January 21, 2014
Harvey Weinstein Brings Hollywood Hypocrisy to New Heights
If you’ve grown tired of hearing from the mainstream media how bad guns and the gun industry are for the country, there’s good news: Soon you’ll be able to pay $12 and eat stale popcorn, drink overpriced soda and watch a full length feature movie about how bad guns and the gun industry are for the country.
Movie producer Harvey Weinstein “let slip” to Howard Stern that he is planning a movie with Meryl Streep that will make the NRA “wish they weren’t alive.”
That’s right: Harvey Weinstein, the man who made a fortune on the success of gratuitously violent films such as Rambo, Pulp Fiction, Sin City, Inglorious Basterds, now apparently believes that guns are bad and the gun industry needs to be destroyed.
It’s a quick change of heart for Weinstein, who just last year saw his film Django Unchained win two Oscars and bank more than $425 million. In Django’s climactic scene, at least 20 people are shot and killed.
We have seen similar hypocrisy come out of Hollywood before. Just last year, once-kind-of-funny-now-C-list actor Jim Carrey released a short, distasteful video mocking Charlton Heston specifically and gun owners generally. The video was probably the funniest bit of acting Carrey had done in a long time, the laughable irony being that the former Mask star had just cashed big checks for his role in the violent “Kick-Ass” movies.
Carrey’s video and subsequent push to support Senate legislation to curb the Second Amendment rights of law abiding Americans subsequently failed, much in the same way Weinstein’s is likely to. What makes Hollywood so successful is that it is a fantasy land – a place where reality as the rest of us know it ceases to exist. But for that same reason, Hollywood is simply out of touch with much of America on many issues, particularly when it comes to the Second Amendment.
It is unlikely Weinstein’s movie will have much of an impact on gun owners or the firearms industry. In fact, in the years since another anti-gun film, ultra-liberal Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, federal gun background checks have increased by more than 54 percent. As CNN’s S.E. Cupp points out, gun owners don’t like Hollywood or Washington telling them how they can exercise their Constitutional rights.
According to IMDB.com, Weinstein is linked with upcoming movies Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, Kill Bill: Vol. 3, which, if either is like their serial siblings, figure to have no shortage of gun violence and no shortage of zeroes on the checks movie mogul Weinstein is sure to cash. We should be able to see, then, whether Weinstein is really shooting straight over his vow to avoid guns in his films or just firing rhetorical blanks.
Categories: Government Relations, Top Stories