The True Face of Hollywood

This week’s Washington Times column:

Sometimes I just don’t get the Republican Party.

Back in 2004, a smart, good-looking moderate Republican Hispanic ran for Congress. At the time Victor Elizalde was just under 40 years old and working as an executive at a big-time Hollywood studio. As an ethnic minority, a family man and a rare open conservative in an industry dominated by liberals, Mr. Elizalde represented hope and change for the Republican Party.

Yet because he was running for Henry A. Waxman s safe seat, Mr. Elizalde got no support from the Republican Party . In fact, no one in the party s leadership took notice of him. As a result Mr. Waxman trounced Mr. Elizalde with 71 percent of the vote.

Mr. Elizalde has since moved on with his life and is no longer pursuing a political career. What a major waste of talent. Yet again, I blame the conservative movement and the Republican Party for writing off Hollywood completely.

Mr. Waxman has run virtually uncontested for 35 years now. And he causes nothing but problems for Republicans. To hear him speak, you d think the Grand Old Party is the No. 1 scourge in the world. Yet Republicans are nice to him and do nothing to hold him accountable for his miserable failure as Hollywood’s key congressional representative in Washington.

In 2006, Time magazine dubbed him “The Scariest Guy in Washington,” touting that Mr. Waxman has spent the previous “eight years churning out some 2,000 headline-grabbing reports, blasting the Bush administration and the Republican Congress on everything from faulty

prewar intelligence and flaws in missile defense to the flu-vaccine shortage and arsenic in drinking water.” Two years later, Britain’s Guardian newspaper similarly described him as “the scariest politician in Washington.”

Since Mr. Waxman was first elected to office in 1974 to represent much of the entertainment business’s core working population, many of the industry s rank-and-file jobs have flown the coop. Film and television production have gone to places like Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Romania and beyond – because California is no longer hospitable for doing business.

According to a recent report from the Center for Entertainment Industry Data and Research, Hollywood has been rocked by lost feature-film production. Despite a 30 percent rise in overall

production, the value of productions in the U.S. has declined from $3.93 billion in 1998 to $3.38 billion in 2005, a statistic that when ripple effects throughout the economy are added in, the Center estimated has cost 47,000 jobs per year and $23 billion.

Where was Henry?

You can read the column in full here.