Christian Toto - Virtue Bombs: How Hollywood Got Woke and Lost Its Soul

BOMBARDIER BOOKS

An Imprint of Post Hill Press

ISBN: 978-1-63758-099-8

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-63758-100-1

Virtue Bombs:

How Hollywood Got Woke and Lost Its Soul

2022 by Christian Toto

All Rights Reserved

Cover Design by Matt Margolis

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

Post Hill Press

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Published in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to Abbott, Costello, and my Father, all of whom made me fall in love with movies in the first place.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

By

Andrew Klavan

W riting is a lonely job, said almost every writer ever. You can Google the sentence and youll see how many names come up. But if being a writer is lonely in general, being a Conservative screenwriter in Hollywood is a quantum leap into infinite solitude.

When you understand that, you will understand the importance of Christian Toto and his remarkable website, Hollywood in Toto . For a Conservative screenwriter to know theres a prominent critic out there who does not despise him, to know that someone who understands the structures of film also understands the politics of freedom, to feel that someone with the critical intelligence to assess his work also has the moral intelligence to understand his worldview can make all the difference.

If that was true over the last few decades when Hollywood was merely insanely left wing, it is even more true now when the film business is suffering from a particularly ugly form of left-wing insanity called wokeism . To paraphrase the one-sheet to an old Sylvester Stallone action flick: If wokeism is a disease, Christian Toto is clearly going to be part of the cure.

Let me tell you how my Hollywood career ended and you will see what I mean.

I had never wanted to be a screenwriter, but my thriller novels had attracted the movie crowd, so every now and then, over the years, I took on some film work for fun and profit. Then, when I was in my forties, a couple of my novels were made into major films. I decided to seize the moment, move to Los Angeles, and really put some effort into the profession before I aged out entirely.

Providentially, the excellent spook show The Ring was released around the same time. Suddenly, PG-13 ghost stories became a hot item. I am a ghost story aficionado. I love eerie tales of the uncanny, long on fear and short on gore. I began turning out scripts in the genre and was soon making an excellent living.

Then one day, I was invited to pitch my version of a major studio remake of a 1950s science fiction horror film. I went in the room, as they say out west, and described to the producer-in-charge how Id write the screenplay.

It was the best pitch I ever did. I was about five minutes in when I realized I was outlining a masterpiece. It was beautiful. Scary, original, and deep, with a powerful tragic love story at the center. Like any good writer, I already knew I was incredibly brilliant, but this was another level. Even I was impressed.

I reached the shattering conclusion of my tale and leaned back on the sectional, smugly waiting for the producer to up-end a bucket of gold in my lap. Instead, he said to me, Do you think we could make the villains the American military?

I hesitated, slack-jawed. The story had nothing to do with the military, but that wasnt what stumped me. It was this. Not long before, a group of Islamist terrorists had murdered 3,000 people in New York Citys World Trade Center. The president had ordered our troops into Afghanistan and Iraq to wreak vengeance on what he called the evildoers. Right at that moment, as we spoke, American soldiers were being shot at and killed by medieval lowlifes serving what the poet John Keats might have called a fierce miscreed.

I told the producer, I dont think American audiences want to see our military depicted as villains right now. At least, thats what I was planning to say, but somewhere between right and now, I found myself out in the parking lot.

Over the next few years, things got steadily worse. Expressing hatred for the American military and its commander-in-chief became a kind of shibboleth for entry into the Hollywood job market. You could be up for a Smurf cartoon, but if you werent willing to curse out the president and our troops, you werent going to get hired.

Personally, I thought that knocking off Islamists was a fine way for American youngsters to spend their idle hours. However you felt about the war effort, it was clearly despicable to make movies attacking the mission while our troops were in harms way. And yet thats what Hollywood proceeded to do. As the wars went on, the industry turned out film after film depicting our soldiers as rapists, murderers, lunatics, and fools. Any movie with even a hint of sympathy for the war or the warriors was excoriated by the press as jingoistic.

Again, have any opinion about the Terror Wars you like. Thats fine. But you dont make propaganda for your nations enemies while your soldiers are facing death for your sake. I said as much in articles and speeches and sometimes even in the room.

And my phone stopped ringing. The jobs dried up. In short order, my income went from the mesosphere to six feet under. I didnt care. American kids were having their legs blown off by squirrely dirtbags far from home. I wasnt going to curse them out in L.A. meetings so I could get work in Hollywood.

I cant prove it, but I know its so. I was blacklistedand by the same perfidious toads whod just spent fifty years whining about the last blacklist.

But heres the punchline. The guys who toed the line, who kept their heads down and their mouths shut, who traded whatever teaspoon of decency a screenwriter has in order to keep their Teslas chargedtheyre all out of work today. Because the blacklisters, encouraged, have come to run the town.

In Hollywood right now, its not enough to disrespect your mother country onscreen. You have to despise it. You have to depict it as a cesspit of racism and cruelty. Your hero has to be a victim. Your victim has to be a minority. Preferably female. Preferably with a penis. This is the twisted, unpatriotic, small-minded, racist, and wicked philosophy called wokeism, which has come to dominate not just Hollywood storytelling but Hollywood hiring as well. Heterosexual white males need not apply.

And yet this particular heterosexual white male is pulling down more film work than ever before. Why? Because patriotic American Liberals, now called Conservatives, have finally gotten wise to the need to create a culture with sane and generous Western values. These folks need meand guys and girls like meto tell good stories about true things, which, by definition, no woke person will ever be able to do.

If screenwriters continue to act alone, the counter-revolution will get nowhere. If my sad tale proves anything, it proves we need more than just stories. We need people who love stories, who understand stories. We need an infrastructure of cultural appreciation: review outlets and award ceremonies and interviews and publicityall the things that make writers less lonely and thus help popular culture thrive.

Which is why we need Christian Toto and Hollywood in Toto more than ever. And why we need books like this one, Virtue Bombs , to help explain how American culture has been hijacked and polluted, and how we might begin to get it back.