10 March 2006 @ 1:02PM >> Yesterday in Los Angeles, Indoctrinate U reached a major milestone. (For those of you new to this site, Indoctrinate U is a feature-length documentary project analyzing political correctness and attempts to enforce uniformity of thought on college campuses.)

On The Fence Films executive producers Stuart Browning, Blaine Greenberg and I watched the very first end-to-end assembly of the footage that will eventually comprise the film.

Although there are a few bits missing, and a few others that need to be tightened up a bit, it was quite exciting to finally see something that’s beginning to resemble a finished product after 2+ years of work.

We’ve got a few more months to go before the film is polished enough to be ready for release. We are also likely to hold the film until the school year starts again in the fall. And, of course, the amount of time it takes to hammer out a distribution deal may affect all of this.

Still, it is good to finally see something that’s beginning to resemble a finished product after all this work.

10 March 2006 >> Peggy Noonan attempts to diagnose the problems with Hollywood:

What happened to the Oscars is what happened to the Olympics. They became common. They made themselves common. When the Olympics were held every four years, they were a real event. It was something to look forward to and be surprised by: The Olympics are on this year. Four years was enough time for a whole new cast of athletes, what felt like a whole new generation, to come up. Enough time for history to have passed, to have yielded up new geopolitical realities, new reasons to applaud and hope for this nation or that one.

Everyone watched. It was a success. So they decided to get even more success by making the Olympics every two years. It’s not an event now, it’s an expected thing, part of the usual tapestry. It’s more common, less special. Viewership is down.

In the same way, the Oscars used to be the big awards show. Then another came by, and another: Golden Globes, People’s Choice, Independent Spirit, Foreign Press.

Movie stars put on their gowns and tuxes all the time now. It must be embarrassing—I mean this seriously—to spend half your year accepting awards on TV, and for what is already highly compensated work.

It’s like what happened a few years ago, when network programmers found that “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” was an overnight sensation. So they put it on four nights a week. And it stopped being a sensation.

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You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that viewership of the Oscars is down because movie attendance itself is down, and that movie attendance is down because Hollywood isn’t making the kind of movies that compel people to leave their homes and go to the multiplex.

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If a lot of the American audience, certainly the red-state audience, assumes Hollywood hates them, they won’t go as often to the movies as they used to. If you thought Wal-Mart hated you, would you shop there?