20 June 2007 @ 5:33PM >> In today’s New York Post, film critic Kyle Smith interviews me about Indoctrinate U, which he declares “alarming and funny.”

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.

30 April 2007 @ 6:47PM >> Two writers for National Review have commented on the film Indoctrinate U. Stanley Kurtz wrote:

Last week I attended the premiere of Indoctrinate U, Evan Coyne Maloney’s documentary about campus political correctness. It’s a fun and powerful piece of work that deserves a wide audience. The film features plenty of encounters between Maloney and college officials who, after being embarrassed by Maloney’s questions, invariably summon police to have him evicted. These confrontations are entertaining, but the real force of this film flows from Maloney’s recounting of a series of incidents of campus political correctness. I had never heard of any of these cases. Yet each of them is remarkable.

[...]

The end result of this torrent of outrages is that foes of campus PC have grown jaded. That’s where Indoctrinate U comes in. This film hits you in the gut, in a way that no column or blog post can.

Meanwhile, Carol Iannone called Indoctrinate U “a terrific must-see” and added:

It is sound, shocking—even to someone who knows a lot about political coercion on today’s campuses—and also, amazingly, highly entertaining. It is both amusing and sobering at once. It deserves widespread distribution in theatres across America.

26 April 2007 @ 7:15PM >> Well, I was moderately aware that classroom indoctrination inspired a movie, but until now, I didn’t realize that it also inspired a high-energy rock song.

Thanks to The Right Brothers for volunteering to put up a special page to make their song freely available for Brain Terminal readers.

23 April 2007 @ 8:44AM >> In this Front Page Magazine interview, I discuss the inspiration behind my first video, Protesting the Protesters; politics, human rights, the global Jihad & the Middle East; McCain/Feingold and Michael Moore (there is a connection!); the one-party state of Hollywood and academia; and, finally, my upcoming film Indoctrinate U.

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.

Read more for her theory why.

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.

30 November 2006 @ 8:52AM >> The CEO of the world’s largest music publisher is attempting to extract money from everyone who buys a digital music player.

Universal Music Group’s Chairman and CEO Doug Morris said of iPods and similar players, “These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it. So it’s time to get paid for it.”

By accusing everyone who bought a digital music player of piracy, Universal hopes to coerce manufacturers of these devices to pay a per-unit fee, a surcharge that is then passed on to the consumer. (Universal apparently figured out that running a profitable business is much easier without the burden of convincing customers that your product is worth buying.) That’s exactly what the music giant did with Microsoft, which now pays Universal for every Zune music player sold.

Now, Universal is targeting the iPod. And with 25% of the market, Universal has quite a bit of leverage against Apple. The company can threaten to pull all of its music from the iTunes Music Store unless Apple complies with a demand to impose a per-unit fee on all iPods. If successful, anyone who buys an iPod will be considered an assumed pirate, and Universal will receive money, regardless of whether any music from that label ever ends up on one of those iPods.

Is this really a road that music publishers want to go down? Aside from the obvious ill will it engenders from honest customers, such a move runs the risk of changing the purchasing calculations of people who own these devices. In effect, it legitimizes piracy in the minds of consumers.

If you’re an honest customer who purchases music today, your decision making may change if you know that record labels charge you simply for buying a music player. You’re already paying once up front—before you’ve even spent a dime to fill the device with music—so why pay again for the same thing when you want to download music? People will feel entitled to download whatever music they want, because they will know that they’ve already been billed for it.

Treating your customers like crooks is never a good way to encourage repeat business. And imposing a blanket music surcharge simply for buying a player is a surefire way to get people thinking that they’ve got a right to download music that they’ve already paid for.

If record labels wanted to ensure that paying customers today become pirates tomorrow, they couldn’t have designed a better way.

18 September 2006 @ 8:32AM >> Roger Waters, the estranged member of Pink Floyd, is now touring the United States. Normally, that’s a show I’d go see; I’ve been to a number of Roger Waters and Pink Floyd concerts in the past.

However, this tour is one I’ll be skipping. Why?

Well, according to the Drudge Report, the left-wing Waters is injecting even more politics into his shows than usual. The infamous flying pig has now been painted with the words “Don’t be led to slaughter! Vote Democrat November 2nd.” (I wonder if the flying pig would be considered illegal advertising under McCain-Feingold.)

I don’t know why musicians think that audiences attend their shows for political advertising. I don’t know why singers assume that if I like their music, I also like their politics. I’m paying to be entertained, so why inject messages that have nothing to do with that entertainment in the show? Frankly, I think it’s a bit rude, like if you’d gone into a restaurant and the chef came out to harangue you on his views on Iraq in the middle of the main course.

