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Hollywood Conservatives
On the radio: President Calvin Coolidge, being welcomed to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios by Louis B. Mayer.
He was born Lazar Meir. By the time he was America’s highest-paid man and the most powerful Hollywood boss in history, he’d done more than anglicize his name; he set the standard for a pioneer generation of studio chiefs who believed in America with the fervent, grateful conviction of people who’d seen the worst of what the Old World could do. Mayer kept a plaster elephant on his desk as a playful, or sometimes a not-so-playful reminder that MGM’s boss was no New Dealer. He was a delegate to the Republican national conventions of 1928 and 1932 and the state chairman of the California Republican Party in the early Thirties. He wasn’t alone, of course. There were always some Republicans and conservatives in Golden Age Hollywood, though those terms don’t always line up with our present-day understanding of them; stars like Ginger Rogers, Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, and Robert Taylor, writers like Morrie Ryskind. There’s a scholarly monograph waiting to be written about that forgotten history, but this post isn’t it. With the greatest respect for the people and events of that era, there’s little or no living connection with the people and the issues of today. What has Hollywood Conservatism been in our own times? How is it organized, and by who?
The origins of the modern Hollywood right can be identified with some precision. After George Bush lost the 1992 election, Oscar-nominated screenwriter and director Lionel Chetwynd (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz; The Hanoi Hilton; Kissinger and Nixon) felt that conservative Hollywood had done practically nothing to involve itself or even so much as to politically express itself. He and his friend, apostate-leftist-turned-conservative David Horowitz started the Wednesday Morning Club, an activity of David’s Center for the Study of Popular Culture. (The WMC name referred to waking up disappointed on mornings after Tuesday elections. Since it was actually a monthly luncheon society that met on random weekdays, “Wednesday Morning” was a perpetual source of confusion.) It would be to Hollywood conservatism roughly what Silicon Valley’s Homebrew Computer Club had been to the birth of personal computers.
WMC was an IRS 501 (c) 3 nonprofit organization, technically a discussion forum, not a partisan one. I saw George W. Bush and Charlton Heston there, but also Arianna Huffington (when she was still on the right), Camille Paglia and Chris Matthews. The lunches were extremely posh, usually at the main ballroom of the Beverly Hills Hotel, and they did attract plenty of non-conservatives, as well as wealthy business people like Anne Volokh (mother of Sacha and Eugene) who liked hanging out with politicians and stars. L.A. journalist Catherine Seipp wrote a sharp piece in Los Angeles magazine, “It’s Wednesday Morning in America”. It was syndicated nationally, greatly boosting both WMC and Cathy’s own career.
That’s the origin point. The Club was a real success for David and Lionel. It essentially paid for itself, being neither a drag nor a boon to Horowitz’s CSPC. It had prestige, but it was not a truly public activity. It wasn’t a true membership club in any sense. It didn’t put on screenings or events other than the luncheons, and had no national presence or cultural influence. None of that is a knock on it; it was built to earn respect and it did.
Only a year into the Wednesday Morning Club, Chetwynd and Horowitz joined with a friend, Cathy Siegel, an entertainment attorney and corporate officer, and founded a separate organization, the American Cinema Foundation. It had a very different charter and mission. It wasn’t set up to be “a top conservative arts group”; it was set up to be a top arts group by any standard, but (for a change) run by conservatives—not quite the same thing. Like Fox News’s Fair and Balanced slogan, the distinction is meant to have a little bit of sly irony, but also to be taken literally. We weren’t seeking the right-wing best, but simply the best, and if as all too often happens, you haven’t heard of it elsewhere, we wanted you to wonder why your other cultural sources were letting you down so badly. ACF would be our Directors Guild, our own mini American Film Institute or micro-motion picture academy. It would hold public activities in Los Angeles and Washington, and later overseas.
It too had limitations, mostly self-imposed for reasons. All of its staff and board would be known publicly; no evasion, no political concealment. The ACF board was small but “heavy”, made up of genuine big shots. It wasn’t snobbish but it was unavoidably elite; it had to be to do the job it needed to do. We were honest about that. ACF wasn’t membership oriented and wasn’t really set up to take advantage of potential sympathy or interest in the heartland. We went after major corporate sponsorship the way AFI and Sundance did, not small dollar donations like more political organizations did.
