23 January 2009 @ 9:01AM >>
Apparently, Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore are trying to do my work for me. I can’t find a better illustration of the disturbing cult-like quality among President Barack Obama’s more enthusiastic supporters than this video put together by the celebrity duo:
Movie star Susan Sarandon compared President Obama to Jesus. Broadway and film actor Alan Cumming thought of him more like Mahatma Gandhi.
“He is a community organizer like Jesus was,” Sarandon said Tuesday night on the bright blue carpet leading into the Creative Coalition’s 2009 Ball at the Harman Center for the Arts in Chinatown. “And now, we’re a community and he can organize us.”
I get why people like our new president. I understand the historical significance of his election. And there is one thing about his election that makes me very happy: it disproves the leftist slander that America is a racist, bigoted country.
But all this pledging to blindly follow and serve The Leader not only highlights the intellectual unseriousness of the pledgers, it also shows that none of these folks know enough history to understand where this sort of groupthink can lead.
15 October 2008 @ 9:05AM >>
You might not know it, what with Fahrenheit 9/11 being released a few weeks before the 2004 election, W. being released a few weeks before this election, and a whole slew of anti-Iraq War films over the last five years, but Hollywood all of a sudden does not want to appear partisan:
[Warner Brothers] has temporarily blocked the release of the DVD version of the 1987 film Hanoi Hilton, which will feature an interview with John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, about his imprisonment in Hoa Lo prison during the war.
The film, which gave a favourable portrayal of US prisoners, will now be released on November 11 - a week after the election.
Warner Brothers’s decision is likely to raise suggestions that it did not want to aid Mr McCain’s campaign by highlighting his wartime acts. The Republican candidate, who was a Navy pilot, was tortured during his imprisonment after being shot down over North Vietnam in October 1967.
Barry Meyer, the company’s chairman and chief executive, last month attended a fundraising dinner for Barack Obama, Mr McCain’s Democratic opponent.
[...]
Ronnee Sass, a spokesman for Warner Brothers, told the New York Times: “It’s just us trying to be cautious and not affect the election one way or the other.”
29 September 2008 @ 9:02AM >>
If you happen to be in Washington, D.C. this week, there are a few films you should take time out to see.
Do As I Say exposes the hypocrisy of the political and media elite, who preach one thing to the masses while practicing another.
U.N. Me is a searing indictment of the United Nations and how its institutional fecklessness has cost countless lives and wasted billions of dollars.
I’ve seen early edits of both of these films. You will be stunned.
One film I can’t wait to see is An American Carol, David Zucker’s hilarious-looking sendup of Michael Moore and the politics of Hollywood.
All of these films will be shown at the American Film Renaissance festival, from October 1st through the 4th. Scheduling information and tickets are available online.
13 August 2008 @ 6:51AM >>
From Scott Johnson’s “Driving Mr. Bin Laden” post at Power Line comes the Quote of the Day:
On Sunday the Guardian reported that Barack Obama’s Hollywood buddy George Clooney is planning a film that will provide a sympathetic portrayal of Salim Hamdan and Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift, Hamdan’s military lawyer. Hamdan was of course Osama bin Laden’s driver. It’s a relief that Hollywood has finally found an American officer connected to the war whom it can lionize.
9 July 2008 @ 9:19AM >>
If you’re a pop culture junkie who doesn’t share the politics of Hollywood, you may enjoy Yeah Right, a new blog started by some fellow Bucknell alums I met while filming Indoctrinate U. Current topics range from The Office to the latest Weezer album, Che Guevara t-shirts, and the new 90210.
Was reading your most recent post about campaign finance reform and how it relates to private citizens generating “issue oriented” content. This is such a slippery slope, on all sides, that I think the judges and congress should be more worried about than us as private citizens. These guys are still thinking about content distribution and ad placement in terms of quaint methods they can wrap their heads around. How do they plan to apply such decisions to web distribution? What about hybrids like CurrentTV? What about YouTube on your TV via AppleTV? Do people have to give equal time on their blogs and social networks? Podcasts? RSS feeds? Twitter?
Further, as an internet marketer I am really curious to see how they ever plan on extending their reach into the numerous platforms of ad distribution: paid search, organic search, banners, email, pay for post, mobile marketing, embedded ads in video, viral marketing, guerrilla marketing, flash mobs... I could go on for hours, and that’s the point. Are these guys who think of the internet in terms of tubes really ready to delve into that world? They are ill equipped to wade into the pool beyond radio, TV and print, and quite frankly, two of those three are all but off the table for most promotional purposes and TV is quickly becoming unattractive as other methods offer vastly superior ROI. They are making bad decisions that won’t even apply to reality by the time they finally pass anything legislatively.
