The Hollywood Reporter reported Tuesday that Michael Mann’s latest feature will revolve around a joint U.S.-China task force tracking down a hacker in the Balkans—a surprising collaboration, given the Chinese army’s role in hacking governments and news agencies around the world.

Additionally, according to the Hollywood Reporter, Quentin Tarantino agreed this week to slightly mute depictions of violence for the release of his latest film, Django Unchained, in China. Tarantino was a vocal defender of the film’s violence and of Hollywood’s artistic freedom in the aftermath of the shootings last December.

The Wall Street Journal also reported earlier this month that Paramount Pictures will change the location of the zombie apocalypse’ origin from China in its upcoming film World War Z and that Iron Man 3 will have two versions for the American and Chinese audiences.

Skyfall’s producers removed a reference to Macau’s sex trade, Cloud Atlas removed sexual scenes, and Men in Black 3 removed scenes of New York’s Chinatown.

“This depiction of a productive collaboration between the U.S. and China would be the latest in a string of onscreen working relationships between the two countries,” noted the Hollywood Reporter.

“For an industry that promotes free expression and alleged liberal values to work with totalitarian government that is the antithesis of the values we hold dear as Americans is in many ways a hypocrisy,” said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch.

“They often mask what they do with other values such as the First Amendment, but if indeed they are working with China’s censors, then obviously they don’t believe in those values,” said Fitton.

Dan Harris, an attorney with Harris & Moure, an international law firm that represents American companies involved in China’s film industry, said China’s State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT) must approve all films prior to release.

“Growth in viewership of movies has slowed in the United States, but in China, with 1.3 billion people and more people emerging into its middle class all the time, movie viewership is skyrocketing,” said Harris.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D., W.Va.) introduced the Violent Content Research Act in January. The bill would compel the National Academy of Sciences to study the effects of violence in the media on children. The bill has bipartisan support but the entertainment industry is working against its passage.

“The censoring of content is simply ‘good business’ as far as the studios are concerned,” said Stephen Tropiano, an associate professor of screen studies at Ithaca College and author of Obscene, Indecent, Immoral and Offensive: 100+ Years of Censored, Banned, and Controversial Films.

According to Frank Couvares, an expert on censorship and the film industry in America at Amherst College, legislative interest in Hollywood is nothing new.

Movies were considered commerce, not art, until 1952 and were therefore not afforded First Amendment protection.

Pressure from religious groups, women’s groups, and other public interest groups led to the establishment of local and state censorship boards, said Couvares.

“There were real threats of government censorship. Every year, there were calls for federal censorship, which were never passed, but the threat was there,” Couvares said.

Hollywood studios created the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to head off calls for federal censorship. The MPAA established the Production Code Administration to assign film ratings and internally censor questionable material.

Couvares also noted Hollywood compliance with foreign censors while pushing back on U.S. regulation is nothing new.

“Hollywood has been doing this for a hundred years.”

Gabe Rottman, legislative council and policy adviser for the American Civil Liberties Union, said Hollywood’s relationship with China’s SARFT is not its only tie to censorship.

The MPAA was a prominent supporter of last year’s proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate. Rottman acknowledges the industry’s commercial need to protect its intellectual property but said the bill went to far.

“SOPA was a conduit to censorship,” Rottman said. “It implicated takedown of content from the internet, which is a direct First Amendment problem.”

The bill was defeated after the technology community organized a vigorous grassroots opposition.

When asked whether Hollywood’s relationship with China will give U.S. politicians leverage in pressing down on the film industry’s use of violent content, Fitton said not to worry.

“I think federal regulations of the content of films is something the courts will be very skeptical of. I just don’t see it happening.”

Couvares also agreed Hollywood’s work with China will not bolster the case for censoring violent content, noting Hollywood’s practice of censoring movies for foreign audiences is business as usual.

“It’s par for the course. This is nothing new in this.”

But Tropiano is wary. He said Hollywood’s commercial interest in censorship might damage the artistic quality of films, and studios are stepping into “dangerous territory.”

“I am sure it is easy for a studio to justify making a minor cut in a film so it could be released in China. But censorship alters the content of films, and when you alter the content, you alter the meaning.”

Although the MPAA declined to comment, former Sen. Christopher Dodd (D., Conn.), who is now chairman and CEO of MPAA, told reporters at this February’s National Press Conference that regulating content is a “slippery slope.”

“Movies do matter,” said Dodd.

