What makes money in Hollywood? Who cares!

A buried article in The Hollywood Reporter yielded this ruby:

Movies with pro-atheism messages in 2010, for example, earned an average $6.6 million while movies portraying "very strong Biblical morality" earned $78 million. Movies with lots of profanity earned $23 million and movies without profanity earned $50 million. Movies with messages advocating a "Christian" worldview earned $105 million and those advocating "miscellaneous morality" earned $10 million, according to the study.

Imagine if Hollywood were a restaurant. Your menu earned raves in the middle 1900's and folks flocked to feast upon your fare. Your success made you proud. Rather than continue to crank out the food the masses liked and the food that made you famous, you began experimenting. From time to time you crafted a tasty morsel, but most of the trials were terrible.  You kept cramming the menu full of your culinary failures because you and a few of your cooks in the back room thought them sophisticated.  But the masses ignored them. They smelled putrid, looked worse, and left the diner cramping for days afterward. To pay the bills, you maintained a few old-style specialties on the menu buried in between the fried spiders and sea-horses-on-a-stick.

Still folks came.  Call it nostalgia. You kept raising prices to make it look like more folks enjoyed your product but the dwindling numbers coming through and walking past your doors told the true story.

Then you began to award yourself. The Best Plate of the Year goes to "Maggoty Meatloaf in the Shape of a Cross." Even with the award, nobody wanted it. When you put it on the to-go menu, still it languished.

How does such a corporation succeed? Any other business to use so ludicrous a model would have bankrupted itself.

What I wouldn't give for a love story that doesn't start with two individuals sleeping with someone else who ultimately sleep with one another, face a crisis and find "true love" in the end.  How about a love story about folks with moral fiber and about the consequences for folks who lack such?

What about a real-life tale of heroism like "Sergeant York." They're out there. A great movie and Gary Cooper doesn't drop a single f-bomb. Would it have been better if he had?

Think of this.  Had Ford stuck with the Edsel and continued gagging up modifications of the same unwanted clunker year after year, Henry's company would have faced fiscal finality long before George Bush took office.

Hey, Hollywood! Serve us up a hamburger and fries.  From time to time, we'll even order a filet with some unpronounceable vegetable side, but you can take the spiders, sea-horses and "Black Swans" off the menu. Yesterday.