We couldn’t do everything, so we stuck to things no one else could do—hold an annual Freedom Film Festival, present seven Andrzej Wajda Awards to brave filmmakers of formerly Communist countries, help get an Oscar for Mr. Wajda, and for films like “The Lives of Others”. We sponsored Cuban films at the Kennedy Center and a protest photo exhibit about Cuba’s treatment of gays. We held seminars on TV writing, PBS, and why Hollywood’s storytellers seem to love dirty cops. But we didn’t do retail politics. We weren’t the go-to place to see Dinesh D’Souza. At a time when every conservative group was casually mislabeled as the Christian right, we were in a literal ethnic sense one of the least Christian.
There are other models, other ways to make a difference. One was the Liberty Film Festival, held for a couple of years by Libertas, an ambitious married couple (Govindini Murty and Jason Apuzzo) who hired and then lost John Nolte, later of Breitbart. LFF was a splashy, explicitly conservative weekend film festival that was more or less billed as America getting in Hollywood’s face. Despite a few “name” guests, some of them on the ACF board, it was neither feared nor respected in the industry and disappeared quickly. Murty and Apuzzo made too many enemies too casually, including on the right, accusing Clint Eastwood of anti-Catholic attitudes over scenes in “Million Dollar Baby”. Libertas was able to attract national attention, at least from conservative publications, and if run more professionally might have survived infancy. But in the words of Billy Joel’s “Big Shot”, “I’ll give you one hint, Honey, you sure did put on a show”.
From time to time other arts groups and would-be influencers announce that they’re coming to town to shake things up, and the hotels, screening rooms and PR agencies welcome them with open arms. At the height of the DVD boom, Walmart could probably have made Fayetteville, Arkansas the next Sundance if it had really wanted to. They had the power to make themselves respected, even feared. No one who lacks that power should bother to make plans to conquer the town.
Another organization that took a diametrically different approach to offering something to Hollywood’s conservatives was the once-secret Friends of Abe, the Fight Club of the American right. It’s okay to say its name out loud; it’s all been in the open since it ended. FOA was altogether different from Govindini’s LFF, from my ACF, and from David Horowitz’s CSPC, although plenty of people belonged to several or all of them. Friends of Abe had something in common with the Wednesday Morning Club; it was a purely social group without public activities or any attempt at public influence. Unlike any of our projects, FOA was completely secret.
Cameras were confiscated at the door. Confidentiality was as assured as velvet ropes and security guards could make it. It was very difficult to join, and almost impossible to find out about. But as fancy as the parties were, once you were in, FOA wasn’t elitist. A libertarian screenwriter, a FiCon financier, and a socially conservative Teamster who drove props to locations could all rub elbows at the bar with Jon Voight and Jim Caviezel. Actors, in particular, were able to relax, knowing that the press was rigorously excluded. Eventually, of course, it leaked. (Good old Pat Boone explained, “I can’t tell you about it. It’s a very secret group of conservatives, real hush hush”. The reporter from Variety nodded as she wrote it down.)
At that point it disbanded from fear of public exposure. FOA was the most actor-led of Hollywood’s conservative groups, and actors are far more vulnerable to shifts in public opinion than writers or directors. This is a harsh sounding but seriously meant metaphor: In other words, to them, being a conservative in Hollywood was something like being gay in Hollywood back in say, 1955. It was something you had to keep secret from the bosses and the general public at all costs because people who used to like you might hate you. It’s not exactly illegal, no, and everyone in Hollywood has heard snickering whispers of someone mixed up in this icky conservative thing, but it’s certainly frowned on socially, something that can only be admitted in private among the closest of friends. Liberals who may hate that metaphor should consider what drives conservatives to see it as accurate.
Does this way of looking at it come anything close to even satirical reality? There’s an element of truth in it. A lot depends on who you are, how old you are, and where you are in the industry. Lionel Chetwynd once put it succinctly, “(Being a conservative in Hollywood) isn’t always a minus. But it’s virtually never a plus”. Fear is understandable, but you have to be careful not to validate what they think of you, as if what you are and what you believe is something to be ashamed of.