The president’s campaign against gun violence has produced a stale debate marked by lots of speeches with little achieved. A more creative chief executive would have used this moment to widen the discussion by drawing attention to the increasingly graphic violence so pervasive in television shows, movies and videogames. Mr. Obama is particularly well positioned to challenge Hollywood because of his special relationship with the media world’s elites. They might be more likely to heed criticism coming from Mr. Obama than from any other president or member of Congress.

According to Brown, Obama asked Congress in January to give a “pittance” of $10 million toward research on the “causes and prevention of gun violence, including links between videogames, media images, and violence.”

However, the White House has yet to show interest on the evidence of media violence.

Mr. Biden met only with representatives of the entertainment and videogame industry and researchers who support the industry. Not a single doctor or researcher critical of media violence met with the vice president.

Brown cites evidence from studies by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, and the American Medical Association that all say exposure to media violence increases aggression and violent behavior in children.

Brown says in order to have a balanced gun control discussion Obama should reach out to his Hollywood friends such as Jeffrey Katzenberg, Steven Spielberg, and George Clooney.

The president has been more than willing to challenge the National Rifle Association, but that is like a Republican president standing up to labor unions—not a move that risks anything with his core supporters. Mr. Obama could show some real bravery by taking on Hollywood.

Favreau (affectionately known as “Favs” to his bros) along with his best bro, National Security Council spokesman, Tommy “TV” Vietor, announced their joint departure in numerous news outlets over the past several weeks. According to the Los Angeles Times, March 1 is the big day:

Amid the high-level departures and appointments of Obama’s second term, a quieter changing of the guard is taking place farther down the food chain. Stalwarts of the Obama generation have begun to take their leave.

The March 1 departure of Vietor, the original Obama youth, marks the moment.

The Times reports that both Vietor and Favreau are identified as the social leaders of the young White House staff that President Barack Obama took with him to Washington to help him change the world. Previous Washington Free Beacon reporting has detailed the hard-partying, beer-ponging twosome’s misadventures on the D.C. bar scene.

But with that mission accomplished, the inseparable duo plan to answer yet to another higher calling: Hollywood.

Some of the key personalities who left earlier in the Obama administration have gone in pursuit of creative goals. Onetime media aide Reid Cherlin is a political contributor to GQ magazine. Former speechwriter Jon Lovett is co-creator of NBC’s White House-based comedy ‘1600 Penn.’ […]

Vietor and Favreau have been cooking up an idea for a television series and hope to begin writing it this year. To pay the bills in the meantime, they plan to form a political consulting business. Vietor also hopes to appear on news shows to speak as a Democratic strategist.

Vietor is especially eager to get his face on television, humbly telling Politico’s Mike Allen:

“We both also want to pursue a screenwriting or TV project we’ve been thinking about forever, and I want to do a lot more TV about the administration and foreign policy,” Vietor wrote. “I plan on being very, very active in defending this administration once I can say whatever I want!”

With Lovett already in Los Angeles, pursuing a career as a struggling speechwriter and humorist, the pending arrival of his old mates should be a welcome relief.

Consider what the bill revealed about Hollywood’s relationship with the Democrats who run the Senate and live in the White House. It is a relationship fraught with denial, in which the gooiest rhetoric obscures the most self-interested acts. For example on May 11, 2012, filmmaker and actor Rob “Meathead” Reiner appeared on “Hardball with Chris Matthews”. The previous day Reiner had attended one of several Hollywood fundraisers at which President Barack Obama raised a total of $15 million. Wasn’t it “interesting,” Matthews said, that when individuals on “the Republican” side “invest in a Republican candidate, they’re investing in their businesses.”

They want a better tax break. They want less regulation. I’m, damn it, in a certain, weird, perverted way, they should get a tax write-off because what they’re doing is for the money!

Whereas “you guys”—by which Matthews meant the good guys, the Hollywood liberals—donate to Obama “for cultural reasons because you share values with the president.”

“That’s exactly right,” Reiner said. “And it’s interesting. But the Hollywood community is the only donor base, as you call it, that would—that has no quid pro quo.”

Yes, it is interesting. It is interesting that Matthews and Reiner were so completely and totally ensconced in their blanket of self-righteousness that they never stopped to consider that “people on Wall Street and the business world, in Texas and around there,” might also donate to Republicans because they share Republican cultural values.

It is also interesting—“interesting” is the most overused word on MSNBC—that Matthews and Reiner seemed blissfully unaware that the giant multinational corporations which produce and distribute Hollywood’s “content” around the globe have major financial interests at work in electoral politics.

