Now look at the Hollywood fund-raiser that Republican presidential contender George W. Bush held in June 1999. The price per plate was only $1,000. Even at that the only celebrities who turned up were Gary Collins, Bo Derek, Pat Boone, Robert Stack, and Warren Beatty. The first four aren’t exactly on the Hollywood A-list, while the last, Warren Beatty, so surprised everyone by attending that at a press conference the next morning a reporter asked Bush what Beatty had been doing there. Obviously puzzled about it himself, Bush was able to offer only a joke: “I think he’s secretly in love with my mother.” A couple of weeks later it emerged that Beatty was considering a presidential run of his own. That explained it. When Republicans throw a Hollywood fund-raiser, the only big star who shows up is just there to take notes on how it’s done.
Trying to figure out why the press is so liberal, you’ll recall, I had several explanations to offer. Yet when I tried to figure out why Hollywood is so liberal, I was unable to offer any explanations at all. Neither could David Brady.
“You know that chain of restaurants, Planet Hollywood?” David said. “I’ve always liked the name. You know why? Because that’s just what Hollywood is, a different planet.”
While people like David and me understand the activities of the press in at least a rudimentary way—like the press, we spend a lot of our own time doing research and writing—the activities of actors, producers, and screenwriters lie entirely outside our field of experience. They might as well live on a different planet, just as David said.
“If you want to do something useful in the book of yours,” David suggested, “go figure out Hollywood politics for yourself.” I tried to do just that.
Since members of a minority are often the most acute observers of the majority, I decided to learn about Hollywood Democrats by talking to Hollywood Republicans. I thought I’d start with the stars. This plan offered the advantage of instantly narrowing my prospects. After years of hanging around Republican politics, I could name only three stars I felt reasonably certain were members of the GOP: Tom Selleck, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Charlton Heston (Bruce Willis and Kevin Costner used to turn up for events at the Bush White House from time to time, but friends in the Bush administration told me that they did so out of loyalty to the Bushes, not to the GOP). I called all three. All three stiffed me. Tom Selleck’s publicist put me off by saying that Selleck was an Independent, not a Republican. Schwarzenegger’s publicist put me off by the still more direct device of refusing to return any of my calls. Heston’s publicist assured me that his client would get in touch with me as soon as he returned from Spain, where he was shooting a movie. I’m still waiting. I might as well have been in Moscow during the old days, trying to get the stars of the Bolshoi to attack the Politburo on the record. When the stars refused to speak to me, I had no choice. I was forced to turn to dissidents.
* * *
During his two decades in Hollywood, Michael Medved became a film critic (for a time he was the co-host of the television program, Sneak Previews), then a critic of Hollywood itself, attacking the entertainment industry in a number of books, perhaps the best known of which is Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War Against Traditional Values. Eventually Medved got sick of Southern California and did what many Californians who get sick of Southern California do, moving north to Seattle. Now he hosts a nationally syndicated radio talk show. An intense, energetic man with tousled brown hair, large brown eyes, and a drooping handlebar mustache, Medved talked to me in his studio after one of his broadcasts. He offered two explanations for why Hollywood is so Democratic. Medved’s first explanation: In Hollywood, emotion is more important than reason.
“In the entertainment industry, you have to have your emotions constantly available to you,” Medved said. “You go to the set in the morning and meet some snot-nosed kid who makes it clear that he doesn’t especially want to work with you. Then you have to spend all day crying because the script calls for the kid to have cancer. People in Hollywood spend their careers engaged in emotional self-manipulation, and a town that operates on emotional self-manipulation will lean to the left.”
