“The Times examination reveals the workings of an opaque economy for this global wealth. Lacking incentive or legal obligation to identify the sources of money, an entire chain of people involved in high-end real estate sales — lawyers, accountants, title brokers, escrow agents, real estate agents, condo boards and building workers — often operate with blinders on. As Rudy Tauscher, a former manager of the condos at Time Warner, said: ‘The building doesn’t know where the money is coming from. We’re not interested.’”
 — Who can afford the luxury of being interested in where the money is coming from to buy all those condos, especially when there is so much to count?

Here’s a look at the live-action shorts nominated for an Oscar in 2015. (Here’s a look at the animated shorts category, too.) Most of these are really good! I SAID MOST. Here they are from best and winningest to… least best.

La Lampe Au Beurre De Yak. So often, short films feel like compressed features; this is a rare chance to take advantage of the short format. It’s worth reading about in more detail. Really lovely; it may repel voters because it doesn’t use actors, isn’t about someone overcoming a crisis, all that crap. THIS IS GREAT and I felt like I was seeing something new and kinda magical. This is what should win. But what is more likely to win is…

Parvaneh. This is a classical format: an immigrant girl in a distant land gets in trouble. In this case, she is from Afghanistan, and meets a privileged Swiss girl. And they become friends! It’s actually really good. Perfectly done, interesting without being gross. Into it. Nice job. (Warning, this trailer is kind of dumb, but accurate.)

Aya. You know when you’re watching a foreign film and you’re like, “Wow I just don’t know enough about the culture here to tell if this is an allegory or a metaphorical indictment or if this is just weird?” That’s this. Basically a wacky intimacy-obsessed Israeli woman accidentally impersonates a driver and picks up this hot frosty Dane at an airport on accident and not quite kidnaps him but… then they talk and drive on their way to Jerusalem. IS IT AN ALLEGORY? I HAVE NO IDEA. It really might not be! I laughed, I was mystified, I enjoyed.

Boogaloo and Graham. A sweet film set in Belfast about two kids whose dad gives them chickens? It seems like one of those kernels of memoir that gets overly ironed into a Short Film Format. It’s good though! And it has lots of filthy talking children. Weird fact: they subtitled the children??? Who are speaking English??? I mean, it’s 2015, we’ve sat through two seasons of “The Fall,” we can handle a hard Belfast accent.

The Phone Call. This stars actual names (Jim Broadbent!) which means it’s dangerously easy to vote for it if you were too lazy to watch these movies. This is FUCKING TERRIBLE. I’m going to spoil it for you! It’s about a nice mousy lady (the wonderful SALLY HAWKINS!!!) who works at a crisis hotline and Jim Broadbent calls her because he’s killing himself (his wife died, he can’t go on), and then HE DOES KILL HIMSELF, which is represented by an ambulance showing up at his house but then his DEAD WIFE walking in his front door to meet him, and they’re REUNITED IN DEATH, and his sacrifice of life means so much to the crisis hotline worker that she finally asks out the nebbishy dude who works in the same office, even though he has a filthy oil slick of a wig attacking his head. WHAT THE EVERLOVING FUCK. This was the worst movie I’ve ever seen. Sorry, I know this film was someone’s blood, sweat and tears — Matt Kirkby’s, in fact. But I HATED it, it was offensive, facile, stupid and senseless. What’s he up to now?

Since I finished editing “The Phone Call” I have been locked away in a cabin in Wales writing. I now have two finished screenplays, one thriller called “Call-Girl.” It makes “Fifty Shades” look like “Mary Poppins.” Imagine Tararantino doing “Basic Instinct”! And also a biopic called “Hair of the Dog” set in the ’80s, a true story about an ex-con who sets his sights on winning Crufts, the biggest dog show in the world. It’s “Shawshank Redemption” meets “Best in Show”! It’s more of a funny drama, it’s got a “Little Miss Sunshine” feel to it.

Sounds like the next Tony Kaye, doesn’t he. Go ahead, give him an Oscar, Hollywood. You’ll get what you get.

by Matthew J.X. Malady

A photo posted by Max Linsky (@maxlinsky) on Oct 13, 2012 at 10:45am PDT

People drop things on the Internet and run all the time. So we have to ask. In this edition, Longform.org co-founder Max Linsky tells us more about Feline Fridays at the office and using Dolly Parton records to comfort his dog.

