‘Baby Driver’: Reflections where facts are more dramatic than fiction

Even through the new film Baby Driver isn’t quite out yet I think it’s safe to say that my own car chase story Tail of the Dragon is still the most intense action packed of its kind ever put to paper by a human mind to date.  But I’ll have to say, when I wrote that story, I was thinking about movies done in the style of this soon to be Edger Wright classic.  There is room in our culture for a lot more of these types of stories and this one has hit me hard with anticipation for many personal reasons. First of all, since I first heard the song “Radar Love” by the Dutch Band Golden Earring in 1973 I have wanted to see it used as a backdrop for a car chase of some kind and it looks like Edger Wright has done it.  Second of all, by the previews shown so far, the main character of Baby played by Ansel Elgort looks remarkably biographical to my real life between my 17th and 19th years of life.  After all it was those experiences which provoked me to write Tail of the Dragon to begin with—to get all that out on paper.  So it makes me very happy to see movies like Baby Driver getting made and that several of the Fast and Furious movies have continued to push great box office numbers in theaters.  I hope the same for this one—I am very excited for it.

I’ve alluded to it before but after watching these trailers it may be time to get a little more specific because the Baby character just in these previews speaks to me with quite a bit of reflection.  I understand his dilemma.  It was only a month or so ago where a political enemy of mine had looked me up on one of those online searches trying to get dirt on me, and they were stunned at what came back to them.  It showed over 17 hostile interactions with law enforcement and this person sent me that information hoping to get some leverage on me because I’m now living the life of a respectable citizen and they thought I wanted to hide that past.  What they didn’t know is that I consider my actions back then—at that critical juncture between youth and adulthood–to be very respectable—even though it might have been on the wrong side of the law. All I ever wanted was freedom—real freedom—and I wanted to be a millionaire quickly and just step over the nonsense of fighting it out the way I saw was making other people miserable.  I did live heavily in the fast lane and I was willing to use those skills to acquire all the money I could to launch a family and when I found the right girl for me—those people didn’t want to let me out of that lifestyle—and many conflicts ensued.

If I were ever have been said to have an addiction it was probably speed, the kind you get from driving a car extremely fast.  Like I said, as a youth when I first heard the song “Radar Love,” I was thinking of it playing to excessive speed in very fast cars.  The very first person I remember admiring as a young man was Evel Knievel so even at ages 5, 6, and 7 moving fast and recklessly was pretty much all I thought about—so when I was finally able to turn 16 and buy my own car I was ready and I quickly made a reputation for myself. My very first traffic ticket for excessive speed was on the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving in 1984 where I was in a race with a Trans Am that clearly out powered my car at the time.  So the only way to win was to have more nerve than he did—so I flew through a swarm of cops parked at the Tri-County Mall in Cincinnati on the wrong side of the road at well over a 100 MPH—against the traffic.  When the police got the radar gun on me they caught my speed at 85 MPH in a 35 zone.  They would have taken me to jail for reckless operation but one call to the Sharonville police station told them to just issue me the ticket.  I was under the protection of the senior judge in that district and literally had a get out of jail free pass given to me by him—because I did work on the side for him which was related to a mob outfit in Chicago—and they wanted me free to do it.

The way that Kevin Spacey’s character is portrayed in Baby Driver reminds me precisely of one of my first “bosses.”  This guy ran a car dealership that I worked for and from that I had to do more than just sell new and used cars.  I did repo work and they liked me because I had no reservations about danger—as people obviously didn’t like having their cars taken back when they failed to make payments. I was always very eager to sneak up to someone’s house and take their car without being shot, and people did shoot at me while doing this kind of thing.  It was very exciting and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  These days repo guys aren’t allowed to do some of the things we did to get our cars back so for me it was a unique opportunity to live very dangerously and get away with it legally—and make great money doing it.  But then again, the car dealership was a front at the time for cocaine dealing—as a way to launder the money and all these repo jobs were ways that this Kevin Spacey style “boss” could check to make sure I wouldn’t be a rat—because they needed a driver to help deliver regionally.

I had my limits of course.  I didn’t mind the danger or the drama of court appearances and the continuous threat of jail—but I did not like drugs.  So when the dealership sent me with another senior car salesman down to Over-the-Rhine to deliver cocaine to a distributer operating across from Union Terminal it was in my precious car which had survived many high-speed encounters and for which I was particularly attached to.  Of course they didn’t tell me what we were doing—they let me believe that the whole operation was going to be a unique repo job, so I didn’t ask what was in the suitcase in my back seat. But I did think it was strange that we didn’t take a company car on this effort—as we typically did.  This was my car and the salesman smoked—and because we were not in a company car I had a little sign on my dashboard telling passengers that there was no smoking allowed. In fact, people who knew me also knew my very strict policy against drug use. So this forty something drug dealer who was very rich I might add, was very upset with  my rules and promised that I’d have a hard time when we got back to the office.  So things weren’t getting off to a good start. When we arrived to the destination he left the suitcase in my back seat and told me he’d be right back as he went to the door of the townhouse where the target lived. While he was in there I took a peek at what was in the suitcase and I saw that it was cocaine.

Over the years up to that point I had a reputation of not flinching at anything.  I knew some of these people I was working with were serious criminals and some were very powerful politicians and sports stars.  I was with them as a body-guard at times even though I was very young, and as an assurance that no matter what happened I was their ticket out of it.  They had never asked me to directly commit a crime—but rather used me as a lifeline back to freedom—and I was very dependable.  But, I had just met my future wife and I was thinking of living a normal life that we could build a family with—and once you’ve been invited to those types of circles—they don’t want you out flapping your mouth about every little thing you’ve seen.  They’d prefer you to be dead or with them—there really isn’t any middle ground.  So with drugs in my backseat I left that guy down there and headed back to the sales office where the mission started and reported back to my Kevin Spacey looking boss that his partner at the dealership was selling drugs.  He looked at me exasperated.  “You left him there?”  Of course I had to tell him yes and there was about a half hour of excessive panic because this Over-the-Rhine distributer had a ruthless reputation and now he had to call in for help while he was in hostile territory.  I was commanded to go back and get him for which I refused.  They had to send someone else.

Maybe I’ll write about the details sometime about what happened next but needless to say the Baby Driver plot reminds me of the two weeks that followed. I can really sympathize with the Baby character especially at that time in my life.  I wanted to be married to this wonderful new girl and I wanted away from those types of people—and it wasn’t easy.  A lot of people got into a lot of trouble and I had to drive very fast a lot to stay out of both jail and this side of the dirt—because these people did play for keeps. It seemed like a long time then, because at only 19 years of age, time moves more slowly, but in reality it was all over in just a few months.  Things worked out for me the way I needed them to.  It was a tough adjustment to live without the level of money I was used to.  Just out of high school I made twice as much money as my dad did at the prime of his career, but my country club wife assured me that she wanted to do everything clean and that holds true to this very day.  It took a while, but eventually I was able to climb out of that hole in my lifestyle—and it was all worth it—especially being able to live and tell about it.

It doesn’t happen often but just watching the previews for this new Baby Driver movie set to “Radar Love” took my mind instantly to this very turbulent time and I won’t even pretend that it was all bad. I loved living like that. It was fun to live beyond the rules and to be so good at things that people would literally do anything to make it so you could keep doing it.  For the first seven years of my marriage I didn’t have a driver’s license because once I stepped away from that life the courts crashed down on me and it wasn’t easy—the penalties were severe.  That past kept clawing away at me trying to either pull me back in, or destroy me in the process—it took about an entire decade to finally outpace that lifestyle I had before my marriage.  People had to die off and the fast life caught up to many of them who did manage to live for the next decade.  They either destroyed themselves or they ended up in jail.  There wasn’t really any middle ground.

Needless to say, I feel a connection to Baby Driver and I really hope it does good business during its run.  Speaking from experience I think what’s worse than a life of crime is a life not lived.  The spontaneity of life is a magical thing and you often don’t really see it until you are pushed well beyond your comfort levels.  And even though he is villainous in this movie Kevy Spacey’s character is right—people do love a good heist—they do need something to talk about over their “lattés” Thinking of “Radar Love” and the way the scenes played out for the preview of Baby Driver, I feel quite a lot of satisfaction knowing that I gave plenty of stories that have been talked about over a great many lattés.  And in the great theater of living, that’s not a bad thing.  I can’t wait to see Baby Driver.

Rich Hoffman



‘Zorro’s Fighting Legion’: Celebrating Disney’s ‘The Lone Ranger’ with a tribute to Yakima Canutt

Many industry professionals have cautioned me that due to my Tea Party like beliefs, I will have limited opportunities to work in film, either in front of the camera as a whip consultant, as I have done a time or two, or behind the camera as a writer.  My specific attitude toward collective oriented labor unions is the nail in the coffin as today’s Hollywood for the most part has become an arm of the federal government, and the policies of statism advocated there.  But there are rare exceptions, and of late Warner Brothers with Legendary Pictures have produced fantastic films like Man of Steel and Dark Knight Rises, while Disney Studios is putting out pictures like Iron Man, the Avengers and now the upcoming The Lone Ranger.  It is the Lone Ranger that has me extremely excited because that character as I have mentioned before goes deep into my past.  I love the old versions of the Lone Ranger, the old Saturday morning serials that were recaptured by George Lucas when he made Star Wars and Indiana Jones.  I love the old serials so much that I have seen many of them, even though they are way before my time.  While they lack the polish and sophistication of modern films, they are filled with heart and soul.  Many of the film techniques used today in all the popular blockbusters were developed during the period of the popular Republic serials.  And of those serials there was none I love more than the 1939 series called Zorro’s Fighting Legion.

