On Hollywood & Its Agenda

I was reading an article on NewsBusters this morning about that overly stupid talk show host on MSNBC, Ed Schultz.  In it he is reported to have made the following claim, in defending Hollywood producers and their penchant for making too many movies that America has no interest in seeing, but that make the liberal crowd on the Left happy:

"The only agenda Hollywood has is making money."

Which hardly explains all the flicks that Hollywood churned out in the Bush years that depicted evil and/or messed-up American soldiers in - and coming out of - the Iraq conflict.  None of which made money.  But were appreciated by tiny movie-going audiences in Manhattan, Madison, and Malibu.

You remember the flicks:

"Stop-Loss."  "Body of Lies."  "Conspiracy."  "Green Zone."  "In the Valley of Elah."  "Lions for Lambs."  "The Messenger."  "Badland."

Or maybe you don't remember them.

Then I got to thinking.

I watched the tail-end of another "war movie" yesterday afternoon on TV.  A highly successful flick when it was in theaters.  But it wasn't about American soldiers killing Muslim terrorists.  Or about killing anyone else for that matter.

The movie?

"Battle Los Angeles."

The enemy?

Aliens.

Box office gross?

$36 million its opening weekend.

Total gross?

$211,819,354.

Its theme?  A handful of United States Marines (and one cute female Air Force enlistee - this is Hollywood, after all) kill a whole slew of badass extraterrestrial monsters and proceed to save the entire freaking world.

Think of it as "Guadalcanal Diary" without anyone on this planet being shot.  Or offended.

One wonders.

What if some courageous (suicidal?) Hollywood producer had taken the script from "Gung Ho" (1943) and adapted it to the remarkable story - yet to be adequately told - about the United States Marine Corps' sweeping victory in the largest battle to take place in Iraq against the terrorist insurgency?

I don't know, maybe he could have called it "Operation Phantom Fury."

Might that producer have achieved a return on his investors' dollars?

We'll never know.

"The only agenda Hollywood has is making money."

Bullshit.