Allow me to retort!
Now, as a disclaimer, while I'm way, way more conservative than to my knowledge literally everyone else on this board, I'm pretty liberal compared to the nation as a whole.
Challenge.
Rand isn't particularly out there for the group of people that your fellow citizens elected to lead our country and most of our states this past fall.
Maybe not. Have you checked the approval ratings recently for the Rand-influenced (i.e., "Tea Party") Republicans) that a whole lotta Wisconsonians, Iowans, Floridians, etc. elected and are now having serious buyer's remorse about?
Do you find all conservative ideas odious?
No. All contemporary Republican-Party ideas, yeah, pretty much. Elementary research will tell you that those ideas are more Nihilist than they are the conservative ideas of, say, the Eisenhower years.
And do you think that that type of thinking - and the type of thinking that prevents decent actors from thinking about appearing in these types of films - has anything to do with the extraordinary, country-ruining election results this past fall? Because I do.
OK, you lost me. You mean my type of thinking, the type that finds Palin-era Republican thinking odious? No. I think quality filmmaking can survive the mostly-self-contrived martyrdom of actors like Gary Sinise, Victoria Jackson, Kelsey Grammer, and Jon Voight. And I'm having trouble seeing how my anti-conservative type of thinking contributed to the election results which, we apparently agree, were country-ruining. Hold on, are you accusing
liberals of ruining the country in 2010?
?
Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal starred in the Fountainhead, which was a weird-ass movie but well acted. Are we better off that actors are forced to choose roles based on political ideology at this point?
Not particularly, but I think the myth that they are is mostly their bullshit, Ask Bruce Willis.
You can't separate the fact that this movie is a doomed turkey from the fact that no known actor in Hollywood - with two types of exceptions - would feel comfortable starring in an Ayn Rand movie with a $500 million budget.
The two exceptions are people who already have a lot of money (Arnold Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Willis, uh Mel Gibson) and people who aren't ever going to make any money (whichever Baldwin it is).
Again, I ain't saying this is a good movie or a good book. I'm just bothered by the fact that what is always, always the second most influential book cited by Americans can't attract any actors to it because it's career suicide to be associated with anything conservative.
And that just leads to more wins for the worst types of conservatives in areas that really matter, like, you know, politics.
I wish it were more suicidal for actors or anyone else on the public stage to identify themselves with an ideology that is ruining this country, but in the end, money will always talk (with your support, apparently).
