Tag: Hollywood

The Will Smith Hit: “Welcome to Earth” Part II

After hitting Chris Rock at the Academy Awards, the only thing Will Smith did wrong was apologize for doing it. The world needed some old-fashioned face-to-face combat. I thought it was a little wimpy to slap Chris Rock for making fun of his wife with an off-color joke about G.I. Jane part II because she had shaved her head due to an illness. A good punch would have been better, but in our overly legalized world of lawyer parasites, the difference between an open hand and a closed fist is a premeditation assault that indicates an intent to inflict harm. So, a slap it was, and it was good for the soul of America to see on what is supposed to be the biggest entertainment show on earth. However, ratings have been down. Hollywood has moved a long way away from Main Street, USA, thinking they could drag everyone with them as they bent the knee to China and a new middle-class there of over a billion people. I’ve been following this kind of thing for a long time. For many years, I really wanted nothing more in life than to make movies in Hollywood. So I know it from behind the curtain more than most do. As it turned out for me, I was way too conservative for the Hollywood of the 90s and the early 2000s. I would have fit in a lot more during the 70s and 80s, but Hollywood had gone woke way before the rest of the nation. America’s enemies targeted it for that very reason, and the attack always came from finance. Will Smith knew all that as he decided to go up on stage and hit Chris Rock. I didn’t just see the action, but many actions behind the move. It was a very interesting thing to do. 

Surprisingly many conservatives in the aftermath openly called for Will Smith to be arrested for assault. It was the standard law and order argument. How many young people now that they witnessed Will Smith hitting another human being on live television and repeatedly replayed on social media would now do something similar? A message had to be sent. That was the conservative rationalization. But as many know, I welcome this kind of thing. I would love to return to a world where we had duels in the streets over disagreements. And slaps in the face are harmless enough. What’s important is the protection of our individual sanctity, of our honor. Our integrity. And at face value, Will Smith protecting the honor of his wife, his woman, his family property was a great thing that many women yearn for, which was confirmed in polling taken after the incident. Despite what destructive woke culture says about men and women, the sexes are what they are, yearning for the same things they always have. Will Smith is no dummy; he has his finger on the pulse of what’s going on in the world. Despite being a great actor, he’s also a producer, and he knows the country’s temperature and where it’s going. Most good Hollywood types do, even if they deny it. They see the trends, and there is a tremendous hunger for American Main Street in the world. Not an America caving to global woke impediments. 

Meanwhile, down in paradise, Disney World, Florida, some radical employees took exception to the Ron DeSantis “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which doesn’t even say “gay” in it. But they were upset that there wasn’t going to be gay indoctrination of little children in public schools, and they were outraged, leaving Bob Chapek, the Disney CEO, with a heck of a pickle to be in. He couldn’t afford to have a massive employee walkout at the happiest place on earth. But he also must stand for what Disney is, a representation of Main Street USA. That is kind of the point of Magic Kingdom, after all. Guests going there don’t want to think about gay sex and rainbow flags. They want to see family values, the American dream, and good winning over evil. Of course, the enemies of America want to see all that brought down, so a small percentage of radical ESG score employees from Disney were attacking those aspects of the Disney product publicly, and it was having an impact on the brand. This is a fight that is happening everywhere. It is most notable in Disney because it’s a brand that interacts with so many Americans. But in general, it was present very much at the Academy Awards and Hollywood in general.  Americans have been turning away from Hollywood, and the people who make the movies know it. Aside from their feelings of abandonment that Main Street America has for the Hollywood product these days, as the realization over liberalism settles over them that America is a Trump-voting nation. Americans will never fall for progressivism when it is spelled out to them directly. So, what happens next? How does the entertainment industry continue on, especially if the China gamble doesn’t pan out as globalism fails everywhere? Main Street USA is still where the money is, and now Hollywood has alienated itself from them. 

Enter the hit by Will Smith against Chris Rock on national television, shocking the world. The incident may have been staged. It may have been pure outrage. But what it was, in essence, was a significant member of Hollywood trying to appeal to mainstream Main Street America and recognizing that the nation hasn’t changed at all from what it’s always been. Hollywood changed. Globalism changed. Finances changed, but people really haven’t, despite the efforts of many to change those people. Americans want to see their private property defended, women want to be protected by their men, and justice must be swift and sure. The way Will Smith marched up there on that stage was a call-back to hundreds of movies over the years where a good guy punished the bad guy, and Will Smith was playing that modern version of the “good guy.” It was very similar to when Will Smith punched the alien in the face in the movie Independence Day and said, “welcome to earth.” Hey, these guys aren’t stupid. They have their finger to the wind, seeing what’s coming. Trump is going to be re-elected. Globalism is failing everywhere. China is closing its markets more, not expanding them, and Hollywood knows it needs Main Street to live and survive. And more than that, Americans understand a duel in the street more than a bunch of sissy slapping passive-aggressive nonsense ran by corrupt governments and paid off judges. A man-to-man fight is much preferred, and if we returned to it, we’d have a much more honest society. That is how Main Street America feels, and ultimately, that’s what happened at the Academy Awards. It was a concession by them to what they’ve become and an olive branch to what they need to return to. Justice, Americans want justice. They don’t want excuses. They don’t want to surrender their life’s work to a mob of collectivists. There needs to be a point in life, and the fight against evil by the good is a goal worth pursuing. Will Smith obviously understands that and felt it was the time to do something to win people over because if he didn’t, Hollywood was headed for irrelevancy anyway. So why not do something? And he did.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

‘The Batman’ is an 11 out of 10: The root of all corruption comes from bad parenting

If you are thinking of seeing The Batman at the movie theater, waste no more time doing so. Just go do it. I think the new film in the Batman franchise is one of the best ever, and it’s a top 50 movie of all time, directed by Matt Reeves and acted by Robert Pattinson. Just talking about good movies; they just don’t make them much better than this one, at nearly 3 hours long. Technically it hits all the cylinders in a very satisfying way. The music is great, the cinematography, sound design, direction, acting, everything is fantastic. There is a love for this subject that obviously comes out of the filmmakers. They painstakingly put that love into every shot of the film, and it shows both behind the camera and in front of it. When you think of a movie that has been done so much, it is easy to be skeptical that anything substantial could come out of a new version of Batman. But this was clearly a fresh take on an idea that Warner Bros. has been building for nearly a century. And it culminated in this film. It reminded me of one of my favorite Dirty Harry films from back in the 70s called Magnum Force. It explores corruption on both sides of the law and why there is a need for good people to step in and fight for justice. But there is, of course, more depth to it than that, and that is why this film is an exceptional one with great artistic value for a culture like we have in our modern one in desperate need of clarity on the definitions for existence. There is big stuff in The Batman that is valuable on many levels, and for that reason, I can’t recommend it enough. I’d give it an 11 out of 10 stars. Go see it now!

