Reader question: "Will Hollywood liberals hate my script if it doesn't lean left?"

David writes in with a question:

I know getting my action novel made into a movie is a million-to-one longshot.  In your opinion, given my story's theme doesn't lean left like Hollywood, do those odds decrease to a billion-to-one?  Or are producers progressives at cocktail parties, but capitalists when deciding what to finance?


I've touched a little bit on the risks of writing political material in this post here, so that older post might be worth a look, even though it doesn't directly relate to the question above.

Honestly, I think too much is made of "liberal Hollywood's" supposed bias.  Yes, there are ranting lunitics in the Deadline Hollywood comments who seem to be ready to foam at the mouth at anything they see as a leftist lean, but most of those lowlifes are devoted Drudge readers - and not even the intelligent ones at that.  The only people on the right who really get stirred up by this are the extreme rightists, and they've attempted to create a climate where "you can't trust those people" simply by repeating their lies and outrage enough.  You can recognize these idiots because they'll "defend" Mel Gibson against a liberal Hollywood that wants to punish him for racist slurs, yet attack Morgan Freeman and wish all sorts of ill on him for stating his beliefs about the Tea Party.

I think conservatives are far more aggressive in trying to squash a message that they don't believe in than liberals.  I'm old enough to remember back when the movie Primary Colors was made, and there were all these voices from the right screaming, ranting and raving about it was deplorable that liberal Hollywood was making a love letter, nay, propaganda that was aimed at glorifying President Bill Clinton, who bore something of a resemblance to the main character of that film.  They even pointed to the fact that Clinton buddy John Travolta played the character as evidence this was a pro-Clinton puff piece.

I'll pause for effect before I drop the bomb that the major revelation of the film is that the Clinton character is later revealed to have had sex with an underage black girl during his campaign.  Yes, this is the pro-Clinton message that Hollywood in its liberal bias made.  This is the part that Bill Clinton's good friend took.  If my "friend" took a part that was a clear pastiche of me, and that character was revealed as an adulterous, statutory rapist, I'd never speak to them again.

That's why I was at a loss to understand why the right was so threatened by this, that they thought such an association could ever be positive for Clinton.  Were they upset that the statutory rape was sanitized by not being directly depicted on screen?

Let's go with a more recent example, George Clooney's The Ides of March.  In it, Clooney plays a Democratic governor trying to win his party's nomination for President.  Some might describe him as a liberal's wet dream, but I actually see him more as a moderate's wet dream because he's not an extremist and he doesn't show a particular blind devotion to the more extreme elements in his party.  Having said that, it's clear he's left-leaning and the first third or so of the story is devoted to getting the audience to really like and empathize with this guy.

SPOILERS

So naturally, he's revealed as having feet of clay when it turns out he slept with a 19 year-old intern and got her pregnant.  Clooney's campaign manager cleans up the mess, taking the girl for an abortion, but when he's fired from the campaign, she ends up committing suicide.  When Clooney finds out about this and the consequences start to fall, suddenly this "good guy" becomes a lot less admirable.  The principled Democrat is shown to be morally weak and corrupt.

END SPOILERS

And yet I'm sure there's some conservative blogger out there ranting about how that film too is an example of Hollywood pushing a liberal agenda.  My real point is that Hollywood has never been afraid to make a film that casts the left in an unfavorable light.

My first question about your script would be: is it a good story?  Or is it a bully pulpit wrapped up in a three-act structure?  Is the aim of the story to entertain, or is it an anti-leftist rant?

Here's a good example: a few years ago, there was a glut of Iraq War scripts, all of them sermonizing against the war, the Bush Administration, the dishonest way the American people were "sold" the war, the neo-cons who manipulated the public and the campaign from the begining, and pretty much everything else along those lines that you could imagine.

And I passed on ALL of these.  Including Fair Game and Green Zone, both of which leaned to the left in their politics.  The issue wasn't so much that they were badly written scripts - it was that I didn't see a market for either film or those like it.  The Iraq War was dominating the news most weeks, and the longer it raged, the more polarizing a topic it became, contributing greatly to the extreme political polarization we now face today.

In that climate, who would want to go see a film that's basically a lecture on the corrupt practices of the Bush Administration, the quagmire that Bush's War became, and the living hell that life in Iraq was?  Both scripts were what I called "eat your vegetables" movies - they were more concerned with the message than the entertainment.

(Full disclosure: I've not bothered to see either film, so it's possible those issues were moderated.  All I can say is at the script stage, my reaction was "Great, another anti-Bush piece.  Wonderful.")

So look, if you've got a great, engaging story that's wild entertainment and just happens to be conservative in it's politics, you probably don't have much to worry about.  But if you're going to shove a plate of broccoli and brussel sprouts at me, pry my jaw open and force it down my throat, odds are I'm going to resist swallowing.