You can’t control political speech and advertising with today’s technology any more than you can lasso the moon. Whether it should be done or not becomes a moot point then.
I agree that political speech will be harder to regulate as media becomes more fractured and decentralized. But I wish I thought that meant politicians and bureaucrats wouldn’t try. If anything, the seeming chaos of the cacophony of individual voices in online media will probably lead some people to start arguing for tighter controls on political speech.
So as long as speech regulations are pitched as something else—such as campaign finance reform—it ends up getting supported by people who don’t pay much attention to politics but casually believe campaign finance needs reforming. And unfortunately, people have a tendency to care a lot less about free speech when it isn’t theirs being stifled.
It is interesting that, by and large, the editorial pages of the nation’s newspapers supported the McCain/Feingold political speech limitation bill. The fact that the legislation limited the speech of other private citizens—and not newspaper editorial writers—probably didn’t hurt. After all, in a world with less political speech, the power of a newspaper editorial writer is enhanced. Faced with a media environment where more people are getting news online and from independent voices, a cynic might say that newspapers saw campaign finance reform as the McCain/Feingold Endangered Editorialists’ Protection Act.
Being embedded in an old-media business, the ink-and-paper columnists might not have seen the regulations as a direct threat to their speech. But that’s only because they’re confusing their product—words and images—with the physical carrier of their product.
By encouraging the government to regulate political speech differently based on the employment status of the speaker and the medium in which the speech is conveyed, myopic editorialists have guaranteed that busybody bureaucrats will eventually try to tie down whatever medium those newspaperites flee to once the last inch of their sinking paper ship is finally dragged beneath the surface.
Whether they be political activists or not, if private citizens, like the folks who formed Citizens United, do not have the right band together to engage in political speech during certain times of the year, then the First Amendment is just a part-time right afforded to only part of the citizenry.
10 January 2008 @ 6:37PM >>
A few years back, I interviewed Michael Moore and asked him if Fahrenheit 9/11 should be considered a political advertisement, and if so, whether campaign finance laws should apply. Moore admitted the film contained his opinions, but that his film should be treated like an op-ed in the paper.
During the 2004 election, neither ads for the Bush-bashing Fahrenheit 9/11, nor the film itself were regulated under campaign finance laws.
The early reviews are in, and three federal judges appeared in agreement Wednesday that a movie lambasting Hillary Clinton seemed an awful lot like a 90-minute campaign advertisement.
Citizens United, a conservative advocacy group, is challenging the nation’s campaign finance laws, which require disclaimers on political advertisements and restrict when they can be broadcast. The group argues “Hillary: The Movie” and related television advertisements are not political advertising even though the New York senator is in the presidential race.
Attorney James Bopp argued that they should be considered “issue-oriented” speech because viewers aren’t urged to vote for or against the Democrat.
[...]
The movie is scheduled for two screenings in theaters, once each in California and Washington. It is also being sold on DVD. Neither of those methods are regulated under campaign laws. The advertisements, however, are scheduled to run during the peak presidential primary season and would be regulated.
Bopp, who successfully led a challenge to one aspect of the campaign finance system last year, compared the film to television news programs “Frontline,” “Nova,” and “60 Minutes.” That prompted Lamberth to laugh out loud from the bench.
“You can’t compare this to ‘60 Minutes,’” the judge said. “Did you read this transcript?”
The movie features commentary from conservative pundits, some of whom specifically say Clinton is not fit to be the nation’s commander in chief.
The content of the film is irrelevant; if the film merely expresses opinions, it is protected constitutional speech. And if it is factually inaccurate in a way that is defamatory to Hillary Clinton, she has legal recourse for that.
It shouldn’t matter whether a film is made by a Hollywood insider like Michael Moore or an issue-based outfit like Citizens United. Groups like Citizens United—on the right and the left—are formed by private citizens with a common goal of promoting their shared ideas. The speech of Citizens United should not be more regulated than the speech of any of its individual members—or any other private citizen for that matter.
All filmmakers—in fact, all citizens who value their free speech rights—should be concerned about this decision. Michael Moore should be concerned. Because even though he has the benefit of Hollywood’s infrastructure and support (and therefore has no need to become involved with an organization like Citizens United), his films are financed and distributed by corporations that may one day find themselves subject to the same regulations now being imposed on Citizens United.
Any attempt to regulate political speech is direct assault on the First Amendment.
2 January 2008 @ 8:57AM >>
Two of my favorite creative minds in music—Thom Yorke and David Byrne—recently sat down to discuss the future of the music business. Last October, Yorke’s band Radiohead released its latest album, In Rainbows. But rather than releasing it through a traditional music label, Radiohead let fans download the music directly from its website. And rather than charging a fixed amount for the album, users were given the option of naming their own price—down to and including zero.
