From the Easy Chair

Discussion of Movies

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 69-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161BJ113

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161BJ113, Discussion of Movies from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[Rushdoony] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 221, July the third, 1990.

This evening we are going to lead off with a discussion of movies. And I am going to ask Otto Scott to introduce the subject.

[Scott] Well, thank you, Rush. Movies at one time were the great American escape. I recall when something like 60 million people a week went to the movies. And the movies in those days ran, at least in metropolitan cities that I knew, around the clock. You could go in in the middle of the feature and you would stay and see the end and then, of course, you would see the next feature and then you would see the beginning of the feature that you walked in on and you didn’t think anything of it. Also they had news reels and comedies and it was a recognizable world that the movies were projecting. They were fantasies. They were romances. They were mysteries. They were gangster films and so forth, but there were blue collar people in the as well as people with money. They showed... it as an American society that as much caricatured, but, nevertheless, recognizable like a real caricature.

Now movies are something entirely different. They reflect an enormous amount of Sadism and they reflect a distaste for the American people in the way that they portray us as grotesques or as monsters or as people who behave in strange and bizarre ways. I find them very difficult to relate to the world that I know and the people that I belong to. And I think that as a subject, as a subject of analysis the movies have been neglected by the sort of people who one would expect to look into them. The intellectuals accept movies as something given, not as something created. And I think it would be interesting to go into what they are doing to us.

[Rushdoony] Yes. You mentioned that back in the 30s 60 million people a week attended movies. We can add to that the fact that there were only 150 million people in the United States at that time. At present what is it, 225 million?

[Scott] 250.

[Rushdoony] 250. And as of a few years ago the attendance weekly was down to 15 million and has been dropping ever since. I don’t know what it is now. You read a great deal about how much movies are now making. Of course this is in inflated dollars. What we are not told is that as against any number of new films produced every week in those days, you now have a handful produced in the course of a year. So the amount of money... first the money is inflated and, second, those who do go are given fewer choices.

[Scott] Well, we remember talking to John Quaid about movie budgets.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And I said why does it take at least 10 million dollars to make a feature film? And he said, “Well, you can’t... you have to have enough so that the people who make the film can steal a million or more in the course of making the film, because they never know if the film is really going to make any money once it is distributed, because the studio accounting methods are so crooked that those who make the film actually have to collect their money from the advance money.”

Now that is very similar to a writer. I know from personal experience and from my other friends in the business that most writers only get the advance. They never see the royalties. And recently writers, for instance, have the author’s guild or author’s league, I belong to it and I never know what the name is. They have taken a leaf from the English. They have written the name of the book, the author and the publisher on a slip of paper and they dump whole slips of paper into some hats and then they have somebody pull out one of these slips, maybe two or three slips and the league will pay the legal expenses of sending an accountant in to check the royalty statements of those books. And so far I both England and the United States they have yet to find an honest one.

Well, the accounting in the movie business is even worse, that those who have a net percentage in the profits, in the net profits find that somehow or another none of the movies make any money.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] No matter what the newspapers say.

[Rushdoony] Well, on that kid of dishonesty, of course, reveals itself at every stage of the process. And one of the things that I have been told by someone in the business that has been particularly disastrous is that the point of economy in television and in films is with the writers.

[Scott] I am to surprised.

[Rushdoony] So that you get very few good scripts and the television scripts which have to be produced very quickly and the writers paid very little he goes through in a hurry. And, as a result, they are of very poor quality. So the writer is the person who is sacrificed in the process.

[Scott] Well, the writer is an independent agent. He is up against a collective group and there is a sort of a myth throughout the United States that anybody can be a writer and that anybody is. Now, it is true that writing like speaking is a... almost a natural ability, but it would be like saying that because we are equipped by God to float I the water that we are all swimmers. That is not exactly so. You have to learn how to swim and you can only do that by swimming more and more and more and more. So writing really takes quite a while to develop into an occupational skill.

On the other hand, what you say about the writers and their treatment, I have heard and read various quarters. I saw a movie... I saw two movies recently which puts me ahead of you, I think. And one of them was Dick Tracy which my daughter took me as a Father’s Day present. And the other was Total Recall which I saw down in San Diego with John Upton. We had some time on our hands.

