Andrew Breitbart thinks Hollywood elected Barack Obama and that conservative should invest in their own version of Hollywood-style propaganda.
The millionaires and billionaires who feed the conservative think tanks and underwrite those who run for office need to join their high-rolling liberal brethren like Barry Diller and David Geffen and realize their political dollars are better spent making movies and nurturing the culture.My biggest fear is that later this week I will be among the legions at CPAC rearranging the furniture. Instead, the conservative movement needs to think in revolutionary terms.
And the revolution must begin in Hollywood.
I respectfully disagree.
Let's understand something important--the Academy Awards is essentially a fig leaf for failure. Brokeback Mountain had liberal rose petals strewn in its path, but only managed to gross 83 million domestically. Its message failed in the market. The Incredibles, an entertaining animated feature with a conservative message grossed 261 million domestically. More recently, Gran Torino is at 130 million domestically (so far). Milk, which was released at about the same time, has a 28 million domestic gross.
Those are people voting with their wallets--a much better indication about how people feel about a message than casually tuning in on a TV wasteland night like Sunday and seeing what the swells are wearing.
We've just had four years of anti-Iraq war movies that flew off the Hollywood aircraft carrier and promptly went into the it did much the same. Sermons don't sell, whether they are right or left-wing sermons. Nikki Finke is THE pipeline for news about Hollywood, and she's not talking about how Hollywood liberals are sitting around drinking Martinis and chuckling about how they have the world by the tale. As she described the run-up to the Oscars, the words that stuck in my mind were "flop-sweat". The Academy Awards has had multiple left-wing bird strikes and its going down. Everyone is waiting for the overnights with baited breath.
These are not people to emulate. Obama won because the Democrats were fired up and the Republicans were demoralized, disorganized and distrusted, not because Oprah said people should vote for him--that's bad history and a bad set of facts on which to build a political comeback strategy.
