Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Hollywood Revolution: Conservative Spinoffs
Proceeding from Gary’s revolution (let’s be sure to pin it all on him and Titus, if there’s trouble), this should be a fun and hopefully productive prompt. What is a film or TV show premise that you had high hopes for but was spoiled by leftism or by any heavy-handed propaganda?
As you know, no challenge is so daunting as a blank slate. “Hey, you should make a conservative film!” Well, that’s … not helpful. We can’t all be script writers. But let’s at least attempt to get the ball rolling with some ideas.
The goal is not to come up with overtly political stories. Rather, it’s to present familiar tales in ways more amenable to the Right’s values.
For example, maybe you enjoy grandiose disaster movies and you just want one without the theme of climate change.
Perhaps you would like a spacefaring story that doesn’t claim we had to leave Earth because humanity stinks and we ruin everything. Maybe curiosity and ambition are reasons enough to search the stars.
Or you might want a romance in which characters don’t jump into bed just because they enjoyed a day together.
The more specific you can be, the better. Name a film or two that had great but wasted potential. Name a show that started out well but fell apart when the usual bunch took over in later seasons. What stories are worth retelling … only without the nonsense this time?
Published in Entertainment
While we are on the subject, recommendations for books and lectures about script writing would not go amiss. Most aspiring writers on Ricochet seem to approach stories more from the perspective of novelists.
Star Wars: Episode VIII.
Batman v. Superman.
The Andy Griffith Show.
Gotham.
“By the Dawn’s Early Light”. In the Arizona desert, the Federal government is building the world’s largest solar generating station, an enormous gold-plated reflector that supposed to focus intense sunlight on a vast field of tombstone-shaped radiators that generate steam to run turbines. But one night before the project opens, due to shoddy, third-rate supervision and engineering, the suspension cables snap and the reflector falls to the ground. Now, with daylight only hours away, the reflector is poised to incinerate much of Phoenix once the sun rises. A FEMA whistleblower, Dwayne Johnson, his sidekick Kevin Hart, and scientist Gal Gadot of the Israeli Energy Agency were there to celebrate the grand opening. Now, they have to destroy it at once. They have to fight not only time, but fanatical administrators who’ve dedicated their careers to SunDesert One and would rather lose thousands of people than their golden dream.
I want to see a show about a group of brave young doctors who actually follow the rules and save lives anyway.
@aaron miller nice prompt…
“Ballers” on HBO became way to “woke”.
“Juno” had conservative themes and Hollywood didn’t even recognize it. Why didn’t she just have an abortion?
A Wrinkle in Time is an obvious kids one that was greatly looked forward to and utterly wrecked.
The tv show Sirens could have been a dark, modern twist on Hans Christian Andersen’s premise of mermaids as soul-less monsters struggling with their basic nature and fighting to reject it, but got very weird with modern sexual proclivities (three-somes, bisexuality) and environmental propaganda. I stopped watching it, so don’t know how far it went.
Most of the rest of what I watch are procedural serial dramas, so not much there. Chicago Justice was a very conservative Law type show that got canned after the first season. I was very disappointed.
I’ve read quite a few books I’d love to see as movies that Hollywood would wreck. I wanted the rest of the Narnia books done, but they were abandoned. In my view, not for good cause. The criticisms against DT were due to market saturation of a pacing technique common in video games that probably originated with DT.
I know I have more, but can’t think of them just now.
When “Battlestar Galactica” (a show that back in the 70s had overtly religious–and Mormon–themes) became an indictment on America, George Bush, and the Iraq war, I quit watching.
Oh… Outlanders is virtue signaling on anachronisms, making Clara even too forward thinking for 1940 – 60s England. It isn’t yet enough for me to shut off, but it really is quite rich for someone who has spent a great deal of time in and pining for the past to be so judgemental about it.
Or, how about a movie specifically about climate change:
2019: Scientists believe they have conclusively discovered the inconvenient truth: if we don’t change our ways in 12 years, the earth as we know it will be gone. These brave scientists, joined by Hollywood, the UN, large corporations, the media and other progressives start to spread the alarm and propose a Green New Deal. Political clashes and hysteria ensue reaching a fever pitch and it looks like civilization as we know it will have to be taken down and rebuilt for a sustainable future. Everything will be rationed and no cows allowed. But a handful of rebel scientists supported by a small but plucky group of “evil” conservatives come together to block any significant reforms. The sense of doom is palpable. In a last ditch effort, a group of environmentalists decides to go deep underground and establish a self-sustaining colony to ensure the human race survives the coming apocalypse. They live there for 25 years, strictly rationing the number of children allowed to be born to ensure only replacement levels. A young couple falls in love and she inadvertently gets pregnant. She refuses to abort the baby, and they are exiled to the surface. They emerge determined to meet their gruesome fate together. When they step out onto the surface, they are greeted with an unbelievable scene: green trees, puppy dogs and children playing under blue skies. In fact, everything looks pretty much the same as it did when they left but with iPhone XX and cute robots. They read the Wikipedia article on Environmental Alarmism and discover that it was a largely discredited theory promulgated by a revolutionary group who wanted to foment revolution. The last scene shows them looking up with their new baby at the monument to the brave “climate deniers” who saved civilization.
