Readers here beg me not to write about politics. I understand where many of them are coming from since they’re international readers and what do they care about our politics. The problem for me is that I mostly have no real reason to do this anymore. If studios still found my voice valuable (aka, among the only truthful bloggers in this space) and if they advertised, then I would have a reason to stick around. I would feel less inclined to depart if Gold Derby hadn’t benched and replaced me after a 25-year friendship and relationship. If I wasn’t greeted, still, with a barrage of hostile commenters who hate everything I think and write, then it would be, at least, still fun.
So let me make it clear to anyone reading this site: As long as I get nothing out of it, then I think it’s fair I am allowed to write as I please. I have been offering up content for free on this site for 25 years. That should be enough for you to be okay with me sometimes obsessing about things I believe matter. If not, the Penske Media Empire awaits.
Every Tuesday, I’ll be writing a column I’m calling, “Wake-Up Call for Hollywood.” This is the first in a series that will analyze politics and the politics of the film and Oscar industry. Read it, don’t read it, it’s your call.
Hollywood now has an opportunity to learn from November 5 and use the momentum to make radical change. Radical change means ending the “woke” religion that has overtaken Hollywood and all major institutions that the Left controls — aka, they’ve just been voted out.
These are hard lessons, painful lessons, but they are necessary lessons. The people in charge of the major studios have to be tough and ready to make the hard calls. There will be tears—lots and lots of tears—but it is either that or the ship goes down.
First lesson:
Here is a good video by Peter Boghossian:
Everything he says in this video applies to Hollywood, too, because they are part of the same group that the American people just rejected.
Second lesson:
Heed the brilliant words of author Martin Gurri, the author of The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium:
Presidential elections resemble ritual mysteries into which we are initiated. Once the votes are counted, we are imparted a message: a revelation.
Often enough, the voice of the people gets garbled in transmission. Did Donald Trump really win in 2016? Did Joe Biden do so in 2020? In both cases, the losing side felt cheated of the correct meaning of the message.
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Everything is clarified. We know where we stand.
Donald Trump’s big electoral win over Kamala Harris last Tuesday was a clarifier for the ages.
Until the surprising results came in, large chunks of reality were up for debate — true not only of our politics and politicians but also of the very nature of our times.
Was Trump the moral equivalent of Hitler? Was censorship necessary to protect democracy in the digital age? Is our country a land of freedom or of monstrous racial and sexual oppression? Arguments raged back and forth.
The American voters have rendered a decisive verdict on many of these questions.
It wasn’t just an election. It was a complete and thorough beatdown, a repudiation, a grand humiliation so complete we haven’t seen anything like it since 1972 when Nixon beat George McGovern in a landslide. McGovern, like the Democrats of today, was chummy with Hollywood. Hollywood had already begun to launch a counterculture revolution throughout the 1960s. By 1969, the Manson girls had slaughtered a group of wealthy friends in the Hollywood Hills. By 1972, it was all over. Sure, the revolutionaries still wandered through our world trying to make sense of things.
In 1975, Warren Beatty and Robert Towne combined two of their screenplays to make Shampoo. Directed by Hal Ashby, it’s a feisty comedy of errors that follows an interlocked ensemble of “wealthy elites.” Juggling the chain of betrayals in their L.A. affairs has them laughably self-absorbed, so they’re oblivious to the oncoming seismic shift in America’s own moral compass. On the cusp of Richard Nixon’s election, even with a pervasive chorus of TV news flickering in the background, the reality of what’s coming never sinks in. Until it’s too late.
Movie-goers flocked to the theaters, hoping to see a movie that mirrored Beatty’s own well-know sexcapades (he had real-life flings with all of his co-stars). But if that’s all audiences were looking for, they were missing the reason Beatty made it. The movie’s plot is backdated to 1968, because in 1975 everyone would know how far Nixon had sunk. Beatty wanted to capture the frivolous, self-obsessed tail-end of the ’60s, as a cautionary tale. He knew Los Angeles liberals had fiddled while Rome was about to be set ablaze. He wanted to remind Hollywood that their cultural flippancy had led to unexpected consequences.
In 1972, when the shock of Nixon’s criminality hit the country like a brick, the shame left America confused about whom to blame. In Shampoo, that despondence not only tore up everyone’s relationships, it destroyed their hopes and dreams. It was the end of the world as they knew it.
I’m seeing a similar end of the world mentality right now. Giving up status, power, and prestige is hard. Getting a stark wake-up call is hard. Democracy is hard. But art — movies, comedy, fiction – must be free of the clutches of religious dogma. And when you let go, free expression can flow again.
That despair and anguish at the loss of power resulted in some of the greatest films ever made – a truly brilliant era of cinema that included Taxi Driver, The French Connection, The Conversation, Five Easy Pieces, The Godfather films. These movies were dark and bleak because that is how the country felt throughout the 1970s. There was Watergate, then Jimmy Carter – which brought long gas lines, hostages in Iran, and inflation. By 1980, America was just DONE with the Left. DONE. Ronald Reagan would reign for the next 12 years — my entire coming-of-age era.
