“Nothing can make you happier than being generous.”
— Marcus Aurelius
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“Adjusted for inflation, the 2024 domestic box office is approximately 35.2% below 2019 levels. This gap highlights the significant shortfall in real terms, even with some box office successes in 2023 and 2024.”
— ChatGPT
DRAMA, AMERICAN STYLE
We didn't see the real Kamala Devi Harris before her spectacular coup of the Democratic presidential nomination because she was self-conscious about her natural smile and laugh. I can understand why when you are battling elections or a Democratic primary against prim Liberal scolds who are no less D.H. Lawrence's description of our essential national soul — "hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer" — than Republicans, only with an almost Teutonic scorn for humor they mistake for moral rectitude.
As Hollywood sits there gazing at its collective navel, trying to find ways to make old ways new again without surrendering to the unthinkable — letting true artists make decisions about creative things rather than businessmen who identify as “creative” — I offer what has become Kamala Devi's superpower: being her true self, not a projection of ideals that require a scowl, a snarling mouth, and a wagging finger.
I’m referring to the meaningful, smart dramas and Neil Simon-esque comedies anchored by observations of genuine human experiences that defined the New Hollywood era of the mid-50s through the early 80s; after that, they were slowly obliterated by the 40-year hegemony of the blockbuster. I call the culture it created in “Hollywood” the umbrella term for all English-language entertainment made throughout the Anglosphere, “Studio System II: Meaner, Dumber, With Agents.”
Under the intractable dogma of Studio System II, filmed and live entertainment alike succumbed to outright fantasy or baseless “aspirational” social-justice tropes, to the point that they’ve become reality. Dramas became grim morality plays in which protagonists were mandated to have a come-to-Jesus moment, the culmination of a “character arc” that shed light on a specious human condition. Any given declamatory, kabuki-rigid classical Greek tragedy was more realistic about humanhood than most Best Picture winners over my entire career.
Broad comedies became pubescent gross-outs that were as far from the legacies of Charlie Chaplin and Lucille Ball as you can get. The valid insights into humanhood of classic rom-coms descended from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Taming of the Shrew were replaced by the white-wedding idealized daydreams of 13-year-old girls.
Other comedy genres from satire to dark were relegated to TV and streaming, despite the many successes of the Coen Brothers; they were perceived as anomalies, not an indication that audiences were still as discerning and intelligent as they were when they buoyed New Hollywood with healthy box office returns.
The past 40-plus years have been the great dumbing-down and infantilization of America and those areas of the world under its cultural influence, fueled by an immovable industry-wide lensing of humanity as half-witted troglodytes.
What Studio System II has been all along is the projections of man-children from Westchester and its West Coast equivalents, prestige addicts calling themselves “creatives” and “storytellers” when they can barely carry a dinner-table anecdote. They’ve been engaged in an extended Fast & Furious XXIII street race with each other, gambling hundreds of millions on movies they want to see and be seen making, so they can make boastful, chest-thumping proclamations like, “I can land a Jumbo.”
These Speed Racers have only advanced actual creative people who shared their views and tastes and weren’t scarily artistic; everyone else has been labeled a “maverick” and “outsider.” They prefer to work with directors of commercials who treat them obsequiously as if they were ad agency creative directors and view movies the way they do: as extended commercials for products — toys, video games, YA and comic books —and as products themselves that spawn sequels and expand into fairground “universes” carpeted with tentpoles and franchises, a galaxy of sequels upon remakes after spinoffs atop reboots.
Anything that isn’t children’s content made for adults is either rejected or shunted to the indie sector based in New York. It isn’t truly independent; it still has to play by rules and parameters set by precedent.
Indie films are so interconnected with Studio System II that they aren’t even Hollywood-adjacent; they’re surviving on handouts and food stamps in a crumbling guest house on the same ostentatious Holmby Hills estate.
If Hollywood the Synecdoche were a global financial institution, indies would be its semi-autonomous private equity division, handling institutional and individual investors of such verifiable net worth they must agree in writing that they can afford to gamble upwards of a hundred grand for a stake in a venture that is unlikely to recoup investment. In terms of risk, it makes thoroughbred horse racing look like pension funds.
As actress slash social-justice activist Jessica Chastain put it during the strikes — when we were given a four-month window to work with the likes of her, thereby securing financing and pulling off a process that normally takes an average of nine years end-to-end because that’s how Speed Racers have rigged it — indies are “the minor leagues.”
The minor leagues have lived this way since the end of New Hollywood. That’s also when Sundance was founded largely in response to the difficulty of getting anodyne American indies accepted at the Cannes and other prestigious European film festivals. If they weren’t filmed morality plays based on Robert Redford’s California-ozonated interpretation of American ideals and Ordinary People-like first-world problems, they were quirky and weird “art films” that must’ve tickled him.
