Facts versus the Lie

The lie of "liberal, out-of-touch Hollywood"

Screenwriter/show-runner John Rogers has had it with the wing-nut myth that Hollywood keeps making anti-war movies that flop, proving how out of touch the Liberal Elite are with the will of the masses.
He has written a wonderful debunking of this notion, looking at every war-related film in 2007/2008 and calculating how profitable they were.

Conclusion: Hollywood makes a modest number of films with anti-war messages, and most of them make a decent amount of money.
Then he goes on to offer an inside account of the process by which potentially risky "message" films get made by big, bottom-line oriented studios.

The whole thing was prompted by a comment by John "Dirty Harry" Nolte, whose site offers this epithet to describe himself: "[a] right-wing, Tim Robbins-loathing blogger."

Nolte posted, "Between narratives and documentaries I’ve counted 16 anti-Iraq war films over the last two years. All have flopped, miserably. More are on the way."

As Rogers shows, this is just not true, as a purely factual matter.

From Rogers' piece: Big Hollywood and Why I Admire David Zucker

1.) Body of Lies (2.714 theaters) -- Actually the point of the column in question. Definitely War on Terror oriented. And as noted in the column cited, not profitable at only $39 million against a production budget of $70 million -- oh I'm sorry, what? We're using worldwide box office? Okay, not my idea, but okay. In that case, Body of Lies made $108 million against $70 million production, plainly in the black, even before after-market sales. That's right, the movie they use as an example of a flop on Day One of their shiny new website actually made money according to their own standards. Way to bring the rain, boys. In profit.

Read the rest of the piece here