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How to Make a Great Movie
 Despite Seymour Hersh’s latest lurid
allegations in The New Yorker, I don’t think the
Bush administration really wants to nuke Iran. Thinking outside the box, it
has merely realized that an obvious solution to global warming is nuclear
winter.  And
if Iran strikes back, so much the better, in the long run.
So this
may be just their way of saving the planet. And after all, isn’t that
what we want? Can’t we all just get along?
Not that
this will stop Al Gore and the Hollywood Left from caterwauling. Those people
are never satisfied.
They
finally gave Marty Scorsese an Oscar for The Departed, a film
about hoods in Boston. I enjoyed it as a work of art, but I asked my brother
Tom, a successful Boston lawyer, if it was based on the feared Sobran crime
family and, if so, whether we could sue, but in his waggish way, Tom
answered only that he thought Borat was based on the
Sobrans. I’m not the only wise guy in the family, so to speak.
It occurs
to me that in order to make a great movie, you have to be not only an
artistic genius, but also a pretty fair businessman. In the first place, you
have to raise a lot of money and also gather and coordinate a lot of
disparate talents, or there will be no movie at all. All Rembrandt needed was
a few tubes of paint, a brush, and a canvas. lt didn’t cost him millions
of dollars to do a picture. Think what Scorsese has to pay for a few tubes,
as it were, of DiCaprio and DeNiro, not to mention stunt men, extras, and key
grips. That’s why I’m a writer. It’s a lot cheaper.
Rembrandt didn’t need stunt men.
Let’s just suppose I get an idea for a somewhat unconventional
children’s book, The Littlest Holocaust Denier. This is
what Hollywood might call “high concept,” though I don’t
see Hollywood snapping it up. It’s not exactly Harry Potter. And the
principal role would probably be too challenging for today’s child
actors.
Continuing our supposition, let’s say Wolfgang Amadeus
Schickelgruber, nicknamed Wolfie, is a German prodigy, a gentle, dreamy,
lonely boy with a strong independent streak inherited from his father, Hans,
who, after a few drinks, is apt to blurt out things like, “I don’t
know about you, but as for me, I’ve had it up to here with all this
Hitler-bashing. After all, which of us is perfect?”
Such
remarks cannot fail to leave their impression on a sensitive boy, and soon
little Wolfie finds himself an outcast at his school. The other children tease
him about his views — kids can be so politically correct! — and
when his teachers refuse to defend him, he is expelled. He is sent to reform
school for several months, most of the time spent in solitary confinement,
then placed in a foster home, where he becomes a victim of child abuse by
his brutally liberal foster parents.
![[Breaker quote for How to Make a Great Movie: Just be a rich genius.]](2007breakers/070226.gif) Isolated,
Wolfie is befriended by
a kindly skinhead, Fritz, the only adult who offers him nonjudgmental
empathy. “National Socialists are the targets of negative
stereotypes,” Fritz points out. “Even the Pope was a member
of the Hitler Youth.”
But
Wolfie’s case becomes an international sensation when such civil
rights leaders as Al Sharpton take up his cause. “We’ve been
here before,” says Sharpton. “The Jews wouldn’t listen
to Tawana Brawley, either.” At age seven, Wolfie is the youngest
person ever to be interviewed by Larry King.
He is
startlingly articulate and tenacious. “Look what happened to Marlon
Brando when he said the Jews run Hollywood,” he tells King. “I
remember,” says King. “He said it right on this show. And he
kissed me on the mouth.” “Brando was sort of weird,”
Wolfie agrees. “That doesn’t mean he was wrong.”
But back
to Hollywood. Scorsese has to make a dozen of the most brilliantly original
films of all time and wait until he’s an old man before he gets his
Oscar, and Al Gore gets one the very first time he narrates a documentary!
It must be Gore’s bubbly delivery, so reminiscent of Robert Preston
merrily panicking the River City rubes in The Music Man. I
don’t know how else to explain it.
And now
the news media are reporting, with their usual good taste, that Anna
Nicole’s remains are “decomposing” (except for the
implants, presumably). Good work, folks! That’s the way to keep the
American public fully informed. Now on to Iran.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2007 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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