What Liberal Hollywood? posts

I have a piece on Salon, “A mea culpa to Hollywood conservatives, living under the shadow of a modern McCarthyism.” It went live just as Rachel Maddow was revealing/not revealing her scoop on two pages of Donald Trump's 2005 tax return. So not the best timing. Even I wasn't paying attention. 

The piece is a reaction—as this post was—to David Ng's LA Times article on Hollywood conservatives in the Trump era, and how awful it is for them, and of course the spectre of McCarthyism is raised. I‘ve done a little reading on the subject of the blacklist—not enough—but it’s important to remember that during this period there was collusion between various forces in American society:

• Hollywood: the right-wing org, The Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, or MPA
• The federal government: the House Un-American Activities Committiee, or HUAC
• Law enforcement: the FBI
• Business and industry: Self-appointed aribiters like Red Channels

Back then, even if a studio head wanted a particular actor/writer/director with a suspect, vaguely leftish background, someone who hadn't been cleared by Red Channels or HUAC or MPA stalwarts like Ward Bond—and “clearing” always involved naming names—then they couldn't get them. None of this is close to happening in modern Hollywood. There is no corresponding Red Channels, there is no corresponding HUAC, there is no corresponding involvement from the FBI, and as far as I can tell there is no Hollywood left-wing org that corresponds to the MPA. There's just ... someone is “shunned” after a political argument. Well, welcome to America. 

One of the less-commented-upon ironies of the blacklist is that even though it was put forth by right-wing business interests and anti-communists, it ran counter to the free market. If you wanted, say, Edward G. Robinson for a movie because you felt his presence, his marquee name, could help the movie make money, tough luck, you couldn't get him. Unless he named names. These right-wing forces helped besmirch a hugely successful American business, Hollywood, which, another irony, had spent decades presenting an ideal version of America and western values to an international audience. 

Anyway, I hope journalists writing about this issue in the future keep some of this history in mind.

“Where is this liberal Hollywood agenda? The agenda seems to be whatever will entertain mass audiences. ... How could an industry have been successful this long if it was alienating half the country?” -- screenwriter Craig Mazin (“The Specials,” “Supehero Movie,” various “Scary Movie” and “Hangover” sequels).

“Film buyers are greedy. They want a good performing film. ... They will change religions for it.” — Ron Rodgers, the retired co-founder of Rocky Mountain Pictures, an independent distributor of conservative and Christian-themed movies.

Both quotes come from the L.A. Times article with the misleading headline, “In liberal Hollywood, a conservative minority faces backlash in the age of Trump.” It's misleading because it also owns up to the rightward leanings of corporate Hollywood—the people who actually make the decisions. And the one concrete example of “backlash”? There was an argument on a TV set, and afterwards the Trump-supporting producer was “shunned.” That's it. That's what's being compared to McCarthyism. My god. Those who don't know history are doomed to be assholes. 

“If you don't understand money in the movie business, it's like an artist who doesn't understand paint.”

-- Jack Nicholson, “Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel” (2011)

“Although many members of the entertainment industry espouse, often publicly, a left-leaning political slant, Hollywood is still dominated by white men who prefer to make movies and television shows that revolve around other white men — men beset by feelings of alienation, who often wield guns, who fight (or represent) corrupt government, and generally attempt to survive and/or save a world run amok.

”Across galaxies, through the centuries, in every genre imaginable.“

-- Mary McNamara, ”The notion of a liberal agenda in Hollywood is absurd," in the LA Times, as part of a series on Hollywood values/elites in the Trump era.

Of course, I've been saying this for years, but it's nice that this notion is getting a wider audience.

“If you're telling certain stories, you'll need to have guns. But I don't see smoking [cigarettes in movies] anymore. Look, everyone talks about 'liberal Hollywood,' but I don't know that that's the case, particularly with guns. This is an industry where, if the tax credits were right, we'd probably be shooting movies in Syria right now.”