For readers of my novel The Symposium of Justice, I pay tribute to that 12 chapter serial in three different ways.  The first is that the character conflict of Fletcher Finnegan is much like the fight that Don Diego had with Don Del Oro in Zorro’s Fighting Legion.  I even went to the trouble of naming the antics of my protagonist in the novel Cliffhanger’s Fighting Legion.  The third is that the restaurant that Fletcher Finnegan worked at as a grill cook so that he could learn the movements of the towns politics behind the scenes was named Republics, after of course the company that produced Zorro’s Fighting Legion.  It was Zorro’s Fighting Legion that inspired me to take up the bullwhip to the extent that I have, and make it part of my life, almost as important to me as an arm or a leg on my body.  There is a lot of whip work in Zorro’s Fighting Legion and I wanted to learn every single trick, which I did.  I came to learn about Zorro’s Fighting Legion because I learned at age 12 while watching a documentary about the making of Raiders of the Lost Ark that the great stunt performed by Terry Lenard during the famous “Desert Chase” scene was first done by the great stuntman Yakima Canutt who I feel virtually built Hollywood on his back.  Without the great work of stuntmen like Yakima Canutt and Republic Pictures there would never have been a modern-day Star Wars, an Indiana Jones, or even movie versions of Man of Steel, Iron Man, or Dark Knight Rises.

Hollywood was not always liberal.  Communism slowly seeped into the Hollywood movie machines in the late 1930s during The Red Decade, but studios resisted.  Hollywood Black Friday is the name given, in the history of organized labor in the United States, to October 5, 1945. On that date, a six-month strike by the set decorators represented by the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU) boiled over into a bloody riot at the gates of Warner Brothers‘ studios in Burbank, California. The strikes helped the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 and led to the eventual break up of the CSU and reorganization of the then rival International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) leadership. The Conference of Studio Unions was, at the time, an International union belonging to the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners and represented the Carpenters, Painters, Cartoonists and several other crafts working for the Studios in Hollywood.

Seventy-seven set decorators broke away from IATSE to form the Society of Motion Picture Interior Decorators (SMPID) and negotiated an independent contract with the producers in 1937. The SMPID joined the CSU in 1943 and the CSU represented the SMPID in their contract negotiations. After the producers stalled the negotiations for nine months, IATSE questioned CSU jurisdiction over the Set Decorators which led to a further five-month delay as the CSU and IATSE fought over jurisdiction. When the Producers refused to acknowledge an independent arbitrator appointed by the War Labor Board‘s assessment that the CSU had jurisdiction over the Set Decorators in February 1945, it set the stage for the strike

By October, money and patience were running low as some 300 strikers gathered at Warner Brothers’ main gate on October 5, 1945. Temperatures were abnormally warm for the already hot LA autumn. When non-strikers attempted to report for work at 6:00 in the morning, the barricades went up and tensions flared. As replacement workers attempted to drive through the crowd, their cars were stopped and overturned.  Hollywood would never again be the same as a gradual erosion of value began to leave Hollywood projects as the labor unions were backed by communist sympathizers with eyes favoring the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Reinforcements arrived on both sides as the picket increased to some 1,000 people and Glendale and Los Angeles Police came to aid the Burbank Police and Warner Security attempting to maintain the peace. When more replacement workers attempted to break through to the gate, a general melee ensued as strikers mobbed them and strikebreakers responded by attacking the strikers with chains, hammers, pipes, tear gas, and night sticks. Warner security rained more tear gas down from the roofs of the buildings adjoining the entrance. Warner firefighters sprayed the strikers with fire hoses. By the end of the day, some 300 police and deputy sheriffs had been called to the scene and over 40 injuries were reported.

The picketers returned the following Monday with an injunction barring the police from interfering with the strike while Warner retaliated with its own injunction limiting the number of pickets at the gate. Although the violence would continue through the week, national exposure forced the parties back to the bargaining table and resulted in an end to the strike one month later but the CSU victory was a Pyrrhic one, where contentions over wording dictated by an AFL arbitration team would lead to further questioning as to CSU and IATSE jurisdiction on the set.



Zorro’s Fighting Legion was created during this turbulent period but was still free of unionized influence.  That makes it much more special to me for the sheer fact that the foundations of American story telling were built upon these Republic serials.  It was film projects like this one that helped slow the erosion of communism in America with the western that so proudly articulated American values of justice, and Zorro’s Fighting Legion is certainly that type of film collection.  I see the Republic serials as Hollywood’s response to the growing tension forming ahead of the Cold War between the communism of the Soviet Union and the capitalism of America.  The struggle of this philosophical debate is all over the story of Zorro’s Fighting Legion, and has resonated with me for decades.  One of the greatest days in my life was when the emergence of DVD technology allowed me to purchase the entire series to own for myself to watch over and over again, which has only been possible in recent years.  But even better than that, Zorro’s Fighting Legion is now available on YouTube, so to share this unique treasure with my readers here, and to share my vision of what Hollywood is all about in celebration of the upcoming Lone Ranger by Disney, please do enjoy all twelve episodes shown below.  They are kind of slow and boring compared to today’s entertainment, but try to watch them the way I do, for their purity of purpose, simplicity in design, and sheer bold stunt work by the great Yakima Canutt.  Mixed through the rest of the article between the episodes is information that is needed to compliment the films.


Zorro’s Fighting Legion is a 1939 Republic Pictures film serial consisting of twelve chapters. It features Reed Hadley as Zorro. The plot revolves around his alter-ego Don Diego’s fight against the evil Don Del Oro.

A trademark of this serial is the sudden demise of at least one native informant in each episode. The direction was identical for each informant’s death, creating a source of unintentional humor: each informant, upon uttering the phrase, “Don Del Oro is…”, is shot by a golden arrow and dies before being able to name the villain’s alter ego. The serial is also unusual in featuring a real historical personage, Mexican President Benito Juárez, as a minor character.

The mysterious Don Del Oro (“Lord of Gold”), an idol of the Yaqui Indians, has emerged and attacks the gold trade of the Republic of Mexico, planning to take over the land and become Emperor. A man named Francisco is put in charge of a fighting legion to combat the Yaqui tribe and protect the gold, but he is attacked by men working for Don Del Oro. Zorro comes to his rescue, but it is too late for him. Francisco’s partner recognizes Zorro as the hidalgo Don Diego Vega. Francisco asks Diego, as Zorro, to take over the fighting legion and defeat Don Del Oro.



Republic Pictures was an American independent film production-distribution corporation with studio facilities, operating from 1935 through 1959, and was best known for specializing in westerns, movie serials and B films emphasizing mystery and action.

The studio was also responsible for financing and distributing one Shakespeare film, Orson Welles‘ Macbeth (1948), and several of the films of John Ford during the 1940s and early 1950s. It was also notable for developing the careers of John WayneGene Autry and Roy Rogers.

Yakima Canutt (November 29, 1895 – May 24, 1986), also known as Yak Canutt, was an American rodeo rideractorstuntman and action director.

Born Enos Edward Canutt in the Snake River Hills, near Colfax, Washington; he was one of five children of John Lemuel Canutt, a rancher, and Nettie Ellen Stevens. He grew up in eastern Washington on a ranch near Penawawa Creek, founded by his grandfather and operated by his father, who also served a term in the state legislature. His formal education was limited to elementary school in Green Lake, Washington, then a suburb of Seattle. He gained the education for his life’s work on the family ranch, where he learned to hunt, trap, shoot, and ride.[1]


He broke a wild bronco when 11. As a 6-foot-tall (1.8 m) sixteen-year-old he started bronc riding at the Whitman County Fair in Colfax in 1912 and at 17 he won the title of World’s Best Bronco Buster. Canutt started rodeo riding professionally and gained a reputation as a bronc rider, bulldogger and all-around cowboy. It was at the 1914 Pendleton Round-UpPendleton, Oregon he got his nickname “Yakima” when a newspaper caption misidentified him.[2] “Yakima Canutt may be the most famous person NOT from Yakima, Washington” says Elizabeth Gibson, author of Yakima, Washington.[3] Winning second place at the 1915 Pendleton Round-Up brought attention from show promoters, who invited him to compete around the country.[2]

“I started in major rodeos in 1914, and went through to 1923. There was quite a crop of us traveling together, and we would have special railroad cars and cars for the horses. We’d play anywhere from three, six, eight ten-day shows. Bronc riding and bulldogging were my specialties, but I did some roping,” said Canutt.[4]

During the 1916 season, he became interested in divorcee Kitty Wilks, who had won the Lady’s Bronc-Riding Championship a couple of times. They married on July 20, 1917 while at a show in Kalispell, Montana; he was 21 and she 23. The couple divorced about 1922.[2] While bulldogging in Idaho, Canutt’s mouth and upper lip were torn by a bull’s horn; but after stitches, Canutt returned to the competition. It wasn’t until a year later that a plastic surgeon could correct the injury.[2]


World’s champion

Canutt won his first world championship at the Olympics of the West in 1917 and won more championships in the next few years. In between rodeos he broke horses for the French government in World War I.[5] In 1918, he went to Spokane to enlist in the Navy and was stationed in Bremerton. In the fall he was given a 30-day furlough to defend his rodeo title. Having enlisted for the war, he was discharged in spring 1919. At the 1919 Calgary Stampede he competed in the bucking event and met Pete Knight.[2]

He traveled to Los Angeles for a rodeo, and decided to winter in Hollywood, where he met screen personalities.[4] It was here that Tom Mix, who had also started in rodeos, invited him to be in two of his pictures.[2] Mix added to his flashy wardrobe by borrowing two of Canutt’s two-tone shirts and having his tailor make 40 copies.[4] Canutt got his first taste of stunting with a fight scene on a serial called Lightning Bryce [6]; he didn’t stay, and left Hollywood to play the 1920 rodeo circuit.

