I haven’t seen Hannity’s movie, but I’m quite prepared to believe it’s awful. A lot of Christian-themed movies are.
That said, do I believe Hollywood regularly churns out movies with a social or political agenda, even when there’s no chance the movies will make money? Definitely. There is NO market for movies about McCarthyism, but Hollywood can’t make enough of them. It sure isn’t because they’ll rake in big bucks.
Good Night, And Good Luck pulled in $56m on a $7m budget, and The Way We Were was just huge. So figure there’s at least some demand, there, anyway.
To be fair, Hollywood was a direct victim of McCarthyism. So, I would expect some attempts to tell the story. As for a social or political agenda, yeah, the agenda being McCarthyism was bad. I suppose a contrary view to that would be stories promoting the agenda of Hollywood Communists being bad, which would be worth exploring. But I would suppose that wouldn’t make any money either.
Cite? AFAICT, there are not in fact very many Hollywood movies about McCarthyism. And they were not by any means all box-office failures.
Got any assertions about any other particular “social or political agendas” about which “Hollywood regularly churns out movies” even when “there’s no chance the movies will make money”? Because your McCarthyism example seems to be largely unsupported by the facts.
And one of those is on the list just because it starred a guy named Kevin McCarthy. And another is the movie Clue, which is a comedy about Professor Plum, Miss Scarlet, Colonel Mustard etc., who have various secrets to hide, which I guess would be sort of related but not “about” McCarthyism. Another is The Manchurian Candidate.
So there are even fewer films really about McCarthyism than would appear from that list.
Communism was just a red herring.
When Jim Carrey wanted to leave his comic image behind and try to win an Oscar, what movie did he make? “The Majestic.” He knew Hollywood ( but nobody else) eats that stuff up.
That’s one “Red Scare” movie that didn’t do well commercially; it doesn’t even come close to substantiating your previous sweeping claim. (For comparison, the recent film “Hail, Caesar!” was also set in the same McCarthy-Hollywood context, and was quite profitable.)
Still waiting for valid evidence for your assertion that “Hollywood can’t make enough of” movies about McCarthyism, or in general that “Hollywood regularly churns out movies with a social or political agenda, even when there’s no chance the movies will make money”. Major filmmakers are really quite a bit more averse to losing money than you seem to believe, although they do acknowledge that it’s bound to happen sometimes.
So you think most of the movie going audience is secular to the point that they’ll eat up secular films?
Perhaps secular themes are more plausible and easier to write. Almost all SF involving aliens is secular, since meeting good Christians out there is absurd on the face of it.
Trumbo? For the Boys? ?The Front? Guilty By Suspicion?
2015, nominated for many awards.
1991 (! Are you really suggesting that a few films with the same period setting over more than 25 years counts as “regularly churning out” movies on a particular topic?), a comedy-drama musical about USO entertainers during the midcentury wars. Where’s the McCarthyism angle? I haven’t seen the movie but I’m not finding anything about the “Red Scare” in descriptions of it. Lost money at the box office but is described as having “cult status” among aficionados of musicals, biopics and war-era films.
1976 (!!! Okay, now a few films over a forty-year period counts as “regularly churning out”? :rolleyes: ), a Woody Allen comedy classic. Made the list of #1 weekend box-office films in 1976.
1991 (see above), critically acclaimed.
I repeat:
The Truman Show.
We are constantly told by conservatives that there is a “Hollywood agenda” to legitimize non-traditional values for mainstream America.
Look at it this way: when Hollywood stars and directors want to make money (which is often), they make superhero and action movies.
But when they want to win Oscars and impress each other, and strike impressive poses, they make left-wing message movies.
False dichotomy. Money-making movies often do win Oscars and impress the industry, and some of them contain a lot of what you would probably call “left-wing message” (such as the Oscar-winning and money-coining Zootopia, for example). And plenty of “superhero and action movies” with no “left-wing message” at all have stunk up the box office like rotten fish.
There simply is not a neat binary division between “message-free” money-spinners and money-losing “agenda films”, no matter how much you insist that there is.
Maybe we have a different view of secularism. I would view art that has no religious purpose as secular art. Hollywood promotes this type of art.
I’m not trying to be an asshole but…
Secular:adjective
of or relating to worldly things or to things that are not regarded as religious, spiritual, or sacred; temporal:
secular interests.
not pertaining to or connected with religion (opposed to sacred):
So is anything that isn’t actively promoting religion “promoting secularism” as you would put it? That seems fairly misleading to me. When I hear someone say something like “X is promoting secularism”, I don’t think “they don’t particularly care about religious purposes”, I think “they are going out of their way to snub religion”.
nm
Do superhero movies sometimes bomb? Sure. But if you ask a studio boss why he green lighted a superhero movie, he’ll tell you, “We thought it would make a ton of money.” And he really did think so.
But did anyone in Hollywood think “Lions for Lambs” would be a big hit? Or “Suburbicon”? No! And yet big stars flocked to be in it.
Why? To impress other Hollywood insiders.
How is liberal secularism different from the profit motive? That Venn Diagram is practically overlapping. Many early socialists were Christians who rejected capitalism based on traditional norms about the evils of greed, usury, and slavery. Consumerism is capitalism’s baby.
Thomas Frank has a good bit in What’s the Matter with Kansas? about American conservatives loving the free market but hating its fruits, and the entertainment industry is one of the more obvious examples. Yes, the culture has gotten more perverted, more violent, more coarse, more spiritually dead, but cons are aiming at the wrong target.