Throughout its history, Hollywood has always been somewhat out of control and most entertainers have always been overtly engrossed with themselves. In the old days, however, Hollywood projected a certain class and set a positive tone that folks could respect. Something sorely missing from todays screen stars, made up mostly of juvenile big mouths and propagandist leftest thugs. Today most of filmdoms elites are full of s**t and think the world revolves around them. To a certain degree thats true. It's the pop culture we live in today. A pop culture that drives the good, the bad and the ugly in American society.
"Throughout its history, Hollywood has always been somewhat out of control and most entertainers have always been overtly engrossed with themselves. In the old days, however, Hollywood projected a certain class and set a positive tone that folks could respect. Something sorely missing from todays screen stars, made up mostly of juvenile big mouths and propagandist leftest thugs. Today most of filmdoms elites are full of s**t and think the world revolves around them. To a certain degree thats true. It's the pop culture we live in today. A pop culture that drives the good, the bad and the ugly in American society.
Yup. In old-time Tinseltown vice at least paid respect to virtue and the studio bosses tried to keep outrageous behavior under wraps. The system did enforce some limits, the communists were officially kept at arms length [see: Reagan, Ronald, W., president, Screen Actors Guild] and during the wars they were unabashedly patriotic [ol' Schickelgruber had his admirers in babylon but after 12/07/41 they instantly found another song to sing]. It is one thing to question authority, to rebel without a cause, to pluck the grapes of wrath, or rub one's golden arm but the roaring sixties didn't just change the culture but rather, reversed it.
Now, by way of example, we have a convicted child molester, the director Victor Salva [Powder, Jeepers Creepers] being lauded openly...
"Perhaps Hollywood's most unsung auteur, Victor Salva's career has been one of moderate commercial success flooded with controversy. To some, he's a competent B-filmmaker with an eye for precision. To others, he's a brilliant thinking-man's Spielberg with an eye for jaded lead characters and some fantastic directorial flourishes. Nevertheless, Salva has brought an almost Hemingway-like approach to his films, films that recall the visual display of Spielberg with characters that recall the rough masculinity of classic Howard Hawks. On the surface, Salva's films seem so deceptively simple, with what seem like basic plots and characters. But beneath the surface lies dark examinations on fear, repression, anguish, and misery."
While Mr. Salva has no difficulty finding people to work with him and defend him in public, anyone who cannot recite the leftist catechism chapter-and-verse might as well be toiling in Inquisition-era Spain or Stalin's Russia. Unless one is as big as Mel Gibson or Tom Hanks one had better carefully watch what one says and does. Not my definition of freewheeling; just the switch of one dogma for another
I was seventeen when MTV debuted and eagerly watched it evolve. In a bit over a decade or so I have watched it mutate into something truly hideous to behold. Every now and then they would come up with something interesting, heck, once upon a time they even played music videos! But now, now it's hootchies, bling-bling, the endless spring break, the Osbournes, and a Real World / Road Rules lineup that once had "real" genuinely interesting people in it but has long since filled itself with pretty, empty-headed, unbelievably boring kids self-consciously behaving badly for the camera. I wondered if it was just me geezing but I recall reading of the original VJ's being interviewed on the occasion of MTV's twentieth anniversary admitting that they don't let their own kids watch it.
This is why I hold out some hope in the technological revolution that has enabled a proliferation of choices good as well as bad. Now, maybe the new spirit of enforcement in the federal broadcasting establishment will begin to bite and hopefully the industry will get back to basics, but the expansion of alternatives to the same old swill will force change one way or another. In addition to satellite, internet and (hopefully) expanding bandwidth the success of Mel's Passion made and distributed entirely outside the old system is the harbinger of things to come. Now that movies can be made and edited (and soon distributed, no doubt) entirely digitally the playing field must even out over time. I for one, eagerly await the revolution.