-- Tom Arnold, in an excellent piece in The Hollywood Reporter, “Locked and Loaded: The Gun Industry's Lucrative Relationship with Hollywood,” by Gary Baum and Scott Johnson. Excellent with a proviso. 

A few weeks back, The Hollywood Reporter published an excellent piece called “Locked and Loaded: The Gun Industry's Lucrative Relationship with Hollywood,” by Gary Baum and Scott Johnson. It gives us a fascinating look into the industries that provide the movies with firearms, as well as the experts who make sure everything is both safe and realistic during filming.

All that's good. The article runs into problems when it tries to parse the contradictions between a so-called liberal Hollywood that glamorizes guns, and a gun-control industry that condemns Hollywood as liberal even as it benefits from 100 years of cinematic heroes with guns. Generally, the article puts the burden of hypocrisy squarely on Hollywood's shoulders, then bends over backwards to underline its point. 

For example, the writers say they contacted “more than 50 actors, producers, writers, directors and showrunners who have been outspoken gun-control proponents while also utilizing firearms in their storytelling.” The implication is that these people are hypocrites for doing both. But notice the verb: not “glamorizing” firearms in storytelling, but “utilizing” them.

Four men of the 50 responded:

• Actor Tom Arnold (“True Lies”)
• Actor Clark Gregg (“Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”)
• Producer Steve Levitan (“Modern Family”)
• Screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (“Milk”)

Again: These are gun-control proponents that also “utilized” firearms in their storytelling. So I get the first two. Kinda sorta. But Levitan? “Modern Family”? Really? He also produced the '90s sitcoms “Frasier,” “The Larry Sanders Show,” and “Just Shoot Me.” Maybe THR was confused about “Just Shoot Me.”

But THR really pissed me off with the way they introduced Black: 

Dustin Lance Black, whose screenplays for Milk and J. Edgar incorporated guns ...

Seriously, THR? You're implying that it's a contradiction for Black to be a gun-control advocate while also writing an Oscar-winning screenplay about a beloved politician who was assassinated? 

The rest of the article is worth reading anyway.

To The Hollywood Reporter, more hypocrisy from Hollywood's gun-control advocates. 

This is the headline:

When Entertainment Reporters Get Political

This is what the headline should read:

Right-Wing Media Demands Impartiality from Rest of Press

The granddaddy of all right-wing rags, National Review, is aghast, simply aghast, that mainstream media reporters are making off-hand political comments as reality TV star Donald J. Trump is about to assume the presidency.

NR thinks it's pointing out a double standard but it's really demanding one: a set of rules for Rush, Drudge, Fox, Breitbart, and yes, The National Review, which get to spread malicious lies about the left (and magnanimous ones about the right); but reporters and columnists (columnists!) for Hollywood Reporter and Variety should just shut their yaps about the political disaster we're in even when they're on Twitter. Nice.

I've got news for National Review: This isn't 1969 and they are not Spiro Agnew. That shit is over.

I could go through NR's list of complaints and knock them off one by one, but who has time? Its overall demand isn't just impartiality but stupidity. It wants the mainstream press to pretend not just that an apple is an orange but a fresh apple is a rotten orange. Next thing you know they'll be demanding impartiality from restaurant critics: “elitists” who look down upon regular food.

It saves its worst thoughts for the kicker:

Maybe entertainment reporters simply assume that they are writing for their liberal friends in Hollywood. But if they are covering an industry that wants to make money off the rest of America, they might try to learn something from the election results.

Right:

1. I think they're writing for people who read, and have a mind, something National Review might want to consider before it disappears.
2. If the goal is popularity, you'd probably want to look at the popular vote, which Hillary won by nearly 3 million votes. National Review might want to consider this before it disappears.
3. The real lesson from the 2016 election is this: It's tough for a good woman to overcome 25 years of right-wing propaganda, onesided hacking, and meddling from both foreign enemies and our own country's prime federal law enforcement agency. National Review might want to consider this before we all disappear.