Roger Waters, the guy who penned the classic Pink Floyd album Animals, should know better than to treat his audience like sheep. And as a citizen of the United Kingdom, perhaps he should take his opinions home and not meddle in the internal affairs of another country.

Well, Waters will not get my money this time. I’m sure I won’t be missing much. These days, all the good concerts can be easily downloaded anyway.

---

Update: Chris Vozeh writes:

Is that a recent picture? November 7 is election day this year, not November 2. 2004’s elections were held on the second... therefore that may be an old picture.

If it is a current picture, I don’t care who or how many people vote for the Dems on Thursday, Nov 2.

Thanks for catching that, Chris. You are right on the dates of Election Day 2004 versus 2006. Perhaps Roger Waters got the date wrong, or Matt Drudge got an old photo. Either way, I know I’m not alone in attending concerts for their musical and not political content.

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 Post profiles 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.

Unfortunately, that day is still very far off.

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.

25 July 2006 >> This past spring, Comedy Central censored the image of the Muslim prophet Mohammed in an episode of South Park. The network’s decision came in the wake of the Cartoon Intifada, in which riots broke out around the globe after a Danish newspaper published cartoons depicting Mohammed.

Recently, in the second installment of an extensive two-part interview, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone discussed the controversy. Trey Parker said:

“This is South Park, and we rip on absolutely everyone in really horrible, terrible ways. And if you’re saying that this is the one thing we can’t do, besides Tom Cruise, because they’re threatening violence, well, then, I guess that’s what everyone should do. Then if the Catholics don’t want us ripping on Jesus anymore, they should just threaten you with violence, and they’ll get their way. That’s why it is such a slippery slope and such a dangerous path to go down.”

Matt added, “I think, too, it was a disappointment because, like Trey said, when that thing flared up in January — we’d actually talked about doing the Mohammed cartoon episode before because those [cartoons] were about a year ago that came out in Denmark. So we’d actually talked about it before it hit the fan in January. When it did, we had this idea where we wanted to show Mohammed’s image, but completely not offensive, just a guy standing there. And that was going to be the point.

[...]

Matt and Trey learned the ridiculous reality that they can show Jesus defecating on George Bush, but they can’t show Mohammed. Matt said, “That’s the point. It’s open season on Jesus.” Trey added, “Yeah. You can do anything you want to Jesus.”

The appeasers at Comedy Central, Viacom and elsewhere are teaching the world a dangerous lesson: if you want your preferred religious figure to get any respect, you’ve got to be willing to kill people to do it.

(Hat tip: Bridget Johnson.)

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.

11 July 2006 @ 7:20PM >> The original Crazy Diamond has passed. Shine on, Syd.

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.

28 April 2006 @ 10:07AM >> Apparently, Angelina Jolie is an Ayn Rand fan. Who knew?

13 April 2006 @ 1:04PM >> Comedy Central censored the most recent episode of South Park to remove an image of the Islamic prophet Mohammed, reports Stephen Spruiell of National Review:

I’m not sure if it’s been reported yet, but for what it’s worth, I just got off the phone with a Comedy Central spokesman. I asked him about last night’s episode of South Park in which, at a moment right before the prophet Mohammed was supposed to make a cameo, the words, “Comedy Central has refused to broadcast an image of Mohammed on their network” appeared on the screen.

According to Spruiell, the Comedy Central spokesman replied that the censorship was not a South Park gag, but was a network decision.

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.”

11 March 2006 @ 6:17PM >> Apparently, George Clooney doesn’t think enough issue-oriented films are being made. So, he’s promoting a competition called “Film Your Issue” for budding filmmakers aged 18-26.

If the “VIP judges” of this competition are any indication—they include outspoken liberal Clooney himself, a Democratic senator, the Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, a relic newsman who finally admitted his own liberal bias years after retiring, two current TV newsreaders, and a handful of other journalists and “social activists”—one can assume that the Film Your Issue competition is looking for issue-oriented films from a certain perspective. No surprise there.

But it might be kind of fun if the judges themselves were surprised by receiving films that did something other than reinforce their pre-existing worldviews. So, while I am too over-the-hill to submit any of my own work, I’m hoping there are some aspiring young filmmakers who might be inspired to enter.

Prove that leftists aren’t the only ones who can master the medium!

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.

[...]

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.

[...]

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?

8 March 2006 @ 12:46PM >> London’s Daily Mail reports:

Surfing the Internet is now more popular than watching television, according to new figures.

On average, adults in Britain spend more time online at their computers - 41.5 days a year - than in front of the TV.