The Center for the Study of Popular Culture is now the David Horowitz Freedom Center and conducts activities. Friends of Abe has some vestigial existence, like the veterans of Woodstock. Effectively it’s long over. The Liberty Film Festival is gone a decade ago, but it helped launch the career of Breitbart’s John Nolte. I started to close out the American Cinema Foundation in 2015, as many of my pals and allies on the Board and I had finally grown older together, and frankly I was confident with a curmudgeon’s professional cynicism that there weren’t many, if any halfway knowledgeable, halfway conservative film curators left in the whole country. I trimmed the ACF website back to what amounted to a static catalog of 1994—2014. We packed up nearly a thousand rare overseas books and video tapes, many sent to the motion picture academy library, some to the American Film Institute. We’d done our bit for history.
In 2016 I rethought the issue, thanks to the writers I discovered on this site and the internet’s ability to make talent visible. With nothing to offer a prospective successor but a name, a track record, a website, and a very modest amount of intellectual property, I asked @titustechera if he’d give it a shot. It’s a rare coincidence: the young online scholar who knew film history the best was also, by providence, the one who cared most about American culture. In two years Titus has reoriented ACF towards online media, interviews, and podcasts. If you care about reading conservative viewpoints about the movies, wish him well. He’ll need all the help he can get.
Remember the guy with the 1928 microphone at the head of this post? Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM when Leo the Lion was the unquestioned ruler of the film industry. He was born in Czarist Europe, grew up hungry in Canada in a big, desperately poor Jewish family, and through ceaseless hard work managed to impress boss after boss until he was made the boss of Hollywood’s top film studio of the Golden Age. When you read anecdotes about “LB”, the same story keeps repeating, because it so clearly said something about the man and his times, and how distant we are from them.
Mayer was in the studio’s tiny, exclusive executive screening room, watching a rough cut, an unfinished edit of an Andy Hardy movie. This was a much liked MGM series starring Mickey Rooney as a go-getter American teenager, sort of a Marty McFly of the Thirties. As always at Metro, all the craft elements were first rate. In this scene, Andy’s mother is sick, possibly dying, while Andy stands weeping at the side of her bed. It’s a tough moment, a three handkerchief special. Suddenly Louis B. Mayer exploded angrily, “That good American boy should be on! his! knees! He should be praying!” On his orders, the scene was refilmed the next day exactly as he wanted it.
People told this story for decades for a couple of reasons: If you liked Mayer, and/or the golden age of MGM movies, it showed how even the tough studio boss had a sentimental streak. If you didn’t like Mayer or the Hollywood studio system in general, it shows how the big producers reduced everything to a schmaltzy, cornball level. But both ways of telling the story ignore the real point: Mayer’s take on the scene was truer dramatically than the original version. It was also culturally more sensitive, psychologically more accurate. Smarter. He was purely and simply right, and the scene was better as a result.
That’s the kind of instinctive understanding of America’s virtues that is so hard to find among today’s tastemakers. That’s the kind of conservative vitamin missing from the Hollywood diet. When I say, “conservatives in Hollywood”, that populist spirit is closer to what I’m talking about than anything old Louis B did to advance the Smoot-Hawley tariff or fund Thomas Dewey’s 1944 campaign. The point is to change the culture, not make films about worthily dull donor class subjects (“Boring From Within: The AEI Story”).
Just like our series on Hollywood Communists, there are always stories within stories to tell about Hollywood Conservatives. We barely touched on movie content in this post, but that’s part of the overall ebb and flow of talent. As always, I’m eager to speculate with you how our years in Hollywood could have been done better, or how the future could be different.
To coin a phrase, I love it when a plan comes together.
Published in General
Gary Sinise would have been an attractive candidate for Congress, maybe even made it in a couple of terms to senator. For him, for a lot of us, as far as popular culture was concerned, the hinge of history turned out to be the aftermath of the 2003 war in Iraq. More than other causes, this is the one that would define him politically. G’s tireless tours on behalf of the troops were never overtly attacked by the left, and in theory they agreed that whatever crimes they held against Bush, the troops were sacrosanct. But like it or not, by 2004 he and everyone in what was then a unanimous front on the Hollywood right were invested in several stories about the universal Arab hunger for democracy that turned out to be rather out of touch. If it had all gone well, the 9/11-is-Pearl-Harbor national attitude would have faded slowly–everything does–but it wouldn’t have curdled.
I don’t know if it’s more correct to call it giving a face to Hollywood’s progressive agenda, or just to say they are mainstream (but) patriotic honest liberals. I’ll take Gregory Peck or Henry Fonda over the woke crowd anytime.