This is the headline on Town Hall, a right-wing propaganda website, about the box office of the new movie, “Miss Sloane,” starring Jessica Chastian:

Surprise: Hollywood's Latest Gun Control Movie Tanks at The Box Office

We haven't even gotten to the article and they‘ve already lied. Can you spot the lie?

It’s the word Latest. As if Hollywood keeps producing nothing but gun control movies. I mean, can you name another one? I can‘t. So I just did a keyword search on IMDb and came up with a list of 75 movies. It includes “Unforgiven” starring Clint Eastwood, “Death Wish” with Charles Bronson, and “Law and Order” with Ronald Reagan. So not exactly gun control. 

Anyway, Town Hall’s piece is culled from a Fox News piece, which laughs that Hollywood liberals have once again failed to breach the “values” wall. The Left Coast created a movie with liberal values, it did poorly at the box office (that part's true: it has), which shows, beyond a doubt, that “Americans don't want to spend their hard earned money on movies insulting their values.”

Right. You know what it shows? That most moviegoers don't go see political process movies—even those with Jessica Chastain in them. They want wish-fulfillment fantasy. They want heroes with guns. 

And guess what? Hollywood gives it to them. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over.

That's really the biggest lie in the piece—this notion that Hollywood, as a whole, is somehow anti-gun, when Hollywood, as an industry, has done more to glamorize guns than anyone else, including the NRA. Every gun owner in America should be kissing Hollywood's ass for making it easier for them to hold onto their guns, because every NRA argument against gun control measures plays off the Hollywood playbook. You know Wayne La Pierre's infamous line: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun”? You know what that describes? Half the movies Hollywood ever made. 

This is how you create right-wing propaganda.

Start with a comment that should be taken with a grain of salt—actor Mark Wahlberg talking to taskandpurpose.com, a website dedicated to American veterans, during the publicity tour for his new movie “Patriots Day.” 

Here's the headline: “Mark Wahlberg Thinks Celebrities Need to Shut Up About Politics.” Except he doesn't quite say that. Opining about politics, he says, “A lot of celebrities did, do, and shouldn't.” Opine, that is. Then he adds:

A lot of Hollywood is living in a bubble. They're pretty out of touch with the common person, the everyday guy out there providing for their family. Me, I'm very aware of the real world. I come from the real world and I exist in the real world. And although I can navigate Hollywood and I love the business and the opportunities it's afforded me, I also understand what it's like not to have all that.“

Wahlberg has been a star for 25 years now—a quarter century—and he thinks he's aware of the real world. Why? Does he carry a wallet? Does he have to work to get a date? Is he worried about paying rent/mortgage? No? Then what is he talking about? What is ”the real world“ to him and why does he occupy it and his colleagues don't?

More, the whole thing plays into a classic conservative POV with Hollywood and other left-wing institutions: They should shut up. Charlton Heston thought this ... until he began railing against feminists and Al Gore, and became president of the NRA. At that point, apparently, it was OK to talk politics. The right-wing kind. 

Besides, Wahlberg does in fact talk politics. At the end of the piece, we get this:

Asked what he thinks of the president-elect's proposed ban on Muslims entering the country, given that the [Boston marathon bombing] Tsarnaev brothers were both naturalized citizens, Wahlberg decided to talk a little politics after all. ”I have a lot of Muslim friends who are really amazing people,“ he said. ”So anything like that is just completely absurd and unacceptable to me. I'm a devout Catholic. I have a lot of Jewish friends. I've got a lot of friends from all over the world. And I think a lot of good people have been mistreated for a long time and we need to fix that.“

Popping a few Cellfood dietary capsules (”It's enzymes, amino acids...“), he added that we need to do a better job of educating people about the real threats out there. ”There's a big difference between a Muslim and a terrorist. Big, big difference.“

I love Wahlberg for this last bit but he does keep contradicting himself. Other celebrities are out of touch but he isn't; other celebrites shouldn't talk politics but he can. It's the contradictions that make the piece (and the man) interesting, but it's what gets lost in translation to right-wing websites. I won't link to them but these are their heds:

• Mark Wahlberg: ”Hollywood is Living in a Bubble... Out of Touch with Reality“
• Mark Wahlberg Tells 'Out of Touch' Celebs to Shut Up About Politics

And it spreads. I just did a Google search on ”Mark Wahlberg“ and this was at the top:

I was on Twitter yesterday and someone with four followers (either friendless or a right-wing troll) quoted Wahlberg in telling actor Jeffrey Wright to shut up about the Confederate flag; he told him he was out of touch; he said he wasn't in ”the real world."

Wahlberg let himself be played here. He should know that telling a group of people not to talk politics is itself a political act. One of the worst ones.

Being all “What Liberal Hollywood?” like I am, this quote from Hope Hicks, 27, Donald Trump’s campaign spokesperson, in Gabriel Sherman’s profile of Trump campaign headquarters in New York Magazine, caught my eye:

“Look at the rally we did in Mesa, Arizona, December 16th,” added Hicks. “That was the first one when we pulled the plane in and ‘Air Force One’ [the theme song of the 1997 movie starring Harrison Ford] was playing. It’s efficient. It’s for branding ... ”

Again. Again the right-wing uses the tropes of Hollywood even as it condemns Hollywood.

Off the top of my head:

• Donald Trump goes for the music of “Air Force One.” (“Get off my plane!”/”Get out of my country!”)
• The NRA makes its pitch for more guns: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
• John McCain during the 2008 election: “I’m like Jack Bauer.”
• W., post 9/11, on bin Laden: “There’s an old poster out west that I recall that said: ‘Wanted Dead or Alive.’”
• Reagan: “I have only one thing to say to the tax increasers: ‘Go ahead, Make my day.’”

The GOP is so insubstantial and absolutist now, it's more like a competing studio than a political party. It's just having a little trouble with its leading man. Casting calls are going out. 

For years, I've argued that the product of Hollywood (i.e., the movies) isn't liberal and never has been. If liberal values are, as George Packer recently asserted in The New Yorker, tolerance, skepticism and reason, then what's so liberal about Hollywood movies that promote certainty, wish fulfillment, and revenge fantasies? Where good guys are good, bad are bad, and relativism is for Oscar season?

But now Ann Coulter, stumping for Trump in L.A., where she lives and cackles, is raising the possibility that the Hollywood artistic community ain't all that liberal either:

“There are definitely more conservatives in Hollywood than anyone would expect,” Coulter told The Daily Beast. “I always say that if they all came out at once, they'd realize they're a majority.”

Hollywood conservatives are both marginalized victims and the majority? Got it.

So far the usual suspects: Clint Eastwood, Jon Voight, James Woods, Kelsey Grammer, Patricia Heaton, Gary Sinese. There's also a secret right-wing org, Friends of Abe or FOA, that the Hollywood Reporter has reported on, and which includes Lionel Chetwynd, the man who gave us a quick-thinking George W. Bush barking orders at a submissive Dick Cheney in the TV movie, “DC 9/11: Time of Crisis.” 

I doubt anything Coulter says, but one thing's certain: If Hollywood were full of cons it would make sense of the absolutist crap they produce.

John Leguizamo says what I've been saying for years—although, in this USA Today Op-Ed about #OscarSoWhite, etc., he's saying it about the place, while I've been saying it about the product:

For all the talk about “liberal Hollywood,” the film industry is as conservative as any other wealthy institution. If Hollywood were a U.S. state, it would be Alabama. It's more conservative than TV. It's more conservative than Broadway, which was the dinosaur of the media world not too long ago.

Then he talks up the musical, “Hamilton,” in which people of color play the founding fathers, and which has been my absolute obsession these past few weeks. Here's an early version of the opening number. Here's a CBS Morning Report on Lin-Manuel Miranda. In the #OscarSWhite controversy, Spike Lee also referenced “Hamilton,” specifically the song “The Room Where It Happens,” insisting—like Leguizamo and Viola Davis—that it's a matter of opportunity; of getting into the room where it happens.

