It's a great day in New York...

...especially in terms of equality. I've been busy all day today (so excuse the late updates), but I wanted to take a quick minute to praise my home state's passage of a Same-Sex Marriage Bill. Equal rights and love over bigotry is paramount to me, and even as a straight male, I see the incredible importance of this. So, just saying...yay for New York!

The Tea Party moves from politics to cinema?

The Hollywood Reporter talks about an upcoming movie targeting those idiots...I mean patriots (no really, I mean idiots):

Atlas Shrugged, a novel in which society’s most productive citizens choose to disappear, was published in 1957, and filmmakers have spent nearly every year since trying to adapt it. They finally succeeded, and the first part of what’s planned as a trilogy comes out April 15. If you didn’t know that, it’s likely you’re not a member of the Tea Party.

It was probably only a matter of time before Hollywood tried tapping the e-mail lists and social networks of the giant political movement, as distributor Rocky Mountain Pictures and filmmakers including co-producer Harmon Kaslow have for Atlas Shrugged: Part 1.

Despite years of cinematic interest and high hopes for stars and funding, the film was made for less than $10 million, with Taylor Schilling — who appeared on NBC’s short-lived Mercy — playing protagonist Dagny Taggart.

By Hollywood standards, the marketing budget is tiny, so word-of-mouth from Tea Partiers sympathetic to the film’s message is crucial to its success.

The film is also the perfect test case to see whether such an effort can work because Ayn Rand’s novel extols free markets and entrepreneurialism and excoriates government coercion and overtaxation, values that unite Tea Partiers. In fact, rallies invariably feature signs that mimic the book’s opening line: “Who Is John Galt?” Another common sign at Tea Party rallies asks, “Is Atlas Shrugging?” If Hollywood can’t persuade this demographic to support Atlas, it might as well write off the Tea Party as a marketing source.