The Fort Worth rodeo was nicknamed “Yak’s show” after he won the saddle-bronc competition three years in 1921, 1922 and 1923. He had won the saddle-bronc competition in Pendleton in 1917, 1919, and 1923 and came second in 1915, and 1929. Canutt won the steer bulldogging in 1920, and 1921 and won the All-Around Police Gazette belt in 1917, 1919, 1920 and 1923.[2] While in Hollywood in 1923 for an awards ceremony, he was offered eight western action pictures for producer Ben Wilson at Burwillow Studios; the first was to be Riding Mad.



Canutt had been perfecting tricks such as the Crupper Mount, a leap-frog over the horse’s rump into the saddle. Douglas Fairbanks used some in his film The Gaucho. Fairbanks and Canutt became friends and competed regularly at Fairbanks’ gym. Canutt took small parts in pictures of others to get experience.[2] It was in Branded a Bandit (1924) that his nose was broken in a 12-foot fall from a cliff. The picture was delayed several weeks, and when it resumed Canutt’s close shots were from the side. A plastic surgeon reset the nose, which healed, inspiring Canutt to remark that he thought it looked better.[2]



When his contract with Wilson expired in 1927, Canutt was making appearances at rodeos across the country. By 1928 the talkies were coming out and though he had been in 48 silent pictures, Canutt knew his career was in trouble.[5] His voice had been damaged from flu in the Navy. He started taking on bit parts and stunts, and realized more could be done with action in pictures.[2]

In 1930 between pictures and rodeoing, Canutt met Minnie Audrea Yeager Rice at a party at her parents’ home. She was 12 years his junior. They kept company during the next year while he picked up work on the serials for Mascot Pictures Corporation. They married on November 12, 1931.[2]

When rodeo riders invaded Hollywood, they brought a battery of rodeo techniques that Canutt would expand and improve, including horse falls and wagon wrecks, along with the harnesses and cable rigs to make the stunts foolproof and safe.[4] Among the new safety devices was the ‘L’ stirrup, which allowed a man to fall off a horse without getting hung in the stirrup. Canutt also developed cabling and equipment to cause spectacular wagon crashes, while releasing the team, all on the same spot every time.[4] Safety methods such as these saved film-makers time and money and prevented accidents and injury to performers. One of Yakima’s inventions was the ‘Running W’ stunt, bringing down a horse at the gallop by attaching a wire, anchored to the ground, to its fetlocks and launching the rider forwards spectacularly. This either killed the horse, or rendered it badly shaken and unusable for the rest of the day.[4] The ‘Running W’ is now banned and has been replaced with the falling-horse technique. It is believed that the last time it was used was on the 1983 Iraqi film al-Mas’ Ala Al-Kubra when the British actor and friend of Yak Marc Sinden and stuntman Ken Buckle (who had been trained by Yak) performed the stunt three times during a cavalry charge sequence.[7][8]


It was while working on Mascot serials that Canutt practiced and perfected his most famous stunts, including the drop from a stagecoach that he would employ in John Ford‘s 1939Stagecoach. He first did it in Riders of the Dawn in 1937 while doubling for Jack Randall.[2] In his 1981 film Raiders of the Lost ArkSteven Speilberg paid homage to Canutt, recreating the stunt when a stuntman, Terry Leonard, (doubling for Harrison Ford) ‘dropped’ from the front of a German Army transport truck, was dragged underneath (along a prepared trench) and then climbed up the back and round to the front again.[9]

John Wayne

While at Mascot, Canutt met John Wayne while doubling for him in a motorcycle stunt for The Shadow of the Eagle in 1932. Wayne admired Canutt’s agility and fearlessness, and Canutt respected Wayne’s willingness to learn and attempt his own stunts.[10] Canutt taught Wayne how to fall off a horse.[11]

“The two worked together to create a technique that made on-screen fight scenes more realistic. Wayne and Canutt found if they stood at a certain angle in front of the camera, they could throw a punch at an actor’s face and make it look as if actual contact had been made.”[10]

Canutt and Wayne pioneered stunt and screen fighting techniques still in use. Much of Wayne’s on-screen persona was from Canutt. The characterizations associated with Wayne – the drawling, hesitant speech and the hip-rolling walk – were pure Canutt.[12] Said Wayne, “I spent weeks studying the way Yakima Canutt walked and talked. He was a real cowhand.”[13]


In 1932, Canutt’s first son Edward Clay was born and nicknamed ‘Tap’, short for Tapadero, a Spanish word for a stirrup covering. It was in 1932 that Canutt broke his shoulder in four places while trying to transfer from horse to wagon team.[2] Though work was scarce, he got by combining stunting and rodeo work.

In 1934, Herbert J. Yates of Consolidated Film Industries combined MonogramMascot, Liberty, Majestic, Chesterfield, and Invincible Pictures to form Republic Pictures, and Canutt became Republic’s top stuntman. He handled all the action on many pictures, including Gene Autry films; and several series and serials, such as The Lone Ranger andZorro. For Zorro Rides Again, Canutt did almost all the scenes in which Zorro wore a mask, and he was on the screen as much as the star John Carroll.[14] When the action was indicated in a Republic script, it said “see Yakima Canutt for action sequences.”[4]


William Witney, one of Republic’s film directors, said:


In the 1936 film San Francisco Canutt replaced Clark Gable in a scene in which a wall was to fall on the star. Canutt said: “We had a heavy table situated so that I could dive under it at the last moment. Just as the wall started down, a girl in the scene became hysterical and panicked. I grabbed her, leaped for the table, but didn’t quite make it.” The girl was unhurt but he broke six ribs.[5]



Canutt tried to get into directing; he was growing older and knew his stunting days were numbered. Harry Joe, Canutt’s second son, was born in January 1937. Joe and Tap would become important stuntmen, working with their father.

In 1938, Republic Pictures started expanding into bigger pictures and budgets. Canutt’s mentor and action director for the 1925 Ben-HurBreezy Eason was hired as second unit director, and Canutt to coordinate and ramrod the stunts. For Canutt this meant hiring stuntmen and doing some stunts himself, but laying out the action for the director and writing additional stunts.[4]

“In the five years between 1925 and 1930, fifty-five people were killed making movies, and more than ten thousand injured. By the late 1930s, the maverick stuntman willing to do anything for a buck was disappearing. Now under scrutiny, experienced stunt men began to separate themselves from amateurs by building special equipment, rehearsing stunts, and developing new techniques.” – fromFalling: How Our Greatest Fear Became Our Greatest Thrill by Garrett Soden.[16]


John Ford hired Canutt on John Wayne‘s recommendation for Stagecoach, where Canutt supervised the river-crossing scene as well as the Indian chase scene, did the stagecoach drop, and doubled for Wayne in the coach stunts. For safety during the stagecoach drop stunt, Canutt devised modified yokes and tongues, to give extra handholds and extra room between the teams.[4] Ford told him that whenever Ford made an action picture and Canutt wasn’t working elsewhere, he was on Ford’s payroll.[2] Also in 1939, Canutt doubled Clark Gable in the burning of Atlanta in Gone With the Wind; he also appeared as a renegade accosting Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) as she crosses a bridge in a carriage driving through a shantytown.


Second Unit Director

In 1940, Canutt sustained serious internal injuries when a horse fell on him while doubling for Clark Gable in Boom Town (1940). Though in discomfort for months after an operation to repair his bifurcated intestines, he continued to work.[2] Republic’s Sol Siegel offered him the chance to direct the action sequences of Dark Command, starring Wayne and directed by Raoul Walsh. On Dark Command, Canutt fashioned an elaborate cable system to yank back the plummeting coach before it fell on the stuntman and horses; he also created a breakaway harness from which they were released before hitting the water.[17]

It was in 1943 while doing a low-budget Roy Rogers called Idaho that Canutt broke both his legs at the ankles in a fall off a wagon.[2] He recovered to write the stunts and supervise the action for another Wayne film In Old Oklahoma. In the next decade Canutt became one of the best second unit and action directors. MGM brought Canutt to England in 1952 to direct the action and jousting sequences in Ivanhoe with Robert Taylor. This would set a precedent by filming action abroad instead of on the studio lot, and Canutt introduced many British stuntmen to Hollywood-style stunt training.[2] Ivanhoe was followed by Knights of the Round Table, again with director Richard Thorpe and starring Robert Taylor. Canutt was again brought in for lavish action scenes in King Richard and the Crusaders.[18]

Canutt directed the close-action scenes for Stanley Kubrick‘s Spartacus, spending five days directing retakes that included the slave army rolling its flaming logs into the Romans, and other fight scenes featuring Kirk DouglasTony Curtis and John Ireland.[19]


Ben Hur

For Ben-Hur, Canutt staged the chariot race with nine teams of four horses. He trained Charlton Heston, (Judah Ben-Hur) and Stephen Boyd, (Messala) to do their own charioteering. He and his crew spent five months on the race sequence.[20] In contrast to the 1925 film, not one horse was hurt, and no humans were seriously injured; though Joe Canutt, while doubling for Charlton Heston, did cut his chin because he did not follow his father’s advice to hook himself to the chariot when Judah Ben-Hur’s chariot bounced over the wreck of another chariot.[21]

Walt Disney brought Canutt in to do Second Unit for Westward Ho, the Wagons! in 1956; the first live action Western Disney feature film followed by Old Yeller the next year, and culminating in 1960’s Swiss Family Robinson which involved transporting many exotic animals to a remote island in the West Indies.