I’d go further in scale in recommending this movie because there is an underlying element to it that says a lot about modern culture and its failures. This is the best Batman character I’ve ever seen in any form, comics, television show, or movie. At no point in the film does this Batman waiver in his resolution to fight for good and to fight for justice. He is never tempted or shoved over the edge, only to be redeemed later. He is solid throughout the entire film, and in the end, he becomes a great leader instead of a hiding recluse. Coming out of the Covid years, there is a lot that this film has to say about the state of our world. And this is not a Hollywood progressive offering of nonsense. It’s an honest story examining real human issues, and as Batman faces those issues, he is a solid pillar of virtue through the entire event. Apparently, they are planning to make three of these Batman movies, and if they put the kind of effort into the following two as they did this one, I can’t imagine what that will look like. The amount of work it took to make this The Batman movie is on a big scale that it would be hard to duplicate, ever. The focus on all the little details is overwhelming. This is Hollywood at its best. It’s just a shame that we can’t get more films like this from an industry that has turned so radically left politically. I would not say that this Batman film is political in the way of Republicans and Democrats, but it does explore in detail the cause of all corruption and gets into the weeds in a better way than even the best of the mobster films ever produced. In many ways, I kept thinking of Scarface from the 80s as a comparative film to what they pulled off with The Batman. 

Yet, the best part of The Batman is that it honestly explores the nature of evil and what leads to all corruption, and that is when the adults let kids down. Parents’ impact on children is a real, unexplored problem in our modern society. Governments have even attempted to replace the parents in society with government supervision, which has worsened the situation. We now have a culture in real life that has produced millions and millions of villains like the Riddler in this movie, the primary bad guy. But I found myself understanding the Riddler quite a lot.   Who could blame him for his anger when the world he sees is so corrupt, and all the parental figures in his life were robbed away from him? The constant theme in The Batman is the cost to young people when adults let them down. When dad runs off with a cheap whore. Or when the District Attorney spends the night in a risqué club instead of staying home with the kid’s doing cocaine with young women draped from his arms. When kingpin fathers manipulate the entire police force and have illegitimate children all over the place, leaving those kids to feel abandoned and broken as adults. The real villains in The Batman are the parents who fell short and left their children without something to hold on to, turning them into adults, broken and vengeful.   What is the cause of all crime and corruption, bad parenting? As I sat watching the movie, I looked around at the glassy eyes of the parents taking their kids to see this film.   Could the parents relate to the good guys or the bad guys? Or was it just too much for them?

I understood Batman and the Riddler. At the end of the film, I loved the question, which was the same posed to Clint Eastwood in Magnum Force. Who is good, and who is bad?   What does it mean to fight for what’s good when most of what’s going on in the world are so bad? Is any of it worth fighting for at all? Should we just leave the world and head for the country as Catwoman did at the end, warning Batman that his fight for justice would likely kill him? And when Batman said to her that he had to try to save the city, it’s the same things we are now saying about our country. Is it worth saving? Should we fight at all, given all the corruption that we see? It’s a worthy question, one that we are all asking in our own specific ways. These are complicated things to think about, but this movie, The Batman, has a definitive statement on it, and I think it’s a great definition that will take time for many to let wash over them. This is a movie worth seeing for more than entertainment. It’s what families should watch together and figure out their place after that where they fit into the puzzle. And hopefully, in the end, the resolution is that they’ll want to be more like Batman than the other characters.   And parents will want to be good role models for their kids instead of just the lately louse that fills the halls of corruption in almost every institution created by mankind. Despite the enormous responsibility it requires to bring children into the world, it is worth doing. But the job only gets more complicated the older they get, and if there is a lesson in the movie, The Batman, failing in that job can lead to all the corruption we see in Gotham City and the greater world in general. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Iniquitous Intent at Disney: When it comes to ‘The Book of Boba Fett,’ it’s all about a “Return to the Primitive”

It may seem iniquitous, but when you know a subject very well, it’s easy to see the changes over time and trace those changes to particular injunctions that contributed to a demise. And that is precisely what I saw as I looked at an earnings report for Disney stock and noticed how many shares BlackRock owned recently, then saw episode 7 of the new Book of Boba Fett on the Disney+ streaming service. The imprint of Larry Fink and his fellow board members of the World Economic Forum was unmistakable. Additionally, I used to write screenplays, and I have a good understanding of the politics of movie-making. When I was a young guy, I had several projects that won screenwriting awards at film festivals and made the circulation around Wilshire Blvd selling them, so I’ve been told more than once by the people of finance, “he who owns the gold rules.” So, I sympathize with what Dave Filoni, Jon Favreau, and even the original creator, George Lucas, went through to make this new show. They tried to do with The Book of Boba Fett, an original character from the old movies, bold and ambitious things. But at the end of the series, Star Wars fans were left feeling shortchanged. That’s the standard review of the show now that it’s completed, and a year of waiting left fans flat and looking for much more. It had some good stuff in it, but the overall message was filled with wokeness, and to my eyes, it points back to the owner of BlackRock owning too much stock in Disney and dictating creatively what ends up on the screen. I’ve seen it before in much smaller ways, and that is certainly the case with what is going on at Disney these days.

My review of The Book of Boba Fett is that its space meets Dances with Wolves. Clearly, the current makers of Star Wars projects, specifically Filoni and Favreau, used to enjoy playing with Star Wars figures, as I did. We are all kind of the same age, and when it comes to Star Wars, we just want to put what we wanted to see as kids on screen. Most people who watch these Disney+ shows and go to the modern movies feel that way; it’s more about childhood nostalgia than what is actually good about it. So it was strange to see the gunslinging bounty hunter from the classic film The Empire Strikes Back, running around in half the show dancing with Tusken Raiders around a campfire, acting like some hunter and gatherer. The purpose of the entire show became quite clear by episode 7, where Boba Fett and another bounty hunter called Cad Bane had a gunfight duel to the death, which was the ultimate climax and apparent purpose for putting the whole thing together. But this is where things get iniquitous, and the influence of BlackRock and other forces come into play. The show’s creators wanted to put on film what they thought about as kids, a gunfight with Boba Fett and some ultimate gunslinger. Woke Disney, essentially not run by Bob Chapek but by the owners of the most stock options, such as Vanguard and BlackRock, changed the story’s nature to reflect real-world tactical goals for global domination. That is clear by what Larry Fink puts in his ultra-liberal letters to CEOs showing the woke parameters for which the show must be done. 

When people ask, “what’s wrong with Star Wars,” well, I would point to the loss of ownership of George Lucas, who over time have listened to people like Larry Fink more in his old age than he would have like a 20 to 30-year-old. Star Wars was about standing up to people like Larry Fink, not being told what to do by them. So now that extreme characters of progressive causes are calling the shots on the finance end and sticking their nose into the creative process of the much more woke Disney than it ever has been before, Star Wars comes out as if Darth Vader made the movies instead of Luke Skywalker. I could recite the production meetings as if I had been there when the pitch for The Book of Boba Fett was made to Disney executives who had an eye toward stock prices and the massive control BlackRock has on it. “You want to make a Disney+ show about a villain from the original movies to win over the fans from all the mistakes that Kathy Kennedy has so far made? Well, you’ll have to make the bad guy into a good guy and to do that, we must make him identifiable with indigenous people, which parallels the gunfighter against the Indian in American history.” So from there, the show’s writers had to figure out a way to get their big gunfight with Boba Fett and Cad Bane done in a way that made the show sympathetic to Disney’s woke needs to stabilize their stock price. Ultimately, they had to make Larry Fink happy, and to do that; Boba Fett had to Return to the Primitive.