It is interesting they would be so unaware because in February 2012 Jeffrey Katzenberg, the CEO of DreamWorks Animation and a major donor to Obama and the Obama affiliated Super PAC Priorities USA, was among the guests at a State Department lunch in honor of future Chinese dictator Xi Jinping. Katzenberg lunched with Xi and Vice President Joe Biden in Los Angeles five days later. At the end of Xi’s visit it was announced that Katzenberg and the Chinese government had set up Oriental DreamWorks, a $350 million studio deal to be based in Shanghai, and that U.S. and Chinese officials had agreed to terms by which more American movies could be shown in Chinese theaters.

Both arrangements improved the bottom line of a man who has “invested” upward of $10 million in the campaigns of Obama. Both arrangements were reported in noted media outlets such as the Financial Times and the Washington Post. However, neither arrangement fits into the kindergarten moral cosmology of Matthews and Reiner, in which Republican particles carry negative charges and Democratic particles carry positive ones, and so whatever complications Katzenberg’s moves might have presented to the myth of selfless liberal millionaires and billionaires were simply dismissed.

The sordid details of the fiscal cliff bill are more difficult to ignore. Once again the “only donor base” that “has no quid pro quo” saw its quo multiply nicely. The tax break that allows film and television studios to expense millions of dollars if they operate within the United States costs around $300 million a year. It was set to expire at the end of 2012. However, the efforts of Chris Dodd at the Motion Picture Association of America and of other Hollywood minions ensured that American taxpayers would provide this subsidy to Katzenberg and Spielberg and Clooney and company for at least another two years.

Rich Hollywood Democrats will pay more in taxes as part of this week’s deal, but they also stand to recoup those tax losses, and more, through political maneuvers including Chinese distribution arrangements, subsidies to production, and labor policies benefiting the constellation of unions that occupy the entertainment industry. It does not matter whether you are a Republican donor or a Democratic one: It’s always good to have influential friends.

The Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group has the most comprehensive catalogue of the gifts included in the fiscal cliff bill for Obama’s favorite constituencies. There is the Production Tax Credit, which benefits the alternative energy industry and its liberal benefactors. There is the exemption for New York City bonds, which is intended to help the city recover from a terrorist attack that occurred 11 years ago but which also helped line the pockets of Goldman Sachs and the future members of Democratic administrations employed there. There is a tax credit for maintaining railroad tracks for which BNSF Railway lobbied intensely. BNSF is a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, which is of course the conglomerate operated by the billionaire Democratic donor and oddball Warren Buffett.

All too revealing that well-heeled lobbyists, many of them liberal, are able to secure some $40 billion in tax breaks for connected interests while the elected representatives of the United States of America are unable or unwilling to stop a $100 billion payroll tax increase affecting 160 million people. Such is life in Washington, D.C., in the early twenty-first century, where the superrich divide the spoils under the guise of enlightened morality. Or as Chris Matthews said so well: “What they’re doing is for the money!”

Mr. Katzenberg’s fundraising prowess has earned him access and a role as the informal liaison between Hollywood and the White House, as the industry continues seeking government help against online piracy—the theft and resale of movies, music and TV shows over the Internet.

White House visitor logs show about two dozen entries for Mr. Katzenberg’s political consultant, Andy Spahn, while Mr. Obama has been president, although it wasn’t clear how many were on behalf of Mr. Katzenberg or other clients. The logs show Mr. Spahn had six meetings with Mr. Obama’s former political director, Patrick Gaspard; three with former top adviser David Axelrod, and two with William Daley, then White House chief of staff.

Katzenberg has become Obama’s most important fundraiser, collecting more than $6.6 million for Obama since 2007 and contributing at least $2 million to Obama’s Super PAC Priorities USA. The Wall Street Journal notes that Katzenberg has also benefited from the relationship, leveraging a seat at a State Department lunch with China’s Vice President Xi Jinping.

Following the SOPA flap, Mr. Katzenberg made the most of the visit by Mr. Xi, China’s presumed next leader. Hollywood’s eagerness to do more China business has been hindered by Chinese requirements that foreign movies be sold through a government-run monopoly that lets in only 20 foreign movies per year.

Five days after the February State Department lunch in Mr. Xi’s honor that Mr. Katzenberg also attended, Mr. Xi appeared at an economic conference in Los Angeles followed by a lunch attended by Messrs. Biden and Katzenberg. There, Mr. Katzenberg announced his company’s expansion into China, unveiling a deal to set up Oriental DreamWorks, a $350 million production studio in Shanghai in a joint venture formed with local companies and investors after about a year of negotiations.