The sinking fortunes of the music industry establishment may have been instigated by technological change, but they are worsened by the industry’s unwillingness to let consumers buy music that isn’t locked to specific formats or media. It’s like peering into the future of the movie industry.
In both cases, you have industries whose fortunes have been protected for decades by the commingling of content and medium. Record albums weren’t just vinyl, they were vinyl with embedded music: the music couldn’t exist without the physical medium. As tapes replaced records and CDs replaced tapes, higher fidelity and increased convenience of each new format gave consumers a reason to re-purchase content that they already paid for in lesser formats. But when songs are stored as data and can be moved around like any other computer file, consumers will only ever need to buy one copy. As long as open formats are used, people will be able to play their music on any device devised in the future. There goes the upgrade gravy train.
Like the music industry, the film industry is rightfully concerned with piracy, because once music and movies aren’t tied to a physical medium, they can be copied endlessly. But consumers don’t care if this inconveniences the industry; people have shown that they want the convenience of digital content, and they are willing to pay for it. So the more that record companies lock down digital content in order to fight piracy, the less incentive legitimate customers have to buy the product in the first place. What good is the “music as a file” model if it is artificially burdened with the same limitations as physical media?
The movie business hasn’t been hurt by the shift away from physical media yet. But that’s only because technology hasn’t advanced far enough. It takes a lot more data to store a high-definition movie than an album’s worth of high-fidelity music. When a typical consumer’s Internet connection becomes fast enough to download high-definition full-length movies in a matter of minutes, the home market for movies will be subject to same technological dynamics affecting the music business today. And that future is only years away.
But that isn’t the film industry’s biggest problem right now. After all, people won’t pirate content that they don’t want to watch in the first place.
The problem with the film business is that too many insiders forgot that the rest of America doesn’t necessarily share the same view of the world as their friends in Hollywood. Instead, Hollywood has become its own echo chamber, which is why distributors keep pushing out flop after flop of military-bashing films. In Hollywood and at film festivals, such fare is highly praised. But in theaters around the country, the audience for films like Redacted is comprised mostly of empty seats. It’s almost as if Hollywood is producing films only for itself.
My experience in trying to get distribution for Indoctrinate U only confirms this. People in the film business just don’t take seriously the possibility that there’s a market for documentaries outside Hollywood’s typical Michael Moore/Al Gore worldview. I don’t know to what extent that’s out of political bias or the result of a simple Catch-22: they don’t see a market for anything different, but that’s because they’ve never tried distributing anything different.
That leaves us in the position of having to self-distribute Indoctrinate U. And because the Internet will allow us to put the film in people’s hands in the fastest, most cost-effective way possible, we’ll be able to conduct a little experiment of our own. Indoctrinate U will not be available on DVD right away. Instead, we’re going to focus our efforts on seeing whether the Internet can be used to route around the gatekeepers in Hollywood—without the shackles of physical media. (Although unlike Radiohead, I’m afraid, we’re not in a position to give our goods away for free.)
Who knows? Maybe the market can be proven without Hollywood’s help. I think it can. And once the market is proven, we’ll finally know who in the film business wants to serve customer desires instead of the dogma of Hollywood groupthink.
12 December 2007 @ 8:32AM >>
Celebrities are frequently mocked for making political statements that yield applause on Hollywood back lots, but that sound tone-deaf to the rest of America. So it’s refreshing to hear a little common sense from a source I didn’t expect:
During a discussion of Republican Presidential candidates on ABC’s “The View,” which the comedian co-hosts, [Whoopi] Goldberg said, “I’d like somebody to get rid of the death tax. That’s what I want. I don’t want to get taxed just because I died.” The studio audience started applauding, but she wasn’t done. “I just don’t think it’s right,” she continued. “If I give something to my kid, I already paid the tax. Why should I have to pay it again because I died?” (Watch the video here.)
[...]
When another co-host, Joy Behar, responded to Ms. Goldberg’s remarks by asserting, “Only people with a lot of money say that,” Ms. Goldberg shot back, “No, I don’t think so. . . . It doesn’t matter if you have or don’t have money. Once you paid your taxes, it should be a done deal. You shouldn’t have to pay twice.”
26 November 2007 >>
“The dogma of multiculturalism holds that all cultures are equal, except Western culture, which (unlike every other society on the planet) has a history of oppression and war is therefore worse. All religions are equal, except Christianity, which informed the beliefs of the capitalist bloodsuckers who founded America and is therefore worse. All races are equal, except Caucasians, who long ago went into business with black slave traders in Africa, and therefore they are worse. The genders, too, are equal, except for those paternalistic males, who with their testosterone and aggression have made this planet a polluted living hell, and therefore they are worse.”