The Democratic and Republican positions on welfare, for example, illustrate Medved’s point. Democrats say the government should spend more to help the poor. The emotional appeal of that position is immediate. It feels good. Republicans say, Not so fast. To spend more, Republicans argue, the government would have to raise taxes. That in turn would have a dampening effect on the economy. Can we be sure, Republicans ask, that the government wouldn’t push as many people into poverty as it intended to help? When government money reached the poor, Republicans go on to ask, would it truly help them? Or would it demoralize them, making them dependent on the government? Instead of increasing government handouts, Republicans conclude, it would be better to fashion programs, like the welfare reform of 1996, * that help the poor get jobs, enabling them to care for their families on their own. The Republican position thus involves a thought process of three or four steps. And the thought process is made up of just that, thought. In a town that would rather emote than think, the Republican position doesn’t stand a chance.
Medved’s other explanation: sex. “The chief motivation for anyone in Hollywood,” he said, “is getting laid.”
Hollywood takes its morals from the marketplace. Competitive pressures are such that if one studio shows ankle, another will show leg, and another will show—well, you can see how one thing leads to another. For years the industry found itself subjected to censorship. The old Hays Office reviewed films before they were released, while censors working for the networks decided what could and could not be portrayed on television. Now such censorship has all but disappeared. Movies may portray whatever they want, subject only to a loose rating system. On television, prime-time programming has become much more sexually explicit than even after-hours programming of just a decade ago. (Watching Ally McBeal recently, I kept count. The word “penis” was used three times. Sexual intercourse was portrayed at least two times. I say “at least” because the way the bodies were positioned, it was hard to tell.)
What takes place on the set tends to take place in private life. Hollywood may never have been a paragon of virtue. But it used to observe certain standards. In the old days even the biggest stars had to sign contracts that contained clauses prohibiting “moral turpitude.” If the stars misbehaved, they risked losing their jobs. Today? It is difficult to imagine an act that anyone in Hollywood would construe as misbehavior. Rob Lowe was sued for having sex with a minor, in an encounter captured on videotape. Lowe’s career continues to flourish. Hugh Grant was arrested with a prostitute. Grant remains a major star. Since Hollywood has rejected traditional moral values, it has little time for the party of traditional moral values, the GOP.
“Everybody wants to date a supermodel,” Medved said. “And if you want to succeed with really great-looking women, you’ll have far more success if you’re a member of the left than if you’re a member of the right.” In Hollywood, the pleasures of being a Democrat are, so to speak, too great to forgo.
Journal entry:
Waiting for Rob Long to arrive for breakfast this morning, I made notes on the scene around me. Everyone in the dining room of the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills wore clothes that looked simultaneously informal and exquisitely expensive. Everyone had a tan. Everyone had perfect teeth.
Two men and a woman sat at a table next to mine. The men wore black trousers and black three-button jackets over black shirts. The woman wore a black dress. The dress was cut low. It would have revealed her cleavage, if she had had any. Both men and the woman had hair that stuck straight up in little spikes and wore glasses with gunmetal wire rims and tiny lenses. Eavesdropping as they lingered over their juice—each had ordered only a single glass of grapefruit juice—I actually overheard them using the terms “red-lighted” and “green-lighted,” as in, The studio “red-lighted” my last project but has “green-lighted” my next one.
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sp; Two thoughts crossed my mind. The first was that the people in this dining room were the real thing, people living the Hollywood dream. The second was that I was the only Republican present.
Rob Long graduated from Yale in 1987, returned to his prep school, Andover, to teach English for a year, got bored, then left for Hollywood. A gifted writer—he had written a number of student productions as an undergraduate—Long enrolled in the writing program at the UCLA film school. “If you were a writer,” Long told me over breakfast, “film school was really easy. I had one class a week, and I spent the rest of the time on the beach.”
During Long’s first year in Hollywood, he became a conservative.
“A friend gave me a copy of Modern Times,” Long explained. Modern Times is the history of the twentieth century by the conservative English journalist Paul Johnson. When he read the book, Long’s own political thinking crystallized. “Sitting on the beach in Santa Monica,” Long said, “I kept reading one thing after another that they’d never taught me at Andover or Yale. I’d read something, and I’d say, ‘Wait a minute. I took advanced placement history. How come I never knew that?’ I’ll give you an example. Remember the overthrow of Allende in Chile? I was taught to believe that it was all a plot by Richard Nixon and American corporations. Then in Modern Times I read that under Allende the inflation in Chile got up to 6,000 percent. I said, ‘Whoa. That probably had a lot more to do with the overthrow of Allende than Richard Nixon or American corporations ever did.’”
