully later canceled). “I have not taken a stand on any war since Vietnam”—if “stand” is the right word for her 1972 lovefest with the enemy. Paramount announced that conspiracy-minded director Oliver Stone, who described the 9/11 terrorists’ “revolt” as a legitimate “fuck you, fuck your order” to culture-controlling American movie corporations (of all things), will helm Tinseltown’s first large-scale drama about the attacks. David Koepp, co-writer of Steven Spielberg’s remake of War of the Worlds, likened the movie’s ravaging aliens to the U.S. military in Iraq. And on the Huffington Post website, such celebrity lefties as Rob Reiner and Laurie David huffed daily about President Bush’s outrages against civil liberties, Mother Earth, and all that’s proper.

But guess what: ever more Americans are shunning Hollywood’s wares—and disgust with Left Coast politics, both on and off screen, clearly plays a part. In a time of declining moviegoing, what gets people out to the theaters, it turns out, are conservative movies—conservative not so much politically but culturally and morally, focusing on the battle between good and evil, the worth of heroism and self-sacrifice, the indispensability of family values and martial honor, and the existence of Truth. Hollywood used to turn out a steady supply of such movies—watch just about any film from its Golden Age of the thirties and forties—and it still makes them once in a while (sometimes thanks to off-screen lefties like Steven Spielberg). We may soon see a lot more of them.

There’s no question Hollywood is reeling. Film attendance is down a wrenching 12 percent from last year, and a May USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll found that nearly half of American adults go to movies less often than they did in 2000. Some pundits have blamed the rising price of tickets, but in constant dollars a ticket costs less than it did 25 years ago. Others believe that it’s all those DVDs that people are buying—except that DVD sales are slumping, too. The most likely explanation is the left-wing politics. “You can date the recent box-office decline from the end of the summer last year, with the intensification of the presidential campaign,” notes conservative film critic and talk-radio host Michael Medved. “It wasn’t just Hollywood’s hostility toward President Bush; it was the naked, raw partisanship”...

There is quite a bit more, you can read the entire article here:
http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_4_urbanities-conservatives.html

Hat tip to Tammy Bruce, who published the link to this article on her blog.