Since the passing of Andrew Breitbart the Internet has become saturated with memoirs and writings about one of Conservativism’s greatest champions. Unfortunately, now, lost among this volume are treasures of Breitbart at some of his most insightful best. Ed Driscoll’s post on PJMedia yesterday is one such moment.
In 2005, after Andrew’s recent publication of his book, “Hollywood, Interrupted“, Ed Driscoll asked Andrew Breitbart to explain Hollywood’s increasing slump at the box office. What follows is pure entertainment and enlightenment into the Liberal motivation behind America’s most loved medium, the movie industry.
Besides Andrew humorously describing his grandmother’s primal scream delivered to an 11-year-old Andrew who dared change her precious CBS, here are a few other highlights from the interview…
I would say that the problem is profoundly enhanced by the cultural disconnect. That the people who are trying to keep up a good front that all’s fine out here are so utterly removed from the common sentimentality of the average American. And I think that Hollywood, to a certain degree, is at war with Red State values. Is that its number one concern? Should it be its number one concern? I would say, no, I think they have much bigger problems. But for people on the right, and for people on the left, it’s a very convenient one to point to.
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In the past, studios said, “OK, let’s craft this movie to the heartland,” and ultimately, by crafting it to the heartland, it sent a message to the rest of the world, “Boy, I’d really like to come to America, it seems magical there.”
But now, there are politically correct sensibilities that aren’t just politically politically correct sensibilities, but they’re bottom-line politically correct concepts that they’re trying to pursue.
That’s the first type of film that they’re talking about: the pursuit of the blockbuster. And there’s mostly an apolitical nature to that part.
But then you have the Oscar/Sundance/Miramax axis. And that’s the type of film that is done on the cheap by Hollywood standards; that tends to be the message movie that conveys perfectly where Hollywood is intellectually and artistically. If you were to isolate that type of movie over the last ten years, you would see that what Hollywood is elevating is nothing short of nihilism. Whether that be American Beauty, or even a Syriana, what you see are movies that pretty much…
These people have long ago put America on trial, and found America, and its underlying consumer-oriented culture, to be guilty. And this is their way of, on one hand producing it, and on the other, looking for immediate artistic penance.
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If I were somebody in Red Country (and I think of myself as being a Red Country American), I do find it offensive, but I think that the comeuppance is in the rejection of Hollywood.
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So I think that what Americans have done, is that when handed lemons, they have made lemonade. And so I think that by taking the sourpusses of Hollywood, the ones who refuse to deign to treat the average American as worthy of their focus, I think that Hollywood has created a vacuum that has been filled by entertainment that is basically Schadenfreude. I think that we now look to watch people fail, especially celebrities, the people who have been handed the most, for the least amount of contribution to society. In the past, we used to look up to them, and wanted to dress like them, and wanted to imitate the way that they spoke; they way that they dressed.
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I think that what you see now is an adversarial relationship between the audience and the celebrities themselves.
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The disconnect is so great, that a George Clooney with his Good Night And Good Luck, is yet another Hollywood produced film that is conspicuously placed out there in the era of terror, in which the celebrities think that the Patriot Act and raw patriotism and jingoism is the worst thing that’s altering our lifestyle.
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But these people have to understand—or it has to be made plain to them—that they have created an environment in which it is as damaging to be a conservative in Hollywood in 2005, as it was to be a communist in Hollywood in 1955.
You can read the entire transcript at PJMedia, along with more back story to the interview.
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