Michael Hollister

Michael A. Hollister Novelist & Critic

INTERFACE RACE SALISHAN HOME PAGE BIOGRAPHY MODEL OF METAPHORS FREE SPEECH LAWSUIT POLITICS OF MOVIES FREE SPEECH LAWSUIT DANEgerus Patrick Garry, novelist Review of Salishan by Fred Delkin Oregon Magazine Review of Salishan Review of Hollyworld by Will Rayment The Conservative Monitor Hollyworld Conservative Bookstore.com Book of the Month Hollyworld Conservative Bookstore.com Book of the Month Peter Carafiol Free Speech Metaphor archetype Blacklist Hollywood Novels McCarthyism Communist propaganda

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Mark Olmstead is a young pest control exterminator whose company, EcoPC, becomes politically incorrect in the ultra green yet polluted city of Portland, where he is swarmed by animal rights protesters. Members of the Militant Insect Alliance spank him with fly swatters. In his hometown in rural eastern Oregon an old hippie, Waldo Ralph, has reconsecrated the town church as the ecocentric Church of Highs, a refuge for wildlife where he grows marijuana in the basement. While trying to make enough money to buy a house, Mark courts a former classmate, Sally Chan, who is half Chinese, and takes a side job as an illegal marijuana distributor, involving him with violent hippies, a black drug gang, Islamic terrorists, political assassins, the FBI, the radical professor Yakov Tete, and a cabal of computer hackers playing God in real life through an Internet video game. The exterminator gets marked for extermination when he turns informer. (2009)

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Historical novel beginning in the last Ice Age. Challenges revisionists, prevailing ecological theory and myths of Nature. First contacts between whites and Indians, then Jedidiah Bowman, a logger from Maine, fights at Gettysburg, rides the Oregon Trail and settles on timberland outside Molalla, near Portland. Five generations of Bowmans help to build the West. Nat Bowman, a logger half Salish Indian, studies forestry and becomes a double agent in the culture war between environmentalists and timber workers focused on owls. Known only as Owl Man--spotted or barred?--he exposes crooks and penetrates an eco terrorist cell after 9/11. Dramatizes the conflict over forests, effects of the Endangered Species Act and urban versus rural politics, with a cast including over thirty tribes. Salishan is the language family of most Indians in the Pacific Northwest and now also the name of a luxurious resort on the Oregon Coast. (2007)

The HOLLYWOOD Trilogy Three historical novels dramatize Hollywood's global influence from the 1930s to the present age of terrorism, through the life stories of Sarah McCloud, a farm girl from Oregon, and Ryan Eisley, the son of a beer distributor from Ohio.

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Hollywood and spirituality in the 1930s. The first marriages of Sarah and Ryan illustrate effects of popular culture on morality. When her husband Burke leaves her, Sarah must separate from her little boy and goes to work in a defense plant. Ryan rises from gas pump attendant to movie director at the Fox studio, with sordid adventures at a Hollywood brothel and an orgy hosted by a horror star. He adapts stories pertinent to his life, including a comic biopic of theologian Jonathan Edwards. Their lives converge to an inspirational ending as the nation rallies after the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, a time when Americans felt united as a country. In the climax, Burke fights in the battle of Tarawa. (2004)

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Hollywood in the 1940s-50s, with deep focus on directors, writers and politics. Sarah marries Ryan and they produce independent films adapting American classics, while she tries to overcome his infidelities with scripts and actresses. Their lives and films dramatize the dominant political and aesthetic conflicts in Hollywood. Their first collaboration is a true untold story of heroism by black tank commanders in WWII. Then they become involved on both sides of the Blacklist scandal with Women in Hemingway starring John Huston, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Tracy and Hepburn influence them while making Blithedale, Orson Welles takes over their Pierre and Stalin courts Judy Garland in their Flowering Judas. (2005)

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The Eisleys film Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, then during the 1960s Ryan turns countercultural and documents the black civil rights, hippie and anti-Vietnam War movements. Their son Davin serves as a medic in Vietnam, while Sarah tries to hold their family together, becomes a film critic in San Francisco, then moves to Portland and enters the Hollyworld of higher education. Their story is interwoven with films including Billy Budd, Dr. Strangelove, The Graduate, Woodstock, Easy Rider, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters, Apocalypse Now, Reds, The Big Chill, The Player and The Passion. It exposes Communist propaganda movies, ridicules political correctness, satirizes Marxist movie stars and professors and culminates with the Iraq War. (2006)