@AnnaHolmes Before I started taking her to work I’d leave Dolly Parton on for Reba

— max linsky (@maxlinsky) January 29, 2015

@harmancipants @AnnaHolmes Nope, Reba’s a pooch. We did make one attempt early on at Cat Fridays but it was a disaster.

— max linsky (@maxlinsky) January 29, 2015

Max! So what happened here?

Well, Anna Holmes was looking for some camaraderie around putting the radio on for her cat when she leaves the house. Usually I avoid Pet Psychology Twitter, but Anna and my dog Reba go way back. Anna once ordered a ribeye just so she could give Reba the bone. Here is evidence:

Remember that time @annaholmes gave Reebs the leftover ribeye?

A photo posted by Max Linsky (@maxlinsky) on Jul 8, 2012 at 2:42pm PDT

So, knowing that Anna loves Reba, I figured she’d like to know that Reba gets lonely too. Or used to at least. Now I take her to work, which I mentioned and which confused people because they thought Reba was a cat and nobody takes a cat to work. Except one time, at my office.

The name was Feline Fridays, not Cat Fridays, and I probably got it wrong in that tweet because I didn’t come up with it in the first place. Feline Fridays was the brainchild of Aaron Lammer and Evan Ratliff, who thought it unjust that only Reba and her fellow office dogs were allowed to come to work. These men are quite attached to their cats, Willoughby and Henry. And they wanted an equal opportunity workplace.

On the first Feline Friday, Reba stayed home and Wilbo and Henry made their entrance. Anticipation was high. The cats had never met before. Or worked a day in their lives. They were pulled out of their carriers, held up face to face. Pictures were taken. The Internet was made aware. Aaron and Evan were ecstatic. Here is evidence:

And here is what happened next: absolutely nothing. As soon as they were put down, those poor cats disappeared. Willoughby spent the entire day hiding in a bookcase at one end of the office and Henry camped out underneath a cabinet at the other end. Neither was seen until it was time to go home. They didn’t say goodbye to each other, or anyone else.

The first Feline Friday was also the last. Nothing about it was casual.

Moving from cats to dogs: Can you tell me about your dog’s affinity for Dolly Parton?

Reba, a rescue from North Carolina, was a mess when we got her. She refused to leave the apartment — I had to carry her to the park for the first few weeks — and only calmed down at night, tucked at the foot of our bed, when she was sure we weren’t going anywhere. That was really her main hang-up: being abandoned again. So every time we left the house was brutal. She wouldn’t get mad, just so sad. Couldn’t even look at us as we left. A few times she chewed up a shoe or a magazine while we were gone, but mostly she just seemed convinced we were never coming back.

After a few days, we started leaving music on for her in the morning, Anna style, just to keep her company. We started with the radio, NPR. But it’s weird to come home to people talking in your house. We tried classical too, but it made walking out the door feel too dramatic. Eventually we settled on Dolly. Reba’s a lady from the South and so is my wife: turns out Dolly is both of their happy music.

Lesson learned (if any)?

Don’t take your cats to work! Or, actually, maybe do take your cats to work! Even though it would mean leaving Reba at home on Fridays, I kinda wish those cats had gotten the chance to acclimate to the office. I mean, look at Henry! Wouldn’t you want him sitting next to you while you tweet at Anna Holmes?

Just one more thing.

Thinking about this a few years into life with Reba, it’s possible that she didn’t give a shit that we were leaving and was just looking sad while actually sleeping with her eyes open, which she does all the time. I’m convinced she appreciated the Dolly, but on that one I have no evidence.

Quartz asks:

Since at least 2013, Facebook has been making noises about connecting the entire world to the internet. But even Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s operations head, admits that there are Facebook users who don’t know they’re on the internet. So is Facebook succeeding in its goal if the people it is connecting have no idea they are using the internet?

Yes. Yes. Yes.

It is rare that a music video so perfectly encapsulates my views on the anguish of this world and our place in it, but, boy, does this one ever do that. It’s like a shot-for-shot remake of my dreams. Enjoy.

“The charge is dangerous because it can take on the air of historical fact — with potentially dire consequences. I am reminded of a similarly baseless accusation that helped the Nazis come to power in Germany: that the German army had not really lost World War I, that the soldiers instead had been ‘stabbed in the back’ by politicians.”
 — It would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic.

by The Concessionist

The Concessionist gives advice each weekend about the sordid choices of real life. Trouble? Write today.

