It's My Party (10 page)

The problem with this explanation? Ronald Reagan. Reagan equaled good copy—for most of the 1980s he equaled better copy than
almost anyone else on the planet. He cut taxes, rebuilt the military, and held a series of summit meetings with Gorbachev,
providing the press with one huge story after another. But I’d be willing to wager that even fewer members of the Washington
press corps voted for Reagan than voted for Bush.

It’s worth noting that the press is liberal in every western democracy in the world. “Look,” David Brady told me, “the reason
the press is liberal is one of those deep questions that combines history, psychology, and for all I know anthropology and
half a dozen other disciplines. Why are WASPs Republicans?” David asked. “Why are the Irish Democrats? Who the hell knows?
Sure, you can come up with this or that explanation, but none of them even comes close to a complete answer. You just have
to take it as one of the stipulations of Democratic politics. The press is liberal. It just frigging well is.”

Hence the Republican predicament. They’d like the press to like them—they really would. But it doesn’t—and no matter how hard
they try, Republicans can’t quite figure out why.

If you want a rough measure of the extent to which Hollywood is Democratic, look at political fund-raisers. President Clinton
has held more than a dozen fund-raisers in Hollywood and its environs. The price per plate at these events has ranged from
$5,000 to $10,000. Virtually every studio head, actor, agent, and supermodel of any standing has ponied up to attend at least
one. Moguls such as Michael Eisner, David Geffen, Lew Wasserman, David Bronfman, and Steven Spielberg (Spielberg is so close
to Clinton that Clinton has been an overnight guest in Spielberg’s home). Stars such as Harrison Ford, Michelle Pfeiffer,
Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, and Barbra Streisand (Streisand is so close to Clinton that she has stayed as an overnight guest
in Clinton’s home, the White House).

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.

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.”