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When Sissy Spacek was preparing for her role in The River back in the 1980s, she came into the video store where I was working in Beverly Hills to do some research on her co-star, a little-known (at the time) actor named Mel Gibson. She’d never seen any of his films, since most of them had been made in his native country of Australia, but we carried a bunch of them and she wanted to check them out.
Like most actors in Hollywood — at least from the time that Lee Strasberg developed “The Method” and Brando used it to transform the profession, and film itself — Spacek considered the research she did into any role she undertook a big part of the job.
Indeed, it is seen by Strasberg’s disciples as absolutely essential, a critical element in helping an actor to “become a character” — as opposed, say, to just hitting his marks and reciting his lines. This helps explain, for instance, why Al Pacino (a favorite student of Strasberg’s) walked home with a limp while playing Richard III on Broadway, and why he made “arrests” when he was walking the streets of New York City during the time he was filming Serpico.
I dealt with enough actors and others in the industry to understand the importance of research — whether it is researching a character they are playing to “find his/her essence” or researching a fellow actor or director to get an overview of their work. And I know that actors can learn a lot about the professions of the characters they portray on screen, or the situations those characters find themselves in, since the actors spend an often inordinate amount of time with people who are actually in those professions or situations before shooting a single scene.
Still, it was a little more than bizarre — after The River was released, and two other farm-related films around the same time, Country starring Jessica Lange and Places In the Heart starring Sally Field — that these three actresses (Lange, Field and Spacek) were called to testify before Congress about what it’s like to lose a family farm and what government policies should be enacted to address the seemingly intractable problems of the farming community.
And it’s still happening today. When Pres. Obama wanted to hear some expert opinion on the pressing issue of immigration, he huddled with three of the most brilliant minds in America — Latina starlets Eva Longoria, Rosario Dawson and America Ferrera. Not surprisingly, all three of them are “open door” advocates who want amnesty for untold millions of immigrants who came into this country illegally, as well as for their families.
When Sissy Spacek was preparing for her role in The River back in the 1980s, she came into the video store where I was working in Beverly Hills to do some research on her co-star, a little-known (at the time) actor named Mel Gibson. She’d never seen any of his films, since most of them had been made in his native country of Australia, but we carried a bunch of them and she wanted to check them out.
Like most actors in Hollywood — at least from the time that Lee Strasberg developed “The Method” and Brando used it to transform the profession, and film itself — Spacek considered the research she did into any role she undertook a big part of the job.
Indeed, it is seen by Strasberg’s disciples as absolutely essential, a critical element in helping an actor to “become a character” — as opposed, say, to just hitting his marks and reciting his lines. This helps explain, for instance, why Al Pacino (a favorite student of Strasberg’s) walked home with a limp while playing Richard III on Broadway, and why he made “arrests” when he was walking the streets of New York City during the time he was filming Serpico.
I dealt with enough actors and others in the industry to understand the importance of research — whether it is researching a character they are playing to “find his/her essence” or researching a fellow actor or director to get an overview of their work. And I know that actors can learn a lot about the professions of the characters they portray on screen, or the situations those characters find themselves in, since the actors spend an often inordinate amount of time with people who are actually in those professions or situations before shooting a single scene.
Still, it was a little more than bizarre — after The River was released, and two other farm-related films around the same time, Country starring Jessica Lange and Places In the Heart starring Sally Field — that these three actresses (Lange, Field and Spacek) were called to testify before Congress about what it’s like to lose a family farm and what government policies should be enacted to address the seemingly intractable problems of the farming community.
And it’s still happening today. When Pres. Obama wanted to hear some expert opinion on the pressing issue of immigration, he huddled with three of the most brilliant minds in America — Latina starlets Eva Longoria, Rosario Dawson and America Ferrera. Not surprisingly, all three of them are “open door” advocates who want amnesty for untold millions of immigrants who came into this country illegally, as well as for their families.
The “brainstorming” session, as Longoria called it, took place during Obama’s most recent jaunt to Hollywood — one of many in which he rubs shoulders with the glitterati, raises oodles of cash, and demeans Christians and Second Amendment supporters as “bitter clingers.”
Because liberals rule the roost in Hollywood, and offer up relentlessly liberal fare designed to brainwash...er, entertain...the masses, liberals in Washington think that movies somehow represent real life. And that would make (at least in their twisted minds) the people who act in these movies to be experts in whatever particular field they happen to portray. Or any other subject they want to talk about.
“I’m an expert because I say I am,” goes the line from a Don Henley song, and the sentiment fits Hollywood celebrities to a tee.
It’s no wonder that a complete moron like Harvey Weinstein can mock Michele Bachmann and think that he is somehow qualified to lecture her on the Constitution, in particular “womens rights” (that’s leftist code for abortion), as he did recently in promoting an anti-Bachmann movie he produced. Well, here’s a clue, Harvey: Neither the Constitution nor any of our other founding documents guarantee a woman’s right to murder her own unborn child. In fact, quite the opposite is true. The Declaration of Independence guarantees a right to life.
The so-called “constitutional right” to an abortion was never seen, understood or read into the Constitution until it magically appeared in 1973 (nearly two full centuries after the fact), and only then because a handful of liberal justices in black robes fabricated it and then imposed it upon our country without the matter ever going through the legislative process or being properly passed into law.
The idea that abortion is a bedrock constitutional principle is pure fantasy. But that’s okay as far as the Left is concerned because the liberal worldview is one which is predicated on just that — fantasy. And no one does fantasy better than Hollywood. Thus, there’s a symbiotic relationship between these two worlds (politics and entertainment) in which liberal fantasy becomes real reality for the elites of government, media, academia and culture.
In his recent film The Ides of March, George Clooney plays a political candidate who is very much like himself — that is, a hardline leftist who is an avowed atheist and environmental nut who campaigns on the craziest of liberal ideas — yet he is so wildly popular and eminently electable that the Republicans are terrified of running against him. Thus, they are compelled to engage in a shady scheme to try to torpedo his candidacy. It’s a perfectly plausible and completely reasonable scenario — but only in Hollywood. Or perhaps an insane asylum.
This has finally all come full circle with Hollywood’s invention of the “reality show,” a slew of programs which are woefully short on reality but rely on everything from cat fights to fake marriages to keep the masses enthused.
And so, when Kris Jenner (Kim Kardashian’s mom) was asked in a recent interview if Kim married for love or TV ratings and the millions of dollars that went with them, Kris deferred.
“That’s a Kim question,” she replied.
The fact that Kim’s own mother can’t answer the question tells us everything we need to know — not only about that 72-day marriage, but about Hollywood’s warped view of reality itself.
e-mail: tom3264@msn.com, or go to tom’s Facebook page to send a message