Dear Concessionist,

I want to fight the man. How do I fight the man?

Sincerely,

Fightey McFightsalot

Dear Fightey,

There is literally nothing you can do. Unless you own a private plane. Do you own a private plane? Then FOR FUCK’S SAKE stop flying it around our ecosystem!

Other than that…

I definitely would have said you could do something, twenty years ago. But the amazing advances of evil in the forms of just 1. Dick Cheney and 2. Walmart together mean that the Ship of Change has sailed. It’s all going to be worse from here on out, on fronts both governmental and The Way We Work Terribly Forever Now, and there’s literally nothing you could do about it! It’s all elderly people making minimum wage in a big box store and the evolution of endless infowar from here on out!

HAPPY DRONEMAS TO ALL AND TO ALL A GOOD DRONE.

Still, as always, there are a few little things that will make you feel smugger until you shuffle off this vale of Tears for Fears.

• Leave New York City unless you need to be here to accumulate money for a The-Man-undermining project to execute somewhere else.

• Stop eating that trash! My God, the crap you eat.

• Probably you should never eat beef or chicken.

• Probably you should stop eating things taken from the over-farmed desert of an ocean.

• Probably you should just start eating the cricket-paste bars now.

• If you really cared you probably wouldn’t wear leather either???

• But then you also wouldn’t wear non-leather things sewn by tiny bleeding hands???

• Also eliminate your patronage of employers that don’t pay living wages, whether that’s Amazon or your corner bar.

• Be more patient. It won’t make things “better” but it does have a ripple effect.

• Don’t have sex with jerks. (This is a tough one, don’t worry about it too much.) Society improves when bad people don’t have nice things.

• Become a journalist.

• Get a time machine (warning, may not work for blacks, gays, migrant workers, et al).

• Do not, under any circumstances, reproduce. You’ve got to be out of your mind (AKA, a perfectly normal human) to reproduce. You need a baby? LOTS OF THEM ARE ALREADY FULLY ASSEMBLED AND ARE WAITING FOR YOU RIGHT NOW. Hurry up and go get one! Making a new one in this world is the height of madness!

Sorry, pregnant friends. I mean, “I respect your choices”! (She among us who is without whatever shall cast the first whatever anyway. I know.) And I have met like four excellent children, and I know it’s not their fault.

But.

We don’t talk about world population like we used to back in the blessed 90s (which really WERE as good as they say), but guess what! It’s still a thing! Really a thing:

The pace of population growth is so quick that even draconian restrictions of childbirth, pandemics or a third world war would still leave the world with too many people for the planet to sustain, according to a study.

Rather than reducing the number of people, cutting the consumption of natural resources and enhanced recycling would have a better chance of achieving effective sustainability gains in the next 85 years….

…which, you’re not going to do, because you’re busy having babies, and consuming more resources together. Good gravy, even the Pope is getting on board with the idea of fewer babies.

Apart from sucking up all the food and and air and stuff (technical terms), child-rearing is also a huge waste of your own time and energy, which you could be expending on something meaningful but instead will use up responding to stupid notes sent home by your annoying school. You can’t fight The Man when little Pepper and LaBeija need help with their pointless homework. (Learning dumb stuff they really won’t need to know when high tide is sloshing around their knees all up and down the eastern seaboard.)

So parents are all useless for a prime twenty years of their lives. I know YOU all don’t like it much sometimes. But society-wide, it’s GARBAGE. Raising children with one or two parents is terrible and inefficient and rotten in dozens of ways, for all of us.

But no one’s going to fix that. So you should ask yourself the hard questions. Do you really need something made out of your own gross DNA? What if you accidentally give birth to the genetic-doppelgänger of your evil Aunt Bettina? Will you have the courage to kill your own baby if it is literally Hitler? Think about that when you are next engaged in the foul act of penis-in-vagina intercourse.

I know none of you baby-makers will listen to this, and at your drink-up playdates you’ll continue mocking the childless for our empty lives. Go for it! The only good argument you had was that there can’t be any more great homosexuals without two heterosexuals to make them, but that’s definitely not true anymore, so you’ve got nothing. Now baby-having is literally indefensible. Yes, sure, I’m going to die unattended and possibly in and/or near a gutter. But let me rebut you first by explaining in great detail exactly how well-rested I am right now. I’m going in for another eight to ten hours of sleep tonight! Oh and what’s this? These are TWENTY-DOLLAR BILLS that I am literally LIGHTING ON FIRE because I CAANNNNNN. I made all this money and time happen simply by not using my genitals!

