Tag: Albert Einstein

Ron Howard Directing the New Han Solo Film: Why hating Donald Trump is toxic for people in the entertainment industry

There is no way I couldn’t do it because it was only the biggest news story of the week—bigger than Donald Trump’s latest speech, bigger than the latest terrorist threat in Europe—it was so big that it actually led the headlines for three solid days worldwide.  The new Han Solo Star Wars movie production fired its two directors—whom I liked—Phil Lord and Christopher Miller with just three weeks left on the schedule and a summer of re-shoots still needing completion.  Obviously, I have designated myself as a Star Wars fan and out of all the characters in that fantasy sci-fi series Han Solo is my absolutely favorite character.  So even though there are thousands of other topics I might otherwise discuss—I must cover this issue by default of its cultural importance—because as I’ve said many times, Star Wars is not just a movie.  For many people it is a nearly religious event with tremendous cultural ramifications.  And yes, this was big news to a lot of people—and to the film industry as a whole.  My first inclination was optimism for reasons that I’ll describe because it tells me that Kathy Kennedy has her arms around these Star Wars movies—she understands what needs to be done and she isn’t afraid to do it—and I respect that.  Her pick for the next director couldn’t have been better—Ron Howard fresh off the Genius National Geographic drama about Albert Einstein.

I understand now that it was the kid playing the young Han Solo who actually started the process, Alden Ehrenreich.  He apparently was concerned that the directors known for their comedy in films like 21 Jump Street were not taking the picture to a place it needed to go and he spoke to people about it.  His instincts were correct, Han Solo is serious business even though there is comedy that surrounds a character like that—it’s a very fine line.  After Ehrenreich stated his concerns the word got back to Kathy Kennedy who took a look at the dailies and the film just wasn’t working.  It’s not necessarily the fault of Lord and Miller, but if they weren’t getting that fine line—then they needed to be fired.

Additionally, and this is something I don’t think any of them would admit, I noticed that both Miller and Lord were openly protesting Donald Trump and were members of this new Hollywood “resistance” which happens to be the same name of the group that works against the Empire in the new Star Wars films—and this was making Disney and Kathy Kennedy nervous.  The Han Solo film went into production in February of this year and I just happened to be in London at the same time so I was seeing news that wasn’t so available in the United States and I was very concerned that these new Star Wars directors were so openly against Trump and were fully supporting demonstrations in the streets of London.  There is no question that some of that radicalism was finding its way into the new Star Wars movie—where it clearly didn’t belong.  By pissing off half the country in America with political activism in a Star Wars film it would certainly take a hit at the box office and the franchise led by Kennedy these days can’t afford something like that, directly or indirectly.  It was so bad that I actually Tweeted the kids to knock it off—they needed to keep their eyes on the big picture.

Just this week Johnny Depp effectively ended his career when he stated that he thought that a modern actor should assassinate Donald Trump—he was speaking to a group in England where that kind of talk is quite popular these days and he forgot really how far his statements might go—and once it hit the American media it was too late for him.  Depp’s latest Pirates of the Caribbean film had done decent business and if he had kept his mouth shut, he might have recovered as an actor.  His recent divorce and difficulties on the set of Dead Men Tell No Tales have flagged him as a has been that can’t deliver at the box office.  His money was over extended and he really needed to just ride the wave of Pirates and actually hope for another one to pull him out of this slump. But now—he’s toxic. Like it or not, Trump is president and many people are having a positive experience because of it—and they don’t want to hear a bunch of spoiled brat actors and directors taking shots at their president in movies they pay to see. It’s just not good business.  I think Johnny Depp—as much as I like him as an actor—just killed his career forever.  He’ll never recover. He literally just went from riches to rags—because with his financial problems he needed to stay on top to get large pay checks and he just killed that opportunity.

