Recent Reviews
The Cagneys
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935)
Something to Sing About (1937)
Angels with Dirty Faces (1938)
A Lion Is In the Streets (1953)
Man of a Thousand Faces (1957)
Never Steal Anything Small (1959)
Shake Hands With the Devil (1959)
Tuesday March 22, 2016
What Liberal Hollywood? Part 90
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.