'Blind Side' Director 'Regrets' Bush-Bashing Joke

First off, kudos to Patrick Goldstein at the L.A. Times who yesterday proved capable of criticizing Big Hollywood without making a whole lot of stuff up. We trust and hope this is the start of a new relationship, a turning over of a new leaf…

Bygones Patrick, and Happy Thanksgiving.

Not to steal any of Big Government’s thunder, but in that massive ACORN dumpster dump a Leftist Decoder Ring was found that translates Left-speak into what the rest of us call The Truth. Mike Flynn was kind enough to let me use it in order to translate Goldstein’s write up…

Goldstein: It used to be the liberals who loved to play the victim. But now it’s conservatives who just can’t enough of that warm and cuddly feeling of being an oppressed minority.

Decoder Ring: Uh,oh, they’re starting to fight back.

—

Goldstein: Nolte proposes the wildly paranoid theory that even if you are a conservative working in Hollywood, you have to placate the Bush-hating liberals by taking shots at conservatives in your movies.

Decoder Ring: Wildly Paranoid = Does George Soros know he’s on to us?

—

Goldstein asked “Blind Side” director John Lee Hancock about the Bush joke. Here’s his full answer:

“This wasn’t in the book. It was something I witnessed several years ago in a post office. It was not intended to represent Leigh Anne Tuohy’s feelings about Bush (she’s a conservative Republican) but rather the civil servant’s. Given Leigh Anne’s dress and demeanor I figured the civil servant would be knocking down Leigh Anne a notch by taking a slap at Bush. I always thought of it as a smile, not a laugh. After completing the movie and playing it for an audience I realized it was, for some, more of a laugh, and a cheap one to boot. I do regret not coming up with something more clever. But it wouldn’t be a movie of mine if I didn’t somehow figure out a way to piss off both conservatives and liberals.”

“After completing the movie and playing it for an audience…”?

Wait … What?

…To the Decoder Ring!

Decoder Ring: See bull shit detector.

Bull Shit Detector: A major studio film with an A-list star had no test screenings prior to picture being locked?

The director all but admits the joke’s falling flat with audiences, so what was different about his test audience? And you would think the studio would’ve made sure to hold early screenings for their target audience, conservative Christians. But it was only after the film couldn’t be edited that the joke fell flat? Every test audience hears the same speech, “This is a work in progress.” The whole idea of test screenings is to remove “cheap” laughs in order to avoid “pissing off” your audience.

I stand by my “wildly paranoid” speculation, which boils down to … way too many Hollywoodists saw an early cut of the film and told the director: “Dude, you gotta leave that in!”