Well, the Total Recall movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger and, of course, he... his muscles rippled as usual, there was lots of physical action. I noticed that it was based on a short story by one writer and that there were seven other writers in the credits. So seven writers put the script together, together with... using as a basis a short story. And I won’t bore you with the thought because it is hard to describe in ordinary language. There were some very raunchy areas in the movie which is now, I think, almost {?} and toward the end the colony on Mars which was having to pay for its air from the villain who was, of course a WASP, the colony... found a complicated machinery inside the planet which could produce livable air for humans, although why Martians should have done that, I don’t know. And I the end all of this was disclosed by a demon like figure, a figure of an infantile looking man who came out of the belly of another person, something like a baby kangaroo, like Roo coming out of Kanga in Pooh, Winnie the Pooh who gave direction which in the end saved the humans from the terrible fate.

And John Upton who you know is in the movie business said, “Well, this is the latest genre.” He said, “The aliens are always the saviors, non humans, because humans are so stupid and so limited that they can never figure their own way out of any dilemma.”

And the Total Recall in the end there was a transfiguration scene, practically, where the sun shone and blue birds began to {?} and John and I left at that point, but it was obvious that salvation had arrived via the demonic aliens.

[Rushdoony] Well, that brings up an interesting point. We discussed writers and we discussed now this sort of thing. One of the problems both in films and I television is that all the emphasis now is on action, exciting action. As a result, character development is out of the picture. And none of the people are characters who have a three dimensional aspect to them.

Now this matter which you referred to of a number of writers on one script, one of the things that has killed some television series that were very promising and potentially good has bee precisely the fact that they have a stable of writers, one team for this one, another for another to come up with fresh ideas, that the ideas are situations. And the result is the series does not gel. The characters on which the story should have rested are not there. And perhaps only one series has had a genuine stress on character, although a superficial one, the Bill Cosby show. The characters are identifiable. You don’t find that each time they are so dramatically different that you don’t recognize them.

[Scott] Well, of course The Cosby Show has been described to me as a white show in black face.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And, as you describe it—I have never seen it—as you describe it the characters are stereotype because they don’t change from episode to episode. You know what you are going to expect from them. And to .... or almost all of the TV shows that I have looked at seem to fall into that category.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] That the police drama and so forth you have the sergeant is always the sergeant and the detective is this way and so forth and so on. This is a sort of fictional short hand. We don’t see the ordinary movies from Britain. We see the extraordinary and so therefore we see better movies from Britain than the British themselves probably see. But the one thing that makes them stand out is that they stick to the script of the writer. One writer.

Recently there was a series called The Charmer. I don’t know if you saw that or not.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] Well, it was a ... an experience, a theatrical experience to see. The charmer was a young man who was charming. He charmed a number of women and swindled them and was pursued by the thwarted courtier or suitor of one of these women who was a middle aged man. In the end, after he had gotten himself into a series of difficulties, he murdered one of his victims. And he was caught. And you knew as the series went on—I think it was six parts—and it was taken from a novel written by a writer who had not been a great success in the 30s, but who apparently had ... whose books had attained a certain respectability and you saw him getting a little bit worse and a little bit worse and you began to hold your breath because you knew he was going to go far. And he did. And he was arrested. He was put on trial. He was sentenced to death and you saw him bring led to the execution. The last shot was the noose or the bag being put over his head.

Now the effect was remarkable because, first of all, he was a villain, but he was a human sort of villain because he was charming and you knew he was going to go too far and you saw the punishment.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now this was very important. Hollywood does not let you see the punishment. In Hollywood there would have been a chase and he would have been shot or he would have gone over cliff or he would have fallen out a window.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] But you would to have seen any punishment whatever.

[Rushdoony] That raises an interesting point. One of the greatest of all novels was Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Now Tolstoy was not a Christian, but all the same he had a biblical text with which he began Anna Karenina. And his whole point was to show what the wages of sin are, that even the finest, most likeable, most lovable person even if they are in a situation that is unfair or unjust if they pursue a certain course, certain consequences are going to follow.

Now that perspective is gone today.