Fans feel shortchanged because the whole thing was out of character for Boba Fett. When he finally had his gunfight with Cad Bane, the bad guy beat Boba Fett to the draw not just once but twice. That meant that Boba Fett had to rely on the new skills he learned from the Tusken Raiders to defeat Bane with a Gaffi Stick in the end. It was like a gun duel with an Indian (native American), and the Indian winning with a bow and arrow. Undoubtedly, a hidden message implied that primitive traditions are superior to technology and that, ultimately, the West will fall to tribal unity. Again, I know this subject very well; I just wrote a book called The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business because I run into people like Larry Fink all over the world. They have been trying to promote China, indigenous people of all kinds constantly over the technology of the West for years. Such an assumption is at the center of Lean Manufacturing. And of course, Disney couldn’t have given me a better example of why I felt the differences between the West and the East needed to be pointed out in business transactions. The message behind The Book of Boba Fett was that in the end, to be the good guy and to beat the bad guy, the classic Star Wars villain had to learn to embrace the primitive tribes of Tatooine, the scary Tuskin Raiders. But in the original movies from 1977, the Tuskin Raiders were thought of as villains. That basic flip of the script is why people are so upset with the Disney-owned Star Wars productions instead of what George Lucas produced on his own originally. Once you start worrying about stock prices, woke politics, and the letters to the CEOs from Larry Fink, what you end up with is a bunch of garbage nobody wants. But suppose Disney wants to keep their stock price up. In that case, they have to do what The World Economic Forum tells them to do, and that is to bring down the West and to sell those asset bubbles to China, where their new world order will emerge under a communist flag and a foot on western civilization that is meant to choke it off, forever. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Don’t Forget to Watch, ‘Don’t Look Up’: In it, Hollywood shows why they are terrified of you

Watch ‘Don’t Look Up’

It was about a year ago when I sat down on my Rumble account and read off to the audience the 45 Planks of communist goals from the excellent book The Naked Communist. Many people at that time and for decades before were confused about the nature of our government and what they were really up to, going all the way back to the Department of Education during the Reagan years. I’ve been talking about these things for years, there was a time when I was a frequent contributor on radio stations and television, but like many of the modern Fox News personalities who now find themselves on alternative networks, like Newsmax, Real America’s Voice, and One America News, I was one of the first to be shadowbanned and ostracized because I saw too much and knew the truth long before anybody was really ready to admit to it. I even did some work in Hollywood during those years and quickly learned that my Cincinnati politics was not something any of them were willing to deal with. They all thought that if they controlled all those planks of communism listed in that book from 1957 as global objectives, they truly would rule the world. And in many ways, what I have been warning them out of kindness is coming true now that we are in 2022 and the midterms are coming up. I even noticed it while watching the U.C. v Alabama Cotton Bowl game on New Year’s Eve; the world that all these corporate types who took over our branches of government thought they were going to get is far from where real Americans are. Even though communists have taken over so many of our American institutions, they have not convinced Americans to accept communism. That was most notably obvious in the new Netflix film with some real powerhouse actors, Don’t Look Up. 

Don’t Look Up is something worth watching if you have a Netflix account. Anymore, I tend not to like Netflix. It’s primarily progressive material that does not represent what I’m interested in watching.   But I keep it so I can see what the other side is always thinking about, and Don’t Look Up is an obvious mirror to Hollywood and their obvious frustration that the 45 Planks of communism from The Naked Communist have not worked out the way they thought they would. The continued failure, which I have observed up close and personal among these media cultures, is the belief that culture is formed through art, not that art reflects life. When art is produced, for instance, out of the political or business realm, it is never effective. But when art comes from the realm of myth, well, then you can have life-changing circumstances that occur. Progressivism, socialism, communism are all products of the realm of politics. The MAGA movement and now the America First Policy Institute approach come from the realm of mythology, the core of American belief. There isn’t anything that any political class, business glass, or subcultural bubble can do to stop it. They don’t understand it, they have no desire to understand it, and their only reaction to these mysterious forces is to shut out people who challenge them, so they don’t have to face the music of their dismal failures.  

That is essentially what Don’t Look Up is, with its powerful all-star cast of Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, and many others is a mirror to Hollywood culture and its failure to wake people up to what they consider the impending doom of a Trump America. Meryl Streep essentially plays the President of the United States as Trump was but as a female version. It was almost a Saturday Night Live kind of hatred for Trump and his supporters that was an obvious mystery to Hollywood culture in general. In the movie, a giant planet-killing comet is headed for earth, and two astronomers work hard to let everyone know about it before the earth ends. They go to the President and get no significant reaction. So they hit the media culture and find that nobody in the world wants to hear about a comet that will end life on earth as the extinction event nears. The movie is essentially Hollywood perplexed about Trump voters and a culture that produced Trump as a candidate. Their blatant hatred of that culture seeps into every frame of the movie. I was perplexed why a major Hollywood project like this film, which was well funded and well-directed by Adam McKay, was going straight to Netflix. The reason was timing. Hollywood still believes that they could defend the Biden administration and the Climate Change objectives of the United Nations if they can get this message to Americans before it’s too late. For the director, and the actors involved, Don’t Look Up was a satire on reality, kind of like a modern version of Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks. But to the Netflix executives and the producers of Don’t Look Up, they have political hopes that they can rock the world with their silly little movie and change the nature of human beings in general. 

I say that last part out of personal experience, in talking with these types of people where they live and eat. I know what books they have read, what they learned in college, and how they speak at their parties. It’s communism that they have wanted because they are insecure by nature.   They lack identity, so they are actors because they need other people to give them identity. I thought all the actors in Don’t Look Up were fantastic in their roles. After the first act, I thought the movie was very well directed. The last part of the film went off the rails too much, almost like a desperate basketball team down 11 points with 1 minute to play and trying to full-court press and foul their opponent hoping to catch up while there was still time. But I was OK with it because essentially, the haters of America were showing their hearts in this movie. It was extremely revealing in just how scared they are of the rest of us, the majority of America who has not been seduced by communism even after all they have thrown at us. In so many ways, Don’t Look Up was an admission of failure and a desperate plea for another chance to convince us that communism is the way to go. People who wanted Trump and still want him as President are just stupid and can’t see the science of climate change, Covid, or the need for a global communist community run by China. Don’t Look Up pretty much says that very thing when the characters are frustrated over nobody in the world wanting to listen to them about the impending comet even when they could look up in the sky and see it for themselves. The entire movie was written and produced from that famous Santa Monica, California view of the world, a phony caricature of progressivism that has looted off the hard work of those who founded the area and are now inhabited by spoiled brats who have the philosophic grounding of a sliced potato in a garden of weeds. I would highly recommend the movie not for the reasons they want you to see it, but for all the reasons they don’t because it shows the cards of the political left going into 2022 and shows just how scared they are of the upcoming elections. And that is a wonderful thing to watch.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Guns Don’t Kill People, Alec Baldwin Does: Make no mistake about it, we hate these anti-American activists