More >>
27 October 2007 @ 6:58AM >>
Matthew Sheffield of NewsBusters recently interviewed me on a wide range of topics. His extensive interview, the first in what will soon be a series on the website, has now been posted.
It is quite apparent from reading the transcript that I must have spoken with Sheffield after a few cups of coffee.
16 October 2007 @ 9:31AM >>
In yesterday’s New York Times, Professor Stanley Fish took an extensive look at Indoctrinate U. While it is clear that the professor and I feel quite differently about the extent of the problems in academia, the final two paragraphs of the piece contained more intellectual honesty than the last bit of coverage the Times gave Indoctrinate U. Professor Fish admits:
But then there’s the part we should take seriously: professors who use the classroom as a stage for their political views. Maloney speculates that perhaps one out of seven perform in this way. I would put the number much lower, perhaps one out of twenty-five. But one out of 10,000 would be one too many.
Academics often bridle at the picture of their activities presented by Maloney and other conservative critics, and accuse them of grossly caricaturing and exaggerating what goes on in the classroom. Maybe so, but so long as there are those who confuse advocacy with teaching, and so long as faculty colleagues and university administrators look the other way, the academy invites the criticism it receives in this documentary. In 1915, the American Association of University Professors warned that if we didn’t clean up our own shop, external constituencies, with motives more political than educational, would step in and do it for us. Now they’re doing it in the movies and it’s our own fault.
Perhaps my biggest disagreement with Professor Fish is over the issue of speech codes. Professor Fish contends:
This is a fake issue. Every speech code that has been tested in the courts has been struck down, often on the very grounds — you can’t criminalize offensiveness — invoked by Maloney. Even though there are such codes on the books of some universities, enforcing them will never hold up. Students don’t have to worry about speech codes. The universities that have them do, a point made by “Indoctrinate U” when Maloney tells the story of how Cal Poly was taken to the cleaners (no, not his cleaners) when it tried to discipline a student for putting up a poster with the word “plantation” in it.
In the Cal Poly case cited by Professor Fish, a student spent 18 months of his life under the threat of expulsion while he battled the university all the way up to federal court. His crime? Posting a flier announcing an upcoming event: a speech by Mason Weaver, a black conservative author who wrote a book on economic empowerment called It’s OK to Leave the Plantation. Apparently, Mr. Weaver’s point of view was not welcome in the Multicultural Center on campus, so Steve Hinkle, the student who attempted to post Weaver’s flier in there, had the police called on him and was brought up on disciplinary charges by the school.
Ultimately, Hinkle was vindicated, and Professor Fish focuses only on the positive outcome in order to deem the whole issue of speech codes to be “fake.” But having to spend 18 months fighting for rights that are already constitutionally guaranteed sends a strong signal to other students that expressing the wrong point of view will end up costing you dearly. It corrodes the whole concept of free speech by dissuading people from speaking. After all, if simply hanging a flier could result in 18 months of battles, many students are going to conclude that certain speech just isn’t worth it. People whose views differ from the campus orthodoxy are going to keep quiet. Speech is undoubtedly chilled.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) gets hundreds upon hundreds of cases each year involving students and professors who have had their rights of conscience trampled. Many of these cases center on the “fake issue” of speech codes. A recent study conducted by FIRE found that over 90% of the hundreds of schools they surveyed had some form of speech regulation on the books.
First, while Fish correctly observes that “[e]very speech code that has been tested in the courts has been struck down,” he vastly understates the severity of the problem by dismissively concluding that therefore “[s]tudents don’t have to worry about speech codes.” That’s hogwash. While the fact that restrictive speech codes have been consistently struck down in court offers clear proof of their unconstitutionality, it certainly doesn’t mean that “[s]tudents don’t have to worry” about them. Contrary to Fish’s assertions, a student at a college with restrictive speech codes on the books is in danger of being punished for engaging in speech clearly protected by the First Amendment. According to FIRE’s first annual speech code report, Spotlight on Speech Codes 2006: The State of Free Speech on Our Nation’s Campuses, more than 68% of the 330 colleges and universities surveyed maintained policies that clearly and substantially restrict freedom of speech. Regardless of Fish’s contention otherwise, that’s something to worry about, as FIRE’s extensive list of speech code cases proves. Besides, Fish gets it exactly backwards: the fact that speech codes are still so pervasive on our nation’s campuses despite consistently losing in court is cause for outrage, not apathy.
Further, students at schools which maintain speech codes must carefully tailor their speech to satisfy oftentimes inscrutable rules—e.g., students at The Ohio State University must be sure that their words aren’t unintentionally “threatening infliction of emotional harm,” whatever that means—or else risk discipline. The chilling effect that inevitably results causes students to self-censor and renders free speech on campus all the more elusive. This too is something to worry about.