[Scott] Well we are... have another perspective of the Hollywood, of course, is not Christian and is not making Christian movies and furthermore has reached the point where it is making anti Christian movies. Now by doing that, of course, it has moved into a different area all together. It is flouting the majority of the people because the majority of the people in the United States are Christian and the majority of the people have rights and the rights of the majority of the people should not be flouted because it inevitably leads to certain disastrous consequences. The ... on the whole question, though of punishment, which one I opened up, the audience expects to see evil punished. It expects to see evil lose. If it is cheated of that expectation, it is cheated of what the Greeks call catharsis. On the other hand, since we are all fallen people in a fallen world, we have to offer some sort of hope to those who repent and those who change their lives so that if we can’t end all drama with a punishment, we have to at some time along the line see reformation and we have to see a new life and we have to see the results of a new and better life. This is totally absent from the drama that we receive.

[Rushdoony] Well, the whole situation is a very bad one and it is not improving. The demonic now is the major stress in films. A few years ago in talking with someone who does some film writing, I expressed more than a little irritation at the kind of plots we were seeing on films and on television. And I said, by way of conclusion, one would think given the stupidity of the plots that the writers are hotheads. And he looked at me and he said, “You are joking, but I am not when I say there is a lot more truth than poetry to your statement.”

[Scott] I think that is true. I think that is true and if you recall that book that was written about Freud and the use of opium.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Do you recall that?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Where the physician author, an author who was a medical physician, said that Freud’s writings revealed the imaginative effects of drugs on an individual.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I think we do see that in the films today.

[Rushdoony] Yes and it is infecting our entire culture.

[Scott] Well, it is like having poison IV, poison dripped into the veins of the people. One of the things that really surprised me some months back or maybe a year or more ago, I went to a movie in San Diego with some other men, again, killing time and going along with the crowd and the movie was based on Haiti and apparently upon what they claim was a true story. Some physician when down to get a drug, I think a muscle relaxant or something like that, which they used to create zombies and...

[multiple voices]

[Scott] ...from the Harvard Medical School.

[Rushdoony] ... the research on it and articles on it.

[Scott] Well, they made a movie. But, of course, the movie was the most lurid thing you have ever seen. All kinds of torture and zombies rising out of the grave and all this. What got me, really, was the audience. At the most grisly moments the audience broke into laughter. Now years ago there was a very famous cartoon in the New Yorker. You may have seen it by Charles Adams who was always cartooning eerie looking people. It showed a whole audience weeping and in the middle one individual with a great smile.

[Rushdoony] Yes. I remember that.

[Scott] Do you remember that?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now it is as though the whole audience is smiling. They are laughing at inappropriate moments.

[Rushdoony] Well, the best thing you can say about that is that the audiences are growing smaller. A few years back I read that they were primarily limited to blacks and students, that theaters near, say, university campus were very well attended and theaters in a ghetto area.

[Scott] Teenagers.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] People in their early 20s.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] With a sprinkling of oldsters. But what are they getting? Now I read an article in the London Times that I have never forgotten. It was at the end of World War II and the writer—and I am very sorry, always have been, but I didn’t keep it, didn’t clip it out—he talked about violence in films beginning with the early German films of the early 20s. And, incidentally, some of the directors of those films were also directors in Hollywood like Billy Wilder and others. He said, “You would open up a film with somebody walking down a tree lined street, everything look very serene and then suddenly some violence would erupt.” The introduction of violence into otherwise civilized situations became an ongoing motif in German films. And he said by that manner, step by step, without perhaps in realizing what they were doing, the film makers accustomed the German people to the idea that violence was a part of normal life. And when he said, eventually, the violence boomeranged on the film makers, they were horrified.

[Rushdoony] Yes. No one has written very extensively on the relationship between the film world and the art world and the rise of the Nazis. Another book could be written, by the way, on the relationship of the universities and the sciences to the rise of Hitler. It was the leaders in the culture that helped make him successful.

[Scott] Well, his largest audiences were school teachers. But the... the whole question of the films, now I expect to see unless there is a great change in the trends, I expect to see explicit sex on ordinary television and in ordinary movies in the United States within, say, the next five years. One of the... this is one of the directions in which they are going. First they broke down the barriers of language and you hear expletives and obscenities on screen that no social group in this country indulges in as far as I know, I mean, perhaps people in the inner cities, I can’t say. But I have been, as you know, a seaman and I have been in the advertising business on Madison Avenue and I have been in publishing and various and sundry other places and up and down the ladder. After all, I began to earn my own living in 1934. And I never knew anybody that used the language that they use in the movies.