And, if I wanted to, I could use all this time and energy to make the world a better place.

Hmm.

I guess this is the part where I insert a “Deal With It” dog with sunglasses GIF. Oooh, WHAT ABOUT THIS ONE?

Anyway.

Yeah. I know.

You want something to love? RESCUE A CAT. It’ll never apply to a $47,000-a-year college. But if it does, then you’ll get so fucking rich off that cat that nothing will matter, not even this smoldering diaper-pail of a planet.

The Concessionist is an adult human in New York City who is somewhat worn down and willing to make a good number of sacrifices for a peaceful life. Is it decision fatigue? Or just ennui? That’s probably a question for a psychiatrist. Anything else, ask me.

★★★ The predawn dark carried the creaking and hydraulic hissing of garbage trucks collecting garbage, not plowing snow. Dawn proper was gray and hard to wake up to. A few snowflakes went past the window. Then the sky grew bright enough to be stimulating. Wind growled against the building. “The wind is pushing me!” a teenager yelled. The edge of another’s hood flapped wildly. The snowbanks were solid and slippery, the sky a keen blue. Tumbled ice was out on the Hudson by the shore, but it would have been child abuse to detour on the way out of the preschool to get a closer look at it. New clouds grew, loosely assembled, golden on their leading edges as they drifted south. In the night, a woman in a fur coat and athletic shoes walked a little dog. The chewing gum from the subway newsstand was brittle. The plume from the steam plant on 59th Street went sideways, white and solid as a fallen marble pillar against the dark blue, as far as the eye could follow.

There are certain concerns that naturally emerge whenever a sufficiently threatening disaster looms over New York City. They vary in nuance from neighborhood to neighborhood, class to class, person to person, but in broad strokes, they tend to be fairly consistent: Will my home be okay? When will I be able to work so I can get paid? The internet will work, right? How will I get around the city?

In recent years, for a certain category of people, the latter worry has taken on a shape particular to our time and place:

Already dreading the Uber surge pricing

— Zak Kukoff (@zck) January 25, 2015

This “dread” of Uber surge pricing, whether it’s because the city’s entire transit infrastructure is on the verge of being crippled by a natural disaster or merely because you know that you are not the only drunk person who wants to flee from the bar without waiting for the subway at 1am on Saturday because, well, you’re older than you used to be and more than a little worse for the wear and you just want to get home to your flannel pajamas after spending eighty dollars on four mezcal margaritas, is by far the most persistent and popular — and galvanizing! — form of antipathy expressed for Uber, far beyond its ruthlessness, its labor practices, or its effects on transit infrastructure. It appears to be a monolithic emotion — “surge pricing sucks!” “more like gouge pricing” — but there are more subtle shadings at play: The most immediate is the natural disinclination toward paying a higher price for something, the pain of more money floating out of a checking account (if in a bizarre, superficially unreal away).

But the outrage experienced by those with a touch more foresight is actually a form of resignation and despair: The problem that these people have with surge pricing is rooted in the certainty that one day Uber, which is undercharging for its services in a drastically unsustainable way in order to fuel outrageous levels of growth, is going to win. And, when it does, after eliminating taxis and other car services — and maybe some forms of public transit in some cities! — it will extract a terrible toll for the convenience, probably when people need it most. Not because Uber is evil or attempting to punish its users, but just because it’s good business; Uber is, after all, the most publicly pitiless company of our time. (This is the same basic reason that people are afraid of — and investors still love — Amazon: Prices are unbelievably low right now, but one day, when everybody else is out of business, it will finally screw everyone in a monumental way.) Every time these people — who are, very often, prolific Uber riders — are hit by surge pricing, the jolt to their limbic system is a reminder of what’s coming. This is why they cannot be placated by being told, “well, just don’t take Uber” or “call a cab” or “ride the subway.” For them, there already is no other option but Uber.