Red propaganda. Obviously. 

At the end of “J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies: The FBI and the Origins of Hollywood's Cold War” (recommended), author John Sbardellati includes a glossary of movies that the FBI tagged as suspect. It's a lot of fun. Some highlights: 

• “Buck Privates Come Home” (1947), starring Bud Abbott and Lou Costello: “One scene portrays a party given for a General, while other scenes reflect an enlisted man on KP duty, making the audience unnecessarily class conscious.”
• “Crossfire” (1947), directed by Edward Dmytryk: “This picture is a good example of placing over-emphasis on the racial problem.”
• Gentlemen's Agreement“ (1947), directed by Elia Kazan; starring Gregory Peck and John Garfield: ”A Police Lieutenant is a party to anti-Semitism and as such is subjected to much criticism.... This was a deliberate effort to discredit law enforcement.“
• ”The Marrying Kind“ (1952), directed by George Cukor; screenplay by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin; starring Judy Holliday and Aldo Ray: ”The [Counterattack] article reflected that pickets led by Catholic war veterans would protest [Judy Holliday‘s] appearance in this picture because of her impressive front record which included affiliations with such organizations as the Civil Rights Congress, the Council of African Affairs, the National Council of Arts, Sciences and Professions and many others.“
• ”Mr. Smith Goes to Washington“ (1939), directed by Frank Capra; starring James Stewart, Jean Arthur, and Claude Rains: ”First Hollywood movie to show tie-up between Congressman and Big Business.“
• ”State of the Union“ (1948), directed by Frank Capra; starring Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn: ”Seems to be a deep seated dislike for most of the things America is and stands for.“
• ”The Treasure of the Sierra Madre“ (1948), directed by John Huston; starring Humphrey Bogart: ”Walter Huston makes a speech in this picture which ... is practically a direct quotation from Marx’s ‘Das Kapital.’“
• ”It's a Wonderful Life“ (1947), directed by Frank Capra; starring James Stewart: ”The picture represented a rather obvious attempt to discredit bankers." 

OK, so I finally got around to reading Michael Medved’s “Hollywood vs. America.” Give me a few decades and I’ll get right on things.

What surprised me? I agreed with him more than I thought I would.

Our minds meet here:

1. Movies influence us. In my view, everything affects everything, and movies, with their wide reach, with millions of potential viewers, can influence that much more. So there’s a responsibility there. With great power, etc.
2. Movies are excessively violent. Given his conservative credentials, I was pleased that Medved attacks right-wing icons Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis and Chuck Norris. He doesn’t give them a pass. Here.
3. Too many ‘Kid Knows Best’ features are a drag. Obviously the goal is to flatter one of Hollywood’s key demographics while insulting the people actually paying for the ticket.

Our disagreements cut deeper.

Medved thinks Hollywood movies are generally anti-family, anti-hero, anti-country, anti-religion, pro-obscenity, and tend to glorify ugliness.

I think most Hollywood movies are good-vs.-evil heroic wish-fulfillment fantasies, and so much about the beauty of its stars that for the rest of our lives the rest of us feel like something the cat dragged in.

But our biggest disagreement is who we blame for whatever mess we think Hollywood is in.

Me: Hollywood’s a business, they’re trying to appeal to as many people as possible—to make as much money as possible—and so they come up with these wish-fulfillment fantasies about heroic men and beautiful women because that’s the story we want to see again and again. The fault is not in our stars but in ourselves.

Medved: It’s the hippies.

Specifically:

Between 1965 and 1969 the values of the entertainment industry changed, and audiences fled from the theaters in horror and disgust.