[Rushdoony] Yes. That is thoroughly the case. Yes. Well, I think this same degeneracy is taking place in one culture after another. I read something by a missionary today, in fact, a man who has been in Japan since before World War II. And, of course, what Japan has seen is the same kind of thing on television, far more then we see, because their television has become much more raw. And also in their films. And an authoritarianism is arising and some Japanese are getting into trouble because they will not have their children take part in the Shinto exercises. And this fall I believe November 14, the young emperor will be formally installed. And the ceremony to which there will be distinguished people, the diplomatic core and heads of state from all over the world attending is in the English guide called a service of thanksgiving. But in the Japanese it is described as the putting on of deity by the emperor.

So it is a very definite return not the old order that is underway there. And I think there are evidences of the same thing in the world order. We are going to the worst of the past, because the moral foundations are being destroyed.

[Scott] Well, it is very interesting. There is, of course, a revival here which has been going on for a number of years. The press is not noticed it because nobody has given them a press release on it. But the very fact that so many millions of people have stopped going to the movies is one indication of that. On the other hand, you have the tape stars, whatever they call them and I don’t use them because they are mostly trash. There is an enormous section in all of them on the occult.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now to believe in the devil while denying God may seem inconsistent to the point of stupidity, but nevertheless they promote pagan ... what amounts to pagan deities, what amounts to a return to the days of old Rome and old Greece when demons were worshipped.

I remember there was an excavation in one part of Rome, Italy about 15 or so years ago in which they had found a Jewish quarter, a Jewish community and the Jewish Diaspora was very upset because what they found were amulets, love potions, horoscopes, dice and all the other things which of course, all the people in Rome were steeped in at that particular period. And if we look at our newspaper horoscopes and so forth, let’s not talk about Nancy Reagan. We are not very far away.

But the films are giving us the dark side of human nature in all its vices.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Envy, gluttony, lust, all the cardinal sins, all the deadly sins are being portrayed in the movies in the most realistic possible manner without any indication that there is anything wrong with them. The only time that they say there is something wrong is when there is an actual murder or something on a very primitive level, but all the spiritual sins are portrayed as normal human behavior.

[Rushdoony] Yes. We are confusing the natural with the normal, the right. And that is basic in our society today. And we have people who insist that things are right because they are natural. I have read arguments in favor of incest, homosexuality and a number of other things, some of which repeat here, acts which are now called normal because they occur in nature.

You mentioned the fact that film makers seem to believe in the devil, but not in God. That is a very important point, because it was predicted by the editor of the New Republic in the late 20s, Kenneth Burke, a very, very perceptive thinker, although wrong headed on a great may political and social issues. And Kenneth Burke predicted that before the century was over there would be rise of Occultism, Satanism, Demonism and more because, he said, man needs grace. He needs power. If he will not seek it from above, he will seek it from below.

So, he said, because man is now denying that grace and power are attainable from above, from God, men will seek it from below in Satan.

One of the most perceptive statements made at a time when everyone believed that that sort of thing was forever dead.

[Scott] Well, that is very interesting.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Then there is another thing here. One of the most influential thinkers of this century, a man who gave the Gifford Lectures in England after World War II... or, no, shortly before World War II, Reinhold Niebuhr. Now for Niebuhr, everything in the way of the acts of God was metaphorical. For him a belief in the resurrection was a necessity, but we could not take it literally. It was a paradigm for the nature of things.

But Niebuhr was by some called a Calvinist although he was a Lutheran, because of his belief in man’s depravity. But his view of depravity, of man’s sin, was not theological, not religious. It was sociological. That is why his answer was sociological. It was though the state, not through God’s grace that you were going to deal with the depravity of man. And that type of thinking has led us to the place where reality is darkness. It is Satan. It is the demonic. It is evil. And anything else is unreal. I have again and again seen prominent actors or actresses celebrate and give a happy interview when they get a role that ... wherein they play some ugly character, because they say, “This part is real. I can sink my teeth in it.”