Government figures from the Office of National Statistics show that we spend just 37.5 days a year watching television.

It is believed to be the first time that using the Internet has overtaken what was traditionally seen as the nation’s favourite pastime.

Two-thirds of the survey respondents indicated that they spend an increasing amount of time online every year.

I suspect this trend is not limited to Britain, and it will be magnified as more people come online and as high-speed broadband connections become increasingly available.

This means that establishment media audiences will continue to become fragmented, and that there is a tremendous opportunity for distributing new content online. The traditional gatekeepers will find fewer and fewer people lining up at the gates.

8 March 2006 >> So this might be a good move for him.

6 March 2006 >> I don’t watch the Oscars any year, so my missing it this year does not represent any form of boycott. And now that you know I didn’t watch it, please allow me to indulge myself by commenting on something about which I have no first-hand knowledge. (Isn’t that a requirement for blogging?)

From what I’ve read, the Academy Awards ceremony was light on the now-expected political lectures (George Clooney’s self-back-patting seems to be the one mild exception). Even the slate of winners was less political than some people—including me—predicted.

I was way off.

Well, I’ve learned my lesson. (No I haven’t.) I will no longer pull predictions out of thin air and present them as impending fact. (Yes I will; I just can’t help myself.) Next year, I will make no Oscar predictions. (I might.) And if I do, by then, nobody will remember this pledge. (Damn. I forgot this post will be permalinked.)

3 March 2006 @ 12:12PM >> National Review asked a few luminaries for their Oscar predictions. In what might be a clerical error, I was included in this group. The overwhelming consensus is that Brokeback Mountain will win for Best Picture. Here’s my rationale for this prediction:

[A] number of Hollywood insiders see a vote for Brokeback as a vote against red-state America. Hollywood seems to view middle America as populated by homophobic bigots — especially those evil red-state Republicans — and after years of electoral disappointment at the ballot box, the Academy Awards are pretty much the only elections where the votes of the Hollywood elite still have any impact. So, they’ll cast their votes for Brokeback, thinking that it is the cultural equivalent of flipping the bird to middle America. And middle America, which Hollywood doesn’t seem to understand, will respond with a muffled yawn.

Other questions for the panelists included “In an ideal world, what would win for best movie?” and “How annoying is George Clooney?”

Post-Oscar Update: Well, my short-lived career as an Oscar prognosticator seems to be over: Crash wins the Academy Award for Best Picture.

1 March 2006 @ 9:28AM >> The American Film Renaissance festival has announced its list of best films for 2005:

Best Picture: Cinderella Man

Runners up:

The Chronicles of Narnia
Walk the Line
Crash
Downfall
Pride and Prejudice
Batman Begins
The World’s Fastest Indian
Capote
King Kong

Best Documentary: March of the Penguins

Runners up:

Grizzly Man
Mad Hot Ballroom
Enron: Smartest Guys in the Room
Murderball

25 February 2006 @ 11:38AM >> Reader Matt Walliser writes:

Evan,

Recent news about iTunes hitting their billionth download made me think a little more about your post a while back about the recording industry not adapting to new mediums. If they’re not careful, they’ll obsolete themselves to Apple’s iTunes. Apple has made it so convenient to get music onto your iPod, that people don’t seem to mind paying a buck for a song. The lawsuits brought forth by the RIAA agianst people who download music can only serve to push people towards iTunes. If Apple creates their own label and plays their cards right, they could have channel dominance from top to bottom. The best part is, it’s being handed to them by the very channel they’re about displace!

While I’d hate for any one company to completely control music distribution, the massive success of iTunes is a wake-up call to an industry that has been hitting the snooze button on every previous wake-up call since the dawn of the Internet era. Maybe this time, the industry will pay attention.

8 February 2006 >> The recent discussion on the ideology of Hollywood has been generating a ton of e-mail. Here’s a sample. (And thanks to everyone who took the time to write!)

From Brian:

[You say:] “Yep. Increasingly, Hollywood is making films that Hollywood wants to consume, not necessarily what the rest of America does.”

I’m fairly skeptical about these sorts of claims, especially the “increasing” part. In so much as the movies you’re speaking of are lefty polemics rather than, say, The Island, we’ve seen remarkably few of these movies in comparison to the 90’s. Hollywood’s obviously a lefty town, and every year you’ll see the occasional Syriana, or Crash (or Brokeback Mountain which has more lefty street cred than politics), but that number’s gone down quite a bit in recent years, outnumbered a few thousand to one by comic book movies and big franchises.