One irony of the resentment toward surge pricing is that it’s part of what allows Uber to be indispensible. Surge pricing only goes into effect when there aren’t enough drivers in order to incentivize them to go onto the road to meet demand; increasing numbers of Uber drivers are part-time, and anecdotally, often only work when surge pricing is active. This indicates that the growth of Uber’s labor force, allowing it to meet rising overall demand, is driven, in part, by the promise of more money through surge pricing. Logically so! The aggressive fare prices that users find so attractive, allowing them to take Uber daily or near so, have continued to cut into driver wages. Surge pricing allows Uber to both encourage daily usage with low baseline fares and attract drivers, particularly when it needs them most (or in the case of a disaster, when it is the most dangerous). If Uber were simply more expensive, which it should be, many people wouldn’t take it as often as they are.

Still, agreeing to a cap on surge pricing in New York — which is dictated by its three highest prices during the prior two-month period, and amounted to 2.8x during the most recent blizzard — is savvy on Uber’s part. A cap on surge pricing placates the government for a time, and suppresses the mild pain felt by its most vocal riders, allowing them to forget, or at least be numb to, most other considerations of the larger issues inherent to a single private company controlling a large and growing portion of the transit infrastructure in cities across the country. (“But public transit isn’t good and there aren’t enough cabs where I am,” you say. What are the chances it will get better when large swaths of a city’s moneyed population, rather than advocating for a better public and semi-public infrastructure, simply choose to abandon it? Hmm.)

In the end, when you complain about surge pricing, who or what is really the object of derision? The driver, who came to get you because they were offered more money, which amounts to a living wage? The weather or time of day that created an exigent circumstance that made a lot of people want to take Uber rides at the same time? The algorithm, which may seem to create the rules, but in truth follows one, the law of supply and demand? Uber, the ultra-rational company that transparently alerts you to the fact that its still wholly optional services are coming at a premium and is just taking the money that you are lying on the table? Or your own complicity in creating a set of circumstances that allowed Uber to take your money?

Photo by Beverley Goodwin

by Abe Sauer

“I hate handguns. Handguns are used to shoot people and as long as they are around people will shoot each other. That’s a simple fact.” Those are not the words of Liam Neeson, the bankable action star whose recent anti-gun comments resulted in firearm maker PARA USA declaring that it “will no longer provide firearms for use in films starring Liam Neeson” and calling on its “friends in the firearms industry to do the same.” Those are the words of James Bond himself.

But don’t expect a boycott of the upcoming Bond film Spectre by handgun maker Walther. Over the years the gun’s name has become as synonymous with James Bond as Aston Martin; the first Bond film ever (Dr. No) includes a scene mentioning Walther by name, as does the latest (Skyfall).

PARA USA’s boycott stunt is a hit with pro-Second-Amendment media and activists. But a stunt is all it is: gun makers have enjoyed a long and cooperative relationship with Hollywood. And as gun ownership develops more fully into a recognizable lifestyle, gunmakers are increasingly leveraging the entertainment industry in their marketing materials. Underneath it all is a decades-old, mutually beneficial relationship between an industry that reviles pro-gun-control left-coast entertainers and a Hollywood whose protesting claims of “authenticity” fall apart under even slight scrutiny.

“When you make a film about a Federal Air Marshal… you know who the best supporting actors will be, right? In this case, the P226 Elite Stainless and the P229R!” bragged Sig Sauer about its feature in Non-Stop, another Liam Neeson ass-kicking box office hit.

A month later Sig Sauer held its first ever Oscars-like “Sig Sauer in the Cinema” awards on Facebook. Categories included Best Picture, Best and Worst Performance and Best Actor (both “pistol” and “rifle.”)

The winner? The P226R and (the late) Paul Walker.

[The movie] might well have been called G.I. Glock. Channing Tatum’s ‘Duke,’ D.J. Cotrona’s ‘Flint’ and Adrianne Palicki’s ‘Lady Jaye’ are all armed with Glock 21s in .45 ACP. And wrestling-star-turned-actor Dwayne ‘the Rock’ Johnson’s character ‘Roadblock,’ with his pair of tricked-out GLOCK 21s, takes movie Glocks to the next level.

So reads an excerpt from the 2014 issue of “Glock Autopistols,” a glossy annual about Glocks and only Glocks (that nonetheless carries a newsstand price of $5.99). “Lights, Camera, Glock” is the title of 2014‘s annual feature reviewing previous year’s Hollywood Glock product placements. “The Superstar Glock” was the title of the 2013 issue’s Hollywood rundown. In 2012, it was “Box Office Glocks.”

