Novelist and screenwriter Andrew Klavan (who wrote True Crime, filmed, after a PC-clean up by Clint Eastwood, and Don’t Say A Word, which starred Michael Douglas) looks at the one-sided nature of the movies playing at your local multiplex:

I can’t help feeling a little disgruntled about the movies the Academy decided to pass over. For instance, how could they ignore Heroes In The Sand, that incredibly stirring tribute to the fighting Americans who blasted the Taliban out of Afghanistan? And what were they thinking when they slighted Reason To Live, the biting drama about a once left-wing university professor who comes under fire when he accepts Jesus Christ as his savior? And what about Goodbye, You’re Out of Luck, the classy suspenser about a heroic 1950’s federal investigator who breaks up a ring of homegrown Communist spies?

Not only were these films ignored by the Academy, but their chances for critical recognition and box office success were severely hampered by the fact they were never made. Which is exactly why I didn’t see any of the Academy nominees when they first came out.

See, my problem with Hollywood is not about the movies it makes, it’s about the movies it never makes. I know we can ferret Christian symbolism out of Narnia or family values out of War of the Worlds. But let’s face it, we’re basically going begging for what ought to be the overwhelming norm: movies that dramatize the conservative beliefs, lifestyles and interests of the majority of the audience.

Because these films don’t exist, I find myself staying away from the ones that do exist, films I would probably enjoy were I not so wearied by the same cluster of agendas and ideas getting screen time over and over and over. I find myself thinking, A frustrated housewife who’s secretly a lesbian? Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. A spy who discovers America’s foreign policy is corrupt? Oh, please, not again. A victim of… something or other… triumphs in a lawsuit? Hey, maybe there’s a ballgame on TV tonight.

When opposing worldviews collide at the multiplex, it’s an exciting sign of life, a sign that the people who live in our country are being represented by the arts of the country, that they’re holding their differences up against each other as a means of national self-examination. But an endless discussion among people who all share the same opinions ultimately becomes a droning soliloquy. The Hollywood left doesn’t win any arguments by silencing the other side. In the end, they simply lose their audience.

But the lack of cinematic diversity is not all that new a development: last week, I pulled out my copy of MGM's Doctor Zhivago to test a new DVD player. When you consider that that 1965 picture postcard of a movie (helmed by British master craftsman David Lean) is the closest that Hollywood has ever gotten to a big screen repudiation of the Soviet Union, you begin to understand just how one-sided Hollywood storytelling has been for literally decades.

Update: Want the mathematics of it? Part Four of Chris Anderson's "Death of the Blockbuster" series is up, over at his brilliant Long Tail Website.