CONSERVATIVES IN TINSELTOWN
SEIPP, CATHERINE
CONSERVATIVES IN TINSELTOWN By Catherine Seipp Hollywood, Calif. Ever since the Rodney King riots and O.J. Simpson, Los Angeles has resembled the proverbial liberal who’s been mugged, and the...
...evidently, an outspoken progun stance hasn’t kept the 74-year-old actor from working...
...He’s currently juggling five projects...
...Ten years ago, notes TV sitcom writer and Wednesday Morning Club member Rob Long (who was co-executive producer of Cheers and George & Leo), it was “practically impossible to find a TV character with AIDS who got it through gay sex...
...And if you look at the minority membership of IATSE compared to the guilds, it’s hardly something that can be pointed to as exclusionary...
...Willis later retracted his words, in a letter to the Anti-Defamation League that basically indicated he hadn’t known what he was talking about...
...But is Bruce Willis a conservative...
...Milius points out that his Teddy Roosevelt drama, Rough Riders, was “the most successful thing TNT ever did, but you never heard of it again...
...One assistant director’s wife involved in this campaign thought that Castle Rock partner Rob Reiner, who had recently begun his “I Am Your Child” project pushing early-childhood education (this was before it had flowered into Prop...
...Anything that gets rid of people is fine with me...
...Take the $20-million-per-picture Bruce Willis, whose complaint about high union wages a few years ago was worthy of any turn-of-the-century plutocrat...
...But Gary McVey, who hears this complaint all the time as executive director of the non-profit American Cinema Foundation, says that’s just the socially acceptable liberal reason...
...I wrote him saying that all the parenting classes in the world don’t do any good if a parent isn’t there,” she recalls...
...Besides Newman, Milius’s friends to the left include Oliver Stone (“a patriot”), whom he worked with on Conan the Barbarian, and Bobby Shriver...
...In Hollywood, it can be shorthand for not wanting anyone to take away your guns or your right to an abortion...
...But isn’t that the kind of wussy car . . . liberals drive...
...It’s a good car...
...Actually, this kind of begs the question...
...Presumably, to do otherwise would have been wickedly judgmental, which is almost as bad as mean-spirited...
...But then he was quoted in George magazine last summer praising Louis Farrakhan: “Anybody who stands up against injustice is a hero of mine...
...As Variety’s Army Archerd said, reporting on the Farrakhan fiasco: “Hey, Bruce, stick to acting...
...It can also mean you don’t like paying a lot of taxes just because you make a lot of money...
...A disapproving phrase heard a lot around town (most recently in connection with Prop...
...A dedicated POW advocate, Chetwynd wrote The Hanoi Hilton (which he also directed), Kissinger and Nixon, and the Academy-award-nominated Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz...
...Hollywood’s famous liberalism is less a carefully considered political point of view than a vague policy of cultural feel-goodism...
...For the November 3 election, Heston is supporting Proposition 10, Reiner’s pet project that funds early-childhood education via extra consumer taxes on tobacco...
...227, the antibilingual- education initiative that passed in the California primaries) is “mean-spirited...
...Hartman’s friends Mike Myers and Adam Sandler took the stage to describe the late Mrs...
...In any case, nowhere is Hollywood’s move away from orthodox liberalism more apparent than in its product...
...Of course, this being Hollywood, politics can become intertwined with image, often daffily so...
...When an assistant cameraman named Brent Herschman fell asleep at the wheel and was killed last year after working a 19-hour day on the just-released New Line film Pleasantville, the cast and crew organized “Brent’s Rule,” a drive to cap Hollywood workdays at 12 hours...
...he shouts...
...The situation of Hollywood conservatives is that the good ones are always working, but their views don’t help...
...And if so, why...
...I’m for large-scale wars...
...The industry runs on the engine of “you like me, you really like me...
...These are fairly complicated technical jobs—how dumb can they be...
...The club’s guest speakers this election season have included Hollywood-to-Washington gadfly Matt Drudge, Matt Fong, California’s Republican candidate for the U.S...
...But although Milius is constantly involved with new projects— a current one is a feature film about the Pattonesque Air Force general Curtis LeMay—he says his success is in spite of his views...
...There was a time, for instance, when the name Charlton Heston couldn’t be mentioned in polite society here without inducing mimed retching...
...I told him, your company should be the second signatory to this (New Line was the first...
...He’s getting me a Volvo...
...Now the well-known gun advocate’s help has been welcomed by, of all people, Hollywood Urliberal Rob Reiner...
...And he parts company in a rather blustery way with the Right on abortion, which he considers “a really good thing...
...She later backpedaled a bit, on the New York Times letters-to-the-editor page, after Quayle’s former speechwriter Lisa Schiffren wrote an op-ed piece there about Bergen’s statement...
...Members of the Independent Feature Projects, a pristinely progressive group, routinely explain that they don’t like to use union crews because the crews are a bunch of dumb, racist rednecks...
...Interestingly, a current hot political topic that never seems to come up is school vouchers— probably because people in Hollywood send their kids to private schools...
...No response...
...He pauses to take another call...
...Simpson, Los Angeles has resembled the proverbial liberal who’s been mugged, and the mood in Hollywood is now far friendlier to conservatives than it’s been in 30 years...
