WHEN LEFTY MET RIGHTY…, OR, SLEEPLESS IN HOLLYWOOD

And he’s not the only virtue-obsessed right-wing Republican scourge here invading this stronghold of the entertainment industry, citadel of the popular culture, namely Paramount Studios, Hollywood, California. There’s William E Buckley, Jr. himself, sitting out on the patio having a turkey sandwich and a Molson golden, wearing a pair of Ray Ban shades to protect his eyes from the all-encompassing southern California sunshine. He’s with his successor at National Review, John O’Sullivan, and NR’s Washington correspondent, Kate O’Beirne. Somewhere around here are representatives David Dreier, Jack Fields, and Dana Rohrabacher. Frank Luntz, one of the architects of the hated “Contract with America,” is here. And Arianna Huffington, wife of 1994 U.S. Senate candidate Michael and authoress and virtuecrat in her own right, is milling about with a big sincere-looking grin, planting social kisses on just about everyone she meets, or at least the important people. Such as Sam Nunn, media critic and retiring elder-statesman senator from Georgia, who after receiving his Arianna kiss, politely asks about her children. Astonishing!

But the really astonishing thing about this gathering is not merely that all the right-wing scourges were invited (and not by Paramount, mind you; that would be way beyond astonishing) but that the Hollywood types knew who was going to be here and came anyway. “Here” in this case refers to the ” Images of Ourselves: A Dialogue Between Washington and Hollywood” conference, put on jointly by the Center for the Study of Popular Culture and the National Review Institute. The purpose is to get the powers who run what John O’Sullivan calls “the two most unpopular cities in America” talking to one another. As David Horowitz, president of the Center and organizer of the event, notes, Hollywood and Washington have been at each other’s throats since the McCarthy era and that unfortunate blacklist thing, and this applies especially to the Republicans. “Conservatives had given up on even trying to gain a foothold in this town,” he says. That is, he is quick to point out, until he came along.

The conference grew out of this little group called the Wednesday Morning Club, an informal association of actors, directors, writers, and producers who, shall we say, don’t necessarily toe the Hollywood line on every issue, or don’t go in much for line-toeing in general. It was formed over breakfast on the day after the 1992 election (hence its name) by Lionel Chetwynd, the man who wrote TNT’s Kissinger and Nixon and directed The Hanoi Hilton, along with some friends who were somewhat irked at how little debate there was in Hollywood during the election. Everyone just assumed everyone else was for Clinton, and that was that. But ’twas not so. A handful of people were willing to admit to apostasy early on, and so this brave new group was born. It has since become allied with the Center, enlisted, as it were, in Horowitz’s crusade to bridge the gap between Washington and Hollywood. ” [We’ve] created a venue in Hollywood where people like Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole can come and talk, and that’s something that’s really unprecedented,” Horowitz says. Not that Gingrich and Dole have actually rushed from the LAX tarmac to have their limos take them into studioland for speaking engagements. But others have come, including Jack Kemp, Dick Cheney, and George Gilder. And look at all the conservative faces at the conference!

The gathering began quite early, in an amazingly plush auditorium where one figures the Paramount execs screen their latest pictures. The seats are more comfortable than the average CEO’s offce chair, which was lucky because the day consisted of six — count ’em! — panels, each of which, aside from maybe the first, easily took over an hour and a half. There was also a lunch in the middle and a banquet in the evening at which Sam Nunn and Tom Selleck received awards, for what it was not terribly clear, except that it had something to do with “values.” Note that word: It cropped up with the persistency of ragweed in a vacant lot in the speeches these Hollywoodsters gave about the culture: “social values,” “family values, …. fundamental values.”… Only Bill Bennett, in his keynote address, mentioned values’ long4ost bastard cousin, virtue.

The first panel was rather uneventful, although two of the themes that would dominate the conference came into sight right off the bat: the V-chip and Pat Buchanan. The V-chip is the little technological wonder that the president and certain United States senators think is going to save our kids from mind-numbing TV violence by allowing parents to block out hyper-violent programs. And Pat Buchanan is… well, you know who he is. Horowitz himself was the first to bring up Buchanan, in the context of praising Bill Buckley and National Review for rooting anti-Semitiism out of the respectable O’Sullivan, who followed, politely declined to get into the Pat Buchanan ” controversy” but later was hissed when he referred to some of the things being said about Pat as “character assassination.”

Chetwynd got off a double-barreled blast at both Buchanan and the V-chip, claiming that if we were going to have V-chips, we might as well have L-chips for language, S-chips for sex, and, for his house, a B-chip for Pat Buchanan.

With the second panel, entitled “Our Nation, Our, culture,” things started to heat up. There was really no dialogue to speak of, despite the conference’s title, just a slew of speeches. But what speeches! The audience got earfuls of inflammatory, accusatory statements from the politicos — with the exception of Susan Estrich — and culture-cons, and defensive, hackles-up responses from the Hollywoodsters. Mark Steyn, film critic for the Spectator in London, led off with a trenchant, sustained attack on American popular culture, once the “soundtrack to the 20th century,” now a depraved pimp pushing its “coke and hookers” portrait of America on the rest of us. The villain of Steyn’s spiel was Joe Eszterhas, the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood and author of Showgirls, the epic bomb about ” lap-dancing in Las Vegas.” The mention of Eszterhas really got Linda Obst into a frenzy, and she started to go on about how she had conceived Flashdance, one of her early films, as a “girl’s empowerment picture” that would show some of the “finest aspects of the human character,” but then how the studio hired Eszterhas to come aboard and do a rewrite, and he just ruined it, turning the thing into a freaking lap-dance movie.

