“I don’t want to make fun of
Hollywood
celebrities. I want to talk to them.” That’s how I explained my frequent coverage of popular culture and the familiar faces within it to my editors.
This was a few years ago, and I was working for a conservative media company outside of
Washington, D.C
. I knew a lot about Hollywood, and my posts celebrating conservative actors such as James Woods and zinging liberal
celebrities
such as Amy Schumer had done well.
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Yet I had been trained as a reporter. That’s why I wanted to talk to the celebrities, not just mock them in a blog.
It turns out journalists are more effective that way, too. There are platoons of reporters in Washington, and their hostility to conservatives and advocacy for liberalism can and do affect policy. Why doesn’t the Right have people in Hollywood? Why not ask to interview Clint Eastwood, Gal Gadot, or Alec Baldwin?
My editors agreed. In the next couple of years, I would interview Roma Downey and Mark Burnett, Kirk Cameron, Kevin Sorbo, Stacey Dash, Marilu Henner, Brian Dennehy, Harry Connick Jr., and Taylor Sheridan. I also got to talk to a few directors.
It was a fun job — but also an important one. It is said that the liberal media ignore people who contradict their narrative, yet this can be true of conservatives in media as well. We don’t talk to actors, comedians, and screenwriters face to face.
When you consider how deeply Hollywood affects the culture, this is crazy. A conservative movie like 300 or Top Gun can change minds more than a thousand position papers from a think tank.
At one point, I noticed that three of the top movies at the time had Christian themes, and I was the only reporter to notice this and write about it. Christian films were being made for small budgets and making large profits. Hollywood wants to make money. Here was a way to do it.
Being a conservative who was writing for a conservative website, I didn’t interview a lot of big liberal stars. Often, they would see a blog post I had written questioning their politics and spike any possible interview. Sarah Silverman didn’t like me mocking one of her far-left positions and said so on social media. My boss appeared at my desk with a big smile: “You’re being roasted by Sarah Silverman on Twitter.”
I did, however, land a couple of big celebrities whose politics I don’t even know, although I suspected they were not on the far Left. One was Dennehy, the great actor who was in dozens of movies. Dennehy revealed that he got stopped by more fans for a small Christian film he made than for blockbusters such as First Blood — a telling detail that says a lot about the kind of movies the public likes.
Then, there was Henner, most famous for her role in the TV show Taxi. Henner has something called highly superior autobiographical memory. Only 100 people in the world have it, and it is freaky. She can be given any date at random, and she will instantly know what happened on that day — as in, yes, on May 10, 1984, I had a date with John Travolta.
The nicest guy I ever interviewed was Cameron, the 1980s sitcom star who became an evangelical Christian and conservative. I got to verify that, yes, he was named after Captain Kirk from Star Trek.
I never interviewed liberal fire breather Alec Baldwin, but I did review his memoir Nevertheless. It reads like a conservative account of the American dream. Baldwin was a child from a poor Catholic family in Massapequa, Long Island. He went into acting not to make the world a better place but for the money. (To those of us on the Right, that’s a valid reason to do something.) The most touching parts of Nevertheless are the descriptions of the early years of Baldwin’s life. He had to grapple with the anxiety of living in a house with an exhausted father and a mother who relied on pills to get through the day. For Baldwin, acting was a way to deal with the stress of his home life.
If Baldwin’s political views hadn’t been “concretized” when he was a child to support the Democrats no matter what, he might be a Republican. He may have even become a member of the National Rifle Association, which would have taught him gun safety and saved him a lot of grief.
Sadly, Baldwin rejected all my requests for an interview. (Our lives did intersect later when he complimented a short film I made, but that’s a different story.)
The most impressive person I interviewed was Sheridan. Now a well-known and award-winning actor, screenwriter, and co-creator of Yellowstone, at the time, in 2016, Sheridan was the screenwriter of a great movie called Hell or High Water. Sheridan talked about avoiding politics in his writing while also being realistic and fair to all sides. While he would not tell me his views on gun control, Sheridan made the point that in certain remote parts of the country, firearms are often the only means of defense. “I mean,” he said, “if the police are 20 miles away, what do you do?” It was one of my favorite pieces, teasing out political nuance and celebrating great art.
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As the Academy Awards approached, I was gearing up for a second interview with Sheridan, this time at the Oscars. Then, word came down that I and a bunch of other staff had been laid off. I suppose it couldn’t be helped, with journalism being in such dire straits these days. Still, I consider it a huge missed opportunity.
Washington and New York are swarming with liberal reporters who are actively for the Left. If the Right wants to change Hollywood, and the culture, it needs reporters in Tinseltown.
Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of
The Devil’s
Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi
. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.