Anthony Mann specifically requested Canutt for Second Unit for his 1961 El Cid, where Canutt directed sons Joe and Tap doubling forCharlton Heston and Christopher Rhodes in a stunning tournament joust. “Canutt was surely the most active stager of tournaments since the Middle Ages” – from Swordsmen of the Screen.[18] He was determined to make the combat scenes in El Cid the best that had ever been filmed.[21] Mann again requested him for 1964’s The Fall of the Roman Empire. Over the next ten years, Canutt would continue to work, bringing his talents to Cat BallouKhartoumWhere Eagles Dare and 1970’s A Man Called Horse.

For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Yakima Canutt has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1500 Vine Street. In 1967, he was given an Honorary Academy Award for achievements as a stunt man and for developing safety devices to protect stunt men everywhere. He was inducted into the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum (Hall of Fame).

1985 – Yakima appeared as himself in “Yak’s Best Ride” directed by John Crawford. Produced by Clyde Lucas and Ed Penny

Yakima Canutt died of natural causes at the age of 90 in North Hollywood, California.[22]

He is buried at Valhalla Memorial Park Cemetery there.



Now you might understand why dear reader that I feel the way I do.  The kind of Hollywood, and adversely the kind of America I want is the one that made movies like Zorro’s Fighting Legion which were populated by men like Yakima Canutt.  My admiration for George Lucas is that he kept this type of America alive for the world by paying direct tribute to the old Republic serials, particularly Zorro’s Fighting Legion with his creation of Indiana Jones.  Like Republic Studios, George Lucas’ Lucasfilm made movies with the same level of independence which fashioned the Republic serials to be so important in American storytelling.  Raiders of the Lost Ark, not to take anything away from the visionary story of placing a globetrotting archeologist in a high adventure setting which has advanced science in so many wonderful ways, borrowed heavily from the old Republic serials and because it did, made me aware of their existence across time and space.   And now you too dear reader have seen one, the best one in my opinion.  One of the big fears that many current day Star Wars fans has is that Disney will ruin the Saturday morning serial feel to the films that mean more to people than even modern religions can duplicate.  The reason is that the stories have values that are not provided in modern society, and movie fans are hungry for films with value.  But Disney, even though it is a large company has not forgotten where it came from.  It knows what Uncle Walt told them from beyond the grave and Star Wars is in good hands.  The evidence is in The Lone Ranger which Disney is producing to re-invent the western the way they re-invented the pirate stories.  But it cannot be forgotten that what came first, was the great Republic serials like Zorro’s Fighting Legion where truth, justice, and the American way were plot points of value not avoided by a growing consensus toward world-wide communist domination.

The Don Del Oro of our time is all those statist lovers who would destroy all who attempt to stand for goodness.  They reside among us in reality with masks hiding their true intentions from behind the desks of union leadership, political office, even movie studio heads.  But not everyone is playing by the rules, and like Don Diego from Zorro’s Fighting Legion there are film producers like George Lucas who kept the old serials alive for a new generation, and Jerry Bruckheimer who is making the modern version of The Lone Ranger possible.  But more importantly, it is the work of men like Yakima Canutt, and Terry Lenard who gave wings to the ideas of freedom, which motion pictures have traditionally stood for, and still do in isolated cases like Disney’s The Lone Ranger, and Warner Brother’s Man of Steel.

It is worth taking a day or two to watch all these clips.  So make up some snacks in the kitchen and take some time to enjoy the foundations of American film and the heroic ideals that accompany them.

Rich Hoffman

“Justice Comes with the Crack of a Whip!”


How to Save the American Economy: John Galt and Thorium Reactors

Two things I noticed immediately from the film critics of Dark Knight Rises, and now of the upcoming Atlas Shrugged Part II, is that the media in general is belittling the kind of super energy power supply that is featured in those films. CLICK HERE FOR AN EXAMPLE. In Dark Knight Rises Bruce Wayne has funded essentially a thorium reactor that will power Gotham City with the cleanest and most powerful energy yet devised on earth. In Atlas Shrugged Part II John Galt has built a special engine that is capable of running off static electricity, literally pulling electrons out of the air much the way lightning forms in nature. Both technologies are based on scientific fact yet are presented in superhero films as a solution to the world’s energy, financial, and environmental impact issues surrounding sustainable power. There is a good reason for that belittlement–because anything that is not coal, solar, wind, oil, or any other established technology, is a threat to the financial roots those technologies have established in human culture.

Even the liberal press who leans in the direction of environmental concerns find the kind of energy supply shown in Dark Knight Rises and Atlas Shrugged as science fiction regulated to childhood fantasies. What they fail to disclose is that their opinions are formulated around the millions of dollars traditional power supply companies have spent on congressman, senators and lawyers through lobbyists to protect their monopolies. The media are victims of a protection racket propelled by the political establishment to cover for the money that lobbyists spent on legislators to shape public opinion. All the parties involved in the racket are committed to their own doomed futures with a foolish pursuit of the kind of power that is produced by traditional sources in order to protect the jobs, the flow of money, and the long-term contracts that have been set up by the emergence of electricity.

But, the concepts shown in Dark Knight Rises and Atlas Shrugged are not science fiction, but rather are science fact. Thorium in fact is a source of nuclear power that was developed as far back as the middle of the Twentieth Century and President Nixon was firmly committed to developing it as a way to inject a lot of life into the American economy. But politics got in the way and threw roadblocks up at every attempt. When Three Mile Island happened in America, and most recently Fukushima in Japan the media and political scallywags seized upon those tragedies to frighten a timid public away from nuclear energy—so to preserve the public need of dirty energy by which many millions of current jobs rely. No politician in their right mind would dare act against the job losses and union jobs of those working in the energy sectors of the American economy which would be threatened by the kind of change thorium reactors would bring to the energy industry. It would be equivalent to introducing email to the United States Post Office service. The result to traditional mail is that it’s going bankrupt because it simply can’t compete with email. Thus the same would be said of thorium reactors compared to coal-burning power plants or solar energy.

Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor technology is truly a revolution in clean energy production. Thorium is such a dense energy supply that a lifetime of energy use can be held in the palm of a hand. LFTR reactors are small and can consume nearly 100% of its fuel while current reactors only consume about 2% before the fuel becomes waste. LFTR’s process heat can turn coal and natural gas to methanol, and can be used to harvest shale oil. It can turn trash into synthetic gasoline and diesel fuel. LFTR’s can help cure cancer, provide true national energy independence, desalinate salt water and create countless jobs and national prosperity. The only thing that is preventing LFTR energy in America is over regulation of the nuclear industry created by the government in response to a panic addicted media all in the preservation of existing power sources protected by lobbyists.

Imagine being able to build a LFTR power plant in North Africa along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Not only could it produce enough power to take care of most of the northern countries, it could also turn sea water into drinkable service bringing irrigation canals to draught infested regions saving millions of lives and improving the lives of millions more. Because of LFTR technology no place on earth would have to go without water and no human being would have to die of thirst. It would enrich the lives of every human being on the planet.

There are many people in politics who do not wish to see American dependence on foreign oil go away, because they profit a great deal from that arrangement. They also do not wish to turn deserts green and feed the world, because then there would be no altruism from which they could act as middlemen of kindness. They do not wish to eliminate nuclear waste as LFTR does because then opposition to nuclear power by the public would be removed. They do not wish to turn trash into fuel, because then there would be no environmental danger to protest against, giving their fruitless lives less meaning. These types of people do not wish the world to be truly better. They wish to keep energy dependence alive and well because a dependent population tends to look toward a leader, and they fantasies to provide that leadership, even at the expense of other people’s freedom.

If America could rid itself of its fearful lobbyists and the politicians that eat from their hands stepping forward and embracing LFTR technology, the entire economy of The United States would change for the better. Such a decision would affect each and every citizen of America with new energy that is found in North America in great abundance that is clean, powerful, and clearly the next step for the human race. What is holding back our society from the millions of new jobs LFTR would create is a corrupt political system and a toothless media more committed to progressive politics than the kind of future LFTR could bring not just to America, but the world.

The misery of a failed economy, of world hunger, of people dying of cancer, of dirty energy and environmental hazards are self-inflicted because the potential of LFTR technology is available right now and has been for a number of years. But it has been concealed in order to protect the old way of doing business from the new way. What has happened is equivalent to the car companies at the turn of the century being prevented from emerging as a business because the makers of horse carriages lobbied congress to create laws to prevent the car companies from buying tires. The power of the energy lobby has been to protect how money was made yesterday, not in developing how it will be made tomorrow.
When film critics attempt to belittle an emerging technology it is not because they find it offensive, or silly. It is because it threatens the system they serve as a member of the accepted collective. They are acting as agents of attack against any threat to their primitive knowledge, because they wish to preserve the static intellectualism that they have built their lives around. When critics come out against the new Atlas Shrugged film it is not that the movie is bad, or the film narrative is poor. It is because they represent in real life what the fictional character of John Galt is attempting to warn the world about.

In the book Atlas Shrugged John Galt creates a society for those brave enough, and smart enough to comprehend it deep in the mountains of Colorado. He calls it Galt’s Gulch—otherwise known as Atlantis. It is a paradise on earth where he his friends flee the parasites of The United States resisting the inventions of the truly brilliant and creative. That society is made possible by John Galt’s miracle power generator, very similar to the LFTR technology discussed in this article. I have reported here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom many technological achievements that are being held up by an overly regulated nation such as cures for cancer, flying cars, and extraordinary botanical growth methods which point to a world of tomorrow what we could have today if not for the degrees of collectivism invented by Karl Marx which is behind almost every modern political action. It is because of Marxist subscription to social collectivism that wonderful technologies like Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor’s have been placed on the shelf to protect the infrastructure of yesterday and the jobs created by that faded dream. The pain and suffering our society is anguishing through now, the mindless war for absolutely no reason but to keep politicians in power and crony capitalism thriving through lobbyists is completely avoidable and senseless. It’s a self-imposed pain created by the masochists in love with Marxism—with huge government bureaucracy, and a political class drunk on tax payer funded power.

Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor technology is not being discussed in the mainstream news because it threatens the monopolies of the past. Even though every politician wishes to get elected on promises they make to fix the problems of our day, deep in their hearts they never want the problems to actually be solved. They crave environmental issues, unstable conditions in the Middle East, nuclear melt downs with radiation that kills thousands because it leaves society scrambling for a leader to save the day, which never comes. So long as there are problems in the world, the politician has a job to do, and Washington—along with every parasite who lives off the money flowing down K-Street strives to keep that system intact. LFTR technology actually solves many modern problems, and that is why it is being shoved under the carpet, and kept from the public’s eyes.

So when the movie Atlas Shrugged Part II comes out understand that the plot of some brilliant man who invents a new form of energy which could save the world and give rise to a new day for the human race, but instead retreats to the mountains of Colorado to selfishly keep it for a small group of capitalists, that it’s more science fact than science fiction. Technology like what John Galt fictionally invented in Atlas Shrugged is actually quite real, and the methods which prevent that technology from benefiting mankind is just as real as the fictional tale claims. The critics who will pan the movie as ludicrous and immature—even selfish are the thieves who are keeping the world prisoner to their Marxist philosophy of collectivism in service to the political elite at the expense of innovation and human prosperity. The by-product of this philosophy is misery by the truck loads and mountains of broken dreams stamping out forever the light behind the eyes of every child with the courage to question their surroundings and crush the spirit of all the children who didn’t leaving an adult population of mindless drones and school levy supporters.

Rich Hoffman

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The “Ayn Rand Cult”: Designations from undeveloped intellects

One thing must be cleared up in regard to Ayn Rand since tensions are rising due to the new Atlas Shrugged movie about to be released in the fall of 2012. But first I must declare my position on Rand’s writing and her philosophy of Objectivism. I came to Ayn Rand’s work only a few years ago, well after my foundation beliefs had been formed. My thoughts about things are not due to any teaching of Objectivism or any book Ayn Rand wrote. But what a relief it was to read Atlas Shrugged for the first time, and see that Ayn Rand over half a century ago had many of the same thoughts that I did. When the truth is pursued on any matter and reality is witnessed with its true value witnessed without any evasion tactics to distort the data, the results are not subject to opinion. The facts are the facts and no encounter group in pursuit of a consensus of opinion can negate the truth for the sake of other people’s feelings. Feelings do not equate to truth.

But there are many who insist on living their lives with shrouded facts and hazy logic. They evade truth at every turn and use their feelings to guide them through existence. They were taught and accepted at face value what instruction they received from the education system they grew up with, and adopted the tendencies of their parents without question. Their life is the sum of the many lives that played a part in molding their core beliefs which is fine for an infinite. But these types of people never take those foundations and apply their own unique individuality to their observations to pursue a truth as it is, not as they wish it to be as small children or puberty stricken teenagers yearning for their first kiss. These types of weak, sensitive beings are attracted to the practices of collectivism and they despise any work by Ayn Rand and her thoughts on individualism. These are the types of people who call Ayn Rand a cult in an attempt to discredit publicly people who enjoy Ayn Rand’s books. This trend can clearly be seen in this movie review of Atlas Shrugged Part One.

A cult is something to the effect that Jim Jones participated in, or what labor unions enjoy. They are collectivist by their very nature, and this is not what Ayn Rand was all about. CLICK HERE TO REVIEW. In an effort to paint Ayn Rand as socially dangerous the word “cult” is used so to discourage any further investigation into the kind of work that Ayn Rand produced. What is really behind such a designation is the attempt by collectivist leaning people to evade reality, and they do not want to even be aware that Ayn Rand ever existed and that she wrote anything at all. They wish to maintain the illusion that the ideas they have built their lives around are the ones that will lead them to success and they don’t want to know otherwise.

I have read many books over the years, and watched many, many movies. I have read books by very left leaning people and there are movies and actors who are extremely progressive on the severely liberal side that I like to this day—Sean Penn comes to mind. I have seen all of Michael Moore’s films and actually enjoyed Roger and Me way back when he was first getting started. I can report that I have never felt anger at someone for something they believed in. I have never felt anger at people who enjoy Michael Moore films or read books by the liberal activist Stephen King. My thoughts are that people who adhere to such beliefs are like children who yet have to learn the rules of the universe, and they have not developed the intellect to comprehend those truths. So I watch films and read books by such progressive minds like I might watch children playing at a park—with mild amusement. The anger comes when collectivists expect my buy-in to something I know to be wrong, because the majority ruled in favor of it. I am not okay with that, and anger erupts often with me under these conditions.

As people get older and more mature, they tend to become wiser—and more conservative. This is why there are so many older people who are in the Tea Party movement. With age comes wisdom, and the gradual acceptance of varying degrees of reality. The reason President Obama panders to young people is because they do not have developed intellects yet to understand what a con artist he is. They are easily seduced into believing in the Obamanation of America. This is why so many young people find themselves wanting to protest whatever their college professors or high school teachers tell them to adhere to, because they have not developed critical thinking to the level of individual thought as of yet, and until they do, they are most likely not qualified to vote, because they are simply too immature to think with reason.

I became interested in Ayn Rand during my well documented levy fights with public education. I always knew my position was correct, but when dealing with people who support public education I quickly realized that the people who supported blindly tax increase after tax increase for a public education system corrupted with collectivist oriented labor unions I needed to check my premise. So I went and read books about education from the pro side and found them dancing around some fundamental flaw in their thinking—since everything centered on collectivism which I have always rejected. In fact there was never a time in my life where I adhered to anything resembling collectivism. So it was a great relief during all this reading about education that I ran into Ayn Rand. Once I read Atlas Shrugged and saw that she predicted much about the world that was happening currently, I realized that Rand had done the hard work of adding up all the facts of an observed life to their logical conclusions.

Ayn Rand was not a mystic who looked into a crystal ball and saw the future even down to the detail of the Obama Presidency, which has been an absolute train wreck rooted deeply in collectivist thought. She simply observed reality and added things up based on the laws that govern everything. I knew she was correct because I had arrived at many of the same conclusions completely independent. Reading her was like meeting one intelligent person in an ocean of fools who actually understood the meaning of things, and it was refreshing. This is why people who work in book stores whisper under their breaths that they enjoy Rand’s work. This is why Ayn Rand is so beloved. It is not a “cult,” it’s a relief to read someone from the past who knew what anyone who is even partially awake knows now. Rand’s books provide the confirmation of truth as it is observed in reality by intelligent individuals. If people don’t understand Ayn Rand or have strong feelings against her, it’s probably because the critics are too stupid to comprehend her basic thoughts, since they have not yet observed such things in their own realities.

People who think individually do not pick up an Ayn Rand book and suddenly start following everything she says like some mindless drone. This falsehood was created by collectivists because they assume all people are like them, and are so easily programmed. Any Rand fans tend to be deep thinkers who have made general observations about reality, and find her work a relief that they are not alone and crazy in their thoughts. The masses that lean toward collectivism can through democracy appear to be in charge through mass threat and intimidation. But what they are is essentially undeveloped mentalities who are either in denial of reality through evasion or they are too immature to be exposed to enough truth so that they can arrive at a conclusion.

The anger at Ayn Rand and the derogatory claim that she has a “cult” of followers are intended to use evasion to hide the world from Ayn Rand’s truth. Socially, these maniacal collectivists have done such a good job of hiding her, and forcing her books underground that I didn’t read one of her novels until I was in my forties. This is quite extraordinary since I do read a lot and know people who are excessive readers and she never came up in conversations until a few years ago. Some people are lucky enough to have a renegade literary teacher or college professor who exposes them to Ayn Rand and those young people become hooked for life, because they recognize the truth in Rand’s work that they can’t find anywhere else, because collectivism has infected much of humanity as it has for the entire duration of civilization. Ayn Rand uniquely has a background that began when communism destroyed her life in the Soviet Union yet she had the intellect to question what was happening around her. She found in America the relief valve to her collectivist frustrations and a very small window to warn, through her books, The United States of what it would become if it did not stop adopting collectivism from Europe and yearn for the merits of Karl Marx and the Bolsheviks who overthrew Russia ushering in communism.

I used to feel that I had to concede my firm beliefs that reality was subjective to democratic opinion, but that was not working when it came to public education and I couldn’t understand why. I knew I wasn’t wrong, but I gave people the freedom to do their own thinking and to disagree with me. I saw that Ayn Rand had pondered the same thoughts and went through the same process I was and a pattern was forming which was very clear to me. Collectivism does not work and to the extent to which it is embedded into public education, politics in general, labor unions, even home owners associations, is truly shocking. I don’t care to spend one more minute of my life negotiating with those who are clearly in the wrong. Ayn Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged based on her observations of the way the Bolsheviks overthrew the largest country on the face of the planet, and she was able to apply those truths to the American experience, and that truth has great reverence to those awake enough to understand the message.

