Tuesday, January 06, 2009
Big Hollywood!
Check out Andrew Breitbart's Big Hollywood, a huge and bodacious group blog that shines a light on a side of Hollywood we never hear about. The right side. From Andrew's opening post:
Big Hollywood is not a “celebrity” gabfest or a gossip outpost - it is a continuous politics and culture posting board for those who think something has gone drastically wrong and that Hollywood should return to its patriotic roots.
Big Hollywood’s modest objective: to change the entertainment industry. To make Hollywood something we can believe in - again. In order to give millions of Americans hope.
Until conservatives, libertarians and Republicans - who will be the lion’s share of Big Hollywood’s contributors - recognize that (pop) culture is the big prize and that politics is secondary, there will be no victory in this important battle.
Right on, and more here. And, in a coincidental but perhaps related development, today I received my review copy of Roger L. Simon's Blacklisting Myself: Memoir of a Hollywood Apostate in the Age of Terror
, out in a couple of weeks from Encounter Books.Breitbart and Simon are on to something very important. Even when conservatives and libertarians have great new ideas and charismatic leaders -- which they do not right now -- they wage a rearguard action against the left's domination of popular culture. We need more righties to go into movies, write exciting novels and screenplays, and produce television shows that people want to watch. Before any of that can happen, though, Hollywood must become more tolerant in both fact and metaphor. Somebody needs to soften up the beaches, and Big Hollywood believes it has the guns to do just that.
All of that having been said, I worry that it will not be possible to turn, or at least neutralize, popular culture without opening up high culture and academia. We need more conservative artists, poets, and professors, too, and that is the project of a generation.
Good luck, guys. And readers who want to help should buy Roger's book
.6 Comments:
By 
JPMcT, at
Tue Jan 06, 11:05:00 PM:
Thanks for the tip, TH...my RSS feed list has grown substantially since I have been hanging around here!
By Fritz, at
Wed Jan 07, 01:08:00 AM:
"I’m told I’ll hurt my career if I continually spout off about Liberalism — which I see as a growing cancer in our society. Worldwide, I’ve seen Liberalism metastasize into virulent incarnations of Socialism, and, left unchecked, even into its malignant cousin, Communism. Only the arrogant or the somnambulist would think such a thing could never happen here. It’s a matter of increment. Once a group organizes into a coalition, it’s a short step to claiming the right to the property of another group. All that is necessary is for an individual’s right to personal property to become a secondary concern. The ‘needs’ of the group must supercede, dontcha know. It’s a vicious cycle – wants become needs become rights. The fact that the thievery is done at the behest of a ‘civilized’ government does not sanitize the crime."
Yup - A++ quality posting there.
By Fritz, at
Wed Jan 07, 01:13:00 AM:
Another gem:
"As documented here, here, and here, through the portrayal of the sympathetic child molester, the onscreen hyper-sexualization of young girls, and child characters liberated through sexual behavior, for a number of years now the film industry has waged a drip-drip campaign in favor of the normalization of sex between adults and underage children. The offensive is a quiet, insidious one slowly slithering into the mainstream, and like all Leftist movements, will not stop until it gets what it wants."
OK. I think I can safely not add this to my list of righty blogs that I read, and be confident that I won't be missing much besides the usual anti-feminism, invective, and intellectual dishonesty.
By Jack Bauer, at
Wed Jan 07, 05:46:00 AM:
Fritz Wang makes as much sense as me deciding not to read this blog because of his two posts here illuminating his inept twitterings.
I guess Big Hollywood will just have to limp along without your piss poor musings, Fritz.
By Mystery Meat, at
Wed Jan 07, 11:40:00 AM:
Breitbart is correct. Leftist Hollywood is an expression of the Gramascian commitment to the destruction of our society and way of life by subverting the cultural institutions that protect us- the military, churches, schools, etc. They want to debase the culture to the point where ordinary people will accept their Marxist alternative.
By 
, at
Thu Jan 08, 12:32:00 AM:
Exactly what are the virtues, ideals, or topics that everyone wants to see in Hollywood? A normalization of ends justifying means and torture arguments a la 24, or "America's really great" flicks like basically every movie about WW2, or what? I ask not only because I find the substance interesting, but because I suspect that it will be drastically different for each speaker.
As for normalizing X, Y, and Z, and "subverting the cultural institutions that protect us": Hollywood transgresses boundaries. It depicts conflict. I think this is the essence of what it does, and a focus on particular issues and extrapolating is as naive as the piece in the WSJ about Hollywood hating suburbia: it's not that Hollywood hates X, Y, Z or suburbia, it's that movies usually need obstacles or something unfortunate to avoid splitting audience share with "Leave it to Beaver" and the Teletubbies.
