Conservative in Hollywood

When resistance is futile, comedy is inevitable.

Laughter is the best, and often only, revenge against authority.

David Zucker has made a career out of skewering the powerful in film spoofs like “Airplane!,” “The Naked Gun” and the “Scary Movie” series. That principle remains intact with his new film “An American Carol,” but his definition of the powerful has shifted.

Zucker had a political epiphany after Sept. 11, and says his new film is the public manifestation of it.

Zucker is one of a group of conservative Republicans – 40 or so – who meet to discuss politics, policy and filmmaking in a proudly liberal Hollywood.

“It’s a little dramatic to say that it’s secret,” Zucker said last week. “I don’t think anybody goes around lying about it. But there have been these lunch meetings” where they “talk about things that aren’t really talked about in the agency meetings and the pitch meetings and the studio meetings.”

It was at those meetings that Zucker met Stephen McEveety, who produced “An American Carol,” and some of the actors who appear in it, like Jon Voight and Kelsey Grammer.

In the spoof of liberal politics, Kevin Farley, brother of the late comedian Chris Farley, plays a Michael Moore-type, left-leaning filmmaker who is visited by three ghosts who help him discover the meaning of America.

“I met Voight at these meetings. And Kelsey I knew. (Dennis) Hopper we just got because he was conservative. And some of them aren’t conservative at all, like my co-writer … and Leslie Nielsen and David Alan Grier,” Zucker said.

“Basically, a bunch of people came together because they knew me, liked me and wanted to work with me or because they thought the script was funny.”

Anarchy is an “up against the wall” response to the establishment, while comedy is throwing things against the wall to see which make the loudest noise and biggest mess. While anarchy is perceived as leftist and the establishment as conservative, the Hollywood establishment, Zucker said, is liberal, and “aspects of it are pretty crazy and foolish and ripe for making fun.”

“The challenge is to find new targets for comedy,” he said. “And this just happened to be my attempt at finding a fresh target.”

Zucker could have kept making “Scary Movie” sequels, “but you have to do what animates you and what you’re interested in.” The “Scary Movies,” he said, “were fun and good and we laughed hard. But in terms of what I wanted to say as a person and wanted to make jokes about, it was this subject matter.”

In college – where he and his brother Jerry Zucker met partner Jim Abrahams – Zucker said he “was on the left, like everyone else. We were all against the Vietnam War. And into the protests. And I voted for Democrats right through the 2000 election. I voted for Al Gore.”

And he has two hybrid cars and solar panels on the roof of his home.

“I’m in a bunch of environmental groups,” he said, including Tree People. “I think you can be a Republican and still be into these other fine things.”

But he found questions on the left about “what our foreign policy had done to provoke” the Sept. 11 attacks “ridiculous.”

He produced anti-John Kerry ads and others against the Democrats for what he perceived as appeasement. A parody of President Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright giving a basketball signed by Michael Jordan to North Korean president Kim Jong Il carried the tag line: “Making nice to our enemies will not make them nice to us.” Another ad compared a Sept. 11 study group recommendation of diplomacy with Iran with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s peace agreement with Adolf Hitler.

In essence, Zucker believes he didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left him.

Noting that the Republican Party is imperfect as well, he added “that somebody once said there were two political parties. The stupid party and the dangerous party. I’m a proud member of the stupid party.”

In the past, Zucker said, he never thought of himself as a conservative.

“But I’m labeled a conservative now. Because I support smaller government, lower taxes and a strong military, all the things that JFK once espoused,” he said. “But now you have to be a Republican to be in favor of those things.”

Zucker’s brother, Jerry, “is appalled “by his political positions and the new film.

“He couldn’t be more against this. But we still love each other.”

And Zucker’s liberal friends “so far have had a good acceptance of me and my contrary views. But let’s see how they feel after they see the movie,” he said.

Had renegade Democrat Joe Lieberman run for president, Zucker said, “I never would have done this movie. Or had Clinton run again. Or maybe even Hilary.”

But he described Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama an “extreme left-wing candidate who doesn’t represent the country.”

And he praised Republican presidential nominee John McCain for being “ecumenical” about “reaching across the aisle.”

So, will Zucker campaign actively for McCain?

“I don’t know if I could do hardly more than I’m already doing,” he said.