Alec Baldwin is Guilty of Killing

I support entirely Donald Trump Jr’s statement about Alec Baldwin on the new shirt sold on his website, stating, “guns don’t kill people, Alec Baldwin does.” I tend to like Christian people; I grew up with lots of families with a religious background.  But I’m a vengeful person, and I think it’s consistent with the laws of nature.  I don’t forgive and forget.  I think it’s stupid to turn the other cheek, and when you get a chance at revenge for things that people have done to you, you take every opportunity to enjoy it.  They deserve what they have coming, those who inflict evil on you.  They deserve to feel all the pain and misery of the ramifications of their deeds.  That certainly is the way I think about those who pushed President Trump out of office, have signed America up for all these terrible United Nations climate change policies, and all those anti-gun liberals like Baldwin. They have done so much evil over the years toward my position.  If Donald Trump Jr. hadn’t made up a shirt like that, I would have.  Now my wife is one of those forgiving types, and her reaction is likely similar to many people out there.  She stated that everyone is worthy of forgiveness.  Well, no, they aren’t.  When people are as bad as Alec Baldwin is, they deserve all the misery of whatever pain they feel, and they are not worthy of forgiveness in any way.  I feel sorry for the cinematographer who was killed on the movie set of the western, Rust, who was killed by a gun Alec Baldwin was using as what they thought was a “prop gun.” That killing should never have happened.  But I don’t buy that Alec Baldwin feels terrible about it the way he is showing. He’s a phony, an actor.  He is a liberal loser and an anti-gunner, and ultimately, he is responsible for the death that occurred on that movie set and nobody else.  He killed an innocent person with a gun, and he can live with that forever in misery, and I hope it rots his soul from the inside out.

The first problem with Alec Baldwin is that he has sold himself to Hollywood and the political world as an anti-gun activist.  Yet he was the producer of the film Rust, a western where guns are always the subject of a story.  Baldwin has made a good living in his life, such as in his gangster films, using guns to tell his stories and make his money; they turn around and talk about how evil they are. He’s a two-faced tyrant at best and a hothead who has personally attacked many conservatives over the years as an outright bully.  I love westerns, but I would not have watched Rust because Alec Baldwin was in it.  What he did on Saturday Night Live to the Trump family and to the president I elected and loved was war.  He insulted all the MAGA movement notoriously and without guilt or thought to any damage it might cause.  Before his Saturday Night Live skits against Donald Trump, I might have just thought Baldwin was a hothead actor.  I might watch a movie with him in it and shake my head at how stupid he was.  But I learned to hate him over the Trump years as he proved himself to be an enemy of America, a progressive buffoon who made money off guns then turned around and sought ways to destroy America by attacking an America First president.  Again, I’ve heard it all before; we aren’t supposed to carry hate in our hearts.  As good “Christian” people, we are not supposed to feed hate or give it a harbor within our minds.  Well, I think that’s a stupid idea, and I have felt that way since my many years of Sunday school until I was beyond the 8th grade.  Not having hate in a heart is like operating in a world without eyes.  Hate is the result of how you feel about what people do to you, and it’s a natural emotion generated from the way people live life.  And the way Alec Baldwin has lived his life and sought to change the way I live mine, I hate him.  I would say I hate every cell in his body and the air he breathes. 

I’ve worked on movie sets, I’ve spent my life around guns.  I work with guns every day of my life, and I would have known that there was a bullet in that gun as soon as someone handed it to me.  I would have been able to tell by the weight of a single live round. I’ve worked with blanks, many kinds of bullets, and guns that fire lasers for sight alignment.  As the person holding the gun, it was Alec Baldwin’s responsibility to know if the weapon he was pointing downrange was loaded or not.  It’s not the armorer or the assistant director.  They can tell you if the gun is hot or cold.  You still must check it yourself before doing anything with it.  These are gun skills that every young person in America should know before they leave grade school.  Millions of families handle lots of guns every year and don’t have accidents as Alec Baldwin did.  Baldwin, as a liberal, trusted as all liberals do the system of responsibility that kills all liberals in every argument.  They are never at fault for anything because it’s always a system’s failure if something goes wrong.  This is precisely what the media attempted to do with this shooting on the set of Rust.  They try to say that the gun was used in target practice earlier that day, and a round was left in it.  The system failed, not the shooter.  They try to say that the prop master was inexperienced, that there were union disputes on the set.  They said many things, but ultimately, everyone who handles a gun under any circumstances knows; the person holding the gun is always responsible.  Guns don’t kill people; they don’t go off on their own.  People kill people. Don Jr. is not wrong in what his t-shirt says. 

Alec Baldwin should never be let off the hook for all those reasons and many, many more.  This shooting should ruin his life in every way.  And we should allow ourselves to smile at the justice of it.  It’s terrible that someone had to die because Alec Baldwin was so stupid.  But it was his fault and only his fault.  Being a nasty liberal and anti-gun activist, he had no business even making a western with guns in it.  The only people who operate guns on a film set should know guns in everyday life and have the skills to work with them.  Putting guns in the hands of many Hollywood liberals who are ignorant about the little things regarding gun safety is an open invitation for stuff like this to go wrong.  But liberals like to talk out of both sides of their mouth; they want to make money with guns, then speak against them like the activist that Alec Baldwin always has been.  And Alec Baldwin should suffer, as should everyone who works against an American First agenda.  These people are not our life partners; they are not our friends.  They are domestic enemies, and they need to be punished when they do something wrong.  And when someone dies because of what they do, forgiveness is not an option.  Hatred is the right emotion, and to never forgive it is the correct thing to do. Some people are just bad in life, and Alec Baldwin is a bad person.

Rich Hoffman

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The Anti-Trump Joker Film: Todd Phillips activism will be rewarded by a Hollywood culture that wants terriorism

Now that I’ve seen the Joker there is no question in my mind that Todd Phillips made the film as an anti-Trump message and his anti-capitalist message will be rewarded with Oscar nominations, and awards. I’ve said it before in regard to how Hollywood operates and the kind of social activism they sponsor. Its not so much the box office that many actors regard as their highest honor, it’s the path to get an Academy Award. Most actors don’t think they can ever be taken seriously until they’ve won one and it is that yearning which keeps Hollywood marching along the lines of social activism. So when we talk about mass shootings and generally bad behavior that we see in society, yet no responsibility is ever placed at the feet of those who are actually responsible, the path to get there is just in the types of projects that brought Joker to be. For women in Hollywood, the message to them is that they must present themselves on screen in the nude, and it is then and only then that they will be taken seriously. For the men, they must show themselves to be disasters of imperfection and flawed to the core of their being. And that is why actors who have played the Joker in the various Batman movies have done so well with awards and this latest one starring Joaquin Phoenix is no different. It would not be surprising to see him get a best actor award for his performance in the Joker. He did a fabulous job, no question about that. But why we consider it fabulous is where the disagreements are and how actual terrorism is usually at the heart of that decision-making process.

Most of the actors in Hollywood have received awards of some kind for dressing as a terrorist clown and updating the mythology. Actors like Jack Nicholson, Heath Ledger, and even Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill have all done praised work of the super villain of the DC Comic universe and that attention does not go unnoticed. The message clearly to actors is, especially white, male, actors is that if you want to get attention, you must do acting not in the moral stewardship of John Wayne, for which Hollywood was built, but on the deranged lunatic, like the Joker villain. This trend goes a long way in Hollywood including in one of the best westerns I think has ever been made in Once Upon a Time in the West. In that film, it was a big deal that Henry Fonda, the perpetual blue-eyed good guy, was the crazy killer and ultimate villain. Hollywood loves and always has loved, to make good people into bad people, even though box office numbers favor good guys who stay good guys. In this world of the “woke” it is the villains that are getting all the attention because to be entirely honest, the people who make movies in that culture want more people like themselves in the world so they don’t feel so lonely.

