Can Trump Make Hollywood Great Again?
Exactly 45 years ago, during Ronald Reagan’s first Inaugural celebration, Hollywood legends still lived, and even more amazingly, voted Republican. Reagan was friends with most of them, having been a movie star himself, and they turned out in style to cheer him on. The guest roster read like a TCM Film Festival tribute list.
Its players are contemptuous of Trump — whom they did everything in their power to defeat — and his dreaded MAGA movement.
It included Reagan best friend William Holden, Frank Sinatra (who sang Nancy [with the Reagan Face] to Nancy Reagan), Dean Martin, Charlton Heston, Jimmy Stewart, Elizabeth Taylor, and TV icons Michael Landon, Robert Conrad, and Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. Bob Hope was funnier than any current late-night comic host has ever been (“He [Reagan] doesn’t know how to lie, exaggerate or cheat. He always had an agent for that.”)
The mood that night in Washington, of the whole country, was jubilant. As if people knew they were in for an exciting, patriotic ride — away from the worst and weakest presidency in U.S. history. In eight short years, the nation’s oldest, longest lasting enemy would be crumbling and near collapse, leaving American military-economic might unmatched. “Here’s my strategy on the Cold War,” Reagan famously said. “We win. They lose.”
It happened just as he stated after his two terms. And Eighties Hollywood reflected the America First zeitgeist with films such as Rambo: First Blood Part Two, Rambo III, Rocky IV, An Officer and a Gentleman, Heartbreak Ridge, Firefox, Rocky IV, and Top Gun, and TV shows such as The A-Team, Airwolf, Magnum P.I. (an ex-Navy Seal Vietnam War vet), The Greatest American Hero, and Mission: Impossible (the TV series sequel). Donald Trump’s Inaugural this long weekend feels very much as Reagan’s did, and is also rocketing off the worst and weakest presidency in U.S. history. Only Hollywood remains a far rottener place this time.
Its players are contemptuous of Trump — whom they did everything in their power to defeat — and his dreaded MAGA movement. Once male role models such as Harrison Ford, Jeff Bridges, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Dave Bautista depleted the last of their masculine appeal by whining about Trump while promoting silly cackling shrew Kamala Harris. Men just ignored them, and Trump won the popular vote last year by 2.5 million people.
Many of them even voted for Ronald Reagan again to the embarrassment of the legacy entertainment media. The excellent independent feature Reagan, a positive biography of the heroic President, made close to $30 million at the box office last year, ahead of its streaming success this year. And on the popular review-citing website, Rotten Tomatoes, regular moviegoers gave Reagan a whopping 98 percent positive rating, yet professional critics just 18 percent, an incredible discrepancy.
Then the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science joined the beclowning. Reagan deserved an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, as did Dennis Quaid for Best Actor, given his outstanding performance in the title role, and Penelope Ann Miller for Best Actress in the part of Nancy Reagan. Yet none of the three received one because the film is ineligible due to its violation of the Academy’s ridiculous and pathetic mandatory diversity rules. You see, the majority of the cast in the historical recreation is nonminority. Following modern Hollywoood criteria, Gorbachev (Olek Krupa) should have been played by a black lesbian.
I was chased out of LA ten years ago. The last script I pitched to a studio exec was a legal drama based on an actual federal case of a national cemetery that banned religious expression. The liberal law student granddaughter of an interred war veteran reluctantly agrees to help a non-profit Christian law firm (like the one that won the real case) in a First Amendment suit, only to encounter brutal blowback from her law school faculty and fellow students, including her fiancé. I saw it as a David and Goliath legal story like The Verdict (1982). But I got branded with the scarlet letter in Hollywoke — C for conservative. So, I became a novelist instead.
Last week added another nail in the Hollywood coffin. The brilliant visionary filmmaker David Lynch (The Elephant Man, Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive) died at 78. Lynch’s genius extended beyond his directorial art and emotional resonance to showcasing some of the most beautiful, talented actresses on screen (Sean Young, Laura Dern, Naomi Watts, Mädchen Amick, Sherilyn Fenn) as real women — feminine, sensuous, and vulnerable — unlike the phony, androgynous, annoying girl bosses of his inferior contemporaries.
With Lynch’s passing, Hollywood seemed a lost cause to many. But not to Donald Trump. In addition to his already full plate like closing the border, deporting criminal illegals, ending two wars, and saving the economy, he announced his intention to make Hollywood great again. To this task he appointed three of the last living screen legends — Jon Voight, Sylvester Stallone, and Mel Gibson — Special Ambassadors to Hollywood. Each of those tough guys has forgotten more about the movie art than any modern punk will ever know. “These three very talented people will be my eyes and ears, and I will get done what they suggest,” Trump said. “It will again be, like The United States of America itself, The Golden Age of Hollywood!”
Jon Voight wasn’t acting when he emoted at the Trump Victory Rally in DC Sunday before the Inauguration on Monday, “What an honor it is for me to be up here in front of you great men and women who have all come here to celebrate the greatest win of all time,” he said.
If anyone can save Hollywood from the forces of wokeness it’s Donald Trump and his Special Ambassadors. I sure hope they succeed. I’ve been on the same crusade for ten years. And I have this old script they might be interested in.
READ MORE from Lou Aguilar:
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Enjoy Trump’s Inaugural with the timeliest political thriller of the decade THE WASHINGTON TRAIL, now out in paperback. Get all the thrills for a lower price. And help make American fiction great again.
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