The problem with the morality plays was the rest of the world didn’t share modern America’s spoiled-drama-queen experiences — they were puzzling and contradictory, displaying a twisted self-awareness that I know well — it took me years of therapy to adjust mine to be more accurate. The problem with the quirky-artsy fare was that European sensibilities automatically parsed the difference between what constituted “art” and what was eccentric for the sake of it and utterly meaningless.
Attendees at the major American festivals are largely professionals in the indie sector, groomed by specific doctrine at our elite film seminaries. They are a stoic, intellectual Jesuit-type order of progressive-leaning Liberals that surmounts hardships and insane obstacles erected by the main house. Every indie that gets to a commercial release is the equivalent of winning Squid Game.
Like members of every religious order and cult throughout the world, they all know each other and share the same beliefs and assumptions. Under the current model, indies cannot be made without alliances between them.
Trevor Goth was the head of programming at Sundance for 24 years, until he stepped down in 2017. It’s fair to say that he established the culture of what was acceptable; changes to staffing and content since then made for representation and inclusivity have been cosmetic, not substantive changes to the kind of filmed content Americans consider acceptable.
In this country, “inclusivity” really means “Even though I’m as American as you are, with all the benefits, opportunities and privileges over the rest of the world that comes with, I’m nonwhite and therefore diverse. I demand to be made to feel like I’m a part of your American sameness.”
By the time Goth stepped down, the festival was wedded to Studio System II, complete with a film marketplace. An indie film not only needed to be accepted by him and his successors, it had to win or receive thunderous positive buzz for distributors to feel comfortable that it had audience appeal.
One of the major issues with that setup is Sundance audiences are hardly representative of what Speed Racers and the minor leagues alike call “the lowest common denominator.” They’re the equivalent of family and compatriots cheering for an Olympian.
There’s also the cross-purposes of Sundance’s mission. As Chat GPT phrased it, “The festival is known for highlighting independent films, documentaries, and other works that may not have mainstream appeal.” Not having mainstream appeal is the entire purpose of most film festivals.
Pair that with the exclusion of content that might also appeal to the 40% of the nation that identifies as Conservative in favor of progressive themes they find offensive — again, these are themes that have no grounding in human nature, only the nature of American Liberals and their communal narratives — and that’s a racehorse with a broken leg before it’s even at the gate.
We all know colleagues whose films were accepted to Sundance despite not being completed by the submission deadline, so let’s not pretend there isn’t favoritism. Big leagues or minor, it’s all the same game.
With every "festival darling" that doesn't recoup or fails to be included and win a race on the major festival circuit, the millions invested by nouveau riche Wall Street patsies are flushed down the drain one more time.
That makes it all the more impossible for minor league producers to finance the next one hundred minutes of approved quirky dreariness about American misery and hardship, featuring Independent Spirit nominees in a remote location staring out the window onto rainy bleakness, signaling feelings you can't possibly comprehend because they're stone-faced demonstrations of idealized dramas, not truly dramatic, fresh and genuinely observant the way New Hollywood films were.
As the people who control the elite film seminaries, the indie sector also provides Speed Racers and talent agents with analysts trained to evaluate a script according to Redford’s interpretation of American ideals marinated in Coca-Cola Marxism. It must also conform to precedents set by films that were similarly vetted. Without precedent, a script has no future, meaning nothing can be original; the most it can be is a different version of the same thing.
As if that weren’t enough, since 2020 analysts have been further assisted in the weeding of petty, contrived heresies by DEI sensitivity editors.
Both Speed Racers and agents say they “read” scripts. In reality, they quickly scan analysts’ hastily written coverage and go straight to the bottom line: whether it’s a ‘pass,’ where 90% of scripts fall; a ‘consider,’ given to another 9% of scripts, meaning they might be considered viable after specified adjustments; or a ‘recommend,’ given to less than 1% of scripts submitted. Avatar famously received a pass nine times before it was approved.
Philosophically speaking, how is the script-analyst system different from the Chinese Film Censorship Committee, which also influences the livery of every Hollywood Jumbo trying to land in Mainland China?
Script analysts are also responsible for preventing anything being made that might connect with Conservatives, or ~135 million Americans, and their counterparts around the world. The standard quip for anything not in line with selective progressive thinking is, “They’ll be fine.”
Let them eat Marvels.
The blinkered, unworldly lensing of how mankind should think and behave that determines which scripts are recommended also ignores those cultures outside the Anglosphere that Hollywood could depend on for 40% to 60% of box office revenue like the Marvels. They only see that if a drama accidentally hits a sweet spot common to mankind, or is propelled by the blast of winning a Best Picture Oscar — no other category will do.
The reason script analysts are so critical is that, under the current model, a minor-league film — true indies are now known as “free-rangers,” and rarely don’t suck — can’t secure financing without attachments like La Chastain. All talent at her level is represented by the Big Four agencies, whose minions cannot meet bonus- and career-affecting annual quotas with the sort of “scale plus ten” fees their clients earn playing in the minor leagues.
In other words, despite not having any function in the filmmaking process, actors’ reps do far more than negotiate contracts for a 10% commission: they determine what gets made and what gets killed.