The giveaway to the Todd Phillips Joker is that it wasn’t the Joaquin Phoenix character who killed the future Batman’s parents, it was an inspired mob. And in the grandiose way that the film ended there was a quiet message to the masses to go out and conduct themselves as the Joker had because the world from the liberal eyes of Phillips is so unjust. But he’s not alone, most everyone working in Hollywood feels the same way, and so does the media. They would never admit in the light of day, but at the bars of Glendale under the warm night air with their arms around their dates, they will say quite openly, “F**k those Trump voters out there over the mountains, in that 2000 miles beyond to the shores of the Atlantic. Let’s kill them all the way good ol’ Charlie did. We won’t have the blood on our hands, and we’ll hide the terrorism behind free speech and destroy them all with their own Constitution since they love their guns so much.” But in their media events, on the show with Ellan, or The View, they will be called artists of great consequence and be told how compassionate they are for the plights of the poor and downtrodden. And after the next mass shooting, which they had inspired by their “artistic” work, they will be quoted for their positions on more gun control managed by the same government that caused all the tension.

It’s the same lunatics that have called Robert Mapplethorpe’s work “art,” while praising The Rocky Horror Picture Show as a true representation of the human soul. Most working in Hollywood are not good at anything else in life so they hate the good family man, the business leader, the titan of industry. Most of the rejects who fled to Hollywood the way gold panners headed west during the Gold Rush was to make money any way possible. They will prostitute themselves in any fashion to get a shot and their moral ethics is part of what ends up getting hired by studios built by the same types of people. People who left their families to make a lot of money in show business, to be whatever someone told them to be so they could get an invite to the nice parties of Los Angeles social life. It isn’t the clean-cut moralist who gets their script bought by a studio ran by people who would rather put hundred-dollar bills in the G-strings of strippers at gentlemen clubs than hang out around the house raising their children. Most producers want writers and actors around them who think the way they do, and much like the Joker played by Joaquin Phoenix they are lonely and would love more company. So they make movies to recruit more people to think the way they do and if it leads to killing people along the way, there is a secret little smile that they have in the back of their minds every time it happens, because for them its revenge.

To provoke that activism the Academy of Arts and Sciences gives out their Academy Awards to social activists and actors who help them sell degeneration to the masses, ultimately so that they don’t have to be alone in life. They truly do want a world like the end of the Joker where Antifa types are running around terrorizing those who want to hold onto that traditional idea of America. They of course don’t say they want to kill anybody, but look at the silence given to Antifa when they physically beat up Trump supporters just for wearing a red Make America Great Again hat in public. Where did that antagonism come from, that spark for violence? It came from Hollywood and its products, in attitudes evoked from the Academy of Arts and Sciences and from filmmakers like Todd Phillips.

Like Charlie Manson they don’t do the killings directly. But they inspire them and while Phillips was cutting together this Joker movie, you can almost hear his voice calling out for people other than him to go out into Trump country and do the work of the Joker. Recently Mark Hamill, the nice guy Luke from the Star Wars series but occasional Joker in the animated series put out a really ugly Tweet toward Ivanka Trump for letting her kid dress up as a stormtrooper. His hatred for the Trumps was truly remarkable and was insight into how these Hollywood types really think of the people who voted for Trump in the last election, and who continue to want an America built by the Constitution. Actors who play characters like the Joker get praise because Hollywood wants more of that type of character because deep down inside they want the school shootings, they want the violence in Chicago, and they want the destroyed families for all the same reasons that Arthur Fleck did. Because they are hurting and they don’t know how to articulate it, so they want to lash out at those they think have victimized them. And in Hollywood, that behavior gets awarded, so they get a lot more of it.

Rich Hoffman

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The Communist Swing from ‘High Noon’ to Trump: Why what Jerry Nadler is doing is far worse than McCarthyism

I think it goes without saying that I love John Wayne and westerns in general, but I have always disagreed with The Duke on his opinion about the great film High Noon. I have never seen it as an allegory on the blacklisting and the congressional investigations led by Joseph McCarthy, which many think it was. Yes, there were communists in Hollywood and yes it is true that Carl Foreman, the screenwriter of High Noon was one of them. The un-American activities were in full swing in 1952 led by Russia to penetrate Hollywood so essentially, they could get the control they have today during the years of Donald Trump. As I have listened to the American leftists reaction to Trump this past week and watched all the activity about the FBI and current hearings led by Jerry Nadler and the rest of the Democrats trying to impeach President Trump, I think we can look back at this documentary about the making of High Noon with a new eye toward history. Personally, I’m tired of hearing about how bad McCarthyism was on America and what impact blacklisting had on Hollywood. That cry baby stuff is long over. Conservatives are blacklisted much worse than any of the communists in Hollywood were then, so let’s revisit the morality of that time without the tears that the left have been hiding behind for years.

Truth be told, I spent the first twenty years of my adult life working toward a career in entertainment and planned to have a Hollywood film stint, and at several points I made major strides in that direction. But I am a Cincinnati conservative not that much unlike many stars who have made it in Hollywood quite spectacularly, but times have changed. If we were living in the days of High Noon where John Wayne set the standard and had the clout to run communists like Carl Foreman out of the country, as Wayne did before High Noon was even released, then I would likely be working in Hollywood right now. So in many ways I could lay claim to being blacklisted all of my adult life from the things I really enjoy. But unlike those complaining left leaning losers, I was able to do other things in my life and I have been successful in other aspects anyway. So what is there to cry about unless you are a one trick pony like most of Hollywood was and still is. They are probably worse today than they were in the time of High Noon’s release.

However, John Wayne made it very public that he didn’t like High Noon because he considered it un-American, and Lloyd Bridges was in an acting group that had lots of communists in it, which didn’t help. The American left loved High Noon because they thought of it as commentary on the McCarthy hearings, as Gary Cooper’s character Marshal Kane was a target for revenge for an outlaw that he had put in jail years ago, before his anticipated retirement. The train bringing the villain was to arrive at High Noon and the bandit was intent to bring his gang to the Marshal to kill him. The Marshal was planning to retire and marry his bride to be, but he is still the law in Hadleyville so he had an honorable obligation to fulfil his job as the lawman. Even though it may kill him. Knowing that a gang of four other killers are going to accompany the leader Kane tries to get other members of the town to help him, but nobody would.

The Soviet Union did not like High Noon because they felt it glorified the individual. Even though there were communists working on the film and the McCarthyism was in full swing in Washington D.C. it wasn’t enough for them and they made sure that even though the film won 4 Oscars because the American left wanted the film to do well, it wasn’t enough for the U.S.S.R. So, in that context it should be clear that John Wayne saw the big picture of the matter and just didn’t like High Noon viewing it as an un-American activity. Wayne was so adamant about his dislike for High Noon that he went into production for Rio Bravo as a direct pro-American answer. So, these are not new disputes these discussions about Trump’s swing back to the political right and waving the American flag around in reaction to socialist and communist propaganda. In the days of High Noon, it was denied that communism was even happening, but after the recent debates with the Democrats has shown, socialism and communism are very much the platforms of their party and their intention. So, the cat is out of the bag. Nobody is hiding it anymore. They were always trying to infect American culture with collectivist Marxism in some version or another. If it wasn’t John Wayne standing up to it, it is now Donald Trump. But the effort has always been there, and the debate is not new.