[Scott] Well, it is easier to portray sin than virtue.

[Rushdoony] Especially if you lack virtue.

[Scott] Well, virtue is... only expresses itself obliquely and sin expresses itself directly. So from a dramatic point of view it is much simpler to write sin. But we have in creating the film, creating the movies, man is to do psychologically what the Roman games did physically. The portrayals of murders and other sins are so clever and so close to the reality that people today can see the real thing without any more emotion than they would feel in watching a film, because the psychological impact... Somebody said that the average child sees 20,000 murders on film before he grows up. And it is exactly what Augustine talked about with the Roman games.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] That you finally get satiated. The games began as athletic contests. In the end the audience demanded death, real death and then finally people eaten by lions and all the rest of it. The Roman stage reached the point of actual murders on the stage of the slaves who were playing the part.

[Rushdoony] And there are no books now written on that.

[Scott] You mean people don’t know that anymore.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] That has dropped out.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Like the stoning of the Sophists. We can’t find any books about when the Sophists we stoned. We know that they were stoned because that keeps cropping up, that the Greeks in the end killed the people who killed their religion.

[Rushdoony] All we get is a rosy colored mythology of life in Greece.

[Scott] Well....

[Rushdoony] And Rome, but especially Greece.

[Scott] Well, we are getting just the opposite of life in the United States. We ... small town America is inhabited by Fascists, by people who discriminate against everyone. The ... in England, for instance, they are getting the same thing and in the latest edition of the Salisbury Review, there is a full page ad for a group that wants to protect majority rights in England. It wants to stop the steady denigration of English history that is being taught in the schools and the scandalous way in which white English people are portrayed in their own schools.

Now, of course, we could say the same thing here in the United States. Apparently this country has never done anything but brutalize Indians, reject blacks. It has never helped anybody. It has never put together an orphanage. It has never had any charities. It has never emancipated anyone. It never fought a civil war. Hundreds of thousands of white people got murdered in order to help the black race. That never happened.

[Rushdoony] I am now reading a remarkable book published by the Oxford University Press on Joseph Davis, the elder brother of Jefferson Davis.

[Scott] Oh.

[Rushdoony] A very remarkable man. He decided that the slaves were human beings with the aptitudes of all people and therefore he was going to give them an opportunity to develop it. And overseers did not like working for the Davis, because if they abused the slaves there was a jury trial. Any offense committed by a slave or an overseer, there was a jury trial with an all black slave jury. And Joseph Davis was the judge and about all he ever did was in some instances, to mitigate the sentence a bit. But the jury convicted and sentenced or acquitted. And they provided excellent justice. If anything, they were harder than the masters would have been. He also encouraged them to develop their abilities and one of them set up a store there and the river boats would stop there, the Mississippi River, and trade there. He would run accounts for plantation women. Sometimes carrying them for as much as 2000 in credit which in those days was a vast amount. An exceptionally able businessman. And he did not believe I slavery, but he felt given the conditions this is the best way to help these people in terms of the future.

Of course, all those slaves went down hill dramatically with a few exceptions under the rather brutal care at times of the union forces who pillaged and did everything to be destructive.

Now granted, this was an unusual experiment in Mississippi. I believe there was one other ... and I knew about 45 years ago or so of one like experiment in Louisiana. In that case operated by an Armenian slave owner. But there were examples of that sort of thing.

[Scott] Well, there was, of course, the ... there is a movie out not too long ago—I haven't seen it—called Glory about the Massachusetts black regiment which I believe—I didn't see the movie—was headed by Wentworth Dickenson...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...one of the secret six. But there is never going to be a movie about the black confederate troops.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] And yet there were black confederate troops and they fought in the Civil War against the union forces.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And, for that matter, we see all this business of the wild West with rapes and there were no rapes in our west.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] Our history has been trashed.

[Rushdoony] It has been dirtied up systematically.

[Scott] Now it is very difficult to say I all honesty that the people who made these films did not know what they were doing, that the greatest excuse, of course, is customary, is that they are giving the people what they want. Now this is like saying that you and I have decided that that is what we want. Neither of us do. The audience has nothing to do with what is presented before it. It is the great cop our. If the audience really is getting what it wants, why has it vanished?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Why has it diminished?

