Clint Eastwood claims his speech is Mission Accomplished and lists three goals he wanted to accomplish “That not everybody in Hollywood is on the left, that Obama has broken a lot of the promises he made when he took office, and that the people should feel free to get rid of any politician who’s not doing a good job”. But on his first point he’s still got a long road to go with one of the big guns of the right-wing blogosphere, Instapundit. Prof. Glenn Reynolds, post speech, is still fairly busy blogging about raising Hollywood taxes as punishment for Hollywood’s massive and decades long support for the left. In fact he shows no sign of slacking off on his anti-Hollywood agenda pushing for a Hollywood tax increase, the one tax increase most likely to pass a GOP Congress as well as movie accounting reform, both issues that would hurt Eastwood’s professional colleagues and him personally in his career as a producer and director.
A tax increase message right now would muddle the GOP’s anti-tax credentials and not be good optics for the campaign. But raising the issue now sets a very different post-election battlefield. Democrats and their media allies will seek to put Republicans in a corner in order to force them to raise taxes. This is an old play, set many times in Washington DC. But Prof. Reynolds has set up a devastating attack line from the right. Any Republicans signing onto a grand tax compromise that doesn’t include Hollywood as a special subject is inevitably going to get asked “why are you protecting liberal Hollywood”? They will not have a credible answer. Even the most dense of GOP lawmakers will not step in the trap. Instead they will force the Democrats to explain why Hollywood doesn’t get to handle its fair share of the burden.
Eastwood may realize this and picked this time to shed his longtime dislike for directly getting into the political fray. But he and his allies are going to have to do a lot more to convince the rest of the conservative movement that Hollywood isn’t their enemy, and shouldn’t be treated as such.
Hollywood is our enemy and should be treated as such.
They may or may not be few good men in sodom and gommorah, but make no mistake, Hollywood is the enemy of ‘traditional’ American culture. I would attribute a healthy percentage of the degredation of American culture in the last 5 or 6 decades at the feet of Hollywood. Hollywood is changing our culture, and almost exclusively for the worse.
Stealing the language of the left, there is no reason for the rest of us to ‘subsidize’ Hollywood by not looting and pillaging every single penny of theirs until there is nothing left. Pun intended.
Given the low box office numbers, tbe proliferation of channels, etc. the future there – as in academia, as it was in vinyl records – is surely going to be almost unrecognizable from the present. But I doubt we’ll be going back to oral ballads around the fire or even novel installmens in periodicals or dusty piles of books. The market for narrative, for fictional characters is going to continue. But how that market is supplied is going to change.
Eastwood self-identifies as part of Hollywood. Is he our enemy?
“The market for narrative, for fictional characters is going to continue. But how that market is supplied is going to change.”:
Through indy writers, Ginny – like me and thousands (maybe more than thousands by now) of other writers who gave up on getting pubbed through the traditional literary industrial complex. There are some fantastically good books out there – this is a pasted in list of some of them, that I posted on the Historical Novel Society yahoo discussion group thread:
I’ll chime in also, with regard to exploring indy e-books. There are some fantastically good ones out there, for a decent price. I am also an indy writer, but I also review books, now and again when I’m in the mood. Herewith, some of the best HF and just plain old literary fiction that I have found:
Francis Hunter – two sisters from Austin who have a pair of books about Lewis and Clark: To the Ends of the Earth, and The Fairest Portion of the Globe
Art Edwards – Stuck in Phoenix and Ghost Notes – about the ups and downs of a musician’s life
T.K. Thorne – Noah’s Wife – a re-telling of the Biblical flood, as it might have been.
Mark McGinty – The Cigar Maker – about the turn-of-the last century cigar industry in Florida
T.H.E. Hill – Voices Under Berlin-The Tale of a Monterey Mary – about the personnel at an American Army listening post, in Berlin just after WWII
Peggy Ullman Bell – Sappho Sings – about the classical Greek poet
Lloyd Lofthouse – he wrote a lovely pair of books about Sir Robert Hart in China. – My Splendid Concubine and Elegy for a Concubine
Jack Shakely – The Confederate War Bonnet – it’s about the Civil War among the Cherokee Indians: half of whom sided with the Union, and the other half with the Confederacy.
Michael Katz – Shalom on the Range – the adventures of a 19th century Jewish railway detective in the far West who has read too many pulp western adventures. Hilarity ensues.
Dianne Salerni – We Hear the Dead – all about the Fox sisters, who inadvertently founded the Spiritualist movement. And Juliet’s (Juliet Waldron)own books are pretty good, also – I reviewed Independent Heart, a while ago. I didn’t put in links since I didn’t want this to go into spam hell, but all of these are available on Amazon, and on Kindle e-book editions. Enjoy – there is a wealth of good stuff out there, by authors who are serious about their work, but decided, for various reasons, to go indy.
After indy-writers demolish the current literary industrial complex, Hollywood is next. Making a good indy movie, and reflecting libertarian/conservative/traditional values may be more expensive than writing a good book reflecting those values … but it’s doable, I think. It may be happening even now, as filmmakers and storytellers work to connect with a receptive audience and route around the pustulant pesthole that is a large part of contemporary Hollywood.
Eastwood is a rare outlier. He knows it.
The people who control Hollywood are aggressive, ruthless ideological enemies.
It is sad if the small numbers of voiceless and closeted conservatives are harmed by a counter attack. They chose to participate in that industry.
Every lawful step that the GOP can take to harm this enemy, and hopefully destroy its wealth and power should be taken.
Technology is moving on. This legacy empire is long overdue to die off. There will be no shortage of entertainment products. Even at their core functions these arrogant, ignorant and vicious people are in the way.
End them. Break them. Ruin their industry.
They would do it to you if they could.
Looking for people to demonize. Enemies are everywhere and you need to identify and combat them.
Ever look at the definition of paranoia? Kinda fits, anyway you are doing what I want almost to a frightening degree. Keep it up you should be able to bring the country to it’s knees pretty quickly. It’s almost there already, just a bit more intolerant madness should do the trick.
I don’t think Instapundit believes that repealing the Hollywood tax breaks is a legitimate part of the Republican platform – rather, I think his battle cry is simply to alert people that although lefties in Hollywood rail on how oil companies and wealthy folk don’t pay “their fair share,” that people in Hollywood rely on similar tax breaks and subsidies to enrich themselves.
Interesting interview with Eastwood with a local Carmel Newspaper –
http://www.pineconearchive.com/120907-1.html
Hollywood is enemy territory and ought to be treated as such. While economics matters there, ideology matters more – often much more than money.
Consider a few examples.
Back in the 1980s when All-American action blockbusters were all the rage, the export market only accounted for 40% of movie income; in the last decade it reversed, and exports accounted for 60%. Thus, alien invasion plots have replaced the action-genre because that reliably sells abroad.
Not only does G-rated fare out-returns R-rated, but Hollywood people simply choose to make much more of the latter.
Remember all of those anti-American war films after 9/11? They all bombed in the US, but not abroad.
Not many months ago, when the US pulled out of Iraq, Peggy Noonan asked an Iraqi officer what he thought about Americans. He replied that you American’s are not as bad as your movies say you are.