Last week, we linked to essays by Mark Steyn and Brian Anderson on Hollywood's ever-shrinking ability tell stories that don't involve stock baddies such as Neo-Nazis and eeeeeevil businessmen.

With a few notable exceptions, Hollywood has been making businessmen and corporations villains since the leftwing Young Turks took over in the late '60s. Those young turks are now establishment old men themselves these days (Spielberg, Lucas, Scorsese, Coppola, et al), but that doesn't mean that their thinking has changed in any way shape or form since those Medium Cool radical chic days.

Edward Jay Epstein writes that these days, there's another reason why businessmen are typically Hollywood badies:

Why don't the movies have plausible, real-world villains anymore? One reason is that a plethora of stereotype-sensitive advocacy groups, representing everyone from hyphenated ethnic minorities and the physically handicapped to Army and CIA veterans, now maintain liaisons in Hollywood to protect their images. The studios themselves often have "outreach programs" in which executives review scripts and characters with representatives from these groups, evaluate their complaints, and attempt to avoid potential brouhahas.

Finding evil villains is not as easy as it was in the days when a director could choose among Nazis, Communists, KGB, and Mafiosi. Still, in a pinch, these old enemies will serve. For example, the 2002 apocalyptic thriller Sum of All Fears, based on the Tom Clancy novel, originally had Muslim extremists exploding a nuclear bomb in Baltimore. Paramount decided, however, to change the villains to Nazis residing in South Africa to avoid offending Arab-American and Islamic groups. Yet, even if aging Nazis lack any credible "outreach program" in Hollywood, they can no longer be credibly fit into many contemporary movies. "The list [of non-offensive villains] narrows quickly once you get past the tired clichés of Nazis," a top talent agency executive pointed out in an e-mail. "You'd be surprised at how short the list is."

For sci-fi and horror movies, there are always invaders from alien universes and zombies from another dimension, but for politico-thrillers, the safest remaining characters are lily-white, impeccably dressed American corporate executives. They are especially useful as evildoers in foreign-based thrillers, since their demonization does not run the risk of gratuitously offending officials in countries either hosting the filming or supplying tax and production subsidies. The "Mission Impossible" franchise replaced the Russian and Chinese heavies that populated the TV series with, in Mission Impossible 2, a WASPish-looking financier who controlled a pharmaceutical company that unleashed a horrific virus on the world in the hopes of cashing in on the antidote. Here, as in other movies in this genre, businessmen's killings are not just figurative. Unlike other stereotype-challenged groups, CEOs and financiers, lacking a connection with the studios' outreach programs, have become an essential part of Hollywood's new version of the axis of evil.

As Steyn wrote last week, "the movies are now so constrained by political correctness the very act of storytelling is itself endangered. That's something slightly more ominous than the feeble limousine liberalism many conservatives blame for the alleged box-office slump".