It's old news by now, but I'm sure a lot of right-wingers are feeling a renewed Schadenfreude as they read this in today's New York Times:

With the last of the summer blockbusters fading from the multiplex, Hollywood's box office slump has hardened into a reality that is setting the movie industry on edge. The drop in ticket sales from last summer to this summer, the most important moviegoing season, is projected to be 9 percent by Labor Day, and the drop in attendance is expected to be even deeper, 11.5 percent, according to Exhibitor Relations, which tracks the box office....

To the Right, this couldn't happen to a more deserving community -- Hollywood, that left-wing cesspool.

Being a liberal, I'm going to offer the usual recommendations for reversing Hollywood's box-office decline: fewer commercials at theaters, fewer sequels, fewer TV remakes, fewer special-effects movies that look like all the other special effects movies. But, perhaps surprisingly, I'm also going to second the Right's prescription for Hollywood: make movies right-wingers want to see. I warn you, though: it won't be pretty.

I think this would work because for years booksellers have been able to count on the success of shrill, tendentious, amateurish-looking books from right-wing authors. Conservatives gobble them up -- right now, for instance, the two top nonfiction books on the New York Times bestseller list are right-wing, the IRS-bashing FairTax Book and Bernard Goldberg's 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America. (And remember: it's summer. This is what conservatives regard as beach reading.)

Obvious, there is a significant segment of the population that wants to be bashed over the head with an agreeable ideology, and with one-dimensional portraits of villains from the other side. So why doesn't Hollywood just give these people want they want in film form?

The result would probably be a bit like what Anchee Min felt when she was growing up in China during the Cultural Revolution. In her memoir, Red Azalea, she describes her response to the culture of her time:

I became an opera fan. There were not many forms of entertainment. The word 'entertainment' was considered a dirty bourgeois word. The opera was something else. It was a proletarian statement. The revolutionary operas created by Madam Mao, Comrade Jiang Ching. To love or not to love the operas was a serious political attitude. It meant to be or not to be a revolutionary. The operas were taught on radio and in school, and were promoted by the neighborhood organizations. For ten years. The same operas. I listened to the operas when I ate, walked and slept. I grew up with the operas. they became my cells. I decorated the porch with posters of my favorite opera heroines. I sang the operas wherever I went. My mother heard me singing in my dreams; she said that I was preserved by the operas. It was true. I could not go on a day without listening to the operas.

Not all that different from the right-wing response to The Passion of the Christ, I'd say.

Just in case you don't know what these works were like, here's the synopsis of one of the best known, The Red Detachment of Women, which was a ballet, an opera, and a film:

On tropical Hainan Island, a group of courageous women pursue the communist battle against the Nationalists. Wu Qionghua joins the group and becomes a proud leader after having suffered pain, humiliation and loss. The evil landlord Nan Batian had killed her father and taken Wu as his slave. She tried to escape but was always captured and punished. She was eventually freed by Hong Changqing, a communist agent disguised as a rich overseas Chinese arms dealer.

Wu joins the female detachment of the Red Army led by Hong. However, obsessed by her desire to seek revenge on Nan Batian, she is injured and endangers her comrades. Through correct communist education she is able to transform her personal hatred into class solidarity. After Hong is burnt to death by Nan Batian, Wu leads her women’s detachment in a successful offensive against the tyrant. He is captured, paraded through the streets and executed. Wu now takes over Hong’s command and continues the battle.

I think every Hollywood studio should set up a semi-autonomous right-wing film division, with a ponderous name (the right-wing book division of Penguin is called Sentinel). These divisions should make unsubtle, ham-fisted movies and then market each one with the strong suggestion that every ticket sold is a big thumb in the collective eye of Dan Rather, Ward Churchill, Jacques Chirac, Michael Moore, and the "MSM."

What kind of movies? Oh, how about The Red-State Detachment of Women, about a group of plucky cadres from the Concerned Women for America who battle for the right of pharmacists to refuse to distribute morning-after pills to rape victims? Or what about Taking the Political Science Department at Oberlin College (by Strategy), about a group of plucky home-schoolers who bring about an educational counterrevolution at a liberal-elite nerve center after sabotaging a sandal-wearing sixties-radical professor's "Iraq and the New Imperialism" teach-in?

If you film it, wingnuts will come.