Contrary to Fish’s casual faith in the courts, resorting to litigation in hopes of vindicating one’s right to free speech is almost never an attractive option for students. The sheer amount of time spent securing representation, preparing a case, filing charges and, if necessary, pursuing appeals is extremely daunting to students. Just ask the San Francisco State University College Republicans, who are suing SFSU after being put on trial for “harassment” for stepping on Hamas and Hezbollah flags at an anti-terrorism rally. In addition to spending countless hours preparing their defense against SFSU’s charges, the students have had to coordinate a federal lawsuit against the college they currently attend. That’s not an easy or enjoyable task by any standard, and FIRE knows firsthand that despite the strength of their case, too many students decide that a lawsuit is just not worth the time, stress, trouble and alienation.
Still, the good professor does acknowledge a problem in academia. We just disagree about the scope of it and the interpretation of the data that document it.
There are other points made by Professor Fish that I could quibble with, but I don’t want to spend too much time arguing with someone who says I have “lean boyish looks that could earn [me] a role in Oceans 14 alongside Brad Pitt and Matt Damon.”
Can someone please forward that suggestion to a few agents in L.A.? I’d do it myself, but the self-promotion might be a bit much...even by Hollywood standards.
19 August 2007 @ 2:09PM >>
Today’s New York Timesprofiles Thor Halvorssen, one of the producers of Indoctrinate U.
The piece quotes Super Size Me director Morgan Spurlock as saying Indoctrinate U “could be a lightning rod.” Spurlock adds, “Movies that get attention and spark a dialogue, get people talking on news shows, can be profitable at the box office.”
Hopefully the Hollywood gatekeepers will give us a chance to prove him right!
Not long ago I developed the story of a West Point cadet whose fireman father had been killed on 9-11. This was the same family President Bush praised in his 2006 West Point graduation speech. It was a service family -– a fire officer father who’d given his life, a soldier son, the soldier’s brother, himself an aspiring fireman, and a mother who’d been teaching school the day her husband was killed.
I called a well-placed Hollywood power broker to get the project launched. I told him the story, and pictured the family, rightly, as the best America has. There was a long pause. Then he blurted out, “Wait a minute! Those are the people who elected BUSH!”
Maybe if the powers in Hollywood remembered that not everyone votes or thinks like they do, they’ll be able to find an audience beyond what they’re reaching now.
4 July 2007 >>
It can be tough for a left-thinking American to get any respect in Tehran.
You can speak out against the United States until you’re blue in the face, and you still get treated like a dirty infidel.
Can’t they see that you’re not some stupid flag-waving, Bible-thumping, Bush-voting, buck-toothed hick? Can’t they see that you’re a jet-setting artist, a sophisticated post-national citizen of the world, a member of the intelligentsia who always recycles, and that you want nothing more than to bring world peace by connecting cultures through the magic of film?
A spokesman for the Iranian president “said that Stone had requested to make a film about Ahmadinejad”:
“We have already seen his documentaries - even though Stone is considered a member of the opposition group in the US, it is still part of the Great Satan,” he said.
Despite his ties to the Great Satan, “Stone is regarded within cinema circles in Islamic Iran as a distinguished filmmaker.”
But I guess Stone’s exalted status in Iran was not enough to overcome his most fundamental flaw.
No matter how great his talent, no matter where his political sympathies lie, he’s still nothing more than an infidel.
And these days, that’s a crime punishable by death.
18 May 2007 @ 7:14PM >>
Earlier today, The Weekly Standard published a nice review of my upcoming film Indoctrinate U. The review was also featured on Drudge Report.
29 March 2007 @ 12:12PM >>Yesterday’s post on Cinnamon Stillwell’s piece discussing the movie 300 elicited more than the usual amount of e-mails. Here’s a small sample.
Garrett, a freshman at Wake Forest University writes:
I’m sure that you have heard of Victor Davis Hanson and his especially insightful view of the world. He not only wrote the introduction to the book The Making of 300 but has spoken on the radio about the values war between East and West.
Hanson takes a grippingly perspicacious look into the dominance of Western culture in warfare in his book Carnage and Culture. He examines nine different battles and how each are indicative of some facet of Western values and how those values do more for martial success than things like resources and geography.
I don’t know if you have seen the movie, but when Xerxes descends his throne and his slaves form a human staircase for him I could not help but think that one thing this movie got right is that in relative terms of course, 300 is a story of freedom versus serfdom and it is undoubtedly a deciding factor in that epic struggle.
I highly suggest you read it. The book will gives credence and historical evidence to something that many of us who see the war on terror have realized all along.
