Here’s another article about the Jon Voight brouhaha, except this one — written by Politico‘s Jeffrey Ressner — has a Voight quote: “It’s out of line to insinuate that we should blacklist people for speaking their minds. It’s an important time for people on the conservative side to speak out, [but] it’s a strange thing when people in this country can’t express their opinions without being attacked.”
I agree 100% that it’s wrong to insinuate that anyone should blacklist anyone for speaking their minds. I didn’t think I did that last week by confessing that if I was a producer making a film I might not hire Voight for it. I thought I was just speaking for myself by admitting to a momentary feeling of petty vengeance. Face it — it feels good to stick to people you don’t like or disagree with, but I wouldn’t recommend or advocate hostile get-backs as a general policy.
I’ve said repeatedly that there’s a big difference between (a) saying I “might” theoretically stick it to someone I disagree with by ignoring them or not giving them a job on a movie and (b) suggesting, much less advocating, that other liberal-minded industry types act on this feeling in reality. I’ve also stated a core belief that hiring actors should always be about what’s best for the film. But none of this matters because the right-wing hammers are going to make as much hay as they can out of the portions of what you’ve said that serve their agenda, and never the all of it.
Voight also told Ressner that “I don’tt want to make a big deal out of this. I made some very strong points, and you do expect that people are going to respond to it in a variety of ways. And that’s how it should be.”
Yesterday Glenn Beck went off on yours truly a little bit on CNN last night,. The usual torrent of wingnut hate mail followed. News cycles on a particular story are pretty short these days — 48 to 72 hours — but this thing has been going since last Tuesday or Wednesday. And it’s not over yet as I’ve agreed to come on CNN this afternoon and The O’Reilly Factor tomorrow sometime. O’Reilly will try and kick the stuffing out of me, but I’ll get a readership bump out of it so why not?