Michael White writes:
Harvey Weinstein gave the world blood-soaked films including Django Unchained, Inglourious Basterds and Pulp Fiction. Now he wants to destroy the National Rifle Association. Take out the NRA, he argues, and real-life mayhem diminishes. “They’re going to wish they weren’t alive after I’m done with them,” the movie producer and financier told shock jock Howard Stern. Sounds like a line from one of Weinstein’s films? Well, he didn’t stop with the NRA. He also intends to sink the market value of gun manufacturers by scaring away investors. The truth is, few people have done more than Weinstein to glamorize and profit from gun violence in movies. Weinstein’s on-screen body count probably rivals the real-life tally of Delta Force. Just try counting the corpses in Django Unchained. Hard to keep up, isn’t it? . . .
Weinstein knows that at the box office, splattered bodies pay. Django, written and directed by Quentin Tarantino and executive produced by Weinstein, cost $100 million to make and generated $425 million globally, according to Box Office Mojo. Add in home-video revenue and TV sales and the margins get even better.
The numbers illustrate the hypocrisy of an industry that makes guns look so very, very cool, while publicly deploring them. Off-screen, Hollywood’s elite looks on gun enthusiasts as dumb bubbas and paranoid fanatics. Yet, the movies and TV shows they make teach a different lesson. In Hollywood’s imaginary world, the good guys carry guns. And they save the day by killing people.
Personally, I don’t care what kind of movies Weinstein makes, nor do I think his films turn healthy people into murderous psychopaths. But I am weary of the intellectual dishonesty of an industry that condemns guns while portraying them as the ultimate problem solvers.
Take Paramount Pictures’ Jack Reacher, released a week after the Newtown shootings. The film opens with a horrific scene of a sniper shooting five people on a public plaza. How is the culprit brought to justice? Well, the legal system is corrupt, so Reacher kills about the same number of bad guys. From a legal standpoint one of Reacher’s killings is murder, plain and simple. And he’s the guy we’re supposed to admire.
Even if the NRA movie is made, Weinstein’s agenda has already tainted it. Audiences don’t mind learning something from movies, but they hate shelling out money for a lecture. And that’s what Weinstein’s project sounds like.
That’s what happened with Seal Team Six, the poorly received TV movie Weinstein made to highlight President Obama’s role in the Bin Laden raid. Weinstein, an outspoken Obama supporter and fund-raiser, rushed the film directly to television a few days before November 2012 elections.
Once he announced the NRA film, Weinstein’s history of exploiting gun violence took center stage. Two days later, he attempted damage control by telling CNN’s telling Piers Morgan that he wasn’t going to make any more violent movies. Well, at least not as many.
“I’m not going to make some crazy action movie just to blow up people and exploit people,” Weinstein said. But he will keep making serious films that depict violence, like Lone Survivor, the true, bloody tale about a U.S. special operation Afghanistan.
In one way, Hollywood is the gun industry’s best friend. In the 1950s and early 1960’s, the popularity of Westerns fueled consumer appetites for lever-action Winchesters and replicas of the Colt Single Action Army revolver, better known by most as the six-shooter of cowboy movies.
For another generation, Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry films made the Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum Model 29 revolver and the .44-caliber Auto Mag stars at gun shows. Never mind that their recoil makes them a bear to shoot. People wanted the gun that Detective Harry Callahan carried.
Hollywood also helped make semiautomatic pistols America’s most popular handguns. In Lethal Weapon, Mel Gibson’s dissolute cop Martin Riggs praised the Berretta 92F, with its 15-round magazine, as the gun to buy. A featured role in Die Hard helped make GLOCK a household word.
This isn’t just my thinking. In a study published in the December issue of the medical journal “Pediatrics,” researchers predicted that an increase in gun violence in PG-13 movies will likely turn more kids into adult gun buyers.
Weinstein said his movie will feature Meryl Streep as a senator who takes on the NRA. So far, Streep has been silent. The movie came up while Weinstein was promoting another movie about Jews who rebelled against the Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto. That movie is “not Holocaust story as much as it is Jews with guns,” Weinstein said. “When injustice is so great, you can’t just march into the camps.”
