MOVIES: Hollywood Conservatives Come Out of the Closet

Hollywood Conservatives Come Out of the Closet

Friday, October 3, 2008 1:00 PM

By: Tim Collie


To hear David Zucker tell it, making a Republican-friendly Hollywood film is like plotting a coup: You plan it in secret meetings, quietly recruit conservative actors, and launch before anybody realizes what’s happening.

“You sort of feel like you have to hide it,” says Zucker, director of the new film, “An American Carol,” which opened in theaters Friday. “When you meet, you give each other a secret look — ‘Are you a Republican too?’ It's the new gay.”

Described by Entertainment Weekly as “Hollywood's first unabashedly right-wing comedy,” the film is a play on Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” using a Michael Moore-like standin for Scrooge in a story about discovering your patriotic American roots.

Instead of Christmas, the Moore character bah-humbugs the Fourth of July, triggering a visit from country music star Trace Adkins as the Grim Reaper. Filling in for Dickens’ ghosts are George Washington, George S. Patton, and a conservative judge. They’re played by fellow consevatives Jon Voight, Kelsey Grammer, and Dennis Hopper — yes, that Dennis Hooper, the one from “Easy Rider” and “Apocalypse Now.”

The three guides lead “Michael Malone” from the World Trade Center site across the American historical landscape to turn him into a patriot. The film lampoons jihadists, Rosie O'Donnell, college professors, President Jimmy Carter and street protesters, among others. One over-the-top sequence finds Malone alongside Hopper’s judge as they fend off hordes of undead ACLU attorneys.

“Most political comedies say both sides are bad,” Zucker told Entertainment Weekly. “We're saying, F*** it. We're taking a side.”

Zucker, like his actors, isn’t some Republican upstart making a fringe message movie. The writer-director of comedy classics “Airplane!” and “The Naked Gun,” he was a consummate Hollywood insider but a closeted conservative for most of his career. For him, like several of his actors, the 9/11 attacks caused him to move from the right wing of the Democratic Party into the full embrace of the Republicans.

He hit upon the idea for “Carol” while shooting anti-John Kerry ads for the Bush campaign in 2004 and began sharing it over once-a-month lunch meetings with Grammar, Hopper and Voight. The money to make the film was raised outside the traditional Hollywood studio system since the premise would never have sold.

“There's no way they would have gone near it,” Zucker said. “'You go to meetings and everybody is talking about how Bush is an idiot. It's part of the environment of this town.” The $20 million seed money came from Mpower Pictures, which “Passion of the Christ” producer Stephen McEveety founded last year.

“I didn't tell anyone, not even my brother John, I had this part,” Kevin Farley, who plays Malone, told the Associated Press. “We wanted to keep it close to the vest. Meanwhile, I'm growing a beard and getting fatter. I had just gone through a divorce, and my brother was like, 'You need help!'

“I think I've always been on the right side of things," said Farley, brother of the late comedian Chris Farley. “I had a dad that was an influence on me. He was part of the Young Republicans at Georgetown University. He then ran for several public offices in Madison, Wisc., which is a bastion of left-wing politics.

“I grew up in the middle of that,” added Farley, “so I'm used to being a fish out of water."

http://www.newsmax.com/headlines/hollywood_conservatives/2008/10/03/137029.html