When he wasn’t lying on the beach reading Modern Times or attending UCLA, Long worked on scripts with his friend Dan Staley, who had graduated from Yale two years ahead of him. When, in less than a year, their scripts impressed the right people, Long and Staley were hired to produce the final three seasons of one of the most popular and profitable situation comedies in the history of television, Cheers. Long and Staley were, respectively, 24 and 26.
Long has remained a figure in the television business ever since, helping, as half of Staley/Long Productions, to produce a string of situation comedies—when we met, he was casting for Love and Money, to be aired on CBS. Long has also remained a conservative, writing regularly for National Review magazine, an activity that his friends in Hollywood pass off as an eccentric hobby, like raising bonsai trees or mastering French cooking. Still in his thirties, Long looks even younger, partly because he has a round, cherubic face, partly because his success as a producer permits him to dress precisely as he chooses, ignoring Hollywood chic to attire himself as if he were still at Yale, wearing wrinkled khakis and wrinkled dress shirts, his hair combed, not spiked. Why was Hollywood so Democratic? “First I’ll tell you about a couple of things that other people would tell you about,” Long said. “Then I’ll tell you what I think myself.”
The first thing other people would tell me about was the blacklist. “What you’ll hear over and over in this town is that it was the blacklist that made Hollywood liberal,” Long said. The blacklist arose during the McCarthy era, when the studios shut out, or blacklisted, members of the entertainment industry who were alleged to have Communist sympathies, most famously a group of producers, directors, and writers who came to be known as “The Hollywood Ten.” “Since the blacklist was an instrument of the right,” Long continued, “it proved that the right is hostile to the creative community. At least that’s the theory.”
It was a theory about which Long had his doubts. The usual view of the blacklist is that it constituted an act of gross unfairness, mangling the careers of innocent people. Yet materials from the Russian archives make it clear that there were indeed Communist cells in Hollywood. The right may have engaged in red-baiting, but the left provided plenty of reds to bait. Anyway, it is difficult to see why events of half a century ago, when many of those running the entertainment industry hadn’t even been born, should dominate the politics of Hollywood today.
The second thing other people would tell me about was Hollywood’s Jewishness. It was widely believed, although for reasons of political correctness seldom stated, that Hollywood was Democratic because it was Jewish. The tycoons who built Hollywood were indeed Jewish—Harry Cohn, Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, Jack and Harry Warner—and the town has remained disproportionately Jewish ever since. Ever since the New Deal, in turn, Jews have been overwhelmingly Democratic. “Take a guy like Michael Eisner [the Jewish chairman of Disney],” Long said. “A Republican could cut his taxes, deregulate every business that he’s in, and promise to protect Israel. He’d say, ‘Thank you very much.’ Then he’d go right out and vote Democratic.”
Yet although Jews, who make up about 3 percent of the population of the country, may make up as much as 15, 20, or perhaps even 30 percent of the population of the entertainment industry, Hollywood still has a large gentile majority. If gentiles in Hollywood voted the way gentiles in Kansas vote, Hollywood would be predominantly Republican despite the large Jewish population. Instead the gentiles vote just as overwhelmingly Democratic as do the Jews.
Now that he had dispensed with the opinions of other people, Long offered me his own. “You want to know what I think is the real explanation?” he asked. “Money.” Long believed that Hollywood was Democratic because it was full of people who had done just what he himself had done, breezing into town to discover that they could make large sums of money with almost laughable ease.
