Tag: information

What To Learn From Howard Kazanjian’s ‘A Producers Life’: Hollywood was never going to be able to help a bad product like Kamala Harris

This will be fun; I could do it every day for years.  I’m not sure how useful that would be, but I’d enjoy it.  And that is explaining to Democrats why they lost the 2024 election.  The first answer is that election fraud was harder for them.  They still cheat in many places, have been caught, and will get into trouble over it.  In these areas of the country that have still been counting ballots weeks after the election in November of 2024, there is only one reason: introducing false ballots to change the outcome.  And in those places, voter ID is a problem, and so are the mathematical trends.  You don’t win in all these national elections, and, in strange places, trend the other way.  That might happen in random spots, but not like this.  Many of these House and Senate seats were stolen for Democrats to keep those two government bodies from sliding even further to Republicans.  It will be easy to prove, and the Trump Justice Department will be able to prosecute those cases efficiently.   But the point remains: if Democrats can’t cheat, they can’t win.  That also makes this perspective that has been going on with Democrats about Hollywood even funnier.  They believed that Hollywood support from celebrities and the visual effects ads they had access to with people like Steven Spielberg would turn people toward their side.  Yeah, that was never going to happen, and I’ve known that for a long time from very personal experience with Hollywood.  They don’t have that kind of power, and they never did.  They only illusioned themselves by talking about these things within their inward culture. 

I just finished reading a great book I promised myself I’d read if Trump won the election.  And boy, is it a real treasure; it’s the autobiography of the film producer Howard Kazanjian, ‘A Producer’s Life,’ and it was a wonderful experience.  I rarely get to read something that good, and it’s not a book intended for mass audiences.  Maybe only 100,000 people worldwide would be interested in it, and most of them would likely be film students.  The book came out in 2021, but I was too busy these last couple of years, even with all my reading, to sit down and enjoy a book like that.  Howard is one of my favorite film producers of all time, and he’s been close to some of my favorite movies, from the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films to Cool Hand Luke and The Wild Bunch.  He worked with Hitchcock and many big-name Hollywood directors through the latest golden age of cinema, from the late 70s to the early 80s.  He told many stories about things that have gone on behind the scenes in many movies that I found fascinating, and I wouldn’t let myself think like that because of all the other stuff politically going on.  There wasn’t time to enjoy anything like that, so the first thing I did once Trump was elected was give myself a bit of a vacation and read a few books like this that I had been thinking about for a long time.  In it, Howard essentially confirms everything I have been saying about Hollywood.  Much of the appeal of that industry is fake, in front of the camera and especially behind it. Hollywood is about creating illusions, not truth, and in this climate of free media and free speech, anything phony is going to be rooted out and rejected.  Someone should have told the Democrats that, but they were so obsessed with their ability to make images that suckers buy in a darkened theater that they missed the trend.  And they have lost miserably because of it.  And they aren’t making any corrections to change anything, which is fine with me.

All this has provoked in me remembrances of my exposure to Hollywood culture, and I quickly learned how phony it was.  I was always just as interested in what happened behind the camera as I was in front of it, and quickly, you see what kind of mentality goes on in these Hollywood productions.  Most people in the industry do not think like Howard; he’s one of the great ones, but most think people are so stupid that they can manipulate the thoughts of mass society with the Hollywood image.  They miss the whole point, and the entire industry misses the truth.  Because they purposely live in a kind of entertainment bubble, they don’t get to talk to real people much, except when they do press junkets and comic cons and lose touch with reality.  I tasted that when I worked on projects, and a producer gave me my trailer to reside between takes. The line producers pamper you with union-standard assumptions.  I thought it was all interesting and for me, a dream come true career wise, but not very practical or sustainable.  I have the opposite way of viewing things as they do; I expect the people being photographed to be good people, turn on the camera, and capture a little bit of their natural essence, and that what is sold is worth investing your time and energy into. 

Ultimately, that’s why the Hollywood machine could never overtake Trump: He isn’t just an image; he’s a lot more in real life than what a camera can capture.  And Kamala Harris’ people thought that if they raised over a billion dollars, they could purchase an image and that voters would be dumb enough to buy it like they would the next Hollywood blockbuster.  That if the movie preview was good but the movie sucked, that people would still buy it.  And, of course, they didn’t.  Reading that book about Howard Kazanjian reminded me of how out of touch many in the movie industry are, even when they are the best in their field.  Ultimately, Hollywood is too slow and clunky to be relevant in the modern world, which is one reason their industry is dying.  The unions will not allow them to keep pace with YouTube content creators, and that’s where entertainment is headed.  People aren’t going to wait for three years for movie content anymore, teased well in advance.  And they aren’t going to buy the Hollywood product of making an image of a president of the United States without the substance of doing anything meaningful as a leader.  It all comes down to public opinion, and just because Hollywood can make an image, they can’t make people buy into it.  That is precisely the trouble the woke new Captain America movie is struggling with regarding test audiences.  The producers won’t be able to cut together enough coverage to fix the film because its merit is terrible, just like Kamala Harris.  More fancy camerawork won’t change the fact that people don’t like the characters in bad situations.  What would you expect if it’s a woke storyline coming from Disney these days? People aren’t going to buy it.  And they rejected Kamala for the same reasons.  Hollywood couldn’t make her.  Hollywood was, and will always be, a reflection of what people want to buy.  Not the creators of what people do buy.  That is a lesson Hollywood has never learned, which is why they are now perplexed.  And also why I do not work in that industry.  I can’t do the phony thing, for me, it has to be real.