But something happened to our culture then, too. Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill is the perfect explanation of what happened. The characters he created had “sold out” because they, too, were sick of living in their vans and burning their bras.
We can see the exhaustion everyone felt from activism and feminism in three key movies:
Kramer vs. Kramer
Network
Annie Hall
Can you imagine an era that would produce a masterpiece like Network? That is never coming back in the state Hollywood is in now. Rip off the band-aid.
I’m at the point now where I think there will never again be a movie that could be this good. Too many people who rule Hollywood now are terrified aristocrats who do not want to lose what they have, so they hide. They hide behind virtue signals to avoid being called out and forced out. But we all pay the price for them.
Fire all of them. Hire people who are ready to roll up their sleeves and get to work.
Take the lesson.
Here’s the difference between then and now: the box office still mattered. Hollywood had to make movies that people actually wanted to see. The Godfather topped the box office. Best Picture winners hit every quadrant because they had to. They could not win the top prize otherwise. Today, you have a movie like Emilia Perez with ZERO connection to audiences. And yet, it can float through the Oscar race as though there’s no such thing as an audience because who cares what ticket-buyers think?
The only films that have won Best Picture since 2009 that anyone will remember are those that were hits with audiences. No matter how good it was, every other movie is still a movie people would have to look up on IMDb. Not me, because they are carved into my DNA, but most people have no idea what any of these movies are.
What’s the lesson? The lesson that “Hollywood went woke” is just another way of saying they reoriented their perspective from wanting to entertain people by prioritizing the issues of race and gender ideology, and they weren’t asking anymore. It’s been written into mandates. Out went merit. Out went humor. Out went heterosexual males, etc.
So, for the Democrats, it’s going to be a painful transition out of this era. Unless the Republicans do something big that people really hate (like getting rid of Social Security or Obamacare), nothing the Democrats have to sell will be what the people want. If the GOP blows its lead that way, then the Democrats have something to work with.
Hollywood, however, is likewise in a pickle. Look at them. Jimmy Kimmel, John Oliver, Stephen Colbert—they’re like court jesters for the aristocracy. They STILL DON’T GET IT and probably won’t until they lose their jobs, which they should. The award industry will keep awarding them, further distorting their sense of importance. The Oscars will do the same unless they get the wake-up call and pivot. Right now, back to the real world.
Here is one guy who never went woke and still gets it, that his job is to be an actor and an entertainer. As of today, Tom Cruise is on a short list of those who do (Denzel Washington, etc).
It’s worth noting that the last Mission Impossible movie opened soft at the box office. I think that’s because Hollywood’s brand is “toxic.” Yes, I’ll use that word because that is how these terrible people described me. Toxic.
HIRE ME
Hollywood studios should hire me and others like me to help guide them through this moment because it will hurt. Bad. The world has changed, and Hollywood is not keeping up. Moreover, they don’t really have to if they sacrifice theatrical for streaming. Netflix is like a perfect landing for Hollywood because they don’t have to worry about any of us. There is no market pressure. And that isn’t good for Hollywood. It’s bad for filmmakers. They are given TOO MUCH freedom, and their work is not disciplined. Why? Because the work doesn’t matter. Only their brand value matters. Sometimes, they get lucky, and they have David Fincher to make movies for them, and he’s disciplined. But most aren’t. They drop these unwatchable three-hour epics no one cares about. However, it puts a stamp of quality on the Netflix brand.
HIRE ME. I will help you.
So let’s recap:
We just lived through a Civil War—a real Civil War, not the dumb one in the movie—in which the working class rose up to defeat the ruling class.
The ruling class has imposed a “woke” ideology upon them and is everywhere and in everything.
The pendulum is swinging right. That doesn’t mean Hollywood has to swing Right but it does mean they have to start making movies for the people again—not “woke,” not telling them how to think or what they should want. Listen to the box office. That will help revive the corpse.
My advice to the Oscars: hire a host who is willing to poke fun at the Left and the Woke. They used to be able to do it, like SNL:
All of that ended when our Civil War began in 2016.
But the losing side doesn’t always learn the lesson. In the South, after our first Civil War, the bitterness and resentment resulted in the worst crimes against humanity in our history. That is why there is a “woke” movement, an attempt to correct the past and make ourselves more equitable. But it didn’t work. It went too far. It served the people at the top and not anyone else. It became a weird cult-like religion with a mandated language and other horrors that I won’t go into here.
Hollywood seems to believe that they need to make “faith-based” or “conservative” movies. That misses the point. Just make GOOD movies. Remember good movies? Those used to exist. I know I’m not crazy. Many of the films made during the “woke” era have been good, but they could have been made for streaming.
Some additional lessons:
The “racists” did not win. The people won.
“Hitler” did not win, the guy who was on Celebrity Apprentice did because he survived their intensifying attacks against him (speaking of face-plants).
America is not now the “Handmaid’s Tale.” America was just sick of the elite, ruling class–aka, the Gilded Age.
I can already see how the Oscars will play out and the ratings. This isn’t something that can be fixed overnight. It’s possible that there is no saving Hollywood and that there is only building outside of it—a new film industry that really does believe in making good movies rather than “fixing” their audience.
Take the lesson, Hollywood. I hope this helps.
