Just to follow up on Thomas’ remarks above that Hollywood wouldn’t make a movie like “Air Force One or “Independence Day” right now — when Bill Pullman starred as the heroic president, the producers of that movie debuted it in the summer of 1996, just before the Clinton-Dole election. Eight years later, the same producers in the run up to the 2004 election came out with “The Day After Tomorrow” with, shall we say, a slightly less flattering portrayal of our national political leaders. And guess which picture did better at the box office?
It’s interesting that the higher percentage of openly non-doctrinaire liberal Hollywood stars over the years seem to have come from the action/adventure genre — Arnold, Bruce Willis, Tom Selleck, Chuck Norris, and going back to John Wayne and Steve McQueen. Sly Stallone may not be part of that group, but a check of his campaign donations over the years shows Ds and Rs in the bunch.
Virtually all of them didn’t “come out” until after their careers were going strong, but as the pro-U.S. movies of the 1990s showed, their success and the type of film they’ve been involved with can be made by anyone, liberal or conservative, and there’s no question it’s been tried by liberals, such as with the recent Bourne movies. But none of those stars has reached the same iconic status, and the reason in large part may be the types of action films they choose tend to reflect their own political beliefs — i.e. the U.S. sucks if there’s an R in the White House — while the public wants to see movies that at the very least, don’t care who’s in charge in Washington. They just don’t want to see their beliefs and their own society trashed just because of the result of the last political election.
Wanna-be action stars who choose their material based on how they feel about the people in charge of the government face a dilemma — they can do a pro-U.S. movie when someone like Bush is in the White House, and risk antagonizing their friends and possibly sabotaging their future career if the film bombs, or they can go with the general flow in Hollywood and make movies where the U.S. military, the CIA, or some big domestic corporation is the supreme evil and maintain their standing in the film colony, even as they churn out film after film that underperforms at the box office.
As much as Hollywood likes to make money, you’d think that would trumph politics in the minds of at least one or two studio execs, but it doesn’t. And if someone like Giuliani or even part-time actor Fred Thompson wins next year, don’t expect “Independence Day II” to be showing up in theaters any time before 2014.
