Hollywood's Red Dawn

FrontPageMag.com ^ | 4-6-11 | Ben Shapiro

[UltraConservative]

“One of the most dangerous plots ever instigated for the overthrow of this Government has its headquarters in Hollywood.” The year was 1945. The speaker was Rep. John E. Rankin (D-Mississippi). The forum was the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Rankin was a racist, a bigot, and an overall nasty fellow. On this, however, he was absolutely right. The only problem is that he was 70 years too early. Of course, he was somewhat right when he spoke the words, too. Ronald Reagan was head of the Screen Actors Guild from 1947-1952, and again in 1959-1960. During that time, he watched as Communist revolutionaries infiltrated the unions, attempting to shut down the studios and turn the instruments of culture toward anti-American ideologies. They remained a vocal minority inside Hollywood, but a dangerous one.

Now, the threat is much greater. The threat remains Communist. It is no longer Russian, and it is no longer internal. The threat comes from abroad, and it comes in the form of cash.

The dirty little secret within Hollywood for the last decade has been the industry’s reliance on Chinese cash. The Chinese movie audience is the fastest growing audience in the world; Fox, Warner, Sony and Disney have developed local programming for the Chinese market. James Cameron’s Avatar — which, as an environmentalist critique of first world imperialism, you would figure the Chinese would love — earned over $200 million in country. 2012 and Transformers 2 also blew the doors off the box office in China. During 2010, move than 1,000 movie theaters opened.

Read more here.

[UltraConservative]

Scary.

[Recovering_Democrat]

The speaker was Rep. John E. Rankin (D-Mississippi). The forum was the House Un-American Activities Committee. Rankin was a racist, a bigot, and an overall nasty fellow.

IOW, he was just like Democrats today.

[mmercier]

Racism is wrong, but being bigoted and nasty is necessary to survival.

We all do this to some degree or another. If you do not discriminate then you eat the apple with the worm in it.

God bless you.

[Evil Slayer]

[Irishguy]

to me what is sad is the change that has happened so fast.

i remember the original. it was a simple enough story, but it had the honesty to say the most likely invasion at the time was from communist russia.

roll on a couple of decades....hollywood no longer has the cohones (which it barely had then) to say the threat is communist china now. in that short time, less than a life time, they have gone from naming a threat to faking a threat. honestly, invasion by north korea? dont misunderstand me the norks are nuts and i have no doubt would nuke if they saw a chance, but invasion...with what? its not credible and it shows a level of cowardice and how submissive the entire west has become. We have all lost our way and to someone like the chicoms it shows a great weakness, that we would calmly walk in lines when ordered to, no matter what the order is.

strangely, its not gone, despite the slowing of a heartbeat, the spark is still there, freedom is not a movie line, it is still there and it wont need much to reinvigorate it. we need a leader who can show passion, charisma. the way out of this quagmire is self belief and self starting and the will to try. all the govt intervention is drowning it out. some simple dramatic changes will stoke the fire and lead to a rebirth...i guess the big question is who is that person?

[lentulusgracchus]

[Article] [I]n December, China Daily reported that increasing numbers of Chinese companies are looking to coopt Hollywood talent, “speeding up their internationalization and strengthening ties with their peers across the Pacific through direct investment in Hollywood, as the dream factor has seen financing from its home market drying up in recent years.”

Shapiro really backs into his main point. Simply walking through the open front door provided by this quote from a semiofficial source (they're all semiofficial -- even the official ones) would be a better way of arguing his point that Hollywood is getting into bed with some nasty actors (as in, Tienanmen), than going through a long narrative about how money is tight and the traditional distribution model and unionized movie production are ossified and financially burdensome.

As for replacing Chinese bad guys with the Norks, that change will fool nobody with the brainpower to realize that the Chinese could indeed incinerate several U.S. cities and put 40,000,000 men across the Bering Strait.

[expatguy]

I think that 99% of Americans dont have a clue as to how bad things can get.

The Chinese are determined to knock America down a peg or two - you can be assured of that

An American Expat in Southeast Asia

[Thunder90]

With the whole Red Dawn movie, it was the US State Department that demanded that all references to Russia and China were removed from the movie. Russia protested LOUDLY when Call of Duty, Modern warfare 2 came out with a sequence depicting the invasion of the US. The Chinese also don’t like being depicted as the bad guys in movies, and both countries complained to the US State Department about the bad portrayal that the new Red Dawn projects towards them. The State Department then went to MGM to have the Chinese and Russians (and references to them) removed from the movie.