Glock is not alone. Barrett, the maker of a massive .50 caliber sniper rifle available for civilian purchase, points out its film roles on its Facebook page. Switzerland-based Kriss’s reminds audiences its futuristic submachine gun is in Colin Farrell’s hands in the Total Recall reboot. Chippa Firearms is happy to tell us about its move into young adult with its cameo in Divergent. (The gun also appeared in The Maze Runner.) Beretta’s Twitter team wants us to know that Walking Dead teenager Carl “knows what he’s doing with his 92FS.” But if zombies aren’t your bag, Beretta is good in other genres as well, such as on Battlestar Galactica. Or how about Heckler & Koch, which highlights Skyfall as an example of “when great movies and great guns come together.” Salient Arms International used Facebook to celebrate its star turn in 2014 films Transformers: Age of Extinction and John Wick. (Wick star Keanu Reeves has been diplomatic about guns, not making any grand statements, but nonetheless conceding he thinks carrying one is “not the wisest thing.”)

Gun makers have known the marketing power of movies for decades. In a 1993 Baltimore Sun interview, Beretta’s CEO Robert Bonaventure cited the sales success his company experienced after its pistol appeared prominently in both Lethal Weapon (1987) and Die Hard (1988). About that same time, Smith & Wesson hired a product placement agency to help it regain the foothold in film it lost after Dirty Harry’s shine faded. Smith & Wesson had seen its .44 Magnum Model 29 go from unknown to sold-out after appearing in Clint Eastwood’s hands in 1972’s Magnum Force. (Yes, the “Do you feel lucky” one.) Smith & Wesson’s Hollywood efforts paid off as it landed plum roles on Miami Vice, including as Sonny Crocket’s handgun of choice.

Bruce Willis immediately made Glock famous in 1990’s Die Hard 2 when he said the gun “doesn’t show up on airport metal detectors” and “costs more than you make in a month.” While the latter of those two statements may have been true, the former established a myth that persists to this day. Years later Glock reportedly paid for a role in Fugitive sequel US Marshals. In that movie Tommy Lee Jones calls Robert Downey Jr.’s gun a “sissy pistol,” instructing him to “’get yourself a Glock.” Downey later hoists his new handgun and says to Jones: “Yeah, Glock .40, just like yours.” It’s no accident that the face of Glock is R. Lee Ermy, a decorated former Marine who’s best known for his roles as a hardass in Full Metal Jacket, On Deadly Ground and Se7en.

Making it even easier for gunmakers to take advantage of Hollywood advertising is the Internet Movie Firearm Database, a wiki launched in 2007 that obsessively catalogs every gun in thousands of action films, TV shows and video games. Imfdb.com has grown to over 1.5 million visitors a month and sells ads against that traffic. (Those ads are primarily for firearms.) Other sites similarly catalog guns in popular entertainment. Cheaper Than Dirt, the eBay of firearms, includes an informative look at guns from The Walking Dead, including the Colt Python. The Python has enjoyed a significant price spike thanks to it being the gun of choice of Dead hero Frank Grimes.

“Authenticity” is Hollywood’s general defense when it comes to a charge of advertising for gun makers. This is a weak excuse.

In a 2004 Greenpeace Quarterly profile (German), a Heckler & Koch spokesman admitted the gunmaker “cooperated closely with Hollywood outfitters” to place H&K pistols in stars’ hands. The flack added that H&K’s guns were selected not because of some situational authenticity but because of the visual pop of the gun’s mündungsfeuerdämpfer, or “flash suppressor.”

Any film that has ever used a Desert Eagle — maybe most prominent of which are Snatch, the Matrix trilogy or any Arnold Schwarzenegger film — also makes the “authenticity” claim questionable. Where is the authenticity when a $2,000, .50 caliber handheld cannon is regularly wielded by street thugs and covert assassins alike?

Even less defensible as artistic license: Last year, Beretta pistols appeared in the hands of Navy Seals in Lone Survivor, the blockbuster based on the true story of the deadly Red Wings mission in Afghanistan. Despite the fact that the source material for the film, the book of the same name, mentioned Sig Sauer pistols, the film used Berettas. Product placement firm Brand-in Entertainment even bragged on its website about the “successful integration.” Representatives at Brand-in refused to answer questions about the project.