Those who call Ayn Rand and her books a—“cult” are practicing evasion, and wish to use peer pressure to prevent others from reading one of the greatest literary achievements ever created by a human mind. I have read Shakespeare, I have read Hemmingway, I have read Plato, I have read Sir James Frazer, I love and appreciate James Joyce and the poetry of T.S. Elliot and Ayn Rand is one of mankind’s greatest authors. She’s great because she was able to devise stories that reflected a hidden truth projected right in front of our faces, but the multi millennium trend to follow after collectivist pursuits kept us from seeing it. Ayn Rand is a uniquely American writer with a viewpoint that was born in Russia and sought The United States in order to flourish. Her work is unusual and fresh even after half a century has passed because few authors have had the guts to follow the truth as far as she did. Sadly, even supporters of Ayn Rand find themselves reading her books in secret and proclaiming their enjoyment of it under hushed voices because they are afraid of the ridicule by the collective.

The collective fears Ayn Rand because they are aware that they are suppressing the facts of existence from their own minds and this is the source of their emotions. If they were so sure of their version of the truth, they would not fear a book or its author. But they do, which is why they have attempted to paint politicians like Paul Ryan as an extreme because he happens to adore Ayn Rand. Even in my fights with the public education labor unions I receive emails and little notes declaring me as a “Randian” as to insinuate that such a term has a negative connotation. These names come from collectivists who follow Saul Alinsky like he’s the second coming of Christ, or Karl Marx the way most of the Obama White House does. The collectivist knows that their edited facts cannot hold up to reality so they hate Ayn Rand for the power of her books to shine light on what they are hiding. It is this trend which states the whole story. Behind the hatred of Ayn Rand is the fear that she’s right and her detractors are every bit the villains of her novels, that she saw through them before they were even born. And that same collectivist hope that if they can rid the earth of Ayn Rand that others will never discover what terrors to the human race the collectivists really are. Through evasion they hope that others who can see as Ayn Rand does and are fully living life awake, alert, and possess the ability to add up the facts will continue to chase their tails in isolation—and keep their crazy conspiracy theories to themselves for the sake of the collective built upon the preservation of evasion.

Ayn Rand is at the center of a war of ideas in modern America. Those who like and enjoy her books whether or not they agree with everything she believed are on one side. Those who hate her with every fiber of their being are on the other. In the middle is a lot of mushy confusion which represents the “undecided” voters. Ayn Rand is as far away from a cult that the definition can conger up. The reality is that people who don’t like her most likely have not yet evolved far enough along in their own minds to grapple with her concepts which are rooted in basic truths. So beware of those who call her a “cult leader” or any other diabolical term. The real villains are those who say such things off their forked tongues disguising through evasion the merits of their ignorance. Such enemies can be crushed with the truth, so wield it at them without mercy and don’t fret when their silly feelings are damaged, because in so doing, you may actually save them from the ignorance of themselves and their grand illusions.

Read my review of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead for more info, CLICK HERE.

Rich Hoffman





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Meet Harmon Kaslow: Producer of ‘Atlas Shrugged Part II’–a preview of the review.

Harmon Kaslow is one of the most passionate movie producers I have ever worked around. That was the only conclusion I could make after we parted ways in front of the Hyatt Regency in downtown Cincinnati where he finally went back to his room after a very long day. Kaslow was at the Duke Energy Center promoting Atlas Shrugged Part II speaking with Glenn Beck, Matt Kibbe and a long list of freedom fighters who spoke during FreePac to a very large crowd that packed the floor with thousands upon thousands of people hungry to see what they could do to make The United States a better country to live in. In the video below Kaslow personally greeted hundreds of attendees after his dramatic presentation on stage, as I along with a team of helpers worked the Atlas Shrugged booth passing out over 5000 t-shirts announcing the release date of Atlas Shrugged Part II.

I was there to help promote the next movie edition of Atlas Shrugged in a similar fashion that I did with Part I only there were not huge forums like FreePac two years ago when that first real film translation of Ayn Rand’s epic novel was released to theaters. CLICK HERE FOR A REVIEW. Things were harder then; John Aglialoro had the rights to the famous Ayn Rand masterpiece that happened to be the most influential novel in America and he wanted to make a film version of the massive book dividing it into three parts, just as they were presented by Ayn Rand. The material is extraordinarily difficult to put into a film version because much of the content is cerebral, so the difficulty in translating such heady material into a visual format proved elusive for the mainstream Hollywood community. The closest thing I have seen to Atlas Shrugged in a feature film is the recent Batman films by Christopher Nolan. But unlike Bruce Wayne from the Nolan trilogy, Atlas Shrugged does not have the benefit a superhuman powers, or cleaver gadgets to fight crime in the city of Gotham. The heroes of Atlas Shrugged are human beings who acknowledge their ability to be unique producers who support the entire world with their creative minds. The primary protagonist that was listed on the t-shirts we were handing out is John Galt, a man of such extraordinary brilliance that he is able to earn the respect of the worlds primary movers to go on strike against the looters of government who pretend to be at the center of everything—but are clearly lacking.

Atlas Shrugged does not have any literary problems. It is a standard unto itself. It may very well be the perfect novel. It is every bit as grand as any novel by Victor Hugo and is as stunning from a literary character development stand point as any novel ever written by any writer. But the deep social divide that comes out when the book or film is mentioned is that the villains of Atlas Shrugged are a bit too real. Members of modern governments and the general media recognize quickly that they cannot relate with John Galt, or Dagney Taggart, Henry Rearden, Hugh Akston, Francisco d’ Anconia, or my favorite character out of all of them Ragnar Danneskjöld—the pirate! Ragnar was a philosopher who became a privateer in the book. Alone he defied the might of the United States Navy and of all the People’s Navies of the world to be, as he famously said, “the friend of the friendless.” Atlas Shrugged does not dress it’s villains up in costumes like Darth Vader in Star Wars, or the Joker in Batman to allow the reader or movie viewer the courtesy of psychological distance. The villains are a too real for many guilty of similar real life acts to fathom, so they of course reject the material of Ayn Rand. Much of the negative criticism that comes from critics, beltway politicians and social looters emerges in defense of their own tendencies to be parasites upon society. These elements make Atlas Shrugged a divisive story that does not spare punches. Written over 50 years ago it features a president that is just like the modern version of Barack Obama. Atlas Shrugged came well before Barack Obama was even born, so the film can never be said to be taking shots at his presidency, or the kind of government he supports. But never-the-less, the policies of the Obama White House are remarkably similar to the policies of the villains in Atlas Shrugged, and the media who supports the President for all the wrong reasons.

All day long at FreePac as I personally handed out thousands of t-shirts people stood slack-jawed at the concept that we were giving them away for free. Many people wanted to give me money for them seeking to trade value for value in their minds with actual currency. If I wanted to I could have pocketed several thousand dollars because people wanted to give me twenty-dollar bills per shirt but I told each of them—“keep your money today, but spend it on an extra ticket for the movie, because the media who is currently functioning does not want you to see this movie. Barack Obama does not want you to see this movie. Mayor Bloomburg in New York does not want you to see this movie. No Democrat, many Republicans, and no head of any network want you to see this movie because they know they are the villains in it, and they don’t want that reality for themselves and they don’t want you to see them in the context presented in Atlas Shrugged, which is terribly realistic. They wish to continue to believe they are saving the world, when it is actually they who are destroying it. So take your twenty dollars and spend it at the box office on Atlas Shrugged Part II because it will need your support, because it won’t get it from the press.” I can think of seven times during my work in the Atlas Shrugged booth where tears streamed down the faces of people who gathered the impact of what I told them and they could only respond through broken gasps—“thank you.”

I warned everyone who took a t-shirt that the reviews for Atlas Shrugged Part II would not be favorable even though nobody has yet seen the movie. The reason for this trend was also covered by Ayn Rand not in Atlas Shrugged but by the juggernaut of novel which happens to be my favorite called The Fountainhead published in 1943. In that book it explains how members of the media align themselves with the politics of the day to help “shape” culture. I recently wrote an article about how this was attempted against the newest Batman film once the media realized that the Nolan brothers had written a story about anti-collectivism and not a troubling thriller featured around Heath Ledger’s Joker character. Dark Knight Rises in spite of the tragedy in Colorado upon its opening had gone on to do over $1 billion dollars in world-wide business so it has the support of the public in spite of how the press turned on it in midstream. The New Yorker led the way coming out against the film in an attempt to steer business away from the anti-collectivist message of Dark Knight Rises in the exact same way that characters from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead attempted to do the same in that fictional tale. CLICK HERE TO REVIEW. The same thing will without question happen to Atlas Shrugged Part II. I told the people I handed shirts to that we needed them to wear the shirts around to their grocery stores, to their shopping complexes, to work whenever possible, to act as a walking billboard because the media machine will not do the film justice. By taking a t-shirt and wearing it proudly they could help make Atlas Shrugged Part II a success without the help of any media, any politician, or mainstream acceptance. I know very well the material of Atlas Shrugged and can report that it is much more powerful than Dark Knight Rises on a cerebral level, which is not intended to take anything away from that fantastic movie. But if Atlas Shrugged II could afford the media backing that Dark Knight Rises had where Warner Brothers put the film on over 3000 screens domestically and on additional screens all over the world, Atlas Shrugged Part II would do similar business. The problem is there is not a major studio behind Atlas Shrugged. It’s John Aglialoro, a few other financial backers, and Harmon Kaslow. To make Atlas Shrugged Part II it required a great deal of personal passion on the scale of the heroes in the novel Atlas Shrugged knowing every part of the process would be an uphill battle. For people like John Aglialoro and Harmon Kaslow making this film is equivalent to the scene that takes place in the actual movie of Part II when Henry Reardon is taken to court by the government for being “too good.” Those types of things do happen in real life and they happen often. So it is a miracle that this film actually got made.

