Hollywood And Propaganda

Andrew Breitbart and David Ehrenstein trade insights about Hollywood's involvement with wartime filmmaking.

Andrew: ...Yet the conservatives who defend and, to a great degree, prosecute this war have only themselves to blame for not putting enough emphasis on popular entertainment, and refusing to get bloody in the trenches of Melrose and Vine. There wouldn't be reverse McCarthyism (to coin a phrase) if there weren't so few conservatives plying their trade out here in the first place.

Whether it be at the film schools that graduate screenwriters and auteur directors or the theater departments and acting classes that used to develop our great actors; or the brothels, vomitoriums and gyms that produce the big stars of today, conservatives are conspicuously outnumbered or not represented at all.

But maybe we were put together for a reason. Perhaps our exploration of our political differences in Tinseltown's paper of record can be an exercise in creating a bridge to our shared values: Getting to live. Given that you are a gay expert of gays in cinema and an upstanding liberal Democrat, and I'm straight with four kids and have voted consistently Republican over the last 10 years, I propose that we start a bipartisan, bisexual artistic commission to fix the mess we've gotten ourselves into.

David: The "bipartisan, bisexual commission" you propose has far too much of a whiff of Joe Lieberman about it for my taste. Moreover, "liberal Democrat" would describe me as a teenager. To quote the cinematically celebrated songwriter Robert Zimmerman, "Oh but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."

...I haven't the slightest doubt that Andrew feels Hollywood should be working 24/7 on stemming the Islamic tide threatening to overwhelm all that's white and Christian, the better to impose "sharia law" on every Western corner of the globe. To this end he should be happy about the exceedingly popular "24" in that it shares the Bush administration's hostility to the Geneva Conventions, habeus corpus and other "benchmarks" of what used to be called civilization before 9/11 "changed everything" -- as every Republican politician reminds us at least twice a day. The problem, of course, is that "24" is not enough for Mr. Breitbart, decidedly displeased with a Hollywood overrun with those far more concerned with who they're having lunch with at the Ivy than what new outrage will spring from the thin, smiling lips of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

... But Andrew, you and like-minded souls might well be interested in considering the remake potential of "The Fearmakers." For while the communist menace is but a dim memory, modern equivalents of Mel and Veda Ann could easily be evoked in a (melo)dramatic expose of those sinister souls running MoveOn.org.