On record, those who supply guns to Hollywood say there is no direct marketing. But Beretta’s Lone Survivor example — rumored to have involved a cash payment in upwards of a quarter million dollars — suggests otherwise. Guns generally make it onscreen though a loose system of prop armorors. It’s this route that gunmaker Kriss used to land huge roles for its Vector pistol in Resident Evil: Retribution, the Total Recall reboot, Person of Interest and The Avengers. When asked if Kriss had intentionally placed its Vector in three of 2012’s biggest films, Kriss’ director of sales and business development told me that the “short answer” is “yes and no.”

The American Entertainment Armorors Association, formed by a handful of the nation’s most important suppliers of guns to film productions, lobbies legislators on numerous laws that could impact those suppliers’ abilities to procure and transport banned guns. To fund itself, the AEAA offers opportunities such as the $5,000-per-year Gold Sponsorship which includes, in addition to a nifty newsletter, “access to all the AEAA associate members contacts.” One sponsor? Smith & Wesson.

The NRA, whose most famous president was a silver screen icon, will also not be supporting any boycott of Hollywood.

The NRA’s National Firearms Museum curated collection “Hollywood Guns” includes both Lethal Weapon and Die Hard Berettas as well as Magnum Force’s Smith & Wesson. Opened in 2002 as “Real Guns of Reel Heroes,” it has been the museum’s most popular exhibit ever. And it travels; Dirty Harry’s Smith & Wesson was on exhibit compliments of the NRA at the gun industry’s just completed Las Vegas SHOT Show.

One of the shows on the NRA’s new digital entertainment network, NRA Freestyle, centered on Hollywood films. Media + Lab features former Navy Seal and host, Dom Raso, who recreates action scenes from famous shootout-heavy films like Heat, the Bourne trilogy and Rambo. The show is underwritten by Daniel Defense, maker of all manner of AR-15 “assault rifle” style firearms.

NRA’s TV channel is not the only example of the exploding guntertainment lifestyle niche. The “bi-monthly firearms lifestyle magazine” RECOIL is about guns but also trucks, ATVs, knives, watches, survival gear, tactical beards, “babes (with guns)” and other gun guy stuff. Hollywood movies are a common topic. Far from its fringe survivalist rag ancestors, the magazine is more like an Esquire for Navy SEALs and, more importantly, SEAL wannabes. RECOIL is printed on glossy stock and has a circulation of 220,000, three quarters of which is in the desirable 25 to 54 male demographic

“There’s just too many fucking guns out there,” said Neeson. He’s by no means alone in his beliefs. Sylvester Stallone, producer and star of The Expendables, is a vocal supporter of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence and is on the record saying of the Second Amendment, “We don’t need it.”

Yet did Kimber, the maker of the special edition Expendables pistols, boycott his trilogy? No, it called its publicist for a magazine feature about the role. Guns & Ammo published a “movie guns” video series around The Expendables. As a helpful purchasing guide, MTV put together “’The Expendables’ Arsenal: A Weapon-By-Weapon Guide.”

In the wake of the Newtown massacre, Jamie Foxx starred in a Mayors Against Illegal Guns ad. Sig Sauer made Foxx one of its 2014 nominees for Best Actor (pistol).

In 2000, Mark Wahlberg said to an MTV Movie Award audience, “I believe Charlton Heston is America’s best villain because he loves guns so much.” More recently, he said of guns, “I’d like to see if we could take them all away. It would be a beautiful thing.” Those comments were made long before Wahlberg put in a turn as hero Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell. Did Beretta care about those comments before it worked to change history and put its handgun in his hands for the aforementioned Lone Survivor? Of course not.

On the flip side there’s Harvey Weinstein. After Newtown, the producer vowed to make an anti-NRA film that will make the organization “wish they weren’t alive.” Weinstein is also the producer of Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, Smith & Wessons from both of which can be found in the NRA museum’s collection.

Hollywood stars are not going to stop advertising guns. Gunmakers are not going to stop using Hollywood for advertising. PARA USA’s outburst was a promotional stunt more about drawing attention to itself than anything else and let’s not pretend anything else because we love our Hollywood with guns. Last year, Kickstarter campaign “The Filmography of Guns” launched with a goal of $6,500; it raised $45,905.