I don’t see it. What’s out of the mainstream about A Brilliant Mind? (The real life guy apparently had a habit of circling all the Jewish-sounding names in a newspaper. Somebody should have bought him a subscription to Variety. It would have blown every fuse in his fusebox.) Ron Howard isn’t within a 1000 parsecs of Republicans Bono or Arnold. By the “pro-white privilege film” you mean “Far and Away”? C’mon, PB, that’s gotta be The Onion talking. If anything, the Irish everywhere have ignored or disowned this clumsy but sincere tribute to our immigration story. This was going to be the Irish “Godfather”. It wasn’t even the Irish “An American Tail”.
As a barely literate child, though, Tom Cruise in Far & Away I liked. Nicole Kidman also.
By the way, in the secret places where conservatives talk, I hear about this J.D.Vance book, Hillbilly Elegy, being adapted into a Hollywood movie–Ron Howard directing, plus a Prog-as-you-please writer, with a good cast: Amy Adams, Glenn Close. I hope it’s going to be good, but I fear sentimental liberalism is what you end up with. Then again I don’t know any conservatives involved in writing, so what’s the alternative for people like Vance?
Andrew Klavan has done screenplays. I’m not sure if he does anymore.
Klavan did “Gonsell”, but as he’d noted on his podcast, he’s persona non grata with most of Hollywood now due to his political positions. Unless he wrote under a pseudonym, signing him to script the adaption of Vance’s book would bring out the progressive crazies in force and bring them down on the heads of everyone else involved in the movie. Even Howard’s past support for Obama, his health care plan, or doing Will Ferrell Funny-or-Die ideological films wouldn’t protect him from being branded as a heretic and a traitor.
Producing an entertaining, challenging and thought-provoking movie certainly is not worth being branded as a heretic and a traitor. Better to play save and stay within today’s stultifying movie conventions. After all, producers no longer produce movies for sales or to please their audience. They produce them to please their circle of acquaintances.
I was being a little flamboyant with the white-privilege comment, but I don’t remember the focus of that film being the dastardly whites stealing the reservation lands, which just about any other filmmaker would have concentrated on. Maybe A Brilliant Mind wasn’t the best example, Apollo 13 might have been better to show his respect for middle class bougie values.
I’ll defer to your judgment on comparisons to Bono or Arnold, but from a distance he seems like someone in that category.
John Milius for President
We subscribed to both. My dad worked in ad sales for Jock Whitney’s TV station group, Corinthian, so the New York Herald Tribune was required reading; my mom preferred The Times. On weekends, dad would bring home the Sunday News, with its great comics section and sports coverage. The News was conservative and the Post was liberal back then, but the real divide was the Times and the Trib were serious papers for dads in suits, while the News and Post were popular, fun tabloids which could be read on the subway in the outer boroughs without the origami tricks you needed for the Times.
Corinthian’s offices were in the Time-Life Building. They had IBM Selectrics, fast elevators, and a great collection of TV Guides. (Hey, whaddya want? I was a kid!) Years later I had the opportunity to visit the Mad Men set, and there in (Republican) Roger Sterling’s office was a 1960’s vintage New York Herald Tribune on the desk.
The Corinthian stations were affiliates of the network owned by Mr. Whitney’s brother-in-law, CBS founder William Paley. The less said about CBS of today the better, though I do wish they would respect the family tree and take Chris Wallace back.
Thanks, Gary, for the overview of recent conservative activity in Hollywood. I remember attending one of those Liberty Film Festivals many years ago, and attending a panel featuring none other than Steve Bannon! I commend everyone who made the effort to enrich the conservative presence in Hollywood, whether through public or private groups, long lived or short.
I’m amazed how many people here have even heard of the Herald-Tribune, let alone have two members with connections to it! You were and are a definite contribution to the L.A. media conservative scene. Yep, Bannon showed up at their events. But Andrew Breitbart came to ours–
That’s Andrew in blue jeans at our Cathy Seipp tribute. This is 2006, so he wasn’t famous quite yet. That’s Rob at the mike. Andrew is standing with libertarian financial writer Luke Thompson, attorney Allan Weiss of the scandal-fixing Sitrick firm, and Jill Stewart, a conservative writer on education issues.
