Mr. Right (My title: Lionel Chetwynd, Hollywood Republican)

It's tough being a card-carrying conservative in LaLa Land. Montreal-bred writer, director and producer Lionel Chetwynd has more than 40 films and TV movies on his résumé, and friends in high places in Washington. But he just can't see eye-to-eye with the antiwar celebrities in an increasingly divided Hollywood, MICHAEL POSNER finds

LOS ANGELES -- Not long ago, Lionel Chetwynd was accosted in his neighbourhood Starbucks. The man was a liberal, outraged by the George W. Bush bumper sticker on Chetwynd's car. " 'How can you support him?' he fumed. 'He's raping the environment!' . . . So I did what I do," Chetwynd recalls. "I made my defence. And then he leaves and I notice what he's driving -- a Hummer."

Such is Hollywood, submits Chetwynd, writer, producer, director and proud conservative Republican in a territory ostensibly overrun by liberal Democrats.

"It's cognitive dissonance," he explains. "You know, 'I supported Hillary Clinton. I'm a good Democrat. I gave at the office. Now I can do whatever I want.' "

But Chetwynd is less interested in labelling the hypocrisy than in leading the countercharge, a challenge he considers all the more critical in the wake of 9/11.

In fact, he maintains, the political terrain is markedly shifting, producing a Hollywood perhaps more deeply and more bitterly divided than at any time since the McCarthy-inspired Red scare of the early 1950s, when Ronald Reagan and the Screen Actors Guild caved beneath congressional pressure and named Communist sympathizers.

Even now, Chetwynd has never been perceived as the lone sentinel guarding the Republican Front. Aging icon Charlton Heston has been president of the National Rifle Association for, it seems, a couple of hundred years. Actor Tom Selleck has endorsed a variety of conservative causes, without discernible injury to his career. Arnold Schwarzenegger's right-wing leanings are cloaked, but known. And Tom Cruise recently defied the anti-Bush windstorm by saying he supposed President Bush had better information than he did about the weapons of mass destruction that Iraq might possess.

Sean Penn, that New World Metternich of diplomacy, has recently taken his act to Baghdad, in an in-depth, three-day mission to determine what's really going on in Iraq.

Bianca Jagger, last seen stalking the killing fields of Bosnia, went him three better: six days, during which she offered the obvious solution to the gathering crisis -- just have Saddam Hussein invite members of the Kurdish opposition into his senior military command.

Sheryl Crow, heretofore known for just wanting to have fun, has apparently discovered, according to the sequined T-shirt she sported at the American Music Awards, that "war is not the answer." (But wasn't that "if it makes you happy, it can't be that bad" that George W. was overheard whistling in the West Wing the other day?)

"War," Ms. Crow crowed, flushed with revelation, "is based on greed." As opposed to, say -- what? -- the music industry?

Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, Martin Sheen and Kim Basinger, Barbra Streisand and Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese and Warren Beatty, Woody Harrelson and Jessica Lange -- every day, it seems, one awakens to find another Armani-draped Hollywood lefty, limo idling curbside, lecturing from a podium somewhere, denouncing the Bush administration for the itchy trigger finger on its Saddam-labelled cruise missiles.

And stars being stars, the media always shows up to record, broadcast and publish these selfless, humanitarian flights of rhetoric.

Of course, this phenomenon is not precisely new. In the 1990s, Joan Baez (and Jagger again) dropped in on Bosnia. Richard Gere materialized in Macedonia. And, lest we forget, there was that Fonda woman, Jane, righteous pilgrim to Hanoi three decades ago.

Understandably, one might encounter this antiwar juggernaut and reasonably come to the conclusion that the Hollywood Hills represent a monolithic bastion of not just liberal orthodoxy, but pacific resolve.

With more than 40 films and TV movies on his résumé, Chetwynd is that rare breed in Lala Land, an unapologetic, card-carrying conservative. His credentials, in this regard, are impeccable.

He sits, by appointment of Dubya himself, on something called the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.

The week after Bill Clinton's election in January, 1992, Chetwynd co-founded the Wednesday Morning Club, a breakfast meeting for disconsolate neocons. For the first two years, they met at his house in Bel Air.

During the Writers Guild strike in 1988, it was Chetwynd who led the campaign to call it off.

Last year, he was elected to membership in the Officers Mess of the Black Watch, Royal Highland Regiment of Canada, in which he enlisted at 16 in Montreal and served two years.

In the past 27 years, he has written, directed or produced any number of films or TV movies that, implicitly or explicitly, beat out an unmistakably patriotic hymn. These include The Hanoi Hilton, a feature that documented the lives of America's Vietnam PoWs and the less charming side of their North Vietnamese wardens; The Heroes of Desert Storm, which chronicled the bravery of U.S. forces in the 1991 Gulf War; and To Heal a Nation, the story of the building of the Vietnam memorial wall in Washington.