A little background. In 1966, Jack Valenti, the newly appointed president of the Motion Picture Association of America, officially ended the longstanding Hays Code, which had banned, among other things, nudity, miscegenation, “sex perversion,” and “willful offense to any nation, race or creed”—or at least the white ones. In its place, he instituted a ratings system: initially G, M, R and X; eventually G, PG, PG-13, R, X and NC-17. From then on, characters on movie screens could swear, and take off their clothes. If you pricked them they bled and if you poisoned them they died. Movies could have sympathy for criminals and could ridicule clergy.

To Medved, that’s where everything went wrong. In 1966, Hollywood opened Pandora’s Box, filth came out, and most of us turned away. He writes:

While individual examples of the countercultural trend might achieve respectable box office returns (Bonnie and Clyde, 1967; Easy Rider, 1969; Midnight Cowboy, 1969; M*A*S*H, 1970), the general distaste for the industry’s emphasis on sex and violence provoked an unprecedented flight of the mass audience.

My thought while reading: Except there wasn’t an unprecedented flight of the mass audience.

Ah. But according to Medved, there was:

In 1967, the first year in which Hollywood found itself finally free to appeal to the public without the “paralyzing” restrictions of the old Production Code, American pictures drew an average weekly audience of only 17.8 million—compared to the weekly average of 38 million who had gone to the theaters just one year before!

Wow, I didn’t know that. Hollywood lost more than half its audience in a single year? And did nothing about it?

So where did Medved get those numbers? From the footnotes:

All figures on weekly movie attendance from the Motion Picture Association of America (research by Opinion Research Corporation of Princeton, New Jersey), cited in Reel Facts: The Movie Book of Records, by Cobbett Steinberg, Vintage Books, 1978, pp. 370–71.

Steinberg’s book does in fact give us those 38/17.8 numbers. In my updated 1982 version, they’re on page 46. But are they correct?

First, let’s admit it’s tough to get accurate box office data on almost anything before 1980. It’s all a little sketchy and the numbers never quite match.

That said, almost everything I’ve ever read on the history of box office disagrees with Medved/Steinberg. Here, for example, is a graph from George Lucas's Blockbusting: A Decade-by-Decade Survey of Timeless Movies Including Untold Secrets of Their Financial and Cultural Success:

This is the agreed-upon history. From the late ‘40s to the mid-‘60s, fewer and fewer people went to the movies because of the following factors:

1. The advent of TV (the big one)
2. The 1948 federally mandated breakup of Hollywood’s production/distribution monopoly, causing the studios to sell its theaters and cut back on production
3. Suburbanization

I.e., 3) meant traveling further when you left the house, 2) meant fewer film options once you left the house, and 1) meant “Why leave the house? Milton Berle’s on!”

(Another factor, less commented upon, is HUAC’s assault on Hollywood, which tainted the brand. For many Americans, the question became: Why spend time and money to see something created by pinkos and fellow travelers? The great irony is that HUAC’s search for communists damaged a successful capitalist enterprise that 99.99% of the time promoted American values around the world.)

Another graph, from Michelle Pautz of Elon University in North Carolina, in her paper, “The Decline in Average Weekly Cinema Attendance: 1930 -2000,” suggests that attendance actually began to level off around the time Valenti and Hollywood got rid of the outdated Production Code:

Movies survived the TV era by giving people what they couldn’t get on TV. In the 1950s, this meant Cinemascope and Technicolor and epics. In the mid-to-late ‘60s, it meant sex, violence and adult themes. This was the lifeline the movies used until Hollywood hit upon the summer blockbuster concept in the mid-1970s. 

But there's an even more important source that disagrees with Steinberg: Steinberg.

During my online research, I came across a 2006 discussion on a message board devoted to arts and faith, in which one user quotes Medved’s 38/17.8 numbers, another challenges him, and the first essentially offers a mea culpa—linking to a LA City Beat article that refutes Medved’s numbers. Sadly, LA City Beat is no more, the links are broken, and I can’t find the original article or even its author’s name. (Let me know if you know who this is.) But the message board user did quote from the article:

...had [Medved] turned one leaf backward [in Steinberg’s book] to look at page 368, he would have seen the chart saying that the average 1966 ticket price was $1.094, and the average 1967 price $1.198. Had he turned one leaf forward, to page 373, he would have discovered that annual U.S. box-office receipts for 1966 were $1.119 billion; for 1967, $1.128 billion.

