America
Finding Myself An Outcast in Hollywood
A
s i write this, i am in chicago. i just fi nished speaking to a group of physicians at a prestigious hospital in Lake Forest. The audience was wonderful, but the trip to Lake
Forest made me sad. That’s where we buried John Hughes about a year-and-a-half ago. He was a genuinely great creative force, and he is much missed. More to the point for this column, John was an ardent,
devout political and cultural conservative. That’s rare — and I mean really, really rare — in Hollywood. I can tell you that I, your humble servant, spent many years as a writer and producer in Hollywood. I was able to earn a decent living, but I was subject to
repeated attacks because I was and am a Republican, a fan of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, a believer in the rightness of the USA versus the Soviet Union, and vocally pro-life. When I fi rst came to work as a consultant on a CBS
sitcom, All’s Fair, during rehearsals, my show’s producer would introduce me to audiences as their “resident fascist.” When I wrote an outline of a miniseries about a Soviet
takeover of America, ABC was kind enough to make it, but the executive producer insisted my name be taken off the credits because he did not want the name of anyone associated with Nixon to appear on the screen anywhere near his name. They paid me to take my name off of the credits. At one point, I had an arbitration at the Writers Guild
about a screen credit for a movie called The Boost based on a book I wrote called ’Ludes. At issue was whether I would get co-screenplay credit for writing the fi rst draft, which was largely what was used in the fi lm. In the bathroom at the Guild, I overheard an arbitrator saying that he would be damned if he would give a credit to anyone who used to work for Nixon (as I did). I didn’t get the credit. When I was hosting Win Ben Stein’s Money for Comedy
Central, we had a show where the proceeds went to our selected charity. I said my charity was the National Right to Life Committee. The production executive called me aside to tell me she knew it was a joke but some people might not know it was a joke.
24 NEWSMAX | FEBRUARY 2012
STEIN DREEMZ
BEN
I said, “No, it’s not a joke at all.” The show was canceled not long thereafter. Now, you may say, and you should say, Well, why did
you stick around for so long when they pulled all these shenanigans? Because it was what I wanted to do. It was my dream —
to succeed in Hollywood. And I did meet some wonderful men and women who did not hold my views against me: Norman Lear, although a committed liberal, was kind to me. Al Burton was incredibly kind to me. Deanne Barkley, inventor of the made-for-TV movie, was good to me, and there were many more, especially Jimmy Kimmel and Cousin Sal from Jimmy’s show, and Andrew Golder. But the prevailing vibe was viciously hostile to conservatives in Hollywood. Even now, there is an organization of conservatives
in showbiz, and its meetings are semi-secret, with code words to protect against retribution if discovered. That’s how bad it is.
E
ventually, I got more interested in speaking and culture and economics and just slipped away from
Hollywood. But I notice that The Wall Street Journal and some other media have recently “found out” how anti- business the Hollywood work product is. Villains on TV and on the silver screen are almost always businessmen and rarely is business shown as anything but corrupt. If you wonder why this is, the answer is not hard to
fi nd. I wrote about it fi rst in the WSJ in the early 1970s and then wrote a book about it (The View from Sunset Boulevard: America as Brought to You by the People Who Make Television). Hollywood is anti-business, pro- abortion, and anti-American in what it pumps out to the world because it is largely run by leftists who just have old City College of New York leftist views. It is a small town, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said in The Love of the Last Tycoon. “We don’t like strangers here,” and in Hollywood, the conservative is always a stranger. There is a reason John Hughes left town. He was tired of being a stranger and making people who disliked him rich.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92