It has long amused me that in a country with 40% of the population considering themselves to be conservatives, we have an entertainment industry so dominated by a political point of view that regards conservatives with contempt. Andrew Klavan, in his own inimitable fashion, explains how Hollywood distorts reality and presents it to us as entertainment.
The playwright David Mamet has committed heresy in Hollywood by coming out as a conservative. He explains in the interview below that the lockstep political views in Hollywood come about as part of the herd instinct of a company town.
Who knows, if enough Hollywood heretics speak out like Mamet maybe some day this Klavan video will come to life:
Actually, I am not too surprised. The arts (using the term loosely to include Hollywood) have been perceived as a more liberal profession for a long time now. Naturally, it would attract more liberal minded people, and perhaps repel more conservative minded ones. If you are a liberal college student, what major are you most likely to gravitate toward – theatre or finance? Marketing is about as close as liberals would get to a business major. And likewise in reverse for conservative students.
What you say is true now c matt, but it is a very recent development. Up to the 20th century artists tended to be quite heterogeneous in their politics. If anything, I think more artists would have been roughly on the right than than the left. (Think John Wilkes Booth for example.) This began to change during the Great Depression, along with the shift in academia from the right to the left.