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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
I would humbly suggest that Code Black would be a better title.
Brain implants calibrated for increases in concentration, pain blocking, etc. lead to addiction/other wierd behaviors. Poss. they can kill the brain by remote.
Sounds like an it could be an adaptation of Terminal Man by Micheal Crichton (1972)
Hilliard, OH (a cable-style streamer that’s cultish, comic, ironic and eerie) is about a real life museum of television, located in a small Ohio suburb. The museum manager lives in a house behind the modest-looking premises. At night, the sets light up with the spirits of long vanished Americans who comment on real life, and each other (think of the jars of presidential heads in Futurama).
The Lady Decides (Made for Ricochet’s OWN Women’s Lifetime Network)
It’s not a mansion, but it’s one of the nicest lakeside houses in a country retreat. Clare Boothe Luce–pioneering Thirties author, conservative columnist, Forties Congresswoman and in the Fifties, our first female ambassador–is spending the last days of summer 1986, aware that it’s likely to be her last, that she’ll soon die. Old friends come by, and old memories are stirred by a phonograph record brought by a friend, of a rousing, funny speech of Clare’s at the Republican Convention of 1944. A young reporter, a woman from Time magazine, is totally clueless about this one-time tigress who ruled her husband’s Time and Life magazine empire. Clare is tartly amused, but softens and brings her up to date on her life, what she’s seen, and why her version of feminism is so at odds with the version that’s evolved by then.
This is actually not a high budget story; you need a nice waterside home, and if your community doesn’t have one, something that’s impressive but not the Taj Mahal will do just fine. Like Downton Abbey, only your exteriors need to be filmed there, anyway. It’s mostly actors in “old” makeup talking, to introduce them decades younger, coming to the house to cajole or confront her. Luce had an amazing life, and what’s most amazing is today’s feminists have totally disowned and forgotten her.
How about a story where a young attractive woman who is a successful Chicago attorney goes back to her hometown for the holidays and discovers her ex-boyfriend is about to move most of the town manufacturing jobs to Communist China? The spark is still there but she goes all MAGA on him, leading the crusade to save American jobs.
If you want to capture suburban women, you have to go full Hallmark.
I always thought The Good Wife petered out at the end.
Some related, but somewhat random, thoughts and observations:
On the contrary, you provide the marginal return we’re all waiting for: you’re energized and understand the problem. You’re a spark plug, a potential activist: alive, you’re worth a million bucks to the movement.
Here’s the deal with Hollywood: we don’t have an issue with gaffers (electricians), grips (big tough guys who lift stuff), drivers, guards, or catering. We don’t have an issue with the camera crew, whose leader escaped from Ukraine in 1983. Technicians are fairly conservative. Even the actors are a mixed bunch: don’t forget, it’s a business built on looks, which can come from anywhere. Those tall, corn-fed blondes grew up in some conservative places and some liberal ones.
The writers are leftist. Directors and writers hate each other, so the directors will sometimes take conservative positions just to keep the aggravation going.
The financiers are not leftists. Almost all could be classified as social liberals, but that’s not due to Hollywood; that’s due to the increasing tendency for America’s rich to support woke causes that won’t cost them money directly.
Insofar as TV concepts ruined by left wing execution, so many choices, so little space.
Seated next to this retired TV critic/professor, my wife hears about all of them, from lines of dialogue to big picture full-on lectures. She had an elderly aunt who used to tell the same few stories over and over, including one about the culinary value of chicken fat, or schmaltz. As I grow older, my “schmaltz story” is how Law & Order went from savvy mysteries to left wing polemics around the time the writers were traumatized by the 2000 election.
Here are three others which really nettle.
There are also countless minor quibbles about individual characters and plot points which really would have worked much better another way. For instance, in David Milch’s brilliant Deadwood, the character George Hearst was an evil villain. Historically, not so. I know evil businessmen are a prime time staple, but David Milch is better than that. That family’s had enough bad press, and created much along the way, but George was a brilliant mining genius and … oh, maybe that’s why Hollywood gave him the shaft.
