I just got a response from a top independent movie producer on my new screenplay which has made me melancholic, not only for myself but for the sad state of modern cinema. This producer constructs exceptional films on budgets that would barely cover Pedro Pascale’s makeup, while evoking better performances from Mel Gibson, Kurt Russell, Vince Vaughn, and, currently, Rob Lowe. My script is Operation Cowboy: The Assassination of John Wayne, based on the true story of a 1950 Soviet plot to murder John Wayne because of his success flushing out Hollywood communists — in showbiz jargon, it’s Day of the Jackal meets Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. And what depressed me is not that the producer disliked it, but rather that he loved it yet can’t move forward with it.

Good and bad news. I really enjoyed this script. It is so wonderful. I would love to see one of the classy old school guys direct this and really bring this to the screen in a way that feels like we were there with JW and the other characters. I honestly have zero notes, just fabulous. Now the challenging part … I do not have nearly the resources or leeway to get to make something like this. Maybe if I was 5 years into building a new American movie studio and things were healthy, but the sheer cost of the production would be far outside my current zone and wheelhouse. Don’t laugh, but I think you need to bring this to John Wayne’s family and ask them to raise the $20m budget. Maybe the REAGAN producers would be the right fit?

“Ay, there’s the rub,” as people who have read my musings here over the past seven years know by now. The fiction I write in books and scripts is inconceivable to modern Hollywoke — traditionalist humanist fare where men, majority straight white men, rise to heroic height, and girl power comprises femininity, beauty, sensuality, maternal instinct, and compassion, minus the ability to beat up men twice their weight or show them up as morons. In other words, now familiar reality over feminist fantasy. Which means Disney and Paramount won’t be having a bidding war over Paper Tigers or The Washington Trail anytime soon.

Even knowing this, I put off working on the contracted sequel to The Washington Trail to write Operation Cowboy, a script sure to repel Hollywoke vampires like a crucifix. Not only does it idealize a time when masculine giants ruled on both sides of the screen and gorgeous women drew both sexes into movie seats — elevating the greatest entertainment factory since the Globe Theatre — it challenges the ultimate Hollywood creed — that the Blacklist was the artistic holocaust. In historical fact, there was substantial communist infiltration of the screen trade intent on undermining traditional values such as family, faith, and capitalism.

And the witch hunters who opposed it were legendary good men like Gary Cooper, Walt Disney (yes, the irony versus his Marxist corporate successors), Jimmy Stewart, William Holden, and SAG President Ronald Reagan, all worth more than Dalton Trumbo, Lillian Hellman, John Howard Lawson, Edward Dmytryk, and other communist artists.

“But the titan among them was the Duke — John Wayne,” I state in the opening narration of Operation Cowboy. “Wayne had cofounded the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. The MPA proved highly effective in exposing then expelling countless Hollywood communists. So effective that in order to complete the Stalinist takeover of the film industry and the American culture — John Wayne had to die.”

Of course, I knew the script would have no shot as a Hollywood production. That its only chance for life would be a formidable independent non-woke auteur like the aforementioned gentleman, of whom there are far too few, who have to struggle to put every penny of their meager budget on the screen, and for whom a project like mine would be out of reach.

So why did I write it? Because it’s a terrific story that has to be told, and no one else was going to tell it — or could tell it as well as me. A story that puts screen and real-life heroes like John Wayne and Ronald Reagan back in the pantheon where they belong, after decades of liberal smearing, along with less famous men.

Who knows that Merian C. Cooper, the coproducer of four John Ford-John Wayne Westerns (Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Rio Grande, The Searchers) and the classic King Kong flew World War I combat missions for Poland against Soviet troops, was captured and interred in a brutal USSR POW camp, and almost died before he killed a guard and managed an incredible 500-mile escape into Latvia? None of the Hollywood weenies who won’t read my script — or watch the film version if it gets made — could even imagine such a man. But they’ll make the hundredth movie about some blacklisted hack who spent three months in a cozy prison whining about artistic repression.

The culture has finally turned against them despite their flailing best efforts. They know this, but lack the talent to stop sucking the real male and feminine essence out of every IP they could never create. Unfortunately for me, and conservative artists like me, investors who could reap the financial reward have yet to step in and pick up the free money, leaving too little for such as my producer friend.

Next fall, God willing, I’ll be teaching Creative Writing and Film Studies at a great Florida university. I’ll try to impress on my students that quality in one subject entirely affects the other. It’s a lesson modern Hollywood can’t comprehend. And if I can inspire the next Ernst Lubitch, Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder, Leigh Bracket, Ernest Lehman, or William Goldman, I hope the screen trade in the future will be friendlier to him or her than it presently is for me.

READ MORE from Lou Aguilar:

It’s Charlie Kirk’s America Now

Trump Embodies the Great Truths of an Old Book

Diamonds Are Forever but Not Britain

Get a jump on your early Christmas shopping, and your love life, with my popular Yuletide romance novel, The Christmas Spirit. Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and fine bookstores everywhere.