Any single solitary sitcom that added a baby or some snot nosed kid. When They do that, You know the end time is imminent.
Or if You see Ted McGinley lurking ’round the set.
I’ll just keep making stuff up. What the hell, it works for Kamala.
Seven Days in Lent
Angry demonstrations at the White House gates. Weak poll numbers. Congressional rebellion. President Daniel Clamp’s peace initiative with Russia gets him denounced as a traitor. Senators seek his impeachment. Over at the Pentagon, Col. Gibbs Casey (Chadwick Boseman) is arranging the schedule of his boss, Gen. J.M. Scott (Denzel Washington), the popular and idolized chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a public critic of the US-Russia peace effort. Scott is at the edge of sedition, filling stadiums with his denunciations of White House policy.
Col. Casey stumbles onto evidence that Scott is secretly collaborating with Congressional leaders to unconstitutionally depose and imprison Clamp during an inspection tour of a media control center. Supposedly a civil defense measure, Casey finds that its code name, “econcon”, stands for “Emergency Control of Conservatives”. He’s got less than a week to stop the overthrow of the presidency, no allies, no credibility for his story.
Aaron and Gary, this revolution is very possible, and it is absolutely needed. What’s stopping us?
You assert that a missing critical success factor is ideas for the script writers.
No. Any script writer can supply the plot ideas and write the characters and any composer/arranger can do the theme music, better than we ordinary people can. If you’ve been watching the present progressive Hollywood campaign, starting with Easy Rider, Mash, etc., the stereotypes are not particularly subtle, and you can re-use the same ones for fifty years. It’s like the Otto engine–coming up with the first one was the trick–and that’s been done.
What is needed right now is just execution. Do-ers, producers, directors, fund-raisers, aggressive activist lawyers (our own, pro-freedom Lawfare conspiracy to mine the legal harbors and sap their legalistic fortifications).
The reason I keep war gaming off-the-cuff, off-the-wall suggestions in the “You Say You Want a Revolution” series is I want to see some guts, some positive action. Of course they aren’t going to make it easy. I just got to a point where I was tired of always reading conservative whines of masochistic helplessness.
If it was Los Angles I could sympathize with the administrators and let them fry. But Phoenix? I still have hope for those folks in a still “pale red” leaning valley.
The Black Code
Black museum director and PBS host Myles Graff DeTyrone is a fixture of the Manhattan social scene, rich, famous, and all but worshipped as America’s foremost popularizer of the sciences. But all of that starts coming apart and crashing around him when he starts investigating a cryptic note from his grandfather, an early civil rights leader. The one legible word, written in Cyrillic–“chorny”–means black in Russian.
One of the earliest accusations thrown at the civil rights movement in the Fifties and Sixties was that it was a Communist-funded plot to disrupt America. To his growing horror, DeTyrone discovers that in fact, that’s correct–tens of millions of dollars were spent by the Russians to influence the 1968 presidential elections, defeating Nixon. If the proof still exists, it’s in a secret vault, a hundred feet below the Martin Luther King Jr Library in Atlanta.
He must know the truth. He must get inside that vault. But by risking the reputation of a sacred cause, DeTyrone is breaking the “Black code” that demands solidarity at all costs.
Timely, since one of my neighbors just covered his roof in solar panels. Now not just the people are flamers, but the birds and squirrels too! ;)
An eco-comedy, if your Fast & Furiously Hot fails.
A multi-ethnic group of friends who disbelieve in
global warming,climate change, the climate crisis, who have large families and support pro-natalist public policy, who support private property rights and the right to possess the effective means of self-defense finds its members slowly “changing” into their philosophical opposites in a sort of Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets Get Out!Boston Legal only Denny Crane and the ex-Marine lawyer are the good guys instead of targets of ridicule.
One reason for this conversation is that Ricochet doesn’t just include ordinary people. It includes people who have published novels, produced films, etc. I myself like to think that I could draft a script or novel, but I won’t claim to be a writer until I do.
Another reason is that all writers, whatever their motivations,inevitably infuse their works with assumptions and themes particular to their own worldviews and interests. People are commonly blind to such assumptions until the ideas are pointed out by contrary parties. Leftists, being culturally dominant in popular media, can avoid such conflict and so often remain unaware of their biases. Or, like me, they believe one’s own biases can be reasonable and important enough to maintain in expression despite the aggravation.
