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No More Heroes?

This is quite interesting. A conservative film maker is starting to make his own films but in a column expresses what I feel sometimes (the part in bold) about heroes.

After starting one of the most successful viral ad campaigns in the history of the Internet, “Will It Blend,” YouTube invited us to come to their first-ever live event in San Francisco right after the 2008 presidential election.

This was a two-hour event that included the likes of Katy Perry, will.i.am (when his dumb Yes We Can Obama song was big) and Jamie and Adam from The Mythbusters.

All at once I saw that this was not just a streaming event with everyone who was famous on YouTube, this was an Obama celebration.

I got to meet The Mythbusters, who I loved and ironically have seen my “Will it Blend” channel and told me how much they loved it. I felt a connection. They invited us to their shop, etc. But, once the topic of where we were from came into play (Utah … oh, you must be Mormon), they pointed out that we sure did real damage with Proposition 8. This was just weeks after the election and it was still heavy on our minds. They ignored us the rest of the show.

I have come to realize that everything has become political, that my heroes of yesterday (Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, others I won’t name) slowly one-by-one were now against me or anything I stood for. There are honestly no more heroes.

The chance of any directing career in Hollywood were never going to surface for me simply because of who I am.

The Last Eagle Scout is a response to this charge.

Documentaries are great, very needed and serve their purpose, but they honestly preach to the choir. It is time for us right of center folk to stop caring what the pop culture says about us and just make our own films.

The Last Eagle Scout is a dramedy/action “what-if” film about how the government tries to shut down the Boy Scouts, while scouter Cliff Elliot (Nick Whitaker) is trying to get his Eagle award.
It really is quite sad to know that some of the people whose work I admire (be they film makers, recording artists, or other creatives) go against the core beliefs I have. Did they always believe this way? Or are they protecting their livelihoods by going with the flow? It seems that to stay alive in the creative industries you must think (or pretend to think) a certain way. You must believe homosexual marriage is alright, and abortion, and Obama etc etc. It is not good when a whole industry is slanted in one direction and blackballs anyone who goes against the fashionable morality of the times.

I was just asking myself before dinner (before I saw the above article), does it matter what the artist thinks? Can I like his work without liking him? I would like to think not, but it probably does matter. Yes, there are some artists that are openly conservative (and I admire them for that), but sometimes I get the feeling that I am 'adopting' them just because they think like me and that I don't particularly have any strong feeling for their work.

There is such a thing as free speech; you can say what you like (mostly). But that doesn't mean that your freely expressed opinions won't have an effect as regards the way people treat you or hire you.

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