I miss Cathy Seipp.
Yeah. It’s been 12 years now. Hard to believe. 7 years for Andrew. Also hard to believe.
Too soon for both of them.
Now I can connect this with your backstory doing package sales for syndication and off-network premieres! It’s not exactly the same thing but it’s pretty close.
Lionel Chetwynd and Cathy Seipp. I’ve always laughed at the slightly indignant-sounding subhead,
“Very Little Kissing Up by L.A. Producers at CPB-Funded Event”
I have to say, Seawriter, that Hollywood is more capitalist than most industries these days. They are fond of making money.
It seemed as though for the longest of times there was a divide between the vanity projects — the small movies that actors, writers and directors would do out of love and sometime take less money to, but would fit their ideological beliefs — and the big budget blockbusters, or just films designed to appeal to the widest possible audience. All those anti-Iraq War/anti-Bush movies of 10-15 years ago seemed to fit into the former category. They represented the beliefs of those making the movies, but they kept the costs low enough to not break the bank. If they lost money, they didn’t lose much of it by Hollywood standards.
Right now, it looks like you have some people who think they can have both a high-cost summer and Christmas season blockbuster that does inject the makers’ ideology overtly into the story lines. It’s not a totally new phenomenon — the global warming screed “Day After Tomorrow” that was designed to affect the 2004 election cycle bombed out 15 years ago — but it does seem as though in 2019 there are more people willing to take long-term successful properties and politicize them, under the belief those properties have such a built-in fan base they can get away with pushing their ideas or pet causes in the stories and still rake in the cash.
The idea of the little, goodhearted idealistic movie you get to do after you’ve given the studios a blockbuster or two goes back a long way, and is by and large an honest, open deal. Whoopi did “Sister Act” for Disney, so to get her to sign for “Sister Act II” they agreed to distribute a South African film she starred in, “Sarafina!” (That deal, BTW, put Harvey Weinstein and Disney’s Jeff Katzenberg in touch and led to Disney acquiring Miramax.) George Clooney’s “Ocean’s” movies more than paid for the small losses of “Good Night and Good Luck”, a decent liberal movie that didn’t cost much. The anti-Iraq war films were fairly cheap by today’s standards. Given international attitudes towards our Iraq intervention, overseas sales were probably decent if unspectacular. You’re right; the studios could afford it, and their employees/partners, the star actors, writers and directors, appreciated the favor.
Everybody involved knew the public, which elected Bush twice, didn’t like the war but didn’t like them either, so no one expected the films to be very popular. To be fair conservatives should admit that the public wouldn’t have been in the mood for strongly pro-Iraq war films even if Hollywood had made them. Once the national unity over 9/11 faded, there was no World War II-style “Sands of Iwo Jima” spirit of national purpose. The resulting movies, years after that era ended, are a mixture: “American Sniper”, “World Trade Center”, “United 93”, “The Hurt Locker”, and “Zero Dark Thirty” aren’t all exactly what everyone here wanted, but they are a reasonably true look at what people felt then.
The differences since then, roughly speaking since Obama’s re-election? IMHO, basically two:
The bosses and the creators aren’t in disagreement any more. They now both believe the vast majority of the public is with them, so the studios no longer restrain writers. There’s been very little skepticism. They believe what they read in Vanity Fair and Buzzfeed, in the Washington Post and on Colbert: the country is swinging their way, in every sense, and Father Time will complete the mop-up operation. There have been massive bumps in the road–the 2016 election; the woke “Ghostbusters”, the hasty retreat from PC at ESPN–but so far, go woke has not generally meant go broke. It could happen, but it hasn’t yet.
Secondly, the decision makers themselves are now products of the PC system. The doctrine had always been that adding women and Blacks would make a difference (Asians and Latinos were basically a liberal’s afterthought), and now that the executive suites have changed, allegiances have also changed. Kathleen Kennedy is no millennial, but as Baby Boomers hand over the reins to Gen X-ers, there’s more and more pressure on each aging generation of Hollywooders to show that they’re more into “Hamilton” than into Alexander Hamilton. If the throne room of supreme power at Disney Television was occupied by a Black woman, it’s not a surprise how the “Roseanne” deal went down.
Franz, you were one of the earliest members to reply, so I didn’t say thanks then, but I belatedly do so now.