In short, most professional scriptwriters lean Left and we would do better to foster our own than attempt to persuade them to abandon their beliefs in their art. We need to make our own stories.
I would appreciate more examples like this, from everyone. You enjoyed the show, but not without annoying interruptions from undue stereotypes and silly ideas.
But I welcome fresh plot ideas, like Gary’s, as well. For bonus points, limit the scope to something amateur film makers could record on modest budgets, perhaps in their home towns. A story told in a house is a lot cheaper than a cross country marathon with awesome special effects and cameos of Washington, DC.
What would a Tennessee Williams play look like through a conservative lens? Jack Daniels would know.
Were you in on this thread? I confess that I don’t recall.
Challenge accepted!
I’d like shows set in the 21st century to actually be set in the 21st century. For example, the last episode of the Big Bang Theory, where Amy Farrah Fowler in her Nobel acceptance speech says “Thank you for the support and encouragement I received at every step of my career” instead of the tiresome “And to all your little girls out there, don’t let anyone tell you you can’t be a scientist”.
The Cancelled Show (30 mins, comedy series)
A comedy team that stepped over the PC line can’t get work anymore in New York. The montage behind the credits in the first minutes of the show see them return to their home town, a mid-sized city where nobody cares that they were sort-of, almost famous. Invited to perform at the college campus where they were once breakout stars, they’re booed off the stage by the woke crowd. The young woman who books the acts is disgusted at the audience’s behavior, and quits on the spot, fed up with the scene. She and the boys start their own comedy club in the backroom of a bar, determined to defy today’s dull conformity. Its online presence attracts other people “cancelled” from the media, resulting in hilarity and fearless fun. It’s Greg Gutfeld’s “Red Eye” meets “Seinfeld”, but in Indianapolis or Macon.
The reason I wrote the Comment you are responding to is this. I too want to see some guts, some positive action.
This is what I meant when I referred to ‘do-ers, producers, directors, fund-raisers, lawyer-warriors.’
Regarding the fact that they aren’t going to make it easy:
Regarding being tired of reading conservative whines of masochistic helplessness: I am VERY tired of reading conservative whines of masochistic helplessness. If I were a producer, director, script writer, fundraiser, or lawyer, I would produce, direct, write, raise, or litigate.
I can’t do any of those things, but
How about the GLoP movie?
A group of conservative thinkers gather to do a round table discussion podcast from one of their homes – patterned after an after diner conversation … so being terrible actors they decide to eat dinner first and do the podcast… One of the members is a controversial figure from a previous administration. A communist protest group (antifa for example) had learned of this podcast and barges into the home with guns – and keeps the group hostage… But as they talk things through they find unexpected common ground and dissatisfaction with the status quo. Drama unfolds as a stand off with friendly/sympathetic police ensues…
Pretty much all of them. NCIS has had a few episodes of propaganda over its 15 year run… Most memorably on the topic of illegal immigration. “The Closer” also had numerous episodes of propaganda, but on a variety of topics like domestic violence, prostitution, and immigration. “SuperGirl” went political in 2016, casting Lynda Carter as president of the United States (although she turned out to be an alien intruder in later seasons – so maybe it was more accurate than intended).
The worst offender by a long shot has to be “The Newsroom”… Aaron Sorkin’s HBO series inside a cable tv newsroom, that broadcast the news the way Aaron Sorkin wished the news had been broadcast – so the initial coverage of events like the deepwater rig explosion, fire and oil spill included the involvement of Halliburton, Etc. It deserves the award for most pointless political drama…
OK then, that makes sense. Let the writers write.
This part I didn’t get. We need writers fighting on our side. All the writers, gaffers, best boys, etc. are currently working for them.
That’s the point I was trying to make. We need execution. Hire our own scriptwriters. We already have the ideas. Our ideas even have a strategic strength: they are true, and the ideas of the Hollywood proggies are all pure romantic-sounding lies. If some gaffer, prop person, or assistant executive producer doesn’t understand the flaws in Marxist facts and logic, call me and I will explain it during his or her lunch break. But I don’t think there is much marginal return to my labor. Like any well-insured husband, I’d be worth more to the cause dead.
I had high hopes that Handmaid’s Tale would explore the theme of how modern feminism’s obsession with female careerism and dumping kids in daycare would lead down some pretty dark paths.
First, let me say that anytime you can blame @titustechera, do so.
A movie that had a lot of potential, but just didn’t make it was Hancock. The concept of an alcoholic superhero who has all sorts of power, but doesn’t use it well, and has a missing past is great. Unfortunately, their eventual explanation of his powers was a non-explanation and where it went from there was just bad. I watched the extras, but it didn’t look like they left anything on the cutting room floor that would have made it a better movie.
I would love to see a better version of that.