Mikey from Jacksonville writes:
Cinnamon Stillwell is way, way off in her take on 300 and what she views as a cultural disconnect between critics and masses.
For one, there’s no such disconnect, really. 300 is running a 61% on the Tomatometer at rottentomatoes.com, which is pretty good (and indeed, the best of the weekend’s top five).
Secondly, she posits a very common strawman, which is that critics and audiences are often at odds. This is just wrong. It’s easy to come up with examples (like say, Ghost Rider) where this holds, but the inverse is more often true. The top ten highest grossing films of all time adjusted for inflation are Gone With the Wind, Star Wars, The Sound of Music, ET, The Ten Commandments, Titanic, Jaws, Doctor Zhivago, The Exorcist, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. These all were, and continue to be, critical darlings.
I agree with her that the critics who criticize 300 are misguided, though. Personally, I loved the film. I think the problem with the negative critics is that they’re viewing a 5th century BC story through 21st century eyes. Of course there were things in Spartan society that today we’d see as less than heroic, but that’s not the point. Other than visual artistic liberties, the film was remarkably historically accurate. Perhaps there are things about Spartan society that bother us and make us think it’s less than worth saving, but this does not make 300 a bad film. Merely one that is disagreed with.
28 March 2007 >>
Over at the San Francisco Chronicle’s website, Cinnamon Stillwell has an interesting analysis of critics’ reaction to the movie 300, which she notes was “the highest-grossing March opening ever and third-highest opening for an R-rated feature”:
While critics described the film as overly violent, juvenile, stupid, macho, right-wing, race-baiting and, according to Stephen Whitty of the Newark Star-Ledger, an expression of “Saturday-matinee xenophobia,” “300” clearly has resonated with the masses.
23 February 2007 @ 8:16AM >>
Jesse Jackson is taking Hollywood to task for not being diverse enough. (Diverse in terms of skin color, that is. The lack of ideological diversity in Hollywood is not a concern of Jackson’s, I would assume.) Now, on a certain level, I sympathize with Jackson’s criticisms. As someone who has become bored by the fact that widely distributed films with political overtones invariably espouse a leftist worldview, I know that it can be frustrating when the industry ignores your market segment.
If certain segments are not being served, that reflects an inefficiency in the industry and presents a market opportunity for enterprising folks who can fill that void by delivering a different product. (In the film business, things are a bit trickier since there are a limited number of movie screens, owned by a small number of companies that typically only deal with major Hollywood distributors.)
So while I think Jackson may have a legitimate complaint about Hollywood in general, he does himself a disservice by relying on statistics that don’t show the problem he decries. One of Jackson’s “areas of concern,” according to Variety, is that “[c]asting of minority actors remains a problem.” Jackson cited “a UCLA study by Russell Robinson” that found “69 percent of Hollywood roles were reserved for white actors.”
First of all, were those roles actually reserved for or merely filled by white actors? If the former were true, then Jackson would be bringing lawsuits, not issuing press statements. (Or maybe not; such lawsuits would have to argue that racial set-asides are illegal and/or immoral—arguments that undermine affirmative action.)
Regardless, 69% of roles being filled by white actors isn’t damning statistic, considering that the most recent census statistics show that 69.4% of the country is classified as “non-Hispanic white.” According to the census and the study that Jackson cites, whites are ever-so-slightly underrepresented in Hollywood. That doesn’t exactly bolster Jackson’s argument.
If you’re going to engage in racial bean-counting, Jesse, at least pick a pile of beans worth complaining about.
25 August 2006 >>
A woman with an unfortunate surname, Kola Boof, says that—for a while—she was Osama bin Laden’s “sex slave.” And if her story in Page Six is any indication, our man of Allah may in fact be a closeted fan of cheesy reality TV:
“He told me Whitney Houston was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.”
[...]
Boof says bin Laden couldn’t stop talking about his favorite singer and had lofty plans for her. “He said he wanted to give [her] a mansion that he owned in a suburb of Khartoum. He explained to me that to possess Whitney, he would be willing to break his color rule and make her one of his wives.”
“[He would say] how beautiful she is,” Boof claims, “what a nice smile she has, how truly Islamic she is but is just brainwashed by American culture and by her husband - Bobby Brown, whom Osama talked about having killed, as if it were normal to have womens’ husbands killed.
“In his briefcase, I would come across photographs of the Star [magazine], as well as copies of Playboy. It would soon come to the point where I was sick of hearing Whitney Houston’s name,” Boof writes.
Let’s see, here we learn that our lovelorn terrorist is obsessed with a trashy pop diva, he reads Star magazine, and he “reads” Playboy.
Maybe we are winning the culture war against radical Islam.
