Momus et al,
Guys, I'm tremendously weary of running around harvesting statistics to prove that grass is green and skies are blue. The top grossing movie statistics vs. the fact that producers keep producing movies that aren't going to make mega-bucks prove the essential point that I was making, it clearly isn't only about making money. In fact, at a time when people nationwide are less inclined than ever to go out to the movies only an idiot would suggest that the problem was that there aren't enough "gay cowboy movies". Producing a movie that specifically alienates the most lucrative portion of the movie market: families with children is not exactly the answer to reinvigorating the industry.
MSNBC, the LA Times, the NY Times, the SF Chronicle and a host of other liberal news outlets owed by large media congloms, continue to lose viewers/circulation hand over fist and yet they still keep having money plowed into them and noone dares to suggest Gee, Conservative media is still growing and making money, maybe we should consider a change of content? They don't make the suggestion for exactly the same reasons that many of the posters to this board wouldn't make it - they can't stand that worldview and would rather close down than promote them. Look, I lived in NYC and D.C. and worked in media long enough to know there is a underlying desire to promote a worldview and change the views of "flyover country."
If you want to make money with a film in the gay marketplace, you make a coffee house picture and play it only in the major cities, its called targeted marketing. If you want to promote an agenda, you make a movie that idealizes that agenda and makes the alternative look awful, and then release it nationwide.
Hollywood doesn't suddenly become ragingly liberal during presidential election cycles and then just as suddenly conservative in the off season. They really aren't terribly different from the people round here, and they'd rather make money doing what they believe in. The producers who donate huge amounts of money to liberal PACs and frankly have no friends who think differently (you know, attend an evangelical church, vote republican, own guns, don't get divorced every other media cycle) have no real core interest in producing movies with conservative themes.
As for the art and literature of Greece and Rome, if you track the progress of the culture as both began to decline, you saw a progressive increase in the amount of erotica throughout the society generally. There was a palpable increase in media designed to appeal directly to the gratification of the baser senses - more bloodsports, more pornography, and so on. By the time attempts were made to curb the excesses of Rome, it was already too late, the society had become rotten to the core.
Anyway guys, I don't know whether to be amused or confused by some of the reactions to my earlier post. I simply made the point that its not about money, and that its an agenda flick (both points the mainstream media and even the McPaper for instance have made - although many described the agenda as "love and freedom and tolerance") and that our increasingly eroticised "arts" roughly parallel those of other cultures in decline, and I'm a wild-eyed street-corner looney accused of declaring its the "end of the world." Its almost as though people are reading not what I wrote, but what they believe I should have written as a stoooopid judgmental un-id-jy-cated fundymentalist bible-thumpin' preacher man.
For those of you who are doing that, would it help if I simply made posts that would fit that general caricature? It would certainly take me less time, I mean this stuff is a slam dunk viewed from a scriptural perspective.
- SEAGOON
