Disney Throws Away Millions For Republican Causes
by digby
Jonathan at A Tiny Revolution notices a strange contradiction:
So…”The Path to 9/11″ cost $30 million and was written and directed by conservative ideologues. Factually speaking, it’s predictably craptastic. And yet Disney is glad to lose at least $30 million on it.
By contrast, this was Disney’s treatment of another political movie—one that eventually grossed over $200 million:
The Walt Disney Company is blocking its Miramax division from distributing a new documentary by Michael Moore that harshly criticizes President Bush, executives at both Disney and Miramax said Tuesday…
A senior Disney executive elaborated that the company had the right to quash Miramax’s distribution of films if it deemed their distribution to be against the interests of the company. The executive said Mr. Moore’s film is deemed to be against Disney’s interests not because of the company’s business dealings with the government but because Disney caters to families of all political stripes and believes Mr. Moore’s film, which does not have a release date, could alienate many.
”It’s not in the interest of any major corporation to be dragged into a highly charged partisan political battle,” this executive said.
You would think they would at least be somewhat uncomfortable about screening this rightwing mini-series only for conservatives. According to this alleged email to Hugh Hewitt, 900 screening copies were mailed out. Sadly, it appears that there were none available for members of the Clinton administration or anyone from the left.
This correspondent told Hewitt that the Disney execs were all atwitter over the week-end:
The story here is the backlash that the Disney/ABC execs experienced was completely unexpected and is what caused them to question themselves and make these changes at all. Had this been the Bush Admin pressuring, they wouldn’t have even taken the call. The execs and studio bosses are dyed in the wool liberals and huge supporters of Clinton and the Democratic Party in general. They had no idea any of this could happen. As I understand this, the lawyers and production team spent literally months corroborating every story point down to the sentence. The fact that they were the attacked and vilified by their “own team” took them completely by surprise; this is the first time they’ve been labeled right-wing, conservative conspiracists.
The scramble caused by this backlash was so all consuming that the execs spent their holiday weekend behind closed door meetings and revamped their ad campaign. But at the end of their mad scramble, they found only a handful of changes they could make and still be true to the events. The changes are done only to appease the Clinton team – to be able to say they made changes. But the blame on the Clinton team is in the DNA of the project and could not be eradicated without pulling the entire show. A $40 million investment on the part of ABC is enough to stem even Bill Clinton’s influence.
We are, apparently, supposed to assume that the communist corporate officers of Disney/ABC (many of whom inexplicably contributed to the Bush campaign) knew that the “blame on the Clinton team is in the DNA of the project” and yet they never expected this fictionalized account of the Clinton administration causing 9/11 would make any waves among their comrades. Sure, that makes perfect sense.
It’s evident that Disney/ABC Entertainment is anything but a bunch of lefties. If they were they would have been thrilled to distribute “Fahrenheit 9/11” instead of avoiding it like the plague. And they most certainly wouldn’t have signed off on crazy anti-semite Mel Gibson’s Holocaust project, for God’s sake:
LOS ANGELES, Dec. 6, 2005 – Mel Gibson, whose “The Passion of the Christ” was assailed by critics as an anti-Semitic passion play – and whose father has been on record as a Holocaust denier – has a new project under way: a nonfiction miniseries about the Holocaust.
[…]
It is not expected that Mr. Gibson will act in the miniseries, nor is it certain yet that his name, rather than his company’s, will be publicly attached to the final product, according to several people involved in developing it. Nor is it guaranteed yet that the project will be completed and broadcast.
But Quinn Taylor, ABC’s senior vice president in charge of movies for television, acknowledged that the attention-getting value of having Mr. Gibson attached to a Holocaust project was a factor.
“Controversy’s publicity, and vice versa,” Mr. Taylor said.
Right. Holocaust denial and anti-semitism is an awesome way to get publicity. But distributing a documentary about the Bush administration’s handling of 9/11 was too hot to handle. And they had no idea that a mini-series claiming that the Clinton administration was responsible for the attacks would be controversial at all.
Here’s the record:
Disney/ABC cancelled the reality show featuring a gay couple, “Welcome To The Neighborhood,” ten days before it was to air when James Dobson and the religious right threatened to withdraw their support for the conservative classic “Narnia.”
Disney refused to allow its subsidiary Miramax, which specialized in controversial fare, to distribute “Fahrenheit 9/11” allegedly because they felt it was too political.
They made a deal with Mel Gibson, beloved on the religious right for his film “The Passion,” to produce a film about the Holocaust even though they knew at the time he held extremely controversial views about the Holocaust and Judaism. They only cancelled the project when he was caught by the police drunkenly saying “all the wars in the world are caused by the Jews.”
Now they have produced a blatantly rightwing work of fiction which they are saying is based on the official 9/11 Commission report and they are giving it away without any advertising. They sent out hundreds of screening copies but failed to send any to the Clinton administration officials who are trashed in the film or to liberal columnists and bloggers.
There’s a pattern here folks and it isn’t a pattern that shows ABC knuckling under to liberals. There is a huge amount of money at stake in all these decisions, but for some reason Disney seems to be more than willing to throw it away when it benefits the right wing: already produced films and TV shows are either cancelled or allowed to be distributed by others, while hugely expensive, controversial rightwing mini-series’ are broadcast with no advertising and allowed to be downloaded for free by I-tunes.
Isn’t that something that Disney shareholders should be just a little bit concerned about? If ABC is protecting its “Narnia” franchise, at some point you have to look at whether the price they are paying is too high. If they have thrown this kind of money away to appease the GOP for business reasons then their shareholders have just been taken to the cleaners. The old K Street project is dead and when Democrats take congress this fall they aren’t going to be happy. They are on to it.
If Disney/ABC is giving away free air time for conservative projects and denying distribution to programs that don’t favor the Republican Party, then perhaps somebody needs to look at whether this stuff is legal. There are laws regulating corporate giving to campaigns. By not showing advertising it seems to me that it’s not impossible to make a case that this latest is a free gift to the Republican party just weeks before an important election.
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