Hollywood And The War ~ The Shootout
A Brokeback Mountain Of Lies
A Brokeback mountain of lies
By Andrew Breitbart
(L.A. Times Shootout on Hollywood & The War )
“I haven’t the slightest doubt that Andrew feels Hollywood should be working 24/7 on stemming the Islamic tide threatening to overwhelm all that’s white and Christian…â€
David, we’ve never met, yet in yesterday’s post you painted me as a white supremacist. And now I’m supposed to chat up Barbra Streisand’s tax returns and play connect the dots with a whirligig of old-time film titles?
Perhaps a reread of my last post to you is in order: I praise not “The Birth of a Nation†but “Supberbad.â€
I know your biracial homosexual bio perfecta trumps my humble multiculti checklist, but I did have a bitchin’ Bar Mitzvah; I adore my Latina sister (we’re both adopted); and I chose to go to college in New Orleans because I really liked Lisa Bonet in “Angel Heart.†Isn’t that enough not to have an embroidered scarlet KKK on my hooded sweatshirt?
It’s not just you, David.
I think you represent the majority in Hollywood. The type that green-lighted a troika of Matthew Shepherd movies after he was senselessly killed because it affirmed their gut feeling that a gay young man living in backward America is destined for death at the hands of hateful ultraconservatives. A street in West Hollywood still stands in his name despite ABC News reporting the story false: He was killed by crazed meth addicts for drugs and money — not because he was gay. Isn’t that tragic enough?
Yet Shepherd is still the icon of gay victims’ rights, and the mistaken story of his “fate†soon thereafter befell Jake Gyllenhaal’s character in “Brokeback Mountain.†The Oscar statuette stands as the exclamation point. Victimhood wears like a cashmere sweater in Hollywood, and the mistaken story line of red-state Americans as murderous homophobes is now a timeless artistic truth.
Yet no L.A.-based gay rights group or concerned gay actor readies a film illustrating exactly how Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made his 70-million strong country “gay free.†In the studio system these days, only white, conservative Christian Americans get that treatment. Maybe Tony Kushner doesn’t want the headache of a fatwa.
Yet despite all of this, you really got me thinking. About race, sexual identity, victim politics, Hollywood values — and even time travel. If I could go back in time, I would go back to your childhood to beat up the boys who beat you up as you started grappling with your homosexuality. I’d go into your past to erase the “hate crimes†that now cause you to blame political conservatism for your deepest wounds. I want to breach the time/space continuum to find out what those young hoodlums were thinking when they went after you. My suspicion is none of them had ever read F.A. Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom,†(no, that’s not Salma’s father) or Russell Kirk’s “The Conservative Mind.â€
Let’s get Hollywood to option the rights to the story: It’s got it all — race, violence, sexual identity, science-fiction and a character Ang Lee could really sink his teeth into. Think “Boys Don’t Cry†meets “Back to the Future.†And at the end of the film, it’s 2014 and I see that you and your partner have been nabbed by Chomsky-quoting al Qaeda fanatics who are getting ready to behead you in an abandoned auto factory in Michigan for the sin of brunching in Dearborn.
But the moment before they chop your heads off — in the nick of time (just like in the Republicans’ favorite show, “24,†which we are grateful you guys allowed us to have) — the good guys, in this case the U.S. Marines, bust through the doors to save you both. At this point, I will have drafted a powerful soliloquy for your character. It’ll be a cinematic epiphany in which you show remorse for tilting at white, straight and conservative windmills — to which you and Hollywood almost exclusively blame for all that is wrong in the world.
We can run it through your agent or mine.
Andrew Breitbart is co-author of “Hollywood, Interrupted: Insanity Chic in Babylon — The Case Against Celebrity;†a longtime editor at the Drudge Report (he speaks neither on behalf of Drudge or his report) and co-creator of the Huffington Post. He also publishes the news aggregation site Breitbart.com and the best-of-news video and audio site Breitbart.tv
October 5th, 2007 at 7:26 am
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