Although I was critical of the Genius show on the National Geographic Channel, Ron Howard did a great job as he always does directing it.  He is one of the top filmmakers in the world clearly functioning from a different place—and when it was announced that Lucasfilm had hired him to replace Lord and Miller I was very happy about it.  Ron Howard knew how to keep the modern politics out of his projects just like many older directors could. For instance, I never knew whether or not George Lucas or Steven Spielberg were conservatives or liberals in the 80s.  When Ronald Reagan invited them to the White House they went and took pictures and they certainly didn’t protest in politics.  If Return of the Jedi had references to the Vietnam War in it sympathetic to the Vietnamese—I couldn’t tell by watching the product.

I was quite shocked to find in the 90s that Spielberg and Lucas gave money to the Clintons and were becoming more active within the Democratic Party—and as much as I liked them—I thought differently about them since then.  No longer did I rush out and see their movies because they had shown themselves to be against conservative positions—and honestly they never recovered their former positions culturally because of it.  However, Ron Howard has never lost that and is the closest thing we have in Hollywood to a good traditional director and actor who established his roots on the Andy Griffin Show.  He knows how to walk that fine line so that people can enjoy a project of his without thinking about the modern politics of the moment—because ten to twenty years from now—you still want the film to be relevant.

For this Han Solo movie to have the kind of appeal that Disney needs out of it they really need to pull off something special and it’s a credit to Kathy Kennedy that she took action before it was too late.  Ron Howard will know what to do and I’m relieved for it.  The world is changing and that radicalism that Hollywood has embraced cannot find its way into something that needs to stay relevant well into the future.  By the time this Han Solo movie is released in May of 2018 we will be living in a different world–largely shaped by Donald Trump’s presidency—and a lot of people will be supportive of him.  They don’t want to see a movie made by people who openly hate him and have filled their Twitter pages with disparaging Trump remarks.  They’ll want to go to the darkened theater and enjoy a new Star Wars movie without politics trying to shape their opinions—and Ron Howard knows how to do that.  After all, it wasn’t Howard’s fault that I liked Albert Einstein less after his Genius series.  It was to Howard’s credit that I was able to get to know Einstein much better than ever before.  As an artist he just presented the facts—he didn’t tell me how to feel—and that is the difference between a great director and people who are just average.  That is why hiring Howard to direct the Han Solo movie will prove to be so brilliant—and I’m glad the production had the courage to do it—before it was too late.

Rich Hoffman

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The Failure of Albert Einstein: Trump’s first 100 days as President

The most telling indicator of Trump’s first 100 days isn’t all the executive orders that he’s undone from the Obama era to take the chains away from American enterprise, or the unraveling around the world of the weak Obama foreign policy which the White House is facing down squarely on all fronts, but it’s in the fact that for the first time ever the Dow Jones spiked above 21,000 for a bit and is actually closing close to that mark. Money is flowing and optimism is high in such a brief period of time.  It has provided a clear window into what the future of America can look like. And for the first time that I’ve ever seen, the Democrats sound like old archaic socialists from some third world country that have no idea how economies work and that is largely due to the contrast they have with Donald Trump.

Wall Street is not a villainous enterprise. It should be remembered that when the World Trade Center was attacked—the goal was to bring down American capitalism because the rest of the world doesn’t have anything like it.  Enemies of America know that the way to beat us is to take away our financial means, and Democrats are the party intent to conduct that objective on behalf of the world.  I was surprised to learn some things new in the National Geographic series, Genius which was about the life of Albert Einstein because in it knowingly or unknowingly the Hollywood left and the progressive objectives of National Geographic revealed a lot about themselves in making Einstein their version of Jesus. In the beginning of the first episode Einstein is having sex with a woman with her back pressed against a chalkboard where he has some complicated equations written—which end up on her back.  After sex he casually wipes away the dust and rewrites them carefully while asking the girl to move in with him and his wife.  She refuses as she should where Einstein then gives a small lecture about monogamy not being natural.  Later, as the Nazis rise to power Einstein as a much younger man renounces his German citizenship to say that he is a man of the world and that Germany is full of temporary nationalists.  Even later his businessman father chastises the young, dreamy Einstein for not being focused on making a living where the two argue about the nature of capitalism for which Ron Howard clearly takes the side of the communist leaning Einstein.  The hopeful disguise is that the political left hopes through the lens of “genius” that viewers will be enchanted toward progressivism—after all, everyone knows that Albert Einstein was a “genius.”  Who could argue otherwise?

