My Advances in the Culture War – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

Some ten years ago, I openly joined the Culture War. Before then, like Rick in Casablanca, I stuck my neck out for nobody. My former work environment, Hollywood, was falling prey to academia-spawned Marxism, but at a then slow pace. And I was making a decent living from apolitical “B” scripts about heroes romancing and saving the girl from a villain or monster and foiling the femme-fatale. Until these old plot points became political.

I experienced the change under Obama. My Hollywood friends loved the guy, although they were in the trenches with me trying to get the Big Break, our Reservoir Dogs or Memento. I’d held my nose and voted for McCain, but kept my mouth shut once he lost. Soon my work started getting rejected by the DEI people put in charge — feminists, gays, blacks, and gay black feminists. They laid out the new rules.

Women don’t need rescuing — certainly not by Toxic Men. They can beat up the 200-pound bad guys themselves. They don’t need to look sexy to indulge the Male Gaze, so delete the femme-fatale. And they don’t want “heteronormative” romance. Give us an asexual plain male butt-kicking female lead. Wait a minute. You can’t write for a woman if you’re not one — unless you become one. Get out of my office, formerly Roger Corman’s.

These rules ended not only my Hollywood screenwriting career but the women-sustained Romantic Comedy and Fairy Tale genres. Mirror, mirror on the wall — what’s the biggest bomb of all? Snow White. They condemned to death by gender-swapping the male-friendly action and comic-book genres, including once enduring franchises like Star Wars, Indiana Jones, James Bond (who they did kill), and the Marvel and DC Universes. But here’s the ironic part, they terminated my ex-friends’ careers too.

Mates who’d supported them and erased me were left unemployable, for the drawback of being straight white men. They’d banished me while I was still in the conservative closet, although I would have gladly remained friends with them. Because they knew I deemed feminist men sad creatures, and the female kind crazy, like Hillary Clinton.

My former friends realized I would vote for Trump over Clinton in 2016, and they couldn’t handle it. Some may have wanted to keep me around, but their wives and girlfriends wouldn’t let them. So, they threw me out. Then they hit the wall. They believed I would too. But unlike them, I had somewhere to go. I joined the counterrevolution on two familiar fronts — the arts and the media.

With the movie screen temporarily curtained to me, I wrote four novels in the past eight years. All received good reviews, my recent detective thriller, The Washington Trail, right here in the American Spectator. Though two of them would scorch the hand of any movie executive who touched it. Take an exchange between the two private-eye heroes of The Washington Trail: “You destroyed a two-thousand-dollar television set tackling the guy.” “It was showing The View,” said Slade.

I returned part-time to my first major career, journalism. I began covering the Culture War from the right side of it, like Ernie Pyle did World War II. My essays brought me to this great regular slot at the American Spectator, where I can criticize everything that’s wrong with Hollywood and laud what was once great about it. And how cinema could rise again.

Midway during Trump’s first term, all seemed lost to the ascendant Left. COVID emptied the streets, cities burned, only black lives mattered, social media canceled conservatives that told the truth — such as transwomen are men. These led to what seemed to be the inflection point — Trump’s defeat by a zombie, who five years ago could not be called out for fear of cancellation. Except by journalists like me in defiant magazines like this.

“F_ you if you can’t handle the truth!” barked Joe Scarborough last March on Morning Joe. “This version of Biden is the best Biden ever!” Three months later, during the Trump-Biden debate, it was the leftists who couldn’t handle the truth. That their candidate had lost his mind. The whole world reacted like the English copper to Claude Rains in The Invisible Man (1933). “’E’s all eaten away!” By that night, Elon Musk had saved free speech, and probably the arts, and my screenwriting future.

A funny thing happened after Trump’s reelection. I started getting contacted by independent producers. Last month, one asked me which of my books would be the easiest to adapt into a film. Not the best, I understood right away, but the easiest logistically. “The Christmas Spirit,” I said. “Contained setting, Yuletide magic, romantic fantasy.” “Do you have a script for it?” he inquired. I did and sent it to him. He loved it, he said, adding, “Now comes the hard part.” “Financing,” I said, being an old hand in the screen trade.

Another producer asked me to write a treatment about the SpaceX rescue of the two astronauts stranded on the International Space Station. So, I did. The true story and my treatment flows with suspense, drama, patriotism, and heroism. And politics. According to Musk, he offered to bring the astronauts down months earlier and Biden refused, not wanting his opponent Trump to get the credit. I included that scene in my treatment, Rocket Man.

Movie audiences sick of dismal studio fare would flock to Rocket Man. Hollywoke suits never will, because it redounds to Elon Musk — and by extension Donald Trump. They’d rather leave free money on the table. I hope some smart non-woke investor will pick it up.

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