What has everyone in a panic now as opposed to the times of High Noon is that the political left felt that the pendulum was swinging in their direction in 1952, and it was. Leftist politics and open socialism were being debated, even if masked with different names and that swing has gone on for well over 50 years. But people are sick of it, and for anybody who saw Trump’s rally in Cincinnati in 2019 could attest to, people are now rejecting the political left. Trump is just the vehicle; the movement is taking a life of its own. For the same reasons that westerns were popular in 1952, conservative ideas are reemerging from the aftermath of failed socialist policies regardless of what political theater would like to believe.

The blacklisting that is going on currently with Facebook, Google, YouTube and many others is far worse for conservatives than it was ever in Hollywood as a direct reaction to McCarthyism. And its not John Wayne anymore trying to keep the pendulum from swinging to the left with more and more pro-American westerns. This time it is the left trying to fight the trend, the media that the communists did get control of. They couldn’t get the anti-American ideas to stick and patriotism is back in style and in spite all their screams of warning, are losing. Regardless of the political tendencies of the movie High Noon, I think it’s a great movie about society failing the individual yet the individual doing what needs to be done against all odds to do the right thing. It is certainly an American film especially in relation to the films of today which are far, far, far more left leaning than High Noon. But it is interesting given today’s political climate to look back at that time when the left was winning and building their case and crying about blacklisting. They have gone far further than anything John Wayne did or any other pro-American advocate during the periods of the Hollywood westerns. I could feel bitter about it, but as I said, I moved on to other industrious efforts. The left can’t and they are choking on their own crap and you know what, I think its funny. I am enjoying the show, because they deserve everything they are getting now. They started it. And its good to see them suffering now.

Rich Hoffman

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Why I’m So Excited for Han Solo’s Movie: A brief history of cinema and the progressive attempts to control the messaging of American values


If you study any ancient society—or any society at all for that matter, scientists and historians always find a way to rationalize their successes or failures on a few key elements. They will proclaim a civilization may have been successful because of their proximity to water, or key trade routes. Or fertile soil, access to natural resources, abundance of food—those types of things. The truly great societies are often judged by the artists they produced and the literature they performed. In a lot of ways entire societies are judged based on the written works produced by their cultures, such as in England with William Shakespeare, or Ireland’s James Joyce. But we don’t really have enough history yet to properly understand how our modern age of great art and entertainment will recoil through the ages, because most of it is so new. American movies for instance are underplayed in their importance to how they shape world culture—because they essentially have only been around for a century, so the effects on people as a whole are still being determined. But I have a pretty good idea how those results will be determined as judged by time and it is for that reason that I am so excited when a new film comes out that I know will be a game changer in the way that art shapes society. That is why I am so excited for this new Solo: A Star Wars Story as it is being produced by Disney. Something very different is going on with this one and if it turns out the way I’m thinking, there will be shock waves percolating through the industry as a whole that will favor the political trajectory of the modern Donald Trump age—and that’s a really good thing.  To get a good idea of what I’m talking about read this fine movie review about Solo: A Star Wars Story in Forbes.  I don’t think I could have written a better one.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/markhughes/2018/05/18/review-solo-a-star-wars-story/#48a5365b7dd8

Over that same century that movies came to be as a form of new art and entertainment liberals under the umbrella of progressivism made their move to spread tyrannical socialism to every corner of the world. Movies didn’t always reflect this socialism because the cultures they were speaking to had emerged before the progressive move to take over the world essentially. Westerns specifically were a group of movies that told stories of Americans yearning for freedom at any cost and the values that could be inflicted on large tracts of unpopulated land with the barrel of a gun pointed at a bad guy, and on the backs of that concept, Hollywood was essentially born. It was westerns that propelled the film industry into being such an important artistic endeavor that became the envy of the world. Not only had America created this interesting artistic machine known as Hollywood that mass-produced art and entertainment in such an excessive capitalist fashion. But it could do so in seemingly infinite quantities quickly spreading the culture of a free North America to every part of the world that had electricity.

Progressives saw this power and sought to take it over starting before World War II but really beginning to succeed in the late 1960s. But some of the best films of that time still came from filmmakers who made movies in the traditional way of Hollywood before the liberal invasion and it was those films that carried Hollywood into the modern age financially. Star Wars is a great example of the type of America that used to show up in the movies of its culture—B movies made quickly and cheaply for Saturday Morning Matinee entertainment. George Lucas was often derided by his peers in the film industry for wanting to make such old-fashioned throwbacks to the old westerns and science fiction films of his own youth—yet the Hollywood liberals built and industry around the commercial success of those movies and the history of all that is well-known.

Fast forward to my excitement in 2012 when I found out that there were going to be more Star Wars movies because Disney had bought the franchise from George Lucas for $4 billion dollars and I had high hopes. I also had my concerns which I expressed to everyone who would listen, including the key people at Lucasfilm. I did not like The Force Awakens not just because they had killed the character of Han Solo, but because they had cheapened that very popular fan favorite into a much weaker progressive character as was reflective of the attempt by Hollywood to follow a more progressive political agenda for which they sought to take over the entertainment industry in the first place. But I kept my mind open because I knew they were planning to make a Han Solo movie in the future so I stayed on the ship awaiting the results of that to figure out if I would continue to support the artistic efforts of Star Wars in the future—or relegate that it had died with the Disney acquisition. Thankfully I am quite happy to say, the financial viability of Star Wars as a business has won out and the filmmakers at Lucasfilm and Disney have come to terms with what works and what doesn’t in that particular universe of storytelling—which is essentially the values of the traditional westerns in America, and they have unleashed all that into this new Han Solo movie.

That’s important because Solo: A Star Wars Story is not about social justice, or the mysticism of religions—its not about altruism and all that garbage—its much more of an Ayn Rand type of story which is what I have always said was the core value system of Star Wars. Han Solo has always been and will always be best when he reflects more a character that would be written by Ayn Rand in The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged than from Les Misérables. Star Wars fails when it tries to be reflective of European literature more than American bravado and that lesson has been reluctantly unleashed in Solo: A Star Wars Story, which is all about guns, getting rich and taking care of the character’s self-interests.

Of course, the liberal aspects of Hollywood are hoping that this Solo: A Star Wars Story will fail at the box office, and for that to happen the industry will pounce on any numbers that don’t reach a billion dollars globally, or under $600 million domestically. Anything short of that and this Solo movie will be destroyed in the press much the way Donald Trump’s presidency is under constant attack because it threatens the status quo. But as I have been saying for many, many years—Star Wars is best when it is about all the things I described this upcoming movie to be as opposed to the self-sacrifice and general altruism of the Jedi and the Skywalker portions of the saga. Without Han Solo, I’d say there is no Star Wars. So to their credit, they listened at Lucasfilm and Disney has not been shy with the money and has thrown their full weight behind this movie knowing that it goes against the general strategies of the progressive community. And they had to do it because economic necessity dictated that they protect the property of Star Wars from the politics of the modern age. The last time I saw Disney market this hard for something like a western was The Lone Ranger in 2013, which was financially successful, but was considered a big bomb at the box office. If I had to bet, I’d say that is why Bob Iger has been nowhere near the early previews of Solo: A Star Wars Story. He is keeping one foot in the world of deniability. But I don’t think he’ll have to throw anybody under the bus. I think this new Star Wars movie will make everyone happy at Disney, even if it does give them a political paradox to deal with.

