Politics is downstream of culture

[blackeagle603]

that was too easy, it's not even fishing season yet.


point is though, the tendency to avoidance, seperation and reclusion into enclaves is notable. There's a little Amish is most conservative veins of society.

[Greg]

that was too easy, it's not even fishing season yet.

I like horses. Apparently even your hobby horses.

point is though, the tendency to avoidance, seperation and reclusion into enclaves is notable. There's a little Amish is most conservative veins of society.

There's a little Amish in *every* vein of society that's composed of people who want to be left alone. As opposed to the people who want to tell others what to do.

[blackeagle603]

I'd argue it's more a conservative thing -- inherent in the leave things be predisposition.

The Left tends to the "let's change the world, leave a mark, think globally/act locally" predisposition.

Which helps to explain the incremental drift to the left.

[Greg]

I'd argue it's more a conservative thing -- inherent in the leave things be predisposition.

The Left tends to the "let's change the world, leave a mark, think globally/act locally" predisposition.

Which helps to explain the incremental drift to the left.

There's more to the world than just conservatives and the Left. Many Conservatives like to tell people what to do. They're not the type to withdraw from the world and mind their own business.

"Let's change/save the world" is a displacement activity for "I want to tell people what to do" or possibly "my ego needs are so enormous that I must be *seen* as the world's savior".

[dfwmtx]

And behind-the-scenes Hollywood wouldn't play, because no one would believe it, and documentaries have to sound real, not like The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen, Part II.

I keep hearing that. My reply is, "try me", but no one ever decides to dish.
And you wouldn't need to show a believeable documentary on how bad Hollywood is, just come up with a nice satire, akin to "Tropic Thunder". Just insert the subtle digs amongst the hyperbole.

Screw releasing videos on Youtube, the conservative/libertarian viewpoint needs its own SKG. Start a Hollywood studio, get a stable of actors, ride herd on them so they don't say stooped stuff (Kirk Cameron, I'm talking to you), put out some decent, non-religious conservative stuff. It can be done. I point again to Firefly/Serenity. How could any of that be portrayed as in favor of intrusive Big Government? Yet it's enjoyed by people on both sides of the political divide.

[blackeagle603]

There's more to the world than just conservatives and the Left. Many Conservatives like to tell people what to do. They're not the type to withdraw from the world and mind their own business.

yeah, and if you look hard enough you can actually find them. If you look even harder you'll find a case or two where they've had any impact in the current era and maybe even saved a blue law or made a cheesy low budget movie.

OTOH, the left's brand of "social engagement" is in our face, politics and pocket books every day: bustering us all in Stage V afterburner toward hell in a handbasket.

[Aesop]

The problem is if all they're going to make is another Fireproof or a movie about Jesus, then there's no point.

Paramount disagrees with you. Whichever way the film breaks, they'll have made my points, and they made it betting $130M (doubled, actually) of their own money betting you're wrong.

Regarding Fireproof:

1) Sherwood Baptist Church did more with any one of the three movies they've made than legions of conservative blowhards shrieking "Bomb Hollywood", and their Idiot Legions have done from 1900 A.D. to date. (Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan, and any other conservative fuckhead including potentially even Pat the Bunny, call your office).

2) Fireproof was huge, even in Hollywood.
It turned in $33,000,000 on a $500K budget (which is the equivalent of "made on credit cards" nowadays).
Put in perspective, that would be Iron Man 3 earning $6,600,000,000, or being made for 1/40th of its actual budget.
You or I could make a very handsome living if all we did was crank out one Fireproof a year until we died.
For reference, you could buy a Barrett M82A1 and 600 rounds, once, for about $10K.
But if you'd fronted $10,000 for an equivalent piece of the gross on Fireproof, you'd be sitting on $660,000 right now, almost enough to buy your own Sherman Tank.
Or make the next $500K movie all by yourself, and keep 100% of the profits.
Tough call there.

3) The movie demonstrated that audiences will tolerate somewhat lesser production values for movies that cater to their worldview with vastly more likelihood than they will abandon that for a movie with phenomenal production values which metaphorically shits on their heads for 2 hours.
(For comparison, Fireproof opened for more in two weeks than the anti-religious screed Religulous grossed in its entire run, at exactly the same time, for 5 times the budget. Tell me God doesn't have a sense of humor.)

4) Frank Capra took a ration of crap form every pseudo-intellectual critic in Hollywood. Derided as a purveyor of sentimental sapwood, and being the Norman Rockwell of the cinematic world, he died with three Oscars for Best Director out of six nominations, tied with William Wyler and surpassed eventually by only John Ford, and seven nominations for Best Picture, leaving behind such minor works as It Happened One Night -Best Picture 1934, Lost Horizon, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, Arsenic And Old Lace, and It's A Wonderful Life.

None of those movies are in the genre of Fireproof, and are in fact Hollywood classics that transcend "religious" movies.
Actual religious movies are movies like Ben Hur, The Ten Commandments, The Agony And The Ecstasy, and The Passion Of The Christ, which are also classics, have huge production values, and incidentally cleaned the box office clock on other Hollywood movies of the day, and racking up a couple of dozen Oscars including two for Best Picture.

So you might want to pick on something crappier and less successful to make your point.
There are good movies, and movies that people like, and there are movies that are both, and only relatively recently have they become strangers in Hollywood.