“The market” turned out to be theme No. 3 of the conference. The great debate raging around this topic was whether Hollywood creates a demand for depravity or merely responds to one that already exists in the breasts of Morn&Pop&Buddy&Sis out there in the heartland. Not surprisingly, the politicos, especially NSIVE, TO the conservatives, argued the supply side, while the Hollywoodsters argued the demand side. One exception was O’Sullivan, who compared the relationship between Hollywood and the rest of America to that between pusher and addict. But he redeemed himself somewhat by calling Hollywood “the Athens of the new Hellenistic world” created by the global predominance of the English language. Still, he was far from sanguine about what the poets of this new Athens were cranking out.

And so were many of his fellow panelists. Every time some culture-con would bring up just how trashy so much of Hollywood’s product tends to be, the Hollywoodsters would reflexively bring up the market and censorship; the market as in “What do want from us? It’s a business, and that’s what people pay to see”; and censorship as in “What do you want, the government telling you what you can and can’t watch?” This in turn made the culture-cons defensive, to the point that they kept prefacing everything they said with ” I’m not for censorship, but…” or even “No one is more opposed to censorship than I, but…”

The third panel was supposed to shed some light on how TV programming decisions are made. To that end, it featured Edgar Scherick, former ABC programming chief; former Cheers producer Rob Long; and Ken Wales, another writer-producer who told a lengthy sob story about how hard it was for him to bring Christy, the tale of a religious turn-of-the-century schoolmarm, to the small screen because of executive obtuseness. For some reason, Sam Nunn and Jack Fields were on this panel too, despite the fact that they knew nothing about TV decision-making. For that matter, no one else seemed to either, or if they did they were having a heck of a time communicating it to the audience. Only Rob Long offered any real insight, which amounted to William Goldman’s dictum that “nobody knows anything,” meaning that all successes are flukes and TV execs are essentially like a bunch of blindfolded kids at a birthday party, wildly swinging the big stick of television programming at the pifiata that is the American public. He also noted that execs tend to follow trends and copy successful shows. Considering how the airwaves are being assaulted by Friends rip-offs, it is an open question how many in the audience needed this pointed out to them.

After the lunch break, the fourth panel convened, on the topic of representing history and politics on the screen. Opinions ranged from “all art is a fiction” that “reflects the truth more profoundly than historical narratives” (Ron Silver) to “Hollywood getting history wrong is cultural murder” (Ronald L. Maxwell, producer/director of Gettysburg). All agreed, however, that the best defense against pop culture’s distortion of history is an educated public and assured us that Hollywood posed no real threat to anyone’s place in history, not even Richard Nixon’s.

The most riveting moment came during the panel on sex and violence. The panel chair called on a woman, but who stood up but David Carradine, Kung Fu “Grasshopper” Kane himself, announcing that the woman had held her hand up on his behalf because his arm had gotten tired. The buzz in the room was that she was his “personal assistant,” which ought to further illuminate the workings of Hollywood for you. Anyway, he started charging down the aisle saying that he’s been “trying to do a spiritual show with family values but I can’t sell it unless I kick somebody for at least four minutes out of every 431/2 minute show.” He also noted, supporting the reflect-not-create theory, that he “took a lot of drugs in the 60s” and movies didn’t make him do it.

Aside from this burst of excitement, the panel was basically three not terribly reflective Hollywood insiders (McTiernan, Bob Gale, producer and co- author of the three Back to the Future movies, and Carmine Zozsora, head of Bruce Willis’s production company) getting skewered by an academician, Stanley Rothman, professor of government at Smith College, who pointed out, among other things, that Hollywood always likes to take credit for the good influences it effects but insists on denying even the potential for bad. After all, why do so many writers, directors, and actors loudly proclaim their desire “to make a difference” and inject plugs for various causes into their work if the medium has no effect on the public? This was utterly lost on Zozzora, the one participant most insistent that Hollywood merely reflects what people want. When an audience member asked why there were no films that showed religion in a positive light, he responded, in perfect seriousness, that the most recent attempt, namely The Last Temptation of Christ, had bombed, and so that was that as far as religious films were concerned.

Then it was on to the final panel, “What Can Be Done?” The answer: Not censorship, not the V-chip, not a rating system. In short, not much. This panel featured three members of Congress: Bono, Dreier, and Rohrabacher. The latter two used the occasion to give campaign speeches about welfare reform (Dreier) and the honest, hardworking folks back in the home district concerned about these very issues (Rohrabacher). Bono, to his credit, decided to use his skills from his days in the entertainment industry to keep the crowd in stitches. It would be impossible to do full justice to his remarks, so perhaps it’s best to leave it at the fact that daytime talk shows feature women who mate with donkeys.

The culmination of the day was Bill Bennett’s keynote address. Chiding not just Hollywood but all of America for what he called “unilateral moral disarmament,” Bennett urged both the entertainment industry and advertisers to recognize the tremendous effect they have on the culture and on the behavior of the young. He was as against censorship as any of the Hollywoodsters — he referred to himself as a “First Amendment absolutist” and in fact noted that he opposed government intervention of any kind (thus completing the day’s rout of the poor, maligned V-chip). Instead he called on Hollywood to be “self-governing,” as it once was, back in those remote days when Louis B. Mayer was chairman of the California Republican party, and even those not so remote days when movies like My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music were winning the Academy Award for Best Picture. How elegantly simple! How perfectly succinct! The only solution, to be sure, and yet… how to pull it off?. How to effect the transformation of one of the most notoriously self-indulgent and unrestrained communities in the country into an exemplar of responsibility and self-government? Bennett did not have an answer. But to his credit, he did manage to say in a matter of minutes what 35 panelists could not come up with over the course of nine hours. ,

Michael Anton, who last wrote in THE WEEKLY STANDARD about the need for a conservative bohemia, studies political philosophy at the Clearmont Graduate School.