I’m a complete outsider to all of this (my movie and TV watching are both vanishingly small), but this does make for interesting reading.
I’d be curious @garymcvey or @titustechera what either of you know about some of the indy work being done out there, especially in light of comment 50 – it seems that with an alliance of woke at the upper echelons it would be harder to make decent films, to say nothing of conservative ones.
On the indy producers, I know he’s no conventional conservative, but Tyler Perry certainly has a lot of wonderful stuff to say, and has set up his own Atlanta based studios to make what he wants to make quite apart from Hollywood. I also see production companies like the Kendrick brothers, who have had decent DVD and streaming circulation. I know there are others out there too.
Would be curious as to your thoughts on those and similar efforts.
Tyler Perry’s a fine example–he has done more thoughtful and funny stuff about marriage that just about anyone else working today. He can do it because his name is a brand name now, in his own way a bit like Clint Eastwood: He consistently turns out good movies without generally swinging for the fences. Tyler Perry sticks to a budget and knows his audience. They do their part by showing up.
Christian films should use that business model, because they have a mid-sized, potentially loyal clientele. Not everything is going to be “The Passion”. A number of Ricochetti of a more SoCon bent than me have said that as much as they appreciated “Fireproof”, it wasn’t good enough to launch a franchise. Sometimes you just have to keep at it. “Gosnell” was more or less made along this plan.
What Titus said is true; technologically and culturally, it’s never been easier or cheaper to make a decent-looking movie. The gatekeepers can’t stop you. Unfortunately it’s also rarely been harder to stand out in a field of thousands of streamed, and screened new product.
Bottom line: It can be done and if there’s actual audience interest, someone will do it. Caveats: The interest has to be real, not just “It stands to reason that…” The film has to be well made. And risks can’t be avoided. Hollywood spreads the risk among a wide slate of releases and hopes the law of averages holds. Conservatives are prone to whine and moan and blubber about how persecuted they are, and do nothing useful to oppose it. Note that this is a case where liberals and leftists put up their own money, not the government’s. They suffer losses and make profits. Until conservatives do the same, they will lose, and I for one am not going to weep bitter tears over their timid tightfistedness.
This seems to be what the Kendricks have been doing: Make a movie with as tight a budget as you can, and pay for it up front as much as you can, get it released and into distribution, then build up the funds until you can launch the next one. They’re making nothing earth-shattering, but then that isn’t their goal – base hits instead of swinging for the fences.
I’m seeing some similar efforts with the streaming network PureFlix (only anecdotally, I don’t subscribe myself and am just going off what others have said), and with the former StudioC folks at their own company JK Studios (their Freelancers series so far is hilarious).
My daughter got a master’s degree last Sunday at Loyola Marymount University. It’s Jesuit-run, with plenty of non-Catholic students, but it’s a particular destination for Latin Americans, sort of a Georgetown U for the west coast. Why this fatherly brag?
Because LMU is a rare religiously affiliated U with a film school. Ricochet member @jimkearney taught there (and he’s good; I witnessed one class). The kids at LMU do flat out professional grade craftwork that you could put into a theater tomorrow. Most will not choose to devote their careers entirely to improving the culture; everybody’s gotta put food on the table. But they offer an example of how easy it is to find trained artists ready to work.
“Fireproof” was not only not good enough, it was awful, a perfect example of how not to make a Christian-based movie that entertains. I had it with “Christian” books and entertainment when they refused to reflect the real world as a necessary element to tell a story; Andrew Klavan talks about this all the time. The little old lady with blue hair in the 14th pew has heart failure if a character utters a sound that acknowledges the existence of s#x, or uses bad language.
I am tired of fillums that think that F-bombs every third word constitute gritty realistic dialogue; I am also tired of people who go nuts if a bad person reveals that badness as a necessary part of a well-told story. The example that comes to mind is the fact that Christian book stores refused to sell Orson Bean’s Mail For Mikey, a story of an unregenerate alcoholic who is transformed and redeemed through the efforts of his AA mentor, because early in the book the bad character uttered the F word a couple of times. Without it, he would have been a plastic character, like a Kirk Cameron role. With it, we saw the change in his life later. Jesus supped with harlots, publicans and sinners, because they were the ones who needed His forgiveness. Today’s Christians avoid contact with the underside so that they can avoid getting dirty- and bad Christian fillums are the result.