Progressives would love to assume that they can shape culture—which is why they wanted to take over the movie business. Films were to reflect the cultures they came from and the values expressed which is what other nations wanted to see in American movies. People get excited to see things they can’t get at home or yearn to become themselves, so they enjoyed the lofty characters of the American westerns who shot first and asked questions later, who did whatever they had to do to get rich so they could live free of the rest of the tyrannical world. Thinking of the great Sergio Leone movies from the late 1960s, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, and For A Few Dollars More, the filmmakers were from Italy making westerns as they interpreted them, as a way out of the fascism that their country had just emerged from and the character emphasis wasn’t on saving the world or even a damsel in distress, it was in using a gun to get rich and live happily ever after alone and disconnected from the rules of society. That was always the allure of the Disney Pirates of the Caribbean movies, that is why the Fast and Furious movies make so much money, and that is the commitment behind Solo: A Star Wars Story.

With this being the fourth Star Wars story produced by Kathy Kennedy as the new head of Lucasfilm economic necessity has dictated a more traditional approach to their films. That is a great thing because it informs what the true values of our culture are which addresses at the most epistemological level values that are conducive to a successful modern culture reflective in movies, and not where Hollywood shapes culture. The values of people are inherit and they need to form their lives around those values—that is self-interest, acceptance of capitalism as the primary driver for success and improved lives. What could be a better message in Star Wars than a black character called Lando Calrissian who loves wealth and the fine things in life and became an extraordinarily successful businessman? Solo: A Star Wars Story may be the first movie in several decades that doesn’t demonize the acquisition of wealth. I doubt the movie will do well in China for that very reason, but that’s OK. Lucasfilm made this movie and hopefully people support it the way I’ve always said they would. I can say this, I am excited for it—for all these reasons and more. I think it’s a game changer that could very well alter the way Hollywood produces films, and that is not good for the progressive elements which have taken over. Like the presidency of Donald Trump, Star Wars is rooted in old-fashioned values, and that was something that Hollywood has wanted to destroy but find that they must reconcile with if they want to live into the future. I never honestly thought I’d ever see a Hollywood product like this movie, where guns are as much of the plot as the pursuit of personal wealth and freedom. But here it is, and my hope is that people show up and support it, because it took a lot of guts to make it—and for Lucasfilm and Disney—it’s a tremendous gamble that could pay off big for them—and the rest of us.

Rich Hoffman
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Observational Realities: What the premier of ‘Solo’ in Los Angeles tells us about the future

I am the type of person who could write a novel about the reason that a person might change the way they hold a fork. Observational changes in nonverbal communication are an obsession with me and are a constant companion. I would have to say that nothing happens that I don’t notice. I am always on the lookout for why someone might have changes to their eye movement, or the tip of a head as it’s positioned on the shoulders, does it drop more than usual, or is it cantered off to the left or right more than typical. Is there an unusual emphasis on words when somebody is speaking and if there is, what does it mean—those types of things. So I enjoy big pop culture events because of all the mass information available to the way I think. I love going to baseball games where there are lots of people, because it tells me so much about the temperature of our culture, and I love big entertainment movie premiers—especially for projects that I am excited about like this new Star Wars movie, Solo: A Star Wars Story because there are always important things that can be learned about the nature of our society. And the thing that I thought was most compelling at the Solo premier in Hollywood this past Thursday wasn’t the usual fanfare that comes from most Disney productions that they know going in will turn in big box office numbers—it was that Bob Iger wasn’t there. I would encourage you dear reader to watch the whole red-carpet coverage. It was quite impressive.

Going even further was the lack of VIP formality at the event, even after the premier. The after party mixed cosplayers and celebrity actors together in ways that were very unusual for Hollywood which is kind of a theme with this new Solo movie. Freedom from social pretension is the underlying message of this new Star Wars movie and the absence of authority figures in our lives is the goal of Han Solo, and Disney wisely embraced that during this premier. This Star Wars movie is quite different from any other in the past, and it reaches back to recapture that feeling so many people had in 1977 when the first film came out where a much younger George Lucas put out a very unusual movie he had made with his wife in what were some very happy days for the fledgling filmmaker. Not happy on the business side, or the marital side, but from the ideological position where observations made were translated into unique characters placed into the Star Wars movies, like Han Solo—maybe one of the most independent characters ever put into film. That revulsion for authority figures was actually quietly part of the Disney movie premier. There were no special speeches by anybody from Disney or Lucasfilm before the three theaters started playing Solo: A Star Wars Story—all that happened were that the lights dimmed, the movie started, people had a good time, and afterwards everyone mingled together no matter what their social standing was. If you were at the premier, you were someone and therefore welcome to interact with anybody, anywhere within the scope of the premier. It was all very unusual. The richest person in the world was at the premier, but nobody made much mention of it. At the after party mixing with fans dressed in their favorite Star Wars outfits was a bald guy introducing himself as, “HI, I’m Jeff.” No pretension what-so-ever.

What these movies about Han Solo do for the Disney franchise of what is coming in 2020 and thereafter is that they use the main character to open up the entire galaxy to new stories. Solo is the thread that is connecting the massive mythology that is being planned by Lucasfilm and that is important in many ways. Lately I have been talking a lot about the scientific changes that are coming to us in real society, like the Uber Elevate sky cars, the missions to Mars by NASA and Elon Musk’s Space X, and just yesterday The Boring Company finished digging a tunnel under Los Angeles meant to carry traffic under the busy city with car pods and Hyperloops. Currently there is a video from Boston Dynamics that is freaking people out displaying a robot running across a park and jumping over a log in much the way a human does, so we are seeing a competitive species of a living thing that humans have invented moving into our world and it is causing some anxiety. There are a lot of things changing and what I see in pop culture are ways to intellectually deal with them that are emerging in our art, like in these Star Wars movies. For many people they need science fiction and fantasy to open their minds to the explosion of new ideas that are coming to the human race in a very rapid fashion and companies like Disney are trying to embrace their role in the whole thing in a proactive way.

Humans need conceptual tools to help them navigate ideas—in much the way that Star Wars needs Han Solo to open up the context of future stories, the elements of the films—the space travel between planets, the way that space travel is conducted, the type of people who will do it, and even the tools that humans use while doing all these things—like robots, religion, and even the type of “can do” spirit that everything takes are part of movies like Solo: A Star Wars Story. The movie exists to make money for Disney and all the merchandise retailers, but of course there is a deeper meaning that people like Bob Iger may not be consciously aware of, but the greater purpose is certainly part of the overall strategy. I watched very carefully the interview with the two Kasdens who wrote this new Solo movie and just like Larry was when he wrote the great film Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Empire Strikes Back, he knew what he was doing with his son on this latest film. It is just the kind of movie that people are looking for at this particular time in our lives where technology once again, as it was in 1977—is taking over and we are wondering what our place is in all of it. The original Star Wars movies told us it was OK to embrace the future and what we ended up with was the fabulous 1980s. I think the Donald Trump presidency had a lot to do with why the original Solo movie directors were fired, because Disney had planned a certain kind of Guardians of the Galaxy Star Wars film featuring Han Solo, but that wasn’t going to work in a post Donald Trump world and Kathy Kennedy wisely made the change to more of a traditional western as opposed to a color popping change that might have been a much more progressive film. I noticed that Disney has been very careful not to put Woody Harrelson on the red-carpet interviews, because he is a major pot supporter. He’s done a few interviews, but not much—he’s not even featured in the Denny’s cards from the promotional tour—and that says something.

