Harvey Keitel

Source: Bigstock

Michael Mailer, son of the great novelist Norman Mailer, is a Harvard grad, a liberal, and an outstanding amateur boxer who advanced further in the Golden Gloves competition than any other Harvard wimp ever has or ever will, for that matter. Michael is a talented film director and producer who has numerous movies under his belt and is at present working nonstop when not arguing with yours truly about politics. He’s also my closest friend.

My beef with the movies is a simple one: the virtue signaling practiced by greedy little bald fat men who cast black actors as historical white persons. It not only signals total dishonesty, intellectually and otherwise, it is pathetic in its efforts to virtue-signal and please the left. Totalitarian regimes have tried this in the past. I remember as a child watching a UFA German production of Titanic. The only officer who did not panic but rescued many women and children pushed aside by eager-to-save-themselves fat Anglo-American capitalists was a German. I remember telling my Prussian nanny afterward how lucky those he saved were to be dealing with a German. (Fraulein agreed.)

So, are these modern Hollywood types like the Nazis, so scared of the truth they have to invent black dukes in Regency Britain? Actually, it’s a laughing matter, and what we should be doing is what an audience member did when he told Bono—who had pompously declared during a concert in Glasgow that “Every time I clap my hands a child dies in Africa”—“Well, stop fucking doing it, then.” We should boycott any movie that dishonestly presents the past and stop rewarding cowardice.

And by this we are not in any way denying past injustices, but representing fictional and factual history. The lefty point is, of course, that they feel injustices more keenly than anyone else, which is the biggest lie of all. Having a black actor play Hamlet as a top drug dealer’s son in Harlem and uttering, “To is or not to is, is the fucking question,” does not benefit anyone, starting with the fools who might pay to watch it. The trouble with America today is that everything is seen through the lens of oppressor and oppressed. The media and the movies perpetrate this myth, and I for one no longer read, listen to, or believe a word the media says, and do not watch movies made after 1959. (Except Michael’s films, and especially Heart of Champions.) Viewing ourselves as morally superior to our ancestors is a crock, and reinterpreting classic works an even bigger crock. But let’s have some fun.

Let’s create the sprawling saga that came to define the antebellum South as a new-and-improved Gone With the Wind movie. No longer black stereotypes in evidence, but Captain Butler as a gay man secretly in love with Ashley Wilkes, played by a black man, with Mamie as a trans, and Scarlett obsessed with Melanie, a Native American whose name was Florensiensis Naledi back out West. It’s bound to work and please the self-obsessed morons who now demand warnings when reading Papa Hemingway’s classics. The super aggressive trans lobby might take umbrage at Mamie’s weight, but to hell with them. And the same goes for the late Edith Wharton, who would have been even more aghast viewing this version of Gone than if she had spotted a turd in the middle of her drawing room.

By now, dear readers, you probably have guessed I’m no Hollywood groupie. Modern Hollywood, that is. The irony is that the few actors I have known were not only gentlemen in the old sense of the word, but became close friends with yours truly, politics aside. The late David Niven was a Gstaad neighbor and was in life as elegant and word-perfect as in his films. David was a very nice man with a good war record, and self-deprecating to a fault. As was Roger Moore, an even closer friend and neighbor, whose jokes were the funniest ever and were matched only by his generosity for the needy. And then there’s Harvey Keitel, whom I met at a party and when introduced to him asked him what was a nice Jewish boy like him doing in the Marine Corps instead of being down in Wall Street screwing Christians? “Who is this guy?” Harvey exploded to no one in particular. “I like him.” It was the start of a you-know-what friendship. The late Louis Jourdan, heartthrob of the ’50s, ditto, and Mathew Modine, as sweet and nice as they come.

Unfortunately, today the f-word has become a synonym for sincerity. The movies are mainly responsible for this, the lack of talent of writers and directors being exposed as millions of f-bombs are uttered nonstop by trained seals, sorry, actors. All it takes is a look at films like The Best Years of Our Lives, All About Eve, and The Razor’s Edge, all great classics without a single f-word ever necessary, and one realizes how far our culture has declined. And it gets even more painful at the sight of Americans in front of brain-dead celebrities and those who interview them, the degrading self-abasement a true portrait of our time.