But after watching him more under the fine direction of Ron Howard was that Einstein was a bit of a little bitch complaining about everything and seeking for ways to daydream rather than do anything productive. Yes, the results of his daydreams was quite good and he advanced civilization—but he was quirky at best and hardly a fine example of human specimen.  Being smart doesn’t necessarily make a person good—it just makes them useful.  That was my takeaway from the National Geographic show about Albert Einstein—was that he was kind of a little bit of a bitch that you put up with because he did one thing really well—and that was articulate the realm of physics.  But he hardly had the keys to a constructive civilization or the understanding of transitory concerns for which we all live.  It’s not enough to only take the long view on things, but we must have both—the ability to see way over the horizon while we work in the here and now.  As Einstein’s wife said to him after his friend was assassinated by extremists of the rising Nazi party—“don’t hide in your work—you need to grieve.”  It doesn’t make a person great to hide in his genius and think about only big problems without doing the things in the here and now.  If that were the definition of greatness countless video game players who hide in their online activities would be considered “great” people instead of escapists unable to deal with reality.  But that is the problem of the political left, they worship people like Einstein without considering the faults of his compulsive desire to hide from the here and now by thinking about the infinite.  Just a few sentences prior Einstein’s wife addressed her husband’s infidelity for which he offered no apology—and she just accepted it the way most liberals do—as something that just happens.

These are the people who have been critical of Donald Trump—people who make movies about Albert Einstein on the very progressive National Geographic Channel and are functioning from a value system hiding out of reality—which is why they don’t understand money or the value of it. Money is a measure of morality in the value of something.  If something is worth a lot of money it’s because its value is desired by many.  Under that lens, the Wall Street stock markets are a measure of our economic horsepower which translates into many other good things which trickle off it.  Einstein might have figured out the theory of relativity, but the value of human achievement was clearly something that eluded him because he was fundamentally as a person detached from the value of such things.  He viewed such things as transitory—whereas they are mini miracles.  For instance—the planet Saturn never built a car.  The mechanisms of the universe may do many cool things across the mysteries of space and time—but with all the vast intelligence contained within it—the universe never invented an eraser to wipe away the chalk found on the back of Einstein’s sex partner.

A progressive would argue that an eraser only has value in the realm of human thought—but if you consider for a moment the value of that thought—isn’t it grander than the power of a black hole, or a quasar? Isn’t it a human mind who can figure out how to build a planet if they could gather up the proper resources as opposed to a bunch of forces that collide to form everything we see—would do so and perhaps even improve on the design of a “plant.”  How do we know that in the end of the quantum physics tunnel that it’s not a human mind that is steering everything—after all—we do typically associate our God figures as being recognizably human.

The New York Stock Exchange is a measure of human thought because the money that is produced by it through investments indicates the value of human concepts by way of invention and commerce. And under Trump that thought is expanding which is a miracle in itself and the greatest thing I’ve seen happen in Trump’s first 100 days as president of the United States.  Trump is beyond the nationalism that Hitler represented and Einstein feared so much—he is beyond even the universal accidents that seem to be happening all over the place in space—because Trump represents a step in human evolution that is directly seen emerging in the increased value of the American stock exchanges—the optimism of the pent-up potential of the human race.  That potential has eluded all societies for millions of years and under Trump it is emerging at a rapid pace—and expanding in ways that would have completely mystified Albert Einstein and his progressive subjects committed to a philosophy that died away with Immanuel Kant.  And Trump is doing it not because he himself is a great man—but because he knows enough to take away the limits to human potential and that along is a massive accomplishment of boundless value.  That concept all by itself is more important than any legislation that could have been created because laws do not make our society great.  Human invention through thought does.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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