Rich Hoffman

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“Escapades of Doom”: Kristi Ertel’s Interview with Brian Thomas on 55 KRC

I’m very proud of Kristi Ertel of Protect Lakota Kids.com for her really good interview on 55 KRC with Brian Thomas. She was there to talk about the latest information on Matt Miller, the controversial superintendent from Lakota, and the trouble he has put himself into with his reckless personal life. Many in the Lakota district, over 800 people, have signed the petition to force Miller to resign. Miller and his radical union members at Lakota did the same thing to the new school board member Darbi Boddy just a few months before, having a petition to force her to resign essentially because they didn’t like her. Supporters of a conservative school board took exception and found out what kind of crazy sexual lifestyle Miller thought was normal, and it became public information at that point. So now the shoe is on the other foot, and I thought Kristi did an exceptional job representing the many people in the Lakota school district who have found how the school board has dealt with the issue reprehensible. And some people like Kristi, who is a fantastic Christian woman with very high standards, can’t deal with the level of morality exhibited by the Lakota administration and its school board. Even with the threats of lawsuits that the superintendent has lashed out at toward his critics, Kristi is the type of person who can’t turn away from a dilemma, which is asking the community to look the other way when reprehensible moral circumstances are imposed on everyone. And she’s not alone. But good for her to stand up for what’s right even when so much is wrong and horrible, and that has been threatened by the public employees as if they were ultimately in charge. When I read the cease-and-desist letter from Matt Miller’s attorney, and Kristi talked about this on the radio interview, I thought some alien from another planet had written it. It clearly didn’t consider any Constitutional provisions regarding free speech. And to the point discussed on 55 KRC, all the information was based on Matt Miller’s own words. But my conclusion reflects the microcosm that is essentially the macrocosm of global politics these days. 

It wasn’t just this interview with Kristi that had spawned a lot of attention on this story over the past week; Libs of TikTok was talking about it, which cascaded into it being covered by the very popular Louder with Crowder show, and Charlie Kirk. The story was always going to get out; when a very public employee exhibits such bad behavior, it was bound to. As if that weren’t bad enough, it’s the cover-up of that information that has presented itself as far worse, as if all the participants involved, the media, the school board, the police, the prosecutor’s office, a whole bunch of lawyers, its as if they believed that if they denied that anything happened, then sent out threatening letters to harass the public into submission, that they could somehow change the nature of reality itself. And if they believed that, then no wonder they thought they could do anything and get away with it. That is, after all, what we are seeing in international and national politics, that characters like Nancy Pelosi, Hunter Biden, or even the fact that Covid was made in a lab in Wuhan, China, and so long as the communist country pretended that nothing happened, then they could literally get away with murder. Or that election fraud never occurred in 2020 or 2022, even though Katie Hobbs in Arizona was caught certifying her own election by pushing all the complaints of voter irregularities past the certification date forcing constitutionally protected fraud in the process. What we saw happening at Lakota was essentially the same type of crazy, extremely liberal behavior. 

Yet the thing that gets missed in all these cases is that no matter what the administrative state does to contain information with public relations officials, lawyers, or open harassment through violence or other means, people are still going to have an opinion on the matter. Unlike in China, where they control every aspect of people’s lives, people in America still have free will and the ability to think independently. Just because authority figures say something is red or yellow when we can see it’s blue, we are not obligated to accept what those authority figures say just because they are authority figures. What’s fascinating about this Lakota cult of liberalism is that they really thought they were going to be able to contain the bad behavior of their superintendent and force good people like Kristi Ertel to act against her conscience, her strong belief system in goodness and the good of God, and accept evil right in front of her face, and that there was nothing she, or anybody could do about it. It’s as if Matt Miller and his army of wife-swapping administrators thought they were in charge of the whole community or something instead of employees within it. And that they could literally do anything, say anything, and push any kind of agenda onto the taxpayers, and they would be obligated to accept their reality without question. It was essentially the China Model but without the controls of a totalitarian regime controlling over a billion people in every way, shape, and form, upon fear of death.  It has been a head-scratcher because I know many of the characters involved. It has been bizarre to see them so consumed with the process and willing to accept outright evil because of some misplaced fear that the law was working against us all and that the big bad administrative state could destroy us at any time. Hey, read a book sometime, and get smart. Lakota schools, their public employees, lawyers, PR people, and the media tag alongs who have helped cover some really detrimental behavior have all contributed to making our community worse, making things more dangerous for children, and thumbing their noses at the community in general.  Lakota was already declining in quality before Matt Miller came along, and since he stepped into that superintendent role, the grades for Lakota have continued to drop. So why all these people would seek to protect a bad employee with a bad track record is beyond logic. But yet, what we have seen come out of all these liberal institutions is an assumption that so long as they control information and how people perceive it, they can hide their poor performance behind this strange veil of corruption. And that people wouldn’t form their own opinions on things. Well, people do have opinions on things, and free minds have arrived at the opinion that what has been going on at Lakota and public schools, in general, does not reflect what taxpayers want. And they are angry about it. I am very happy to know that many people like Kristi Ertel are free-thinking enough to form their own opinions and defend them when challenged by such nonsense as we have witnessed in this Lakota case. If not for free speech and people like Kristi, there would be a lot more corruption in the world, and now we see why things are so screwed up everywhere because there haven’t been enough Kristi Ertels in the world standing up for what’s right, and teaching children how adults should behave by condemning bad behavior when we do see it. And if more people did call out such bad behavior, it would at least force the perpetrators to keep it hidden from public view. But when bad people don’t fear the judgment of the public because they think the system will hide them from the guilt of their actions, well, then you get what we have seen at Lakota, and other places, wherever liberalism is out of control, and a war against God and goodness has been unleashed as if the pages of the Book of Revelations were manifest on the earth and the Devil himself were in charge of everything, and everybody. 

Rich Hoffman

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