Okay, one more. The Americans. Again, a well produced show, but not the great American cold war spy drama, which is yet to be told. The Soviets did have a special school to train spies in how to be American, and they did plant sleeper agents here for decades. That much is true, and kind of funny if you think about exam week in spy school. True or false, Mel Allen announced Dodger games? What are Barbie’s hollow parts? What’s the difference between Fats Domino and Chubby Checker? But you know what I’d like for a really good story twist? Show us the Soviet sleeper agents left over after 1989, and make one a Presidential candidate’s spouse. That’s what the great espionage author Charles McCarry did in Lucky Bastard, and I think it would make a wonderful and controversial television adaptation if Netflix, Amazon, or Epix would dare. Which they probably wouldn’t.
“HAVE A GORILLA.”
No thanks, trying to cut back.
But they lost me when they couldn’t quite make the translation to the realities of American politics. The episode that did it was the nationwide teacher’s strike. You can pull that off in the UK but not in the States. There are 13.5K individual school districts in the states, each with their own contracts for teachers. A nationwide strike would fall like a, uh… er… house of cards.
I don’t think I saw that one.
There’s a tale to be told about the hastily made mid-series revisions on “The Untouchables” (1959-63), once ballyhooed and condemned as the most violent show on TV, which in truth it probably was. Desi Arnaz was getting the complaints on all sides, and Desilu wilted a little.
Look at an early episode. Every opening features violence, often unusually personal, even sadistic. Par for the course today; not in 1959, outside of Mickey Spillane. Every show ends in a shootout. The show had a unique moody look, often filmed “night for night”–real darkness, which is a pain, production wise, and raises costs.
After the networks got raked over the coals in Congress, Desilu didn’t neuter the show, but they made some careful trims. The openings dropped the cruel, Tarantino-esque shock effect. Shootouts were briefer. Women were brought in as social workers to express concern for gangsters’ children. More shows were set in daytime.
Superficial graphics changes had a subtle effect. The background behind the credits was now newspaper headlines, and each episode opened, still-framed, on the pages of a book, “The Depression, 1929-36”, as if to say, this isn’t just a bunch of thugs; this is US history.
I want to say The Simpsons, but I think its politicking is more a symptom of the lack of ideas and talent than anything else.
Star Trek has always had a lean to the left, at least in comparison to the eras in which it was created, but Discovery was a hot mess, in large part because it tried to substitute wokeness for good writing. Like many people that know about Trek, but don’t know Trek, the writers thought that Trek was supposed to be a lefty message show, as opposed to The Twilight Zone On a Spaceship.
I’m not really hip to many shows and movies, especially these days, but I do know that a lot of video games have caught the bug too. The Wolfenstein series went from a generic shooter about shooting Nazis to SJW message shooter games about shooting Nazis. The Civilization series also has gone woke with the latest game; where the loading screens and encyclopedia entries in Civ V have important and/or relevant historical quotes from philosophers, leaders, inventors, and scientists, all narrated by Morgan Sheppard, in Civ VI there are pithy, barely-related, and/or comedic quotes from actors, modern politicians, comedians, and other nobodies, narrated by Sean Bean (who not only lacks the gravitas and dignity of Sheppard’s performance, but also can’t pronounce some of the stuff). This on top of the global warming events in the recent updates, or the attempted balance of male and female in civilization leaders (leading to situations like Catherine de’Medici being France’s representative). And all that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Were you somehow allowed to watch it, Gary?
The nun made it clear we weren’t to watch on account of excessive violence.
[Same nun periodically took 6th graders into closet; SFX SLAPPING SOUNDS; student emerges with red finger marks on face; Sister follows, rolling down sleeves of her black habit.]
So the book I want to see as a movie is called Dawn of Wonder. It is a fantasy coming-of-age story about a boy who’s female best-friend was kidnapped from her small village by slavers intent on using her for a special sacrifice that civilization practices.
