Rebels With a Cause

[travelinman]

Rebels With a Cause
Are Hollywood Republicans on the verge of a big break?

BY BRIDGET JOHNSON
Wednesday, July 21, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

HOLLYWOOD--It might have been the first premiere not intended for the public: John Kerry topping the credits and John Edwards in a supporting role, the cast rounded out by A-list actors who hopped into the fund-raising limelight to prostrate themselves at the feet of the most culturally liberal presidential ticket in history.

After Whoopi Goldberg wowed the Democratic crowd with locker-room musings on the alternate meaning of our president's name and Mr. Kerry scooped up a foot locker full of entertainers' cash, eyes were rolling outside New York's Radio City Music Hall. Somewhere in a La-La Land far, far away, in Hollywood and across the outlying Valley hamlets, everyday actors, writers, directors, producers and crew members dreamed of the day when the world would see that not everyone in the entertainment business lives to choke--gag--on his own foot.

These minorities, these aliens too often undocumented, these artists sorely underrepresented at loudmouthed fund-raising galas are better known as Hollywood Republicans.

Along with not succumbing to the casting couch and not dating your co-stars, one of the unwritten rules in Hollywood has been not coming out of the GOP closet. Actress Emma Caulfield ("Darkness Falls") was slammed when she said she would campaign for Elizabeth Dole. "I would never fully admit to being a Republican in this town," she later told Premiere magazine. "I want to work."
So what's a Republican to do in Hollywood, where you want to create entertainment for the masses and not a political statement tailor-made for liberal elite, or just want to safely say "I like Bush" (not in the Whoopi sense) within 50 feet of a producer? Will you just end up Bambi to a studio Godzilla?

According to actor Mark Vafiades, president of the Hollywood Congress of Republicans (hollywoodrepublicans.com), Hollywood Republicans do suffer discrimination, sometimes losing work for their political views. "We hear the stories all the time," he says, noting that while it's hard to prove, it's kind of obvious when actors get cut from auditions right after the subject of politics is brought up.

Hollywood culture, for all of its intended creativity, does tend to resemble a massive flock. Ask any producer what he craves in a script, and he's begging and pleading for something that hasn't been done before. In this culture, wearing a John Kerry button becomes as important as scoring that Hermes Birkin bag, and praising the creative genius of Michael Moore is mandatory. Show-biz types who lift the Democratic banner and think Che is cool delight in seeing themselves as revolutionary and antiestablishment, when they're really playing into the Hollywood establishment and its herd mentality.

So a Republican in Hollywood is a true nonconformist. That's hot.

In addition to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tinseltown rebels include Bo Derek, Bruce Willis, Tom Selleck, Dennis Miller, Mel Gibson, Chuck Norris, Ben Stein, Pat Sajak, Kelsey Grammer, Danny Aiello, Patricia Heaton and James Woods. "I love George Bush right now and I always have," Mr. Woods told Jay Leno in 2001. "I'm the only guy in L.A. who voted for him."

Where did the notion of compulsory leftist party registration in Hollywood come from, anyway? The first theory is that it's the aftereffect of the blacklisting era that has cast conservatives in the role of industry enemy, a tradition carried on by those not even conceived yet in the 1950s. The more likely answer is simple: Liberalism is akin to a long-running Hollywood fad. Personal accountability can be a foreign concept when you have a publicist to get you out of any jam. Taxes are easier to swallow when you bring in $10 million a film. Marxism sounds vaguely groovy and compassionate when you live in the Hollywood Hills, as opposed to under any of the regimes responsible for between 85 million and 100 million deaths in the last century. Celebs like to see it as a heightened global consciousness--excluding global realities like, say, terrorism--and make their scheduled appearances for the television cameras on Skid Row, dishing out turkey and green beans for the homeless.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110005377

[gae]

In addition to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tinseltown rebels include Bo Derek, Bruce Willis, Tom Selleck, Dennis Miller, Mel Gibson, Chuck Norris, Ben Stein, Pat Sajak, Kelsey Grammer, Danny Aiello, Patricia Heaton and James Woods. "I love George Bush right now and I always have," Mr. Woods told Jay Leno in 2001. "I'm the only guy in L.A. who voted for him."

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">I'm surprised by Bo Derek, Bruce Willis and Kelsey Grammer. I don't know why.

[Lew]

Shannon Doherty is a conservative, and I have always found her to be smoking hot.

There's something to be said for hot chick right-wingers, like Shannon, like Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, Gae, etc...