Losing hearts and minds

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During the Golden Age of Hollywood in the 1930s, '40s and '50s, the major movie studios worked closely with the Protestant Film Office and the Roman Catholic Legion of Decency to reach the broadest possible audience and to avoid governmental censorship.

Due to this partnership, films like "Ben Hur" and "The Ten Commandments" became the two highest grossing religious pictures of all time.

Because of a withdrawal of funding by conservative denominations and in-fighting among liberal denominations, however, the Protestant Film Office shut its doors in 1966, contrary to the desires of many studio heads at the time. This invaluable advisory resource on spiritual, moral and religious matters left a vacuum in the entertainment industry.

To placate the anxious public, a new rating system was introduced by Jack Valenti, a liberal marketing guru in the Lyndon Johnson administration. Three years after the closing of the Protestant Film Office, attendance in movie theaters plunged from 44 million weekly to 19 million weekly in 1969.

By this time television had been around for 20 years and VCR and cable were 20 years into the future, so it is clear the biggest impact on the box office was the degradation in the moral and spiritual content of the movies.

In 1969, "Midnight Cowboy," a homoerotic X-rated movie about a male prostitute dressed in a cowboy hat with a sickly, foul-mouthed friend, won the Oscar for Best Picture.

The power vacuum left by the closing of the Protestant Film Office had begun to be filled by radical, leftist and secular elements whose main purpose was to "push the envelope" and change the mores and political outlook of the American public.

A new crop of independent young filmmakers began appearing in the '80s and '90s. Using new and cheaper technology, this group started getting noticed for dark, edgy movies with explicit sexual themes. Many of these newcomers were radicalized by neo-Marxist, atheist and feminist intellectuals now running many film departments on our nation's campuses, departments like those on the campuses of New York University and Northwestern University in Chicago.

The young filmmakers are now in control of much of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, as clearly indicated by this year's Oscar nominations. These are actors, directors and producers who make or appear in one or two movies for Sundance Film Festival, but have never directed or acted in a movie produced by one of the six major studios.

This large Academy voting block anointed the movie receiving the most nominations this year -- sexually explicit, "Brokeback Mountain." The film was nominated in eight categories but won in three, none of them for acting. "Brokeback" garnered Oscars for best director, adapted screenplay and its musical score.