The problem is that anybody who might write a screenplay either sucks at it, or never even starts, or is too lily-livered to beat the doors down to get it made, which gets to your other complaints:

There is a follow-up article on PJMedia which was a reply to Klavan's article that discussed that Conservatives aren't doing what the Left does and building in their ideas subversively and innovatively, nor to they seem to be interested in doing anything but boycotting, while at the same time not getting off their asses to put out the kind of material that the Left has been so successful with.

What it seems to boil down to, and I get this impression the more and more time passes, is that Conservatives are weak and lazy. They'd rather retreat from society like the Amish than engage in trying to winning it back. They seem to use the old excuse of "the game's rigged" as their way out. It's essentially the "Inequality" argument in its opposite form, but without the effort to do anything about it.

As my namesake noted The Fox saying at the time, "The grapes were probably sour anyways."
And as both Klavan and the Lotto commercials note, "You can't win if you don't play."

[Aesop]

And behind-the-scenes Hollywood wouldn't play, because no one would believe it, and documentaries have to sound real, not like The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen, Part II.

I keep hearing that. My reply is, "try me", but no one ever decides to dish.

We like our jobs. No, really. Non-disclosure contracts are a biiiiiiiiiitch.
But you could read William Goldman's autobio, or "You'll Never Eat Lunch In this Town Again", or any fifty insider tell-all books, and still only scratch the surface of what a bunch of gutless, ridiculous, foolish, stunningly talented and embarrassingly stupid @$$holes inhabit and run a multi-billion dollar industry. At this point, right into the ground...

And you wouldn't need to show a believeable documentary on how bad Hollywood is, just come up with a nice satire, akin to "Tropic Thunder". Just insert the subtle digs amongst the hyperbole.

You want subtle, watch L.A. Story, or Bowfinger. In the latter, pay attention to the Three Amigos (which is also a third flick to watch). It's not a coincidence that these are [strike]both[/strike] all Steve Martin flicks.
Hollywood self-parodies far better than any fiction could do justice, as any episode of any celeb-biz TV show proves. Hollywood, on its best day, is 500 retarded kids doing the pie fight from The Great Race, with metal spikes in the bottom of the pans, in a minefield, to the death. Every day for 100 years. And it keeps getting funnier with every pie hit and explosion.
It's every window-licking fart-sniffing paste-eating kid you went to kindergarten with, who left in mid-semester under suspicious circumstances, and you always wondered what happened to them. They're here, they're producers, directors, actors, and swarms of remora-like lawyers around all of that. With the same IQ they had at 5, just better toys, a snottier attitude, and stronger drugs.
Frequently, a prehensile tail is involved as well, and the poo-flinging is to die for.
Monkeys in the rainforest come here to apprentice under the true world masters of that art.

Screw releasing videos on Youtube

You have to crawl before you can run steeplechase. Movies started out as penny theatre on a sheet on the side of a truck going from town to town.
But you make a YouTube flick that gets 10,000,000 hits, please, call me. I can get you a gig as a director, and I'll only charge you the standard 10% agent fee against your contract.

the conservative/libertarian viewpoint needs its own SKG. Start a Hollywood studio, get a stable of actors, ride herd on them so they don't say stooped stuff (Kirk Cameron, I'm talking to you), put out some decent, non-religious conservative stuff. It can be done. I point again to Firefly/Serenity. How could any of that be portrayed as in favor of intrusive Big Government? Yet it's enjoyed by people on both sides of the political divide.

Damn straight. That's the point. THX got it wrong: the audience isn't listening; they're freaking dying of thirst waiting for something they want. Hollywood liberal shite that panders to Eurotrash and Islamo-fascist apologists isn't playing in Peoria. And what is playing well there kicks Liberal/Progressivism in the crotch so hard George Clooney coughs blood every time it premieres.

Star Wars
Indiana Jones (the first one and the third one, not the other craptastic ones)
Harry Potter
Lord Of the Rings
The Hobbit
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
300
The Dark Knight
James Bond
Mission Impossible
Even pure mindless crap like The A-Team and The Expendables.

Conservatism at the movies and in the arts is like a lion cowering in its cage because a mouse said "Boo!" and called it names.
If, against all odds, the lion ventures outside the cage, our side helpfully forms a circular firing squad and opens fire at the lion if his roar isn't perfect.

[MiddleAgedKen]

But you could read William Goldman's autobio, or "You'll Never Eat Lunch In this Town Again", or any fifty insider tell-all books, and still only scratch the surface of what a bunch of gutless, ridiculous, foolish, stunningly talented and embarrassingly stupid @$$holes inhabit and run a multi-billion dollar industry. At this point, right into the ground...

The music business is pretty much the same. The story as I have read it (might have been Dannen's Hit Men or it might have been elsewhere) is that the record industry was originally made up, to a significant degree, of washouts, ne'er-do-wells, and no-account booger-eating relatives out of the New York garment district.

You want toilet paper from a moral sewer, read the standard major-label contract sometime.

Getting back to the main topic, Klavan makes some good points. We might not be able to waltz onto the slot following Big Bang Theory, some of us have got stories to tell, some of those are likely to be pretty good, and we should be about telling 'em.

[Aesop]

Two producers see a beautiful starlet walking past the café where they're having lunch.
The first producer says, "Man, I'd really love to screw her!"
And the second producer says, "Out of what...?"