Okay, that's a weird analogy.  What I'm getting at is, if the politics are at the forefront of your story, you've made a sale harder because doing so makes the script less marketable.  It's no sinister liberal conspiracy - it's more of a capitalist one, I suppose.  If Hollywood sees money in a property, they'll make it.

Talking politics - attacking Beck and Limbaugh

I'm probably about to wade into volatile waters here, so as such, I'm coming to this post armed with a bit more secondary sources than I usually do. Yes, friends... today we're talking politics.

There's been a specific sort of tertiary character who pops up in a fair amount of scripts I read, particularly those that fancy themselves political satire. That is the right wing blowhard and bigoted radio commentator. Yes, screenwriters love to mock that conservative fat jolly old elf himself, Rush Limbaugh.

Limbaugh, for those who don't know, is a conservative radio mainstay who is enjoying a recent resurgence in media coverage after losing a fight with relevancy somewhere back in 1995. Seriously. Until Obama got into the White House the last time Rush was of any relevance, Michael Moriarty was the lead assistant District Attorney on Law & Order. He's the angry voice of the disenfranchised privileged white man. You know, people who don't understand why everyone in Springfield is so hateful to that nice Mr. Burns. He's Archie Bunker without the likability or the sense of tact. (If you don't believe me, listen to the callers on his shows.)

From the time I started reading scripts in 2002 to about 2006, I rolled my eyes when a Limbaugh clone turned up in a script. Not because of any of my own political views, but more for the fact that deeming Limbaugh relevant enough to mock was an attitude about as timely as a Murphy Brown spec script that has been sitting in a drawer since 1992.

But Limbaugh has managed to shout his way back into the the wider public eye, so references to him again seem timely. Sharper writers have also moved on to mocking analogues for Fox News' Glenn Beck. For those uninitiated, Glenn Beck is like a batshit crazy Mr. Rogers. Both speak in simple sentences, both of them consider themselves educators, and both of them have shows that regularly venture into worlds of vast fantasy. The only significant difference between the two is that Mr. Rogers fantasy world is achieved by his putting his hand up a puppet's ass, while Beck's fantasy world is born when Beck puts his head up his own ass.

So I don't dispute that both men are eminently mockable. My problem is when there is zero artistry to the hatchet job. In the worst cases, the writer has stuck the most ridiculous dialogue in the Beck/Limbaugh character's mouth, as if to make the point, "This guy is so evil that he says the most offensive ridiculous things." They give the characters on-the-nose dialogue like "All blacks should be denied a vote if they're only going to vote for black men," and then call that satire.

I once read a script that had such a hard-on to attack Bush and the Republicans that literally every villainous character in there was spewing Republican talking points. Another script revolved around an election where the "evil" Republican candidate was running unopposed, so our hero ran against him and challenged his "vile" views. However the "hero" of the story ran not as a Democrat, but as an independent. (For you see, had he run as a Democrat or had a Democrat been in the race, the script would have been obliged to either show faults in Democratic philosophy or else reveal its bias.)

That script had one agenda - vilify the Republicans, and there was literally no low that the Republican candidates, the Republican media and the Republican commentators in the script wouldn't stoop to. I think the writer thought he was making some grand point, that he was dealing a serious blow to the Republican party. Instead, all he was accomplishing was making me roll my eyes at this painful straw man story.

It offended me greatly and I am NOT a Republican. The fact that the writer didn't appreciate the irony when his character took Fox News to task for only presenting one part of the story in furtherance of a larger ideological agenda also angered me. While I love political satire, I detest straw man arguments.

Even more annoying is when a Beck/Limbaugh character shows up so the writer can get a cheap shot in at Republicans and that scene has nothing to do with the larger plot. The whole script stops dead so the writer can get in a "I hate Rush" scene that can easily be removed. I think that's somewhat dangerous to do in a mainstream comedy. At least in a political satire, the audience expects that sort of gag to a degree. Drop it in a romantic comedy and all you've accomplished is getting half the audience to resent you. Bravo.

I don't like either of those men, but to dismiss them outright is to overlook how fascinating they and their followers are, and thus, miss a potentially greater source of satire.

Honestly, a year or so ago, I wouldn't have included Beck in this diatribe or even considered him worth mentioning. He seems so unbalanced, so disconnected from any semblance of reality that I had long assumed that those who watched his show did so ironically. That was before the town hall meetings and the Tea Parties last year, which showed that a lot of people believed utterly outrageous lies and show up to shout at government officials merely because Glenn Beck told them to.

How does one not find that fascinating? Real satire would not be putting these characters in and having everyone in the script roll their eyes at them. Real satire would explore how his followers latch on to his every word, lemming-like. What makes Beck credible in his audiences eyes? How does he cast that spell? How does he present his argument and his beliefs in a fashion that stokes his audience's passions?