What’s more is that, despite the doom-and-gloom rhetoric about Hollywood ignoring the masses, these small, left-ish films tend to end up with a tidy profit, and sometimes more - American Beauty, if I recall, took in well over a hundred million. I’m fairly certain that none of the Oscar nominees that have caused such a ruckus will end up losing money. Aside from bad conservative press (which, let’s face it, would happen anyway - it’s a sweet political schtick to milk), there just doesn’t seem to be much of a downside to the concept of a few little lefty films a year for a Hollywood executive.

My perception is that Hollywood is increasing the political content in its films. I don’t have hard data to back this up, but until 2004, I don’t think we ever saw a major movie release whose goal was to change the outcome of a U.S. presidential election (Fahrenheit 9/11). We also never before had a major movie studio dedicated to advancing left-wing politics (Participant Productions, creators of the George Clooney films Syriana and Good Night and Good Luck). It is also a fairly recent phenomenon that people now expect the Academy Awards to be used as political podiums by the Hollywood elite. So, to me, it does seem like Hollywood is becoming politicized to an unprecedented degree.

But even if my perception of this is wrong, the real issue isn’t the fact that Hollywood puts political messages in films or releases overtly-political films, the issue is that of the films with recognizable political content, that content almost invariably represents a left-of-center worldview. This is bad business.

Why? Well, for one, it serves to underscore the leftism of the more outspoken Hollywood pseudo-politicos. And that alienates potential customers who happen to have vastly divergent opinions. I know a lot of people who will never watch the Academy Awards because they don’t want to endure four hours of having their beliefs trashed by Hollywood’s condescending know-it-alls. That same frustration keeps people away from theaters, too.

Can left-wing films still turn a profit? Sure. But the fact that the only political films happen to be left-wing indicates that a huge market is going unserved. On talk radio, cable news and the best-seller lists, conservative perspectives do quite well in the marketplace. But with film, demand for this type of content is not being fulfilled because of—I believe—the political views of the gatekeepers.

From a business standpoint, it seems obvious that there is a downside to Hollywood’s current practices. Unfortunately, it’s hard to calculate the gross receipts of films that haven’t been made, so Hollywood has no way of knowing just how much money it is leaving left on the table. The market has to be proven for Hollywood to wake up. And for that to happen, some insider needs to take a chance, or technology will eventually render the current business model obsolete.

---

At Slate, Mickey Kaus says:

Matt Yglesias points out to me [video link] it’s not simply Hollywood’s films that skew “left.” Hollywood’s audience—largely young people, in cities—skews left also. There’s less of a mismatch there than Hollywood critics like Ben Stein and Evan Coyne Maloney like to claim. But this natural congruence also means a film can succeed at the box office without changing many minds in Bush country.

This factoid could just as easily prove my point as disprove it.

Let’s assume it’s true that Hollywood’s audience does skew to the left. Is that a cause or an effect? Does Hollywood churn out left-wing political films because they see their audience as left-of-center? Or are the audiences more left-leaning because conservatives see Hollywood’s output and decide that there are better uses of their time and money?

I wonder, have moviegoing audiences historically been left-of-center? Was it that way during the 1940s and 50s when Frank Capra and Orson Welles were kings? If not, why has the audience shifted left today?

---

Jeff God writes:

Passion of the Christ and Narnia have mopped up with the rest of America. I think a better explanation is that Hollywood, as any business, will make what people want. But Hollywood, as a political action committee, will reward the kind of movies that appeal to the members of the Hollywood PAC.

Remember that both The Passion and Narnia were created and distributed by people who are seen as fringe players by the rest of the industry. Sure, Mel Gibson was famous before The Passion, as an actor, but when it came time to find industry support for the film, he was locked out of Hollywood’s inner circle. Similarly, Walden Media, responsible for Narnia, is a bit of a renegade outfit. Walden was formed specifically out of a belief that Hollywood wasn’t making certain types of films.

---

Jeanne B. writes:

In reading the self-centered comments from the Hollywood gliteratti, I am flabbergasted at their total cluelessness.

Most striking is their seemingly universal conviction that the rest of us aren’t having a dialogue...aren’t paying attention. They think we’re oblivious to being “set adrift” by our government. If they can just yell loud enough and long enough, suddenly the masses will wake up to “the truth” and embrace Hollywood and its views. More, they think we’ll forever be in their debt for saving us!

Such ego. They don’t think we disagree with them. We’re just ill informed and too stupid to recognize how right they are. They really think they’re doing it for our good! Such gobsmacking elitism.

Well, maybe they do have a point. Perhaps one day I will evolve enough, become wise enough to take my political cues from the likes of Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon. Until then, I guess my ignorance makes me deserve their constant scorn.