21 August 2006 @ 3:43PM >>The Washington Postprofiles left-wing documentarian Robert Greenwald and his innovative approach to film financing and distribution:
Greenwald’s documentaries generate more heat than coin. Their take at the box office is tiny (mostly they’re seen on DVD). “We weren’t raising anything,” says Greenwald, sitting on a recent afternoon in his office, located in what appears to be a converted motel behind the Sony Pictures lot, as his team rushed to complete the project for its debut next month.
The usual bankers of political documentaries — left-leaning organizations and high-roller liberal donors — weren’t rushing to write Greenwald any checks. Greenwald doesn’t know why. “Maybe I’m a lousy fundraiser,” he says.
Then Gilliam had his idea. Robert, why not go on the Internet and just ask for the money? “I thought he was crazy,” Greenwald says. “I thought this would never work.”
On April 25, Gilliam — weak at home in Newport Beach, his lungs scarred and ruined because of earlier cancer treatments, but still able to type — sent out a mass e-mail to thousands of people who had purchased DVDs or expressed interest in Greenwald’s movies or causes through the company’s various Web sites.
The e-mail alerted potential supporters that Greenwald was committed to making “Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers,” and though they had not shot a single frame, Gilliam promised “it will have an enormous impact when it comes out shortly before the elections this November.”
The pitch? Gilliam wrote: “To start shooting, we need money. Overall, the film will cost $750,000. We can expect about $450,000 to be offset by DVD sales, selling foreign rights, and an advance from our retail store distributor, but we still need $300,000. A generous donor just stepped up and will contribute $100,000 if we can match it with $200,000 from someone else. That someone else is you! 4000 people giving $50 each. We’ll put everyone’s name in the credits.”
They got $267,892 in 10 days.
[...]
Small-scale independent filmmakers, the kind who bring their documentaries to the Sundance Film Festival, put together funding however they can — with art grants, money from educational or journalism foundations or from relatives and friends — and in many cases by racking up hefty balances on their credit cards.
Gilliam and Greenwald say they know of no one who has ever raised hundreds of thousands of dollars on the Internet to make a movie. (Though this year at Cannes, a do-it-yourself director named Melissa Balin attempted to auction her finished movie — “FreezerBurn” — on eBay. It sold in one market: Lithuania.)
“For all practical purposes, this is the first time I’ve heard of raising money for a film this way. I’ve got to hand it to them. I’m very impressed. It’s clever,” says Lawrence Turman, a veteran Hollywood producer of over 40 films (from “The Graduate” to “American History X”) and author of the how-to book “So You Want to Be a Producer.”
Turman says the Internet funding seems well suited for “political and in your face films” like Greenwald’s documentaries. “You’re not going to raise $40 million, but you might raise $1 million,” he says.
“I think this is the future,” Gilliam says. Not for standard Hollywood fare, he admits. But for niche product, for indie stuff. “It is my dream to pull this off,” Gilliam says. “To figure out how to fund movies out of the control of corporations. Our goal is to fund and distribute any movie we want to make completely outside of the system.”
17 August 2006 @ 7:30AM >>
Today’s issue of Los Angeles Times carries a manifesto in the form of a full-page ad signed by 85 Hollywood bigwigs.
I know what you’re thinking: maybe they’re complaining about low-thread-count linens for the prisoners Guantanamo Bay or the hurtful stereotyping of people named Osama.
Well, sit down and prepare yourself for a shock. This group of not-quite-100 honchos has issued a political statement the likes of which I’ve never seen from Hollywood: they’ve actually managed to point their fingers at a culprit that isn’t America or its evil, chimp-like leader.
Believe it or not, the people behind this ad argue that we need to “stop terrorism at all costs”, and they place the blame squarely on “terrorist organisations such as Hezbollah and Hamas.”
The folks lending their signature to this startling declaration include Nicole Kidman and:
Michael Douglas, Dennis Hopper, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Danny De Vito, Don Johnson, James Woods, Kelly Preston, Patricia Heaton and William Hurt.
Directors Ridley Scott, Tony Scott, Michael Mann, Dick Donner and Sam Raimi also signed their names.
Other Hollywood powerplayers supporting the ad included Sumner Redstone, the chairman and majority owner of Paramount Pictures, and billionaire mogul, Haim Saban.
Hats off to all of them for recognizing terrorism for what it is, and that it must be stopped “at all costs” or “chaos will rule and innocent people will continue to die.”
Acknowledging that there are millions of people who want to kill you just because you want to live differently from them is an uncomfortable leap for a lot of people, one that’s much easier to ignore...especially for people whose careers require them to live in a fantasy world.