Once Harmon finished his speech talking about Atlas Shrugged II and Glenn Beck finished up his speech, Kaslow came back out to the booth and helped us pass out the rest of the shirts as seen in the video above. After a long hard day he was still full of energy and boundless enthusiasm for his movie. He and I talked about the questions people had been asking me all day, primarily why the cast from the original film was not in this update. Many people discovered Ayn Rand for the first time though Part One which is available right now on Netflix, so naturally they are in love with the characters they came to know in that first installment. As Harmon explained, they had the opportunity to beef up their production value so they had to take the leap. He explained that the decision was hard but that Spiderman, Batman and many other superhero films had relied on the strength of the material instead of the character of the actors playing the part, so as a production they made the decision to take steps forward as they learned what worked best from their first film and expand on it. In essence Atlas Shrugged is a superhero story, and is every bit as fun and powerful as The Avengers, not on a physical level, but cerebrally. That is why the Atlas Shrugged booth all day long resembled more of an active booth at Comic Con than a political convention. The geeks in this case are not the kind of fans of The Incredible Hulk arguing over the Edward Norton version from past films or the new Mark Ruffalo version in The Avengers. These Atlas Shrugged geeks are fans of capitalism and the minds that drive it. They do tend to be smarter because they work to make themselves that way, and to see the emotion on their faces just to shake the hand of someone associated with the Atlas Shrugged production was wonderfully encouraging. Most of the day at FreePac I represented the face of the Atlas Production, and it was refreshing to see so much joy at getting a t-shirt advertising the movie and answering questions about the book and Ayn Rand in particular. I enjoyed watching people line up to have their picture taken next to Kaslow—just to be near a man who helped make Atlas Shrugged into a movie.

You know a man is authentic when the crowds are gone and the cameras are turned off, and they still espouse the same principles. As Harmon and I crossed Elm Street in Cincinnati he and I continued to talk without any pretense of selling the movie to a hungry public. We were just a couple of guys talking and I told him I admired him for taking such a shot with his movie. His efforts were tireless as he is about to go on a media rampage speaking on virtually every radio interview possible, TV spots also, and will shake tens of thousands of hands over the next two weeks. But like the characters from Atlas Shrugged I could see why John Aglialoro put so much of his own money on the production of the next Atlas film. It was the energy–the springy enthusiasm that Harmon Kaslow brought to the production that was making Atlas Shrugged possible. In a large part the thousands of new readers of Ayn Rand’s work were getting exposure to her novels because these movies Part One and now Part Two–because of the guy walking next to me along 5th Street about to leap into the Hyatt to rest from a hard day of marketing.

Two days prior to FreePac my wife and I spent 4 hours buying our stock of books for the week at Books-A-Million and Half Priced Books. I was happy to find a copy of Frazer’s The Golden Bough which I purchased along with a host of other choices and my wife had a stack up to her chin, as usual. But during our time in those two book stores I watched the staff set up a new display promoting all of Ayn Rand’s books in a special stand prominently featuring them with proud reverence—and people were buying them by the bucket. I personally watched that stand lose 50% of its stock in just a two-hour period and I knew it was because of the anticipation of Atlas Shrugged II about to hit more than 500 movie theaters. To find out if one is near you, or how to get one, CLICK HERE. The movie is a celebration of Ayn Rand’s work. If people want the full effect, they MUST read the book. But the movie will bring millions of new fans to the great and highly intelligent work of Atlas Shrugged. And to a large extent it is the tireless energy of Harmon Kaslow, the man shaking my hand for the 100th time in 2000 feet of walking that is the force able to take the movie from financing, to casting, to production, to wrap, and now to delivery standing up in front of thousands upon thousands of people to promote Atlas Shrugged. Like the character of John Galt, Dagney Taggart and Hank Reardon from Atlas Shrugged  I thought of all three of them as Harmon gave me one last wave before the sliding glass door to the Hyatt opened as if to move hastily out of his way so not to be crushed by his boundless energy.  Before he entered the doors to his hotel he proclaimed to me in a loud voice not caring who around us was listening, “I’m the luckiest guy in America, to be able to work on a picture like this!”  Seeing him standing in the doorway of the Hyatt with his arms stretched out fearlessly reminded me of the ending of Shawshank Redemption.  No question about it, completing Part II for him was redemption of a different nature, and most likely just as difficult.   I continued to walk through the streets of Cincinnati thinking about that wave as minds half asleep with social evasion gathered in front of a closed Macy’s looking for something to do. It takes people like Harmon Kaslow to move the mountains of the world so that the sleepy minds of the ordinary can even have the opportunity to touch greatness for brief moments in their lives. And when Atlas Shrugged Part II opens, it is because of real life people like Kaslow and Aglialoro who haven’t quite given up on the world and retreated to their own versions of Atlantis that make it happen. They are still out fighting in the city streets of Cincinnati and residing in the Hyatt with a cell phone to their ear and an iPod in their hands answering email, setting up interviews, and plotting the next day’s activities in an effort to save the world by getting the people in it………to think.

CLICK HERE to see what Ayn Rand, Walt Disney and Ronald Reagan attempted to do to save Hollywood from the real life villains of Atlas Shrugged in the 1950’s. This is the real document as written by Ayn Rand to all the major studios in a fight that Harmon Kaslow and John Aglialoro are respectfully continuing to this very day with Atlas Shrugged Part II.

Rich Hoffman





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The Real Ellsworth Toohey: Anthony Lane Reviews ‘Dark Knight Rises’

I am very happy that the movie Dark Knight Rises stayed on top of the box office rankings for three weeks in a row in spite of the terrible shooting at Aurora, Colorado. To date the worldwide sales for Dark Knight Rises is at $750 million and continuing to grow. After three weeks of running at the top it beat the opening of the Total Recall remake by more than $10 million dollars. Dark Knight Rises made $36,440 million in domestic sales during a weekend of heavy competition at a run time of 2 hours and 45 minutes, which defies logic in Hollywood terms. Dark Knight Rises is only $40 million dollars behind the domestic total of The Dark Knight–the previous Batman film in the Nolan trilogy–at its 17 day total mark, which is quite incredible considering the blanket of horror that shrouded a very good film on the opening weekend tragedy.

But Why?

The why is the reason I sat in the Regal Theater long after the movie credits ended and only silence in an empty arena looked back at me with a blank screen white and motionless. I know damn well why Dark Knight Rises is so successful and there are factions on the progressive political side that fears that reason, because they know it too and work to prevent it. The movie is fantastic not because it has any particular realism to the story line. Some might find parts of it unbelievable as the heroics might sometimes defy logic. But Dark Knight Rises is not about realism, it’s about what lives in the human heart and why. It is about what works in society and what doesn’t, and it holds up the confusing messages of our current world and takes viewers on an incredible journey into topics that baffle us in the light of day. Read my review by CLICKING HERE.

I will have to give Christopher Nolan credit; he played the ultimate Don Diego. Only people who know me well will understand what I mean by that, but Nolan pulled off a miracle that critics should have seen coming in the previous two films. I suspected it was coming, but I had no idea that he would be able to pull it off with a 2 hour and 45 minute movie without Warner Brothers cutting the film down to an even 2 hours, because the extra 45 minutes contain all the important messages that progressives have managed to suppress for many years of film making. Dark Knight Rises is the movie that Ayn Rand would have put her support behind, along with Walt Disney, and John Wayne. CLICK HERE TO SEE WHY. Nolan working within the framework of a progressive town wore the mask himself and did the impossible delivering to the world a film they needed to see.

And the world is HUNGRY for it. Once critics saw the film and realized the heavy anti-collectivist message Dark Knight Rises contained they tried to back out of their gushy support for Christopher Nolan, which up to a few weeks ago could do no wrong. But it was too late.

You see, the battle for the heart of mankind is at stake, and progressives want to posses that heart. They want control of the media in virtually every way and they do not want competition in thought, because their ideas cannot compete directly with a philosophy of freedom. If you are familiar with the great novel The Fountainhead there are a million Ellsworth Toohey’s working today as newspaper reporters, newscasters, and film critics. Dark Knight Rises directed by the critically acclaimed Christopher Nolan turned out to be a work of Howard Roark and the critics didn’t catch it till after the film hit theaters and a gush of anxiety rippled through progressive communities like an earthquake.

To see an example of what I’m talking about here are a couple of reviews from Anthony Lane of The New Yorker. The New Yorker is a progressive publication in the extreme. They were progressive well before there was ever a Huffington Post, a Daily Show, and Bill Maher. They were progressive when George Soros was still making his fortune as a capitalist on Wall Street. I have read The New Yorker for years as a way to hone my writing skills, because they often publish very good short stories and I enjoy their articles. They’d never publish anything I’d write because my politics is way too conservative for them, but I do appreciate good literature even if it’s progressive. But it cannot be ignored that they are attempting to paint Dark Knight Rises as unsophisticated tripe that should be ignored by popular culture. Below are two links from The New Yorker so you can see for yourself what is being said by them and how. Read these reviews intently. The gap between what the general public wants and what the progressive desires for mankind is absolutely clear by looking at the words of the reviewers who have come out against Dark Knight Rises.


It is in such pretentiousness that many Victorian well wishers hold much sway. For the leeching progressive who desires human weakness, ever-growing government, and perpetual debt they fully endorse films and other art that supports their cause. They do not want characters like Batman to inspire an entire generation of young people toward the cause of inner strength and valor. Valor to the progressive is the Holy Water of political exorcism. Hollywood fears these types of progressive critics because they are perceived to be the intellectual elite and don’t want the intellectual elite to alienate Hollywood from cocktail conversation.