You bring me a comedy or a drama that explores that in depth and you'd better believe I'm captivated by it - no matter how much I detest Beck. Don't go for the easy gag - understand why that easy gag exists.

It's amazing that Beck commands such a following that they accept his word so blindly that they don't even need to fact check, they just react. Honestly, when I hear something ridiculous, even from a news personality I trust, my first reaction is "That can't be right." Then I go to Google and let my fingers do the walking. Usually within five minutes I can find at least two trusted sources that can either debunk or affirm those claims.

It's the same with Limbaugh, only the scary thing about him is that he's more mainstreamed. Yet whenever I can choke down enough bile to listen to even part of his show, I find it riddled with inaccuracies, half-truths, false equivalences and blatant misrepresentations. We're talking about a man who once got duped by an article that was clearly labeled as satire! Then, after the truth was pointed out to him, he said he didn't care the quotes were fake, that he "knows" that's what Obama really thinks.

But take a look at just a few of the recent bullshit that has spewed from this man's mouth:

- He had a listener help him insinuate that Obama's reasons for directing those who wish to donate to the Red Cross Haitian relief fund to the link on the White House website. He stirs up paranoia that the Dems are going to use this to put those people on a list. In truth, all it was was a link to the Red Cross, and that link was placed there in part so that people wouldn't get duped by false charities that spring up during these tragedies. Then he vilely says, "We've already donated to Haiti, it's called the U.S. income tax."

- He distorted the facts on the ClimateGate emails.

- Perpetuated untruths about the Health Care bill, including the "Death Panels."

- He regularly race baits, though for some reason this quote is my favorite, even though it's probably one of the less inflammatory ones: "[I]n Obama's America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering"

- said it "seems perfectly within the realm of reality" that the H1N1 vaccine was "developed to kill people"

- Failed to appreciate the irony that the Hawaiian health care that saved his life when he suffered a heart attack is EXACTLY the same sort of heath care that his party is fighting tooth and nail. Then he tried to argue that had Obama's plan taken effect, he would have been denied that health care. (starting 3:00 in, Rush's quote is at 4:11).

To say nothing of the fact that when Limbaugh is on the losing end of an election, he claims that the winning party only has the right to 56% of their agenda - but then defines "Bipartisanism" rather uniquely. I would not want this man educating kindergartners, much less functioning adults. (Can you imagine Rush teaching kindergarten? He'd call a lecture on sharing "socialism," and then mediate disputes by encouraging both participants to fight it out, with the stronger participant declared the winner. Compromise is the same as pugilism in Rush's world.)

I don't like Limbaugh in the least, but I also don't like seeing him dismissed as just a pill-popping overweight shock jock who's whining about wanting to boot anyone less than 7/8ths Caucasian out of the country while calling for giant magnifying glasses to be placed in the Arctic specifically to melt the ice because it will piss Al Gore off. That's not a parody of Limbaugh, that's a cartoon.

I think most of the people who take shots at Limbaugh don't even listen to him. They have a vague sense of who he is and what he does, but they've never studied this man that they're attacking. That's just bad writing - bad research.

Just look at that list above - that's all the shit I found on him without even looking HARD! Use something like that as the basis for your Right Wing punching bag. Don't just look at the arguments - look at how he presents the arguments. Rush tends to set himself up as the victim, or he'll frame the argument in such a way that his listener's are co-tenants in his persecution complex. He'll say something racist and then attempt to head off that criticism by saying something that translates as "You can bet those black racists will try to twist that and make ME look racist."

I stop short of calling it masterful because too often I see those puppet strings, but the man does know how to twist an argument so that it overrides the brain with emotion. He finds the worst sides of his listeners' politics and fans that spark into a forest fire. I hesitate to call it charisma, but it is a skill of sorts. Yet in all my years of reading scripts with bad Limbaugh clones, I've never ONCE seen a writer truly capture this.

Propaganda is subtle and is rarely on-the-nose. Limbaugh and Beck are masters of it, but their counterparts in bad spec scripts are about as skilled in propaganda as the average editorial writer in a junior high newspaper. If you're going to play with those characters, at least make sure you're playing at their level. Otherwise, you're just wasting a lot of valuable time in your script just to tell me you think Limbaugh sucks. I know he does, but at least give me some substance to that argument.

(Before I get a host of comments wondering why I didn't go after any liberal commentators, the answer is simple - in seven plus years of reading scripts, I can't recall a single instance of a liberal ideologue being the punching bag. Not once. I've read enough war mongering Republicans and their evil cohorts to fill an entire book shelf, but the worst any writer does with an overtly liberal politician is have them cheat on their wife. Apparently Republicans are out to destroy the world, Democrats just want to get laid. Go figure.)