After this week I am seriously thinking of becoming a movie producer for my next big project. After considering the astonishing success of Rosanne’s return to television, the box office take of Tomb Raider overseas—especially in China, the controversy of Facebook data theft and the general liberalism of all the tech companies from Microsoft to Twitter—I am thinking that there is a serious need for a conservative voice in the world filling these entertainment markets. That is the ultimate solution after all. I have all these scripts sitting around from my Hollywood pitch days which went on from roughly 1995 to 2006 that I have sat on for a long time because only liberals were putting money into films. It was obvious to all of them that they wanted to go in this liberal direction and I didn’t fit at the time. But it hasn’t worked out for Hollywood and there are a lot of lost opportunities to make a lot of money and to make people in the world generally very happy. It really hit home for me this week while Steven Spielberg was doing press for his upcoming Ready Player One movie. He is well aware that he has lost his touch, because essentially epistemologically he has change. Spielberg directed some of the greatest gunfights in cinema history in Raiders of the Lost Ark, but he never has since as he found friends in Hollywood that he didn’t want to piss off. He is now one of those people who put $500,000 behind the March for Our Lives anti-gun march which was an excessively liberal crusade. As conservatives feel vindicated somewhat that Disney put Rosanne back on television as a “Trump supporter” there is an obvious starvation out there for the kind of movies that Hollywood used to make, to be made again, and rather than complain about it, some of us should just get together and fill that market void.
As a Star Wars fan I had to get The Last Jedi Blu-Ray when it came out this past Tuesday. I liked the movie and I thought Rian Johnson did some really good work as the writer and director. But, it has epistemological problems with its foundation philosophy. These new filmmakers are just so San Francisco liberal that it gets in the way of their stories. George Lucas when he made the original Star Wars movies was not a liberal. He might have spent all his time around liberals, but he had enough small-town conservative in him to detest Hollywood. When he took a big chance and went to the bank to fund The Empire Strikes Back with his own money—that was not a Hollywood communist doing the work, it was a passionate filmmaker and that effort showed up on the screen. Lucas may have had liberalism on his mind as a Vietnam protestor, but he like his friend Steven Spielberg grew up on classic westerns that were about good guys against bad guys and he wanted to tell a modern story about those ideas—so they followed the well stated philosophy to great box office success. But George Lucas is obviously missing from The Last Jedi and it was excessively noticeable in the bonus footage this time as opposed to The Force Awakens by J.J. Abrams. Abrams at least is something of a protégé of Lucas and Spielberg so he was able to recapture some of that on-set magic. Rian Johnson was simply a fanboy of Star Wars who was a modern Hollywood Trump hating liberal that was taking the foundations of Star Wars and making a progressive film on top of that foundation.
With all the attempts to show women empowerment and to put Asian actors in various roles in The Last Jedi the film was rejected by Chinese audiences, which Disney and Lucasfilm were obviously trying to cater to. All the female roles in The Last Jedi were liberal embodiments of what the political left thinks feminism is all about, and it comes across uncomfortably political, and it certainly hurt the film. Yet Tomb Raider is all about the magnificent empowerment of Lara Croft and she has guns in her movie, and she kills people and enjoys it—and the Chinese went crazy over it rewarding it surprising in oversea sales. I listened to the bonus footage of The Last Jedi and carefully noted that Rian Johnson thinks the Force is all about altruism and sacrifice, and that his good guys in this movie were all about blowing themselves up for a greater cause—he obviously missed the point of what heroics are classically about in movies. Han Solo is one of the most powerful characters in Star Wars, and he’s all about possession, he loves his ship, he loves his friend Chewbacca, and he loves his friends and would do just about anything for them. Even though in a pinch he is a giving character he is still portrayed as someone who has personal value for things and people due to his selfish need to be attached to them. But the Jedi as Lucas and many other filmmakers struggled with are supposed to get rid of attachments otherwise they become like Darth Vader and this is where their epistemological liberalism destroys their concepts. Those things aren’t at odds with one another, they are connected—personal value and heroics. If the Chinese wanted to hear a bunch of liberal propaganda they’ll just turn on the state-run television—so they weren’t excited for this latest Star Wars movie. But with Tomb Raider, now that is something they can’t get in China and they soaked it up like there was no tomorrow.
Like I said, I think Rian Johnson did a good job with The Last Jedi. It’s good science fiction. It’s no instant classic that people will love way into the future. But its better to have a world with Star Wars in it than not to have it at all. I know Rian Johnson is a Joseph Campbell fan—as I am. But I want to remind everyone that deep down inside, Joseph Campbell was a conservative—and very much an individualist. He would often say, “are you the light or are you the bulb” which liberals immediately associate with values of collectivism. Without the bulb, the light doesn’t come into the world, so the value in story telling is and should always be on the nature of the bulbs. When a light bulb goes out, the liberal thinking is that you just unscrew the old one and put in a new bulb and the light continues. But in reality, the bulbs of our lives are missed. At the end of The Last Jedi you can see the struggle the filmmakers have on this very subject—they are missing the light of Han Solo not just in the story, but in the Star Wars franchise itself. You can’t just unscrew Han Solo and screw in Poe Dameron–then have him get thrown around the room by a bunch of girls and expect audiences to go along with things. It doesn’t work, as liberalism doesn’t work in the world because of the epistemological failures of the basic concepts of the story telling process.
I will continue to cheer on the efforts of filmmakers like Rian Johnson and Lucasfilm in general. And hopefully Disney learns something from their production of Rosanne on television. But I think we as conservatives could make better movies, better music, and even better social media platforms. I certainly know I could. That’s why I’m thinking of doing just that for my next big thing. I’m in the middle of one of those big multimillion dollar projects now, but I’m coming up on a time where I want to do the next big thing in my life, and by the looks of things, I may just start producing some movies. Not from Hollywood mind you, I’d do it from Cincinnati. Back ten and twenty years ago that was an impossible idea, but these days, the rules have all changed. So why not?
Rich Hoffman
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