But it’s OK Hollywood to turn the progressive opinion loose. The numbers from Dark Knight Rises should solve the question once and for all. Dark Knight Rises will make well over a billion dollars for Hollywood, much, much more than Slumdog Millionaire. Making the kind of movies that make people like Anthony Lane happy will not make Hollywood money. But making movies like Dark Knight Rises will. And it takes more than dressing up a guy in a bat suit to pull it off. The movie has to have the correct message that audiences respond to, and Dark Knight Rises has it, and they put it up on the screen without apology.

To understand the intention of The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane all one needs to do is read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. Ellsworth Toohey is a character in the microcosm of that classic novel that many of today’s critics and newspaper journalists play similar roles. In media circles, the New Yorker is considered to be the top rung of social thought, and out of all the journalists who wish to become great novelists, or work for a big news organization, they read the opinions of The New Yorker, where writers like Anthony Lane help shape the parameters of society in the exact same say that Ellsworth Toohey did against Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, written in 1943. So the tricks are not new, but if left unchecked will play out perpetually forever and to great destructive effect.

In The Fountainhead, Toohey was furious that Howard Roark was able to build the type of architectural designs that authenticated Roark’s individual existence. So Toohey used his influence at the newspaper he worked at to shape social thought away from Roark’s designs even though the public enjoyed the originality, and strength of them. Toohey being the gatekeeper of what was “cool” in society or “uncool” attempted with all his effort to bring Roark to his knees in complete destruction for the sole reason that Roark functioned outside of the influence of Toohey. For an example, below is a short line from Toohey from The Fountainhead. Then compare what Anthony Lane says about Dark Knight Rises in the linked New Yorker movie reviews above with the Toohey quote in mind. If you know the Rand work, you will understand immediately. If you are still being exposed to this work, then it might take a moment of thought to behold.

• Don’t set out to raze all shrines—you’ll frighten men. Enshrine mediocrity—and the shrines are razed.
o Ellsworth Toohey, p. 636 of The Fountainhead

Now, The New Yorker quote from the July 30th 2012 film review.

• Be honest. How badly would you not want Bruce—or Batman—to show up at one of your parties? He has no small talk (and Bale, as an actor, has charisma but no charm), although ask him about fear, anger, and other large abstract nouns, especially as they relate to him, and he’ll keep you in the corner all night. He doesn’t eat or drink, besides toying with a flute of champagne. Basic human tasks are beyond his reach; direct Batman to the bathroom, and it would take him twenty minuets of hydraulic shunting simply to unzip. On the rare occasions when Bruce, fresh from his helicopter or his Lamborghini, enters a reception with a girl or two on his arm, he looks deeply uncomfortable, and Nolan, as if sharing that unease, tends to hurry him through the moment. The point—and, after three installments, it seems a fatal one—is that the two halves of our hero form not a beguiling contrast but a dreary, perfect match. Both as Wayne and as super-Wayne he seems indifferent, as the films themselves are, to the activities of little people and to the claims of the everyday, preferring to semi-purse his lips, as if preparing to whistle for an errant dog, and stare pensively into the distance. Caped or uncaped, the guy is a bore. He should have kids; that would pull him out of himself. Or else he should hang out with Iron Man and get wasted. He should have fun.
o Anthony Lane from The “esteemed” New Yorker.

If you understand the media network and how it works from the top where Anthony Lane writes from to the bottom, where the local 22-year-old journalism major is trying hard to impress editors at large publications so they can advance their careers by mimicking the type behavior exhibited in The New Yorker, you can begin to understand why I did not want to leave the theater at the end of Dark Knight Rises, because the way the system is set up, such movies hardly ever get made to the epic scale shown in the latest Batman film.

Yes, there is a war for the heart of man, and too many writers trained in colleges and film schools have been taught to bend their will to the Anthony Lanes of the world. The writing pool in Hollywood has been watered down with progressive tripe, in spite of the hunger for American audiences to witness the exceptional. So Hollywood has turned to comic books, not destroyed by progressivism for new material to put on the big screen, because comic books have not been destroyed by the Ellsworth Toohey’s of literature. The American public wants exceptionalism. Children want more than mediocrity, and much of their anger as young people approaching adulthood is the realization that the world they live in is mediocre, shaped in large by people like Anthony Lane. Because when an example of exceptionalism shows itself, progressives attempt to crush them before they have a chance to encourage others to also rise above mediocrity.

I appreciate exactly how difficult it was to bring a movie like Dark Knight Rises to the big screen, and it is now obvious that like Nolan’s film Inception, the concept of delivering Dark Knight Rises was a dream within a dream within a dream. The motive was well-kept and hidden from people like Anthony Lane behind the performance of Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight to set up this well conceived comic book masterpiece that arrived intact to millions of fans in a unique exposé of valor, honor, and inner strength exemplifying the plight of the individual against a parasitic attack by collectivists.

In this case, fans are voting with their wallets. But the progressive wishes for the vote to never take place, which is why more films like Dark Knight Rises does not see the light of day off a film executives desk. The process for which such restrictions occur were written by the former screen writer Ayn Rand in her masterpiece The Fountainhead. For me, to see Dark Knight Rises was equivalent to reading about Howard Roark’s construction of the Wayland Building. The journey is very similar and to see it happen is an act of wonder that I won’t soon forget.

Toohey in the novel The Fountainhead embraced socialism as a political philosophy because he was a weakling in his youth. He knew he could never be exceptional, so as he grew into an adult he used his natural manipulative abilities to bring down the world around him with aspirations of collectivism in an attempt to eliminate his own anxiety about a world that would always outpace him—as he would always be condemned to a life of mediocrity. Without knowing Anthony Lane personally, his views of the world are without doubt very close to the fictional views of Ellsworth Toohey and for the same reasons. They fear that stories like Dark Knight Rises might push society to reach for exceptionalism and are a direct threat to their meager, boring lives.

However, as the evidence at Comic Con testifies to, most people do aspire to become more than mediocre. The fan geeks and other Comic Con nerds are at least in their minds attempting to behold the heroics of exceptionalism even if their bodies cannot rise to meet the cause. It is in the act of embracing the idea of a superhero where magic actually happens, and this is to the peril of collectivism. No child at 5 years old yearns to the toy aisle at Target to search for the newest toy that will allow them to pretend they are at a New York dinner party impressing people like the snooty Anthony Lane. Instead kids look for fast cars in their Hot Wheels, action figures from The Dark Knight, and Star Wars light sabers because in such play is the attempt to be more than social yielding wants for us. Hidden deep in the mind of Anthony Lane is a concession that fantasy should be abandoned in favor of realism which falls under the spell of political control where magazines like The New Yorker set the standard of quality. But the box office results do not lie. Nobody waits in line to read The New Yorker and nobody would scammer to the theater 3 to 4 times to see the same movie like they are doing with Dark Knight Rises, if the movie was about collectivism. It is exceptionalism that audiences want and in the case of Dark Knight Rises, Director Christopher Nolan found a way to work around the system to give everybody but the progressive what they wanted. Warner Brothers get a smash hit that will help carry their studio through the rest of the year without worry. And the fans received a film that will fill their imaginations with a yearning for greatness, even if the closest they ever get is in a darkened movie theater.

The truth is in the box office take, because in spite of the progressives who wish to shape society with gentle nudges, the fans have put their money where their mouth is. This is devastating news to all the Ellsworth Toohey’s who are quite stunned at the box office take in spite of all their efforts. So it brings me great pleasure to see Dark Knight Rises continuing its path to a billion dollars. Because film studios must take note of what not just American audiences want, but the entire world. The world wants Batman, and they want their heroes uncorrupted, unafraid, and larger than life. And these days, the modern heroes’ ride the musical wave of Hans Zimmer as it is his music that most plays from my iPod hour by hour week by week on a quest for valor and hope of what can come from fearlessness.

Behold—the superman! What every young person should strive to emulate without apology!

To place in perspective just how important those box office numbers are for Dark Knight Rises consider that popular summer film geared exclusively toward older women, Magic Mike featuring male strippers was released on June 29th and to date has only made $110,894 million total, and has not been released to international markets. Magic Mike would be considered a progressive film as it plays to the feminist movement. The movie did very well the first couple of weekends as all the “liberated” women flocked to the theaters to see a movie that gave them revenge on men for all the “sexist” films they’ve watched over the years like American Pie and the Hangover. Opening that same weekend was Ted directed by the makers of the cartoon Family Guy which to date has made $203,414 million with a production budget of only $50 million, both movies could be considered a financial success, but not even in the same category as a film like Dark Knight Rises.

In the same arena however would be the latest Spiderman which is not considered a success and insiders are disappointed. Opening right before the 4th of July it had the benefit of a holiday week with a rare Tuesday midnight opening, then a following weekend to make a ton of money, but for the month of July it only made $250,640 with a production budget of $230 million, not exactly a runaway success. The only film that looks to beat Dark Knight Rises in the year of 2012 is The Avengers which opened in early May and to date has a worldwide box office take of $1.6 billion dollars after three months of release. Dark Knight Rises is already halfway at that point, and it still hasn’t opened in China or Italy. But what those last mentioned films have in common as opposed to the more progressive films like Ted and Magic Mike is that they are superhero movies—movies about individuals doing big and glorious things. Critics like those who write for The New Yorker and other so-called prominent publications seem to dislike money, so to them all the movies are on equal footing. But in a world where fans of movies vote with the price of a ticket, the differences are extremely clear. In the end, the ones left standing in the corner talking to themselves won’t be Batman at the dinner party but the pretentious socialite that wants to talk about feelings and how to save the poor which global socialism created. Everyone else will be at the movies watching Batman kick the crap out of the kind of people who write for The New Yorker.






Rich Hoffman





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Rich Hoffman