Everything means something and there is a lot going on with Solo: A Star Wars Story. Disney is giving fans what they want in a Star Wars movie even if they don’t personally like the direction the franchise is going, because they have their eye on the bigger prize—the furtherment of human civilization as a whole, and the part they play in it as artists. While the company of Disney may not want to do a modern cowboy movie with hot rod spaceships, the fans want it, and that’s what drives merchandise sales and brings people into the parks where the real magic happens for Disney. That’s also where new technology gets its cutting-edge tests for public consumption, and directly leads to the world we are all stepping into. We are all going to space and our daily lives are changing with all this new technology. As humans we are looking for ways to process all this information into the context of stories, which is what we have always done when processing new observational realities. And it’s all very exciting!

Rich Hoffman

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The HBO ‘Spielberg’ Documentary: What used to be good about Hollywood

I eagerly awaiting the time when HBO released its newest documentary titled simply as Spielberg. It was a Saturday night on October 7th when I was finally able to see it after waiting months for it to air, and I enjoyed it immensely. With all the recent discussion about Harvey Weinstein and the current decline of Hollywood, this Spielberg documentary was an interesting looking into everything that has been good about the movie industry. Clearly, and I’ve always felt this way, without Steven Spielberg as a great producer and writer, all of our lives would be much less optimistic. What the HBO documentary did that most DVD interviews have failed to do is pin point what drove Steven Spielberg and how that raw ambition touched the lives of so many people. It’s hard to watch anything on television or at the movies that Steven Spielberg has not touched in a good way. I always loved that filmmaker’s natural optimism and enjoyed how he could take incredibly dark topics like Schindler’s List and find the good in such a terrible story. Personally, 1993 was a year of really intense emotions. I was being sued many times over for a business deal that went south. Bill Clinton had just become president when I campaigned hard for Ross Perot and I literally felt like the world was coming to an end in everything that was going on around me. Then I saw Jurassic Park where several brilliant shots in that movie by Spielberg blew the doors off the future of visual effects—namely the attack at the T-Rex paddock in a downpour of rain in a lush tropical jungle to a booming symphonic musical score that I have never forgotten. Then just a few months later Schindler’s List was released and it became one of my favorite movies. As a very young person I was ready to be a filmmaker myself because Spielberg inspired me to do so. But what I learned harshly over the next 15 years was that I was more intended to the subject of movies rather than the maker of them. Some people are meant to be behind the camera, others are meant to be in front of them. Steven Spielberg was uniquely gifted in life to be behind the camera where everything made much more sense to him, and we are all better for it.

http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/news/10-things-we-learned-from-hbos-spielberg-documentary-w506623

What made Spielberg tick was his overly optimistic approach to life mixed with his natural fears that were more defined than most people were aware of. Spielberg used movies as his natural therapy to work out things in life that were beating him down. The only time Steven Spielberg was a fearless human being was when he was behind the camera where he was able to work things out in a way that allowed them to be captured on film. I learned about myself much later that I didn’t like the collaborative process of making movies the way Spielberg did and that I didn’t live my life like he did his. I wasn’t insecure about anything and that doesn’t make for very compelling stories—only the characters within stories as they interact with the outside world. Understanding that made me appreciate what Steven Spielberg did that much more over his lifetime.

I have enjoyed Spielberg’s movies since that magical year of 1993, but never to the same extent as before that date and I think he’s happy with things that way. Hollywood beat up on him for being such a Peter Pan type of personality and they wouldn’t give him credit for being the best director in film history until he made more “adult” dramas which he has. With a new wife to support him, Steven Spielberg went on to make a number of very serious and ambitious movies that many respect, but never tickled the box office quite the same. The Hollywood communists were happy, but the movie industry as a whole wasn’t but who could be mad at Spielberg. He certainly did his part to invent the industry from virtually nothing in the 1970s with a handful of other filmmakers including George Lucas. I’ve always known it but the HBO documentary really captured how unique the movie brats for which Spielberg was a member truly was. I’m glad to have grown up in a time when those types of filmmakers were making movies in Hollywood. I thought it might go on for a long time, but it really only lasted about 20 years. As I was working to get into that business it was obvious the door had closed and people like Harvey Weinstein were in charge of Hollywood and the doors to the next generation of movie brats were not open to conservatives.

Filmmakers like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas are not what we’d consider today to be conservative, but they came from a time when father was supposed to know best and rectifying that disappointment took their characters in film to great places. But the foundation of conservativism was there because they grew up in small towns and had fathers who worked hard and were successful in their own ways. They came from intact families and those foundations are present in their movies, from Star Wars to E.T. The magic of those types of movies from those types of filmmakers are so rare now. I thought it was amazing the way the world stopped for a moment just to watch the preview to the new Star Wars movie The Last Jedi during Monday Night Football on October 9th just a few days after the Spielberg documentary was released on HBO. Star Wars is all about family or the lack of it and people are so desperate for a sense of family these days, because liberalism has essentially crushed the notion. That is what separates Spielberg’s movie brats from the lost kids of today. There are no filmmakers like Spielberg out there or coming up, because the American family has essentially been destroyed. If you really want to breakdown what’s sick in Hollywood it is that they don’t tell stories about families anymore. They tell stories about why families are so messed up which robs the viewers of their products of the sanctification they are seeking with the price of a movie ticket.

Even Brian DePalma’s film Scarface which I was surprised to learn Spielberg actually worked on, was about family. Without the family element Tony Montana was just a thug. But in the context of his actions, we could sympathize and like the cocaine mogul because he was in essence a guy who wanted to take care of his family and start one of his own crawling out from under the communist regime in Cuba. Becoming a cocaine dealer was his only real path—a premise that was elaborated on later with the Breaking Bad series. But to come up with these stories from scratch the original movie brats for which Spielberg was the undisputed leader is something we may never see again. I’m glad to have seen it once, but it really is sad that we likely will never get it again for a long time. The conditions that make someone like Steven Spielberg just aren’t there for a new generation of movie makers. The material that young people have to work with now are the products of people like Weinstein where with Spielberg and Lucas it was John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock. The idea of a young Spielberg camping out illegally on the Universal lot just to learn how to make movies is something that the institution of filmmaking today just wouldn’t allow with their obsession with rules and regulations—and that is truly sad.

But the documentary was a marvelous look into one of the most fascinating people in human history, Steve Spielberg who was able to take his natural optimism, massive creative intellect and disappointments toward the nature of family life and put them into a series of marvelous movies that have lasted for decades and will stand the tests of time. I will always have a soft spot for Steven Spielberg even though later in life he has become more of a Democrat and supported politicians like Barack Obama. I’m sure if I sat down at lunch with him I’d have far more in common than not. What has always made Spielberg great is that he understood the American family and refused to be tainted by the disappointments of our times. And instead he put up on the big silver screen all the optimism his vast imagination could conceive and it made our world far better off.

Rich Hoffman

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