His recent PBS film about screenwriter Carl Foreman (High Noon) infuriated old-line liberals because it provocatively blamed producer Stanley Kramer for betraying Foreman to the McCarthy-era House Un-American Activities Committee and leading to his blacklisting.

It is certainly no coincidence that Chetwynd is now involved in writing and producing a new movie (DC: 9/11) about what happened inside the White House on Sept. 11, 2001, and in the days afterward. During research for the project, he was granted a 57-minute audience with President Bush.

You put all this together and it's not surprising that David E. Kelley, creator of The X Files, ER and several other hit shows, once said: "If they created a lifetime-achievement award for Lionel Chetwynd, it would be a Lifetime Pariah Award."

In fact, Chetwynd says, the reaction he routinely receives runs the gamut from "tolerated to marginalized and then to hated." But he long ago abandoned the notion that one could be liked by everyone in Hollywood.

"Look," he says, settling into a chair in his comfortable new hilltop home in Sherman Oaks that he shares with his wife of 40 years, actress Gloria Carlin. "Being a liberal in Hollywood is not a political statement -- it's a religion."

Although he doesn't see eye-to-eye politically with Chetwynd, writer Josh Greenfeld (Harry and Tonto) acknowledges the double standard.

"It's amazing," he says. "There are all these people who give to this liberal cause and that liberal cause, great humanitarians all, and in business, they're the meanest, toughest sons of bitches you'd ever want to know."

Robert Thompson, of Syracuse University's prestigious Newhouse School of Communications, says there's a political paradox lying at the heart of Hollywood. "On the one hand, by background, education and personal opinion, most people would admit that the film and television communities do lean slightly more left of centre than the rest of the population," he says. "On the other hand, they're working in a profession that by definition is about as conservative as it gets. AOL Time Warner, Viacom -- these are huge corporate behemoths protecting the status quo."

Nevertheless, Chetwynd's attachment to cherished Republican causes sometimes disqualifies him for work. One HBO executive, he says, declined to hire him because " 'conservatives can't write caring characters.' Which kind of distressed me, because he was a gay man and I would have thought he would have sensitivity to that kind of stereotyping."

On the other hand, he adds, "the dance calendar is full. I am much in demand at dinner parties and so on, because there's a war coming and they want me there to bait."

But Chetwynd, who is in his early 60s, flatly rejects the notion that on the subjects of Bush or the looming war, Hollywood speaks with one undeviating voice. "There has been a noticeable, even dramatic change," insists the London-born, Montreal-raised naturalized American, who left school in Grade 9 but later earned law degrees from McGill and Oxford before going to work for Columbia Pictures in London.

"It started with 9/11 and it has become intensified with the recent news about North Korea. People are starting to see the face of nuclear blackmail and think, imagine Saddam Hussein walking into Kuwait with a nuclear bomb in his hip pocket."

It was in the weeks after 9/11 that Washington sent White House point man Karl Rove to meet at the Peninsula Hotel with Motion Picture Association of America president Jack Valenti (winner of the civilian patriot award and veteran of 50 aerial-combat missions during the Second World War) and 41 other Hollywood Pooh-Bahs, to discuss what the world's foremost manufacturers of saleable images could do for the war against terrorism. A number of prescient films were already in the works: Behind Enemy Lines (Bosnia), Collateral Damage (Schwarzenegger versus terrorists), Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down, which writer Larry Gelbart described as so upbeat about the U.S. military it might as well have been called Black Hawk Up.

"Something is wrong if half the world thinks we're the Great Satan, and we want to make that right," Chetwynd said.

"All of us have this incredible need, this incredible urge to do something," Lansing said.

Well, not "all of us." Overt political pressure is counterproductive, and whatever their political leanings, however sympathetic they might be, most studio executives had little interest in turning their sound stages into propaganda factories, as they did during the Second World War.

Pro-war movies were good business in the 1940s but they might not be today, not in a globalized economic climate where foreign box-office revenues often determine profit and loss. In other words, the studios' aversion to being drafted for duty is based on the cold calculus of money. The half of the world that regards America as the Great Satan is unlikely to pay money for movies that paint it as a light unto the nations.

"For a long time," the Newhouse School's Thompson says, "what was good for American audiences was good for international audiences. We didn't have to think about it. But that is changing dramatically -- even in places like Canada. Markets that were so in the bag for so long for the consensus culture aren't so reliable any more. Hollywood is going to have a hard time dealing with that."

Still, Chetwynd is doubtless correct in thinking that the centre of political gravity has moved, however subtly.

Indeed, with the Wednesday Morning Club now largely defunct, he is assembling a new, more bipartisan spinoff.

The new group will convene moderates from left and right of centre -- the old steering committee of the WMC (Chetwynd, uberlawyer Bruce Ramer, producers Frank Price and Bob Gale) and moderate liberals (actors Ron Silver and Richard Dreyfuss), to hear speakers from across the political spectrum.