[Rushdoony] There was, some few years ago, an excellent critique written by an historian of the Gary Cooper movie High Noon. In that picture these four criminals are going to come back to this frontier town and kill...

[Scott] And scare everybody.

[Rushdoony] Yes. They are going to kill Gary Cooper who was the sheriff that sent them up and so on. And nobody wants to stand with him. And he said, “That goes contrary to all of frontier history. Every man would have been there to eliminate those four men if they ever dared set foot in town.”

[Scott] Oh, they would have been strung up.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] In fact, that is what happened to desperados. They were strung up.

[Rushdoony] Yes. That is why the wild west towns like Dodge City and Tombstone only lasted a few months to a year at most in their wildness because the women, the businessmen, the Christians, cleaned up the community.

[Scott] Well, this is true, of course, when the Puritans came across the ocean. They set up a compact before they landed. They established a constitutional government from the word go. They were civilized men from a civilization and they behaved as such and the people who moved west did not move west from any disorderly scene. They left from very orderly self governing communities and the recreated those communities when they moved.

Now to persistently overlook this, to persistently do this to any culture means that you hate that culture. You are trying to destroy its memory.

[Rushdoony] Before the time of the War of Independence, those who moved westward did not simply go west. They organized a company with rules and regulations. They made sure that they had at least one carpenter, at least one blacksmith and they made sure they had a variety of skills so that the community could work, function together, help one another exchange skills and create a viable community in a short time.

[Scott] Well, then, what can we say? Why is it that our psychiatrists and our sociologists and our historians and our medical therapists and our clergy have never really, as a group or class or professions, looked at what the theater is doing in the United States? What sort of license have these people attained that keeps them from being analyzed when every other group in this country is loaded with odium?

[Rushdoony] Well, they would be loaded with odium if they attacked them or analyzed them and that is why they steer clear.

[Scott] Well, that is...

[Rushdoony] They will not touch them.

[Scott] That is cowardly.

[Rushdoony] Of course. Of course. That is very popular these days. Well, I think it would be appropriate at this time to talk about someone who is doing something, Ted Baer, whom we both know. And Ted Baer has been here with us. Ted Baer puts out a movie guide. That is the title. And the subtitle is A Biblical Guide to Movies and Entertainment. To commend those who do right, 1 Peter 2:14, and to expose the fruitless deeds of darkness, Ephesians 5:11. And what Ted does in this is to review every time the new releases, whether on video or in the theaters and these reviews are very careful analysis and he will tell you whether the movie is good to see or tell you what is wrong with it and, in various ways, give you an excellent guide for the family. And I think it is something that families should have because it is a good guide for family entertainment. I would like to suggest those who are interested that they subscribe. It is 29 dollars and 95 cents a year. Good News Communications, Incorporated, PO Box 9952, Atlanta, Georgia, 30319.

Now Ted is a person who is doing something about this. Moreover, Ted Baer is well qualified. He has produced in the past a number of very fine feature length films, documentary and otherwise for PBS. It tells you what has happened that now he cannot get the funding very readily to do this sort of thing that he once did frequently. But people like Ted Baer need to be supported. We need to see that works like his are financed so that he can be back in the production end of things as well.

So all is not darkness. There are people who are concerned.

Now I heard Ted Baer speak recently when I was at Atlanta at the Reconstruction conference there put on by the Chalcedon Presbyterian Church in Dudley. And I was one of the speakers as well, but Ted spoke on what has happened in films, how bad they had become it the 20s until there was a national outcry. And then the Catholic legion of decency was formed. Then various protestant film groups were formed. And so you had films before they were produced being submitted in script form to these various groups, Catholic group, national council group, Southern Baptist group and so on. And the result was entertainment that was family oriented.

Well, the coalition fell apart when one Protestant made a very stupid remark about the Catholics which got to the Catholics, total distrust it was. And the Catholics and Protestants then rather drifted apart and did not work together as they had. And then in the 60s the Catholics with Vatican II and other problems with all the upheavals in the church dropped out. And the Protestants dropped out. And with that Hollywood immediately headed for the gutter.