In his desire to prevent others from meeting her fate, he seeks skills to help protect people and overcomes fears born from his own personal traumas, all while making new friends, pulling pranks, exploring where he shouldn’t, and building relationships with his mentors and teachers.
It’s a great book. And some of the imagery in the book could translate easily to the big screen (or even as a limited series for tv).
I went to Catholic school in first grade, the year John XXIII was elected Pope. After that, not until high school, where the nuns exclusively beat up girls. My parents were honest-to-goodness Catholics, not Catholic Lite, but they didn’t care much about TV violence. In NYC at that time, cops-vs.-mob action was an intramural sport. If our parish, St. Luke’s R.C. Church had come down too hard on the mafia, weekly collections would have dropped off sharply.
There’s the problem. It ought to be about 50K individual school districts.
Make a series about that.
Yes! Wholeheartedly agree.
Oh, you meant that kind of execution…
I find it interesting that films and Tv can spend millions on advisors for space, physics, medical so they can get the technical aspects of those professions realistic but can’t be bothered to visit clergy to get any aspect of Christianity or Catholic priests even remotely correct.
You’re assuming they are interested in getting that right.
The usual problem with movie and TV clergy isn’t hostility, but ignorance and sappy cliches. Nuns always speak in “god talk”, a wondrous vapor of happiness, providence, and rainbows. BTW, don’t think for a minute that Judaism gets any more of an in depth treatment.
Just to be completely accurate, film/TV in the aggregate may approach the million dollar mark for consultants over time, but outside series TV consultants need to spend years working themselves up inside the writing and producing staff ranks to match what other writers earn. Consultants IMHO are historically underpaid, relative to how much they raise the quality of the shows. TV needs to go back and use them again as they did in the realistic 1990’s, and in doing so go back to the traditional law enforcement and prosecutor franchises where the rooting interest is with the true good guys.
As for priests, I don’t know if Blue Bloods uses a consultant, but the Stacy Keach character Cardinal Kearns seems 100% human and real to me. He’s a personal friend of PC Frank Reagan, and they talk like real male friends with jobs which can strain the friendship. I also think the Reagans’ religious practices reflect the well on Catholicism. The whole family says grace together before every Sunday dinner in every episode; ceremonial/sacramental occasions can naturally take a story into church; and several characters strive for ethical decision making, especially Tom Selleck’s. There’s no gratuitously shoehorned dialogue of a religious nature, so the show is welcoming to all. For a more directly religious high quality TV drama, try the 1991 Australian show Brides of Christ if you have a PAL compatible DVD player or can find it streaming online someplace.
[Catholics who yearn for priests who don’t come off as phony and sanctimonious on TV can at least offer thanks that real life DC Cardinals McCarrick and Wuerl are no long regular holiday visitors on Fox News Sunday.]
Without endorsing her political noise, I must praise Meryl Streep for her spot on portrayal of a traditional Sister of Charity in the period film drama Doubt. I couldn’t tell you whether writer John Patrick Shanley used consultants or relied on his personal experience in a Catholic high school to form his characters, but he deserves high praise along with his Pulitzer Prize and Tony for his work. As for the character of Father Flynn, following Shanley’s example I’ll leave the judgement to the audience.
Films that conservatives could make:
Take another shot at Bonfire of the Vanities, I believe it was the most successful popular novel after The Godfather and is the perfect examination race hustling, wealth inequality and left wing nonsense written. Future generations will look at the affirmative action Nobel Prize given to Toni Morrison when Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer were still available and wonder what we were thinking.
I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I think an updated version of The Searchers, showing just why the Comanches had to be exterminated for civilization to survive, would be shocking to our indigenous loving public.
In watching a couple of Polish movie trailers recently, I got the impression that they have the same problem over there.
What do you think of the filmabilty of I am Charlotte Simmons?
Only read a chapter before I got sidetracked – I should go back to it. Thanks for the reminder.
Was Once an Eagle ever adapted? Talk about famous…