“It’s not that people out here don’t work hard,” Long said. “They do. They put in long hours under a lot of pressure. But writing scripts or acting don’t feel like work in the same way that going down coal mines or teaching first graders or harvesting crops feel like work.” Because their money comes to them so easily, people in Hollywood tend to demonstrate the same traits that people who inherit their wealth tend to demonstrate. Feeling guilty about having so much, they attempt to absolve themselves by performing good works. They give to charities. They join museum committees. And they support Democrats.
“What does it cost them?” Long said. “So they support higher taxes that working people will have to make sacrifices to pay. So what? People in Hollywood will be among the richest people in the country no matter how high taxes go. So they support bilingual education and it holds Hispanic kids back instead of helping them get ahead. So what? The people in this town would never dream of sending their kids to public schools. Never. People here get to take any political position they want because they know that they’ll never have to deal with the consequences of those positions in their own lives. They’re reflexively left-wing because their money frees them from any accountability.”
By way of example, Long explained the economics of his current project, Love and Money. He and his partner had hired more than half a dozen writers. The lowest paid would receive a salary of several hundred thousand dollars. After having breakfast with me, Long would join his partner to begin casting the show. Actors in even the smallest roles would receive salaries, again, of several hundred thousand dollars. If the show succeeded, everyone involved in the project would make even more money. If at the end of a run of several years the show was sold into syndication—in other words if stations bought Love and Money to show the reruns—everyone would make more money still, with Long and his partner, who would receive 30 percent of the proceeds, standing to make many millions of dollars.
Long glanced at his watch. “Gotta run,” he said. I made no effort to delay him. There was too much money at stake.
Journal entry:
Rob Long had a bowl of cornflakes and a glass of orange juice. I had a muffin, a glass of orange juice, and a cup of coffee. With the tip, the bill came to $52. There must be just as much money in this town as Long claims, or even the Four Seasons wouldn’t have had the nerve.
After breakfast with Rob Long, I drove to a studio in a converted warehouse on a far edge of Los Angeles to see Michael Beugg, a friend with whom I attended business school. Unlike Rob Long and Michael Medved, Mike isn’t a dissident from liberal Hollywood—for that matter, Mike isn’t even a Rep
ublican—and I stopped by just to say hello, not to talk politics. But when Mike, a line producer, heard why I was in town, he promptly added another reason why Hollywood is Democratic. “Isn’t it obvious?” Mike said. “This is a union town.”
The relationship between unions and the Democratic Party is an old one. As far back as the first years of the republic, urban workers sided with the Democratic-Republicans, the precursors of the Democrats, while opposing the Federalists, the precursors of the Republicans. Early in this century the Democratic Party, notably under Alfred E. Smith, governor of New York, championed the growth of unions, and then at mid-century the Democratic Party, under President Franklin Roosevelt, made organized labor one of the central components of the New Deal coalition. The relationship between unions and the Democratic Party has sometimes proven uneasy—when George McGovern received the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972, George Meany, chairman of the AFL-CIO and a hawk on Vietnam, refused to permit his union to endorse McGovern—but the Democratic Party has always remained the natural home for organized labor all the same.
Here in Hollywood, Mike explained, the people who run the studios and production companies hire and fire at will—he had only gotten his current position because the two line producers who preceded him had both been dismissed after only a couple of weeks on the job. And since there were always more people who wanted to work in the entertainment industry than there were jobs, individual workers found themselves in an impossibly weak bargaining position. The transitory nature of the work compounded their insecurity. When a soundman or makeup artist was on a project, it was difficult to predict how long the project would last. When he was between projects, it was difficult to say how long the layoff would last.
“People here depend on their unions,” Mike said. Hollywood workers saw unions as a way of making certain they received benefits, such as health insurance, and wages high enough to enable them to survive from one project to the next. While Rob Long had told me what life was like for people at the top of the Hollywood pay structure, Mike Beugg was telling me what life was like for everybody else. “When you’re watching the Academy Awards or the Emmys, you’re only seeing the people at the very top of the business. There are thousands of others who work in this town,” he explained. Hollywood gave most of them neither fame nor riches, just a precarious way of making a living.
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