And if the same thing happened today?
“I’d find a gun,” Weinstein told Stern.
He might find it difficult, especially in New York, where Weinstein Co. is based. Jews rounded up by the Nazis had the same problem. Their guns had been confiscated under Hitler’s 1938 gun control law. But let’s not let history cloud the issue. As far as Weinstein is concerned, guns are bad. Unless he needs one.
[Los Angeles-based journalist Michael White covered the film industry for Bloomberg News for more than a decade. Before that, he wrote about Pacific-Rim trade and ethnic/racial issues for the for the Associated Press. He is also enjoys recreational shooting and is a devoted admirer of vintage firearms.]
I always love how the guys saying gun owners suck and are horrible people who he wants to make wish for death preach all of this from inside mansions behind tall walls patrolled by armed guards.
When did this Weinstien guy show up? I haven’t heard of him until recently and I thought at first we just had a new nickname for Feinstein.
The Weinstein brothers (Harv and Bob) founded Miramax, which was a big mover in the independent film scene in the 1980s and 90s. They made Soderbergh, Tarantino, Rodriguez and Peter Jackson’s careers when they were “small fish”. Miramax’s success ironically helped kill the indie film market, as they and other indie distributors sold out to the studios.
METO! I even told my wife about Feinstein’s new nickname. I feel like Will Ferral in Anchorman, “I EVEN WROTE IT IN MY DIARY!”
Weinstein is an uber-connected New York lib elite. He could have a NYC CCW permit in ten minutes flat.
The rest of us? Not so much.
He probably already does. As far as I know there is no way to find out.
Well, Howard Stern is one of the few with a NYC CCW. Of course he is also anti-gun… anti’s are almost amusing at times.
By permits are public record and a lot of elitist libs have them
In actor’s own words. There is no such thing as bad publicity. Shock and awl gets the job done for free. Let the media pay for it.
Don’t bring an awl to a gunfight.
In a Sean Connery voice -‘Isn’t it just like a sailor to bring a awl to a gunfight.’ Untouchables:The Pirate Version.
You know they probably misused awl there. They were probably thinking of a fid which is used to untie tight knots, not to scratch markings into things.
The small awl in your pocket beats 3 big ones in the safe!
Well done!
Weinstein has been crystal clear, only Jews should have guns.
Weinstein lives in a fantasy world. The only people who will see this movie are already anti-gun. Most of the time when Hollywood wants to make a statement they misjudge their audience to such an extant that the message sent is the opposite of the one they think they are sending.
Good points, though if the purpose of the movie is to help solidify a leftist base of support, it might do that. Same as the DNC doubling down on “inequality” for 2010. Keep their minds off drastically increased insurance premiums and their cell phone data being scooped up and stored for all time by the NSA.
Weinstein’s problem is he can’t hide from his hypocrisy. He would have more credibility if he gave up all his $$ and focused on this as his cause. But he won’t so he can STFU and die.
Honestly, any of these dopes who have ever had armed security for any detail instantly lose whatever credibility they might have. Safety for me but not for thee. Pathetic
Damn. I loved many of his movies. Pulp fiction is on my top 10 list. I’m not throwing out any of my DVDs, but I’ll never see another movie with Weinstein involved. He obviously doesn’t have the best interests of the USA (the citizens who comprise the country, not the government that is supposed to serve the people) at heart.
Just a note. It was “Die Hard II ” that exploited the fictional ” porcelain Glocks”. No Glocks In “Die Hard”. McClain had a Beretta 92F and Hans had a H&K P13.
The other difference, the first “Die Hard was a great action movie, “II” was a waste of celluloid.
I have to thank “Whinestine” he reminded me to renew my NRA membership.
“… he wasn’t going to make any more violent movies. Well, at least not as many. “I’m not going to make some crazy action movie just to blow up people and exploit people,”
May I point out that Whinestein has just agreed with the NRA’s post-Newtown position on violent movies and video games? Apparently, this Hollywood dweeb agrees that violent movies may influence violent people, by glorifying said violence? Hey Harve, are your lib buddies going to accuse you of trashing the 1st Amendment?
