As you might imagine, being a Republican in Los Angeles isn't much fun these days. Criticising Barack Obama in this town is like serving barbecued puppy at a dinner party. It's like declaring that really, when you think about it, Martin Scorsese is probably overrated, and that, swear to God, Schindler's List should never have won Best Picture.

“I feel like a Christian in Ancient Rome,” a conservative friend complained to me the other day, after being admonished by his boss for making a joke about Obama during the Presidential nominee's trip to the Middle East (the punchline was something about Obama wanting to visit Israel only so that he could walk on water).

It's tempting to see all this as part of the Vast Liberal Media Conspiracy. But that would be wrong. Hollywood is much shallower than that. Hollywood likes Obama because he is movie-script material, an underdog endowed with supernatural photogenicism (“manorexia” as it's known in the business) and faultless oratory skills. Let's face it, Obama's biopic would clean up on Oscars night. John McCain's biopic would go straight to DVD - before being picked up for syndication by the History Channel.

This isn't as cynical as it sounds. Hollywood is a company town, and company towns like to elect politicians who fit in with the corporate culture. Why else would it have helped to dump the former Democratic Governor, Gray Davis (old, spindly, boring), to replace him with the more Tinseltown-friendly Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican who once professed his love for Richard Nixon?

Which makes Mr McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his VP-in-waiting very interesting indeed. As any good casting director knows, the co-star can make the picture. Where would Butch Cassidy have been without the Sundance Kid? Who would have cared about Harry without Sally? When you think about the rival tickets purely in the terms of double-act movie pitches - and that's surely what they are - Palin changes everything. Obama-Biden becomes “two lawyers go to Washington”. McCain and Palin? “Cantankerous war hero returns from the dead to storm the White House with a gun-packing, moose-wrangling, salmon-trawling milf from Alasksa who keeps a dead bear in her office.”

Sure, it might take Hollywood a while to come round to a small-town creationist who represents the Party that Dare not Speak its Name.

But I know which movie I'd rather watch.

In from the cold

Mrs Palin's almost implausible rise reminds me of the career of the late Ray Mala, an Inupiat Inuit “discovered” in 1921 by a German film director named Frank Kleinschmidt, who had gone to Alaska to make a movie called Primitive Love (racial sensitivity clearly wasn't a big thing in those days). Mala, 16 at the time, managed simultaneously to star in the movie and act as chief cameraman. He relocated to Hollywood, where he featured in a movie titled Igloo before clinching the lead in Eskimo, by which time the word “typecast” must surely have been invented.

Eskimo was billed by MGM as the “the biggest picture ever made”. It was shot entirely on location, with the crew setting up a “Camp Hollywood” in the Alaskan wilderness, complete with the head chef from the Roosevelt Hotel in LA. The movie was the first (and presumably last) performed entirely in the Inupiat dialect, and the first to win a Best Editing Oscar. Mala starred in other movies such as Last of the Pagans, The Jungle Princess and Hawk of the Wilderness. Sadly, he died of heart disease at the age of 46. His son now practices “natural” medicine in Anchorage.

Chilled out

As you have almost certainly heard, Mrs Palin's husband, Todd, is also Inuit - half-Yupik Inuit, to be precise. You've probably also heard that Todd is known in Alaska as the “First Dude” and competes in (and wins) 2,000-mile snowmobiling races. If Mrs Palin makes it to the White House my guess is that Todd will follow Ray Mala into showbiz. After all, First Dude is a reality TV show just waiting to happen. Or failing that, an Adam Sandler movie.

Conventional morality

Mr Schwarzenegger seems tremendously excited about Mrs Palin's appointment. He boomed to the Los Angeles Times that it would be “terrific” to have “a man and a woman running things together” in the White House. Trouble is, after Arnie's problems with “gropegate”, I'm sure that the last thing anyone in the Republican Party wants is to have the “governator” locked in a late-night meeting with an Alaskan beauty queen. Maybe that's why he's staying away from the Republican convention - on the rather flimsy ground that he has more urgent budget matters to attend to.

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