The most illustrative headline on the current state of the Culture War appeared last weekend in the web magazine Cosmic Book News: “Supergirl Box office Collapses 80 percent And Loses To A George Washington Movie.” Predicting the Supergirl implosion in my review of the movie required no Nostradamus mysticism. Nor did anticipating the enormous success of Young Washington. The Angel Studios release opened at $20 million, which just happens to match its production budget. By comparison, the $170 million DC Universe picture has grossed close to $65 million worldwide, and may fall well short of a hundred million.
In fact, despite a half century of endless films depicting the McCarthy era as the Hollywood holocaust … there was real subversive communist infiltration of the movie business.
Premiering a respectful religiously correct biography about the Father of Our Country over America’s 250th birthday weekend would once have been standard opening procedure for a major Hollywood studio. Today, none would even make the film. In their minds, one of the greatest men who ever lived was a white male Christian slaveowner, and the patriarch of a racist colonialist nation supporting genocidal Israel.
Which is why they gave this year’s Best Picture Oscar to One Battle After Another, romanticizing left-wing violence against the United States, led by a black girlboss to the chagrin of dysfunctional white men Sean Penn and Leonardo de Caprio. That the film was a financial dud bothered studio heads not at all. Asexual girlbosses, they insist, are where it’s at, no matter how many times the audience of both sexes reject the concept. Hence, Supergirl to the rescue — and to empty theaters.
So, once again, little Angel Studios (The Sound of Freedom) picked up the free money by coproducing and distributing a patriotic faith-based historical bio, and reaping the financial reward. This Veteran’s Day Weekend, Angel will release another biopic, Jimmy, ironically about the Hollywood that no longer exists, and the white male (cue industry feminist shrieking) who symbolized the best of it, James Stewart. Specifically, how Stewart went from Academy Award-winning actor to World War II hero to the star of one of the most beloved films of all time. And it’s a wonderful story.
Jimmy Stewart was at the top of his profession in 1941. He’d just won the Best Actor Oscar for The Philadelphia Story. Some thought, and still do, that the award for his breezy yet charming performance as just one of three leads — along with Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn — in the classic hit was a consolation prize for not winning it for his film-carrying tour de force in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Regardless, MGM now owned an MVP (the studios had contract players like baseball teams back then). Later that same year, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. And Stewart traded his huge paychecks and career prospects for a private’s uniform in the Army Air Corps.
He wasn’t the only major movie star to do so. Almost every single marquee name, no matter how big, joined the military ready to go into combat — Clark Gable (Army Air Corps, tail gunner on bombing missions over Europe), Tyrone Power (Marine, flew wounded Marines out of Iwo Jima), Henry Fonda (Navy Intelligence, battle support), Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (Navy, amphibious operations in Europe), Robert Montgomery (Navy, PT boat commander in the Pacific). Yes, the Greatest Generation included Hollywood. And every one of those men would have laughed at Penn, DeCaprio, One Battle After Another, and Hollywoke.
Stewart went into the heart of darkness. He flew more than 20 combat missions over Germany, got almost blown out of the sky, and watched comrades die. He returned to Hollywood no longer a naïve Mr. Smith or a breezy romantic lead but a shaken, somber man, unsure of his screen future. Fortunately for him and posterity, his Mr. Smith director, Frank Capra, had the perfect script for his heavier postwar persona, It’s a Wonderful Life.
Just as Angel Studios now has the perfect crowd-pleasing movie ahead, plus plenty of dough from their last one, Young Washington. Yet like America against a communistic world, they’re still practically alone versus a leftist industry. This is good for their coffers, but not so great for the culture, which would benefit from increased traditionalist fare.
Last year, I submitted to an Angel-affiliated production company my screenplay Operation Cowboy, based on the true story of a Stalinist plot to assassinate John Wayne, spurred by his success flushing communists out of Hollywood. In fact, despite a half century of endless films depicting the McCarthy era as the Hollywood holocaust (The Way We Were, The Front, The Majestic, Good Night, and Good Luck, Trumbo), there was real subversive communist infiltration of the movie business. Wayne and Ronald Reagan helped put an end to it, alas a temporary one.
Or, as the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh responded to an X critic calling his commentary “a new era of McCarthyism,” “First of all, you live in Turkey. My country is none of your business, foreigner. Second, yes I absolutely want a new era of McCarthyism to crush the communists. McCarthy was right and fully justified.”
I never heard back from the production company about my script. And, sadly, it’s Angel Studios or bust for such a project. Hollywoke moguls would balk at a crowd-pleasing fact-based thriller puncturing 75 years of communist propaganda. But they’ll give DC Comics film CEO James Gunn another opportunity to diminish Superman, and the feminist Supergirl screen-wrecker (Ana Nogueira) a whack at ruining Wonder Woman. It’s time for another Hollywood witch-hunt.
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