If anyone can tell me how ticket prices can go up roughly 10 percent, box-office receipts can go up a little under 1 percent, and attendance drop by nearly 53 percent … well, please drop me a line.

Let’s do that math, shall we? If you take Steinberg’s annual box office receipts and divide by Steinberg’s annual ticket price, then divide by the 52 weeks in the year, you get the following average weekly attendance for 1966 and 1967:

Not exactly 38/17.8.

So Steinberg doesn’t even agree with himself. In fact, he’s culling information from many different sources. But it’s only the average weekly attendance number, on which Medved based so much, and which comes from a study by the Opinion Research Corporation of Princeton, that includes a proviso from Steinberg:

These figures are only estimates of the average weekly number of American moviegoers. Industry statistics can never be exact here. 

I searched to see if any book and/or movie critics at the time that “Hollywood vs. America” was published called out Medved on his suspect data. Nada.

I checked to see if Medved has since offered a mea culpa on his suspect data. Bupkis.

To be sure, Medved gets other things wrong, too. He goes on for pages about a 1990 Christian movie, “China Cry,” claiming it earned twice what Box Office Mojo says it grossed ($10 million vs. $4.2 million). He attacks B movies of the 1980s that aren’t worth a second thought, and ascribes shabby, countercultural motives behind Martin Scorsese’s desire to make “The Last Temptation of Christ.” He thinks R.E.M.’s song “Losing My Religion” is anti-religion and “The Simpsons” isn’t funny.

But this is the big one. He believes that the movie business, which has given us John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Rambo, Arnold and Bruce Willis, puts left-wing ideology before money. It’s right there in that 38/17.8 number: the number that other numbers, not to mention logic, not to mention its original source, tells us is wrong.

The movies that caused audiences to flee from the theaters “in horror and disgust,” according to Medved. 

Here are the first five searches for the phrase “liberal Hollywood” on the New York Times site, as sorted by oldest:

1. Jan. 28, 1975: “He is also consulting with Warren Beatty and other liberal Hollywood stars who backed Senator George McGovern for the 1972 nomination.” — from Christopher Lydon's straightforward “Special to the Times” piece on Henry “Scoop” Jackson considering a run for president in 1976.
2. Oct. 7, 1990: “He has won wide admiration among Jews for his staunch support for Israel and has earned credits in traditionally liberal Hollywood circles for backing the motion picture industry in its regulatory battle with the television networks over syndication of reruns.” — from Robert Reinhold's straightforward “Special to the Times” piece on California gubernatorial candidate Pete Wilson steering a course for the political center. 
3. Oct. 26, 1990: “Citing contributions to Mr. Waite from Al Pacino and other movie figures, Mr. McCandless said that Mr. Waite is part of the 'liberal Hollywood crowd'...” — from Robert Reinhold's “Special to the Times” piece on conservative U.S. Rep. Al McCandless' poliltical battle with actor Ralph Waite, who played Pa Walton on “The Waltons” in the 1970s. 
4. Sept. 17, 1991: “'[Bob] Kerrey's the one in the liberal Hollywood community,' said one influential public relations executive who spoke on condition of anonymity. 'He's spent a lot of time out here. Frankly, he's young, he's attractive, he's a war hero, he slept with a movie star and he's got a good hair cut.'” — from Bernard Weinraub's piece on Hollywood's love of gossip, including, but not limited to, the 1992 presidential election. 
5. June 25, 1992: “Perotmania seems to be hitting liberal Hollywood, at least somewhat.” — from Bernard Weinraub's gossip column on budgets and the '92 campaign. 

Over time, the compound modifier becomes its own phrase. Then it's off to the races.