In fact, if Hollywood were really as rigidly governed by left-leaning ideologues as it is sometimes suggested, it's doubtful that a conservative as outspoken as Chetwynd would have done as well as he has. In a town where writers and producers may count themselves blessed to see one in 10 scripts produced, Chetwynd has seen 14 of his past 15 projects actually get made.

All of which may demonstrate that the business of filmdom is, in the end, film. Political issues come and go. The balance of power may tilt one way and then the other. But money always talks and, where money is concerned, Hollywood always listens.

National Desk was a great PBS show...but they had a cat fight and today PBS has no balance...
http://www.current.org/ptv/ptv0214horowitz.html

Lawsuit tells how PBS bought into right-wing series

Originally published in Current, Aug. 5, 2002
By Karen Everhart

A civil lawsuit filed against a right-leaning producer in Los Angeles County July 19 offers an intriguing account of how public broadcasting leaders negotiated to bring conservative programs to public TV after members of Congress attacked PBS for liberal bias in 1992.

Writer and commentator David Horowitz, who led the right's attack on pubcasting during the CPB reauthorization process in the early '90s, tells in his lawsuit how he used his political leverage to gain CPB and PBS support for a conservative public affairs series that he proposed to counterbalance Frontline.

Horowitz is suing former partner Lionel Chetwynd, whom he blames for ending the conservative documentary series National Desk (originally Reverse Angle) in 2000. The two had been leaders of the Wednesday Morning Club, a prominent right-wing Hollywood group that hosted luncheons with speakers.

In the suit, Horowitz claims a major role in launching the series. He says he recruited Chetwynd, co-founded the nonprofit production company Whidbey Island Films and raised a portion of the series budget from conservative foundations.

At the same time, Horowitz was maintaining pressure on PBS by publishing the newsletter Comint, which battered pubcasters with negative articles by Laurence Jarvik.

A central figure in the complaint is former PBS President Ervin Duggan, who negotiated directly with Horowitz to launch a four-part series, according to the complaint, but later reacted angrily when Horowitz lobbied Congress to push for its expansion into an ongoing series on par with Frontline. Duggan did not respond to a request for an interview.

In his complaint seeking damages from Chetwynd, Horowitz alleges that his former collaborator conspired to force him out of Whidbey Island. Alleging that Chetwynd profited substantially from his relationship with PBS, Horowitz demands a share of the profits plus other monetary damages. Norman Powell, an executive producer with Whidbey Island, also is named in the suit.

National Desk went off the air in 2000 after PBS negotiated a new deal with Chetwynd to produce higher-profile documentaries, the first of which, "Darkness at High Noon," debuts next month (earlier article). Horowitz tried to keep National Desk going by informing influential House Republicans, and says the cancellation partially motivated the lawsuit.

Chetwynd "destroyed my project" and "enriched himself at my expense," Horowitz told Current. "I need some justice, and that's what this suit is about."

Horowitz "seriously misperceives the nature of the business and his lack of a role in it," replied Mark Brifman, Chetwynd's attorney. "There's no fraud and conspiracy, and there's no money."

The complaint describes how Horowitz's campaign against liberal bias on public broadcasting in the early 1990s opened the door to talks with CPB and PBS leaders about corrective right-leaning programs. CPB President Richard Carlson gave $250,000 for a treatment for Horowitz's proposed six-part attack on 1960s leftism based on Destructive Generation, a book co-written by Horowitz and Peter Collier. The treatment was completed but never funded for production, Horowitz said. CPB also backed two installments of Reverse Angle, which was re-configured as the limited series National Desk after a meeting between Carlson, Duggan and Horowitz in spring 1994.

At this meeting, Horowitz proposed "a 22-segment PBS current affairs series, as a parallel to Frontline," according to the complaint. "Duggan countered by asking whether four parts would be satisfactory to begin." CPB and PBS committed $1.3 million to the project.

Horowitz approached funders of his own organization, the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, to raise the $300,000 that completed National Desk's first-season budget, according to the complaint. Whidbey paid a 20 percent commission to the Center for Horowitz's fundraising activities. To skirt a foundation's prohibition on fundraising commissions, Whidbey booked the expense as a purchase of rights to Destructive Generation, the complaint alleges.

Horowitz continued to lobby Congress for more conservative programs, according to the complaint, and he did this with Chetwynd's "full knowledge and support." By June 1995, an irate Duggan confronted Horowitz at an event in Nashville.

"He really unloaded on me," Horowitz recalled. "I was quite taken aback and didn't defend myself."

Two months after the blow-up, Horowitz resigned from Whidbey after Chetwynd told him that Duggan delivered an ultimatum that his continued involvement with the company jeopardized the series' future. Horowitz said he understood that he could return after the situation cooled off.

The complaint alleges that Chetwynd lied about Duggan's threat. Horowitz said he regards the former PBS prez as "fair-minded" and is grateful that he "brought us into the system."

Duggan did not lean on Whidbey to force Horowitz's resignation, nor did Chetwynd tell Horowitz that Duggan was behind the ouster, said Brifman, Chetwynd's attorney.

The defendants have until late August to respond.

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