I don’t know if Hollywood as a whole is waking up to reality yet, but more and more sensible Westerners are, and there are bound to be some entertainers among them.
Frankly, it gives me a little hope that we might someday find the fortitude required to face this enemy directly and act relentlessly to defeat it.
29 July 2006 @ 12:26PM >>The New York Times is reporting that Oliver Stone (”the director of [two] antiwar movies”) is getting praise for his World Trade Center film from some unlikely sources:
L. Brent Bozell III, president of the conservative Media Research Center and founder of the Parents Television Council — best known for its campaigns against indecency on television and for stiffer penalties on broadcasters — called it “a masterpiece” and sent an e-mail message to 400,000 people saying, “Go see this film.”
Cal Thomas, the syndicated columnist, wrote last Thursday that it was “one of the greatest pro-American, pro-family, pro-faith, pro-male, flag-waving, God Bless America films you will ever see.”
[...]
To top it all off, a writer on The National Review’s Web site, Clifford D. May, actually wrote the words “God Bless Oliver Stone.”
This about a filmmaker whose conspiratorial tirades — not to mention his hyperviolent “Natural Born Killers,” polarizing political films “J. F. K.” and “Nixon,” and the lesser-known television documentary on Fidel Castro — have driven conservatives batty for decades. Only last year, The Washington Times, in an editorial, called the hiring of the “conspiracy-addled” Mr. Stone a “maliciously inspired choice” to direct “World Trade Center.”
The film isn’t out yet, so I can’t judge it for myself. But when the project was announced, I do remember thinking that Oliver Stone was a poor choice for a film about September 11th. (Fortunately, I didn’t write about it, so there’s no embarrassing rant to sheepishly recant.)
And that reminded me, we all have our own knee-jerk reactions and personal biases, even those of us who make a hobby out of pointing out the biases that exist elsewhere.
I’ll watch the film, simply because I’d like to be surprised by someone like Oliver Stone. It’s a healthy thing when your prejudices are proven wrong.
12 July 2006 >>
The idea was simple enough: give the world a small taste of the political environment that college students face every day.
How many people outside academia realize the degree to which classrooms have become political platforms for professors? Who off campus hears that entire press runs of student newspapers routinely “disappear” because they contain opinions that challenge the campus orthodoxy? Who knew professors could be hounded out of their jobs simply for failing to register with the preferred political party?
While campus political correctness has been the subject of magazine articles and books, people rarely get a chance to see the students and professors who suffer very real punishment simply for holding the “incorrect” set of views. Never before have the excesses of the campus power structure been scrutinized in a feature-length documentary film.
Nearly three years ago, I teamed up with Stuart Browning and Blaine Greenberg to form On The Fence Films, specifically for the purpose of creating films that ask questions other filmmakers weren’t. Our first planned feature-length film would cover the political environment on college campuses.
I am very happy to report that this film, Indoctrinate U, is now being shown to distributors and should be released this fall. We are also setting up a campus tour to coincide with the release; I’ll be traveling to schools around the country screening the film.
Film distributors interested in Indoctrinate U should contact Blaine Greenberg at:
blaine (AT) onthefencefilms (DOT) com
Students (or anyone affiliated with a college or university) who want to bring Indoctrinate U to their campus can request a screening.
Indoctrinate U covers a number of stories never before shown on screen. Some of the stories are bizarre and so hard to believe that you may end up researching them yourself. And if you do, you’ll realize that the truth on campus truly is stranger than fiction. Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s frightening, and sometimes, it’s just plain depressing.
We haven’t posted our trailer online yet, but in the meantime, here’s a bit of a tease.
26 May 2006 >>
Are these truly The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time? Judge for yourself. I’m going to keep my mouth shut, because I have friends who’ve worked on some of those projects, and I wouldn’t mind remaining friends.
Meanwhile, here’s a decision bound to appear on a future update to that list: Hollywood studios have reportly decided that the next generation of DVDs, new formats created to bring high-definition (HD) video to HDTVs, will eventually be rigged to not output HD-quality video to some HDTVs. Why? Because Hollywood wants your TV to have built-in copy protection circuitry.
So, even if you bought a brand-new, state-of-the-art flat screen HDTV today, future HD DVD players may not support the HD quality the name implies. You might think you’re buying HD; whether or not you get it is another story.
If you have an HDTV with what’s called an HDMI connector, you should be OK. But if your set relies on any other type of jack, it looks like you’ll eventually be out of luck. The only question is when.
27 March 2006 >>
Sean Penn has an Ann Coulter doll that he uses for performing ritual mutilation:
In an interview with The New Yorker magazine, Penn reveals, “We violate her. There are cigarette burns in some funny places. She’s a pure snake-oil salesman. She doesn’t believe a word she says.”
