There are two things that annoy me about political celebrities:
1. When a celebrity takes a contoversial position, they have to understand that there will be a lot of people who disagree with them. When your manager calls and tells you the World Concert Tour is now a three week bi-coastal jaunt because they can't sell tickets in Omaha, don't start pretending to be Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the Russian gulag.
2. Actors, Directors, critics, etc are always talking about each others "courage". One obvious example was the film "Philadelphia". Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington made a sympathetic portrait of an AIDS victim, became the darling of the critics, and won a wheelbarrow full of awards. And all along the way everyone kept talking about how much "courage" it took to make that film. The truth is that if you were going to sit down and try to come up with a film concept that was virtually guaranteed to win Oscar nominations, that concept would be "Philadelphia". At least in the nineties. The tastes and sensibilities of the Hollywood elite are always evolving. Sometimes they are moved by Left Wing views of public health issues and sometimes they are moved by Left Wing views of foreign policy.
Here are some film concepts that would really take courage to make in Hollywood:
1. The life story of
Whittaker Chambers. This should have been done forty years ago.
2. A movie about Vietnam POWs. (Wait. This one was made. It was called "
Hanoi Hilton" and came out around the same time as "Platoon". No major studio was interested. Oliver Stone, again though, was lauded for his courage."
3. An old style Biblical epic. (And by "old style" I mean no gay disciples and no Mary wondering wether she should have an abortion)
4. A movie in which a person who owns an unregistered handgun saves her family by shooting an intruder and is then persecuted by the government as though
she were the criminal. The bad guys would include an overweight, drunken, and lecherous politician from an unidentified northeastern state and some wild-eyed anti-gun advocates.
5. The life story of Joe Gibbs. (Movie exec: "Can we change 'The Lord's really blessed us' to something like.. I don't know... '****ing Awesome, Dude! And instead of being a Christian, maybe he could be in to Yoga'")
6. This is really fun. Anybody else have any ideas for couragous movies?