...This basically sets the tone...
...The private schools favored by the Hollywood set begin at $15,000 per year...
...More than anything else, Hollywood is a deeply hypocritical town—a place where, as Chetwynd has long maintained, “the liberalism stops at the studio gates...
...When David Horowitz (whose Center for the Study of Popular Culture funds the American Cinema Foundation and the Wednesday Morning Club) took out a full-page ad in Variety saying a film sympathetic to the Black Panthers was “a two-hour lie,” the filmmakers proudly added it to their press kit...
...Even Murphy Brown admitted a few months ago that Dan Quayle was right: The “body of the speech” criticizing out-of-wedlock childbearing “was completely sound,” Candice Bergen told the Los Angeles Times...
...Let’s hear it for Chuck Heston, America’s new Top Gun...
...Willis’s anti-liberalism is so well known in Hollywood that, as sort of an inside joke, his oil-driller character in Armageddon was shown lobbing golf balls at a Greenpeace ship...
...Ben Stein, the screenwriter, character actor, game-show host, and former Nixon speechwriter who’s long been an open conservative (and, unlike the rest of them here, is adamantly anti-abortion), says you can see the improved position of conservatives in Hollywood most dramatically in this lack of liberal ideology, a remarkable absence in that it was once pervasive...
...As veteran screenwriter William Goldman pointed out years ago in Adventures in the Screen Trade, few prospects horrify a star more than the possibility of being seen as “an unsympathetic son of a bitch...
...Nowhere is this more apparent than in the way management treats workers...
...Milius doesn’t disapprove of militias, because “it’s good for these guys to get out and exercise instead of sitting around drinking beer...
...The hippest, hottest show now is South Park, and the main character says ‘goddamned Democrats’ at least once per episode...
...That Milius’s politics haven’t harmed his social life says something about the position politics really have here: Business is always more important...
...10), might be a likely supporter...
...So is Hollywood, long a liberal town, becoming more of a conservative town...
...The suggested annual voucher credit of around $2,500, which would pay for the parochial education many school-choice supporters want, means nothing here...
...On the other hand, another reason many Hollywood conservatives are reluctant to identify themselves as such may be that the best-known conservatives don’t always sound so smart either...
...No, the problem is these [union] guys want $3,200 a week, and producers would rather pay $1,300 a week...
...they’re as much a part of his style as the cigars...
...Milius, a dedicated cigar-smoker despite the asthma that dashed his hopes of serving in Vietnam, is known for his contrarian opinions, tactlessly expressed...
...Thus we had last summer’s odd spectacle at the MTV Movie Awards, which took place shortly after comedian Phil Hartman’s wife fatally shot him while their children slept in the next room and then killed herself...
...Or they describe themselves as libertarian, without always realizing what that means...
...Screenwriter Lionel Chetwynd, for instance, founded the Wednesday Morning Club as a forum for dissenting (i.e., non-liberal) views the morning after Clinton won the 1992 election...
...Criticism from conservatives is still considered a badge of honor here...
...bomber Timothy McVeigh’s favorite movie...
...Senate, and California governor Pete Wilson, who used the occasion to stump for the teacher-union-enraging Proposition 8, which would impose such reforms as teacher testing and the quality rating of schools...
...Hartman as “a wonderful wife and mother...
...Chetwynd points out that Hollywood conservatives almost never describe themselves as conservative...
...Such A PRISTINELY PROGRESSIVE GROUP OF FILMMAKERS EXPLAIN THAT THEY DON’T LIKE TO USE UNION CREWS BECAUSE THE CREWS ARE A BUNCH OF RACIST REDNECKS...
...Nevertheless, McVey—who carefully describes his organization as “middle-of-the-road and traditionalist . . . with a degree of conservative support unusual in Hollywood”—finds hard-headed businessmen blanch when presented with independent films that (to cite three examples) criticize Castro, satirize the grant-supported arts world, or fail to completely condemn nuclear weapons...
...Basically, they agree with everything you say—and then add, ‘But of course, I’m a Democrat.’ There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance...
...Heston did voice-over narration in last summer’s hit movie, Armageddon...
...head-in-the-sand piety is not the case now...
...This sounded more like left-wing demagoguery...
...Nor have libertarian views stalled the careers of fellow gun fanciers Kurt Russell, the action hero and Cato Institute friend, and jingoistic director- screenwriter John Milius, whose 1984 the-Russians- are-coming film Red Dawn became notorious, in the wake of the Oklahoma City massacre, as Catherine Seipp, a Los Angeles writer, is the former Hollywood columnist for Salon...
...The Simpsons was the first show that said if you’re a loser it’s your own fault,” Stein says...
...Yet he recalls losing out on a job because the producer thought Chetwynd’s politics meant he couldn’t write sympathetic characters...
...That was a great, true, honorable friend of mine, Paul Newman,” Milius notes, returning to the line...
...And when Heston was elected president of the NRA last summer, the Los Angeles Times, Hollywood’s paper of record, ran a follow-up feature that was—although shaded with sarcasm—not entirely unsympathetic...
...he asks...
Vol. 4 • November 1998 • No. 8