The NRA is a member based organization and has a membership count of some 5 mil. I guess Whinestein finds that number of American citizens willing to pay to join and support the organization ‘inconsequential’ and worthy of his scorn.
I’m certain he’ll at least draw a fair representation of Democrats and other liberal progressive socialists who will adore Meryl Streep as a ‘victim’ of NRA lobbying, something *never* seen from the gun grabbing left.
“They’re going to wish they weren’t alive after I’m done with them…”
Watching Weinstein’s movies are going to make people wish they weren’t alive, I can buy that, I felt like that during all of Inglorious Basterds.
Larry Correia is a badass. I can’t believe I haven’t read any of his books. I need to fix that, pronto.
My favorite Correia blog post: http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2013/09/20/the-internet-arguing-checklist/. Liberal/progressive debate tactics wrapped up in one entertainingly sarcastic package.
“The movie came up while Weinstein was promoting another movie about Jews who rebelled against the Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto. That movie is “not Holocaust story as much as it is Jews with guns,” Weinstein said. “When injustice is so great, you can’t just march into the camps.”
Anyone who’s studied the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising knows that it wasn’t a valiant last stand. It was a punctuation mark on a horrific failure of humanity. The civilized world watched as Jews were systematically murdered. Jews watched as their neighbors were murdered and no one acted until over 100,000 had been sent to their deaths in Treblinka.
The uprising was no Thermopylae. I started studying it thinking it was but firsthand accounts of survivors were sickening. One story (I think told my Marek Edelman, but I’m not sure) was of a large group of Jews confined in a room who listened as a few Nazis gang-raped a young woman in a back corner, right in front of all of them. The Jews had been disarmed. They did nothing to stop it.
Being armed isn’t just about having guns. Owning a firearm provides not only the tool to resist oppression, but also gives you the psychological choice to resist. If you’re armed with a pitchfork, it’s easy to say to yourself “there’s nothing I can do against these oppressors. I must submit.” But if you’ve got a folding stock AK slung over your back, are you going to stand there and watch someone being gang-raped and do nothing?
I’ll leave that choice to each of you.
This whole thing is only good for the nra and for guns.
There should be pro NRA 2A demonstrations everywhere this movie is screened.
Actually, that would probably have the opposite of the desired effect. I would guess that would bring out the marginally-involved sheep and the chronically unlaid, thinking that by plunking their money down they would magically become “KEWEL L33t” and all their dreams would come true.
I’m pretty sure gun manufacturers are doing okay right now… thanks in large part to people like Weinstein.
IMO we can all thank people like Richard Donner and Jerry Bruckheimer for the average person’s apathy towards police overreach. If you look at the typical “buddy cop” film from the ’80s and ’90s, what was the usual take-away?
“It’s OK for the police to do whatever they have to do in order to catch/kill the bad guy(s.) The end always justifies the means even if the means are illegal.”
Hollywood is nothing more than a contemptible hive of hypocrisy and unwarranted self importance, populated by empty-headed, plastic puppets who have egos far outsizing their actual value to society.
Very astute, my friend.
I’ll start taking this guy seriously when he returns all the money he made from movies that glorify “gun violence”
The trouble with overt propaganda is that the message can be so overt and in-your-face that it can turn viewers away. Weinstein should look at the overtly anti-Jewish Nazi propaganda that tried to associate Jews as a plague of rats. The film flopped at the cinema. So the Nazis got subtle and made a love story where the villain appeared to be Jewish, at least in the stereotypes. That movie was a success at the cinemas but it is not clear how successful it was as a tool of propaganda.
You’re selling DJANGO UNCHAINED way short, Robert. That movie was unadulterated, calculating anti-white race-baiting. Like MACHETE. Chop the lousy Anglos to pieces.
Weinstein is Public Race War Inciter Number One. Never has it occurred to him that his fat, rich ass might be the first to go on the spit.
Bookmarked! Well said.
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