Now there is no reason why we cannot restore some kind of common sense to the scene and men like Ted Baer are very, very much concerned with doing this. He also produces, by the way, audio tapes. He has one on civil wrongs about what civil protesters, sodomites and others are doing, environmental paganism is another video that he has produced, two, in fact, on that subject. So I strongly recommend Ted Baer and his work.

[Scott] It is interesting that you bring up the legion of decency and those groups of an earlier generation. Right now I understand that all scripts that involve homosexuals have to be submitted to the homosexual groups for their approval.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And scripts that involve other minority groups, we can call them that. I guess we can, are also submitted to them for clearing.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] But the Christian groups no longer need... no longer have enough influence for such efforts for clearance to be made.

[Rushdoony] If they say anything it is called censorship. But all these groups, homosexual and otherwise, are the consultants and, in fact, one of the most powerful consultants today, Ted Baer has pointed out is Anton Levay.

[Scott] The Satanist.

[Rushdoony] The Satanist.

[Scott] Satanist pope.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] {?}

[Rushdoony] And you will see if you watch his name on credits as a consultant. So whether it is on TV or in the films, his name appears very often.

[Scott] Interesting.

[Rushdoony] Yes. But Christians have surrendered and now they complain about what has happened. So it is time to do something and men like Ted Baer who are doing something need to be supported.

[Scott] Well, Wildman is doing good work in this area, is he not?

[Rushdoony] Yes. Yes, he is.

[Scott] And he has made himself felt.

[Rushdoony] Well, he is doing something, but I feel that Ted Baer’s is a positive approach, because he wants not only to stop this sort of thing, but to help produce good films.

[Scott] Well, that, of course, leaves open another subject which we will get in to later about the lack of Christian support.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...for the arts.

[Rushdoony] I think that is a very, very important question and I do believe this is an area where there has to be a great deal of work done in the future.

[Scott] It would be just... you don't’ really have to be a script writer or even very interested in films. I have always stayed away from the theater and from theatrical writing because it is a form of group activity. The director gets in the act. The actors get in the act. Everybody gets in the act and I am not the sort of writer that really enjoys getting involved with a whole group who want to go over the dialog and the narrative and everything else. But it really doesn't take any enormous amount of ability to see that there are all kinds of subjects which could be covered in film in the United States that would be very helpful.

The... the whole business scene, the whole business of working for a living seems to have dropped out of attention. The blue collar has totally dropped out, so has the middle collar. All we have now is villainous chairmen of the board and caricatures of big business tycoons that are hiring murderers, all that nonsense. But the argument between the liberals and the business community contains all sorts of inherent drama. The argument between the university trained and the parents who send them to school and then suddenly have a stranger return they ... for that matter the interreligious and interracial collisions need to be discussed and need to be addressed in a dramatic way which could do a lot not to exacerbate, but to alleviate the problems that we have as a society.

In art a theater that doesn’t reflect the realities of the society that supports it is failing in its duty.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, consider what could be done, Otto, if we and many other groups similarly could budget 25,000 a year to give to someone like Ted Baer for production.

[Scott] Well....

[Rushdoony] 25,000 to have an art exhibit and good prizes to outstanding Christian works of art. This is the kind of thing that needs to be done and is not being done.

[Scott] Well, John Upton and I have started a series of films on the great Christian revolutions.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...with the same thought.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] That we are dealing with an audience that no longer knows its own history and needs to learn it.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, our time is almost gone. Are there a few last comments you would like to make?

[Scott] Well, I just... I did write something which will appear in print some time later on which I said regarding the Dick Tracy movie that no adult should be caught going in to see it. They did a marvelous job on the makeup of the characters. And I remember the strip when I was a boy. They had prune face and they had flattop and they had all the others and they really looked like Gould drew them, but the trouble is they didn't do anything. There was nothing but explosions, people falling out of windows and all that sort of nonsense.

[Rushdoony] Well, I was on a flight, the one last year from London and they showed Batman and all I can say for it was that it did put me to sleep within five to 10 minutes, so I was grateful for a long nap.

[Scott] You missed the very evil section where the clown, the murderous clown went into a museum and slashed all the paintings.

[Rushdoony] Oh, my. I am glad I slept. I am glad I slept.

Well, our time is up. Thank you all for listening and God bless you.

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