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Full Title Liberal Activist Ed Asner Explains Hollywood Silence On Obama, Syria: They 'Don't Want to Feel Anti-Black (Hollywood Reporter) In 2003, ahead of a U.S. attack on Iraq, a robust anti-war movement in Hollywood included a TV commercial starring Martin Sheen and Sean Penn visiting Baghdad. There were online petitions signed by Ed Asner; letters to President George W. Bush pleading for peace were signed by Matt Damon, Tim Robbins, Barbra Streisand and Alec Baldwin; former M*A*S*H star Mike Farrell fronted multiple press conferences where celebrities denounced war. In interviews, Janeane Garofalo stopped identifying herself as an actor --...

POLITICIANS in the former British colony of Virginia are starting to wake up to the fact that its government is about to sign a secret treaty called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) that will give sweeping powers to the movie and music businesses to lock up filesharers. Two US senators are not happy about allowing the government to sign such a treaty, which is so secret that hardly anyone knows about it and the entertainment cartels have the right to send death squads around to the houses of people who are in the know but shouldn't be [you made the...

In the early days of women’s “liberation,” many activists saw abortion as a necessary and even desirable component of the sexual revolution of the sixties. Freed from childbearing, women could engage in numerous relationships without consequences.  However, like many of the tenets of feminism itself, such attitudes no longer prevail. In the grueling battle over abortion, there is growing public perception of antipathy to the barbarous practice. There is a certain remorse surrounding the issue that even its most ardent supporters find difficult to overcome.  Such a perception represents a psychological victory on the part of those pro-life forces whose...

California's Democratic politicians often decry special tax loopholes and other corporate subsidies, but when it comes to one business sector - the movie industry - they make a huge exception. Not only is the Southern California-based movie industry heavily unionized, but its executives are almost all political liberals who donate lavishly to Democratic campaigns. That, in a nutshell, explains why the Democratic speaker of the Assembly, Fabian Núñez, quietly amended a bill this week to grant movie producers tens of millions of dollars in subsidies from a state treasury that already is drowning in red ink, with multibillion-dollar annual deficits....

Remember when Hollywood liberals claimed to care about the world's poor? Man, those were the days. Now the richest people in Southern California, who sit on top of a booming $35-billion industry, are using their impressive political clout to punish the struggling citizens of South Africa, Mexico and Romania for having the nerve to think that their tiny domestic film industries could so much as bite Hollywood's ankles. And our politicians are falling all over each other to service Hollywood's poor and huddled masses, doling out heaps of protectionist corporate welfare that our government cannot begin to afford. In Los...

....Yes, "Spider-Man" led the 2002 box office, its $404 million gross nearly a third larger than the $310 million earned by second-place "Star Wars: Episode 2 — Attack of the Clones." And yes, whether the year's final tally turns out to be $9.2 billion or only $9.1 billion, it is a significant increase that comes at a time when almost all other forms of popular entertainment are suffering shrinking revenues and dwindling audiences. But it does not mean, as some may interpret it, that movies are more central to American life than ever. "It's a totally different world, and people...

LOS ANGELES, April 16 — If in past summers Hollywood seemed to surrender its creative soul to the making of sequels, prequels, spinoffs, remakes and franchise films based on comic books, television series or video games, take a deep breath and prepare for the summer of 2002. Between this Friday's opening of "The Scorpion King," a muscle-bound spinoff of "The Mummy" series, and the Aug. 9 unveiling of "Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams," at least 16 movies will fall into one or more of the above categories. "Usually, there are four or five of these movies over...