That evening, Chinese and U.S. officials announced a deal that would make it easier and more profitable for Hollywood studios to show their films in China, a development that Mr. Biden said would “significantly increase” access for U.S.-made films. Mr. Katzenberg’s Shanghai company will be working through a local venture, which means it can circumvent the quota.

However, the Wall Street Journal fails to mention that Katzenberg’s deal with China has become the subject of an SEC investigation into possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Katzenberg’s relationship with the White House has become so strong that during debate over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), Chris Dodd, head of the Motion Picture Association of America, called Katzenberg to learn more about Obama’s plans. Katzenberg has since been a key figure in negotiations with Silicon Valley to broker a compromise over SOPA.

Galvanizing conservatives, Dinesh D’Souza and John Sullivan’s documentary 2016: Obama’s America grossed a stellar $6.3 million as it expanded nationwide over the weekend, beating a trio of new films.

The anti-Barack Obama film, opening last month in only a few theaters, boasts a domestic cume of $9.2 million, the top gross of the year for a documentary (excluding nature films). Bully was the previous crownholder with $3.5 million. …

Obama’s America—promoted heavily on talk radio and distributed by Rocky Mountain Pictures—timed its nationwide expansion to the Republican National Convention, which gets underway this week in Tampa, Fla. The convention was supposed to get underway Monday, but tropical storm Isaac is complicated plans.

The documentary tied Premium Rush and beat out Hit and Run and The Apparition, three Hollywood offerings with larger promotional budgets, bigger production costs, and popular stars. It also had the highest per-screen average of any film in the top 15.

It is unclear if Hollywood will follow up on this surprise success by churning out dozens of copycat conservative documentaries.

Between Jan. 1, 2011, and July 20, 2012, employees at the seven major media conglomerates — Comcast, Disney, News Corp., Time Warner, CBS, Viacom and Sony – donated $4.1 million to Democrats and only $711,000 to Republicans. That means Hollywood employees are backing Dems with about six times as much cash as the GOP. …

Those who work at Time Warner, home of HBO and Time magazine, lean the most lopsidedly left, according to the figures, with the conglomerate’s employees giving $1.1 million to Democrats and a meager $39,000 to Republicans.

Republicans get little help from liberals’ favorite target: Fox News.

Even those employed by News Corp., home of Fox News Channel and controlled by the conservative-leaning Rupert Murdoch, gave the vast majority of their political dollars to Democrats, to the tune of $488,000 compared with $165,000.

Obama’s largest contributors come from the entertainment industry. Misogynist TV host Bill Maher and Academy Award winner Morgan Freeman each contributed $1 million to Obama’s super PAC, Priorities USA.

Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg has raised more than $2.5 million for the president. The mega-donor is currently under SEC investigation for allegedly bribing Chinese officials to secure a movie deal brokered in part by Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“So on a whole host of issues, you’ve got very stark differences.  And the good news is that you guys are the tie-breaker. You and the American people.  And when you walk into that ballot box — or don’t walk into the ballot box.  That’s the second time I’ve said this today.  (Laughter.)  When you walk into the voting booth — it’s illegal, I’m sure, to walk into a ballot box.  (Laughter.)  When you cast your ballot, you will have the opportunity to determine the course of this country’s direction not just tomorrow, or next year, or five years from now, but probably for decades to come.”

The new documents could shine a greater light on how the administration helped the filmmakers create a movie that is anticipated to portray Obama in a glowing light.

The administration faced a chorus of criticism for granting filmmakers Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal unprecedented access to sensitive insider information pertaining to the bin Laden raid.

Politico reports on the new documents:

The documents about CIA dealings with the film now titled “Zero Dark Thirty” were “inadvertently overlooked” in response to a Freedom of Information Act request and lawsuit filed by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, Justice Department attorneys said in a motion filed in federal court in Washington Tuesday afternoon (posted here).

“The CIA discovered a 4 to 5 inch stack of records potentially responsive to plaintiff’s FOIA request that had been inadvertently overlooked during the CIA’s search,” Civil Division attorney Marcia Berman wrote. “The CIA is continuing to look into the circumstances of the discovery of the new documents to ensure the adequacy of its search.”

A CIA spokesman said the agency does not comment on matters in litigation.

Westport News reports:

Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein will open his Westport waterfront estate for a $35,800 per head fundraiser for President Obama’s re-election next month, reciprocation for the coveted State Dinner invite he received earlier this year from the White House.

Obama will then be whisked off to a fundraiser in Stamford, where tickets are expected to go for $500 a pop.