To Speed Racers, theatrical dramas and smart comedies are for pussies who prefer to fly twin engines rather than land Jumbos designed in the 80s, upgraded with special effects. As a result, those projects are relegated to the crumbling guest house, hoping to catch La Chastain’s fancy on her way to the pool.
An exception is made for prestige-garnering Oscar bait — it’s not called a “race” for nothing — gorgeous whales of bloated emotions and lofty values that rely largely on music composed with specific chords to push home dramatic effect. They’re usually directed by someone on a shortlist with a track record of nominations and awards like Ron Howard, or geriatric auteurs from the New Hollywood era like Martin Scorsese.
Speed Racers and the minor leagues have ensured that few true auteurs have been minted over the past 40 years. In my view, Tarantino and Wes Anderson are faux-auteurs, gimmickists with a signature style whose movies are loud pastiches, filmed amusement-park rides that are houses of unthreatening horror and confectionery spinning teacups, respectively. They’re as man-childish as the Marvels, presentational cabinets of behavioral curiosities as opposed to what they still are to auteurs in the rest of the world: representational stories about the human condition made with a unique vision.
P.T. Anderson might be an exception if I didn’t find him overrated. An essential problem might be that I’m not interested in most of the subjects he explores, nor do I find he has any insights into what it means to be American, a problem I have with most of our literary canon, too.
P.T.’s focus is almost exclusively men who reflect D.H. Lawrence’s American essential soul — “hard, isolate, stoic and a killer” — which extended so far as his portrayal of an English fashion designer in Phantom Thread, which was unlike any I’ve ever known, and I’ve known them all in the modern era. They weren’t so different in the 50s.
When it comes to our artistic-creative output, I’d add “dull, rigid, conformist, unworldly, incurious,” and a bunch more to Lawrence’s grim string of descriptors. No longer being able to tell truly funny, insightful jokes, dulling what was once our considerable wit, has made us creative paraplegics.
As far as tech, science, medicine, engineering, human rights, and philanthropy are concerned, America is the perpetual New World, a churn spurred by a ruthless competitiveness that never rests. Our arts and entertainment are to Britain, Europe and Asia what New York Fashion Week is to London, Paris, Milan, Tokyo, Shanghai, and even Delhi fashion weeks: a predictable parade of safe, glorified schmattes, a running eye-rolling joke among the global fashion community season after season, year in, year out.
Our most radical native son fashion designer, Rick Owens, whose reinvention of L.A.’s cholo streetwear I’ve adopted as my daily uniform, only found the acceptance and success he deserved by relocating to Paris with his French wife and muse, Michele Lamy. He manufactures in Italy. It shouldn’t be that way.
Also an uncommonly brilliant intellectual in his own right, Owens is nonetheless miles away from PT Anderson’s portrayal of an exacting fashion powerhouse.
Perhaps more than any other culture I’ve lived in, the wheels of the ars americana juggernaut have churned from one extreme to the other. Since the beginning of the 90s, however, it’s been locked in a cultural “end of history” with nothing left to say.
Filmmaking is the highest of art forms, combining all other disciplines as one. Hollywood the Synecdoche, including the minor leagues, has for decades mirrored the stagnation of American arts, locked in a senile dialogue with itself, the epitome of Macbeth’s statement that life “ is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
A SKUNK AT THE GUILLOTINE
Too many New Hollywood films would be considered "problematic" in America today, "unmakeable" in a Hollywood that up until October 7, 2023, was trapped in a hostage mentality by a deranged paranoid fringe, causing it to commit instant follies such as erasing a legacy asset in the form of a cartoon skunk, Pepé Le Pew.
Charles Blow, the Robespierre of the social justice movement, accused Pepé of being not what he was for generations of people around the world, a representation of a common human condition, limerent love, which when unrequited by a romantic interest often causes the mind to perceive compatibility when there is none, a clever cautionary character for children disguised as a smelly 8-ball of cheer with a thick French accent.
In Blow’s view, Pepé was now a symbol of a nonsense construct known as "rape culture," and therefore an existential threat to the social order that needed to be eradicated.
Blow’s accusation wasn’t based on data that showed how boys who loved Pepé grew up to be rapists. It was because Blow grew up in the 70s without feeling adequately represented in content made for Black children.
Somehow, he missed all of Sesame Street; my treasured Disney book about Br’er Rabbit, Songs of the South, based on a West African children’s character; Bill Cosby and his shows The Electric Company and Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids; and the Black Barbie dolls — yes, plural — that a girlfriend of mine in first grade had, and I’m considerably older than Blow. The Jeffersons came out when Blow was five, followed by… never mind.
When Blow’s opinion piece was published, Pepé was being animated into the mixed live-action movie Space Balls. He was removed, literally erased.
An uproar ensued so intense that Black Robespierre took a break for a few weeks to take stock of his many abuses of power during a time when the modern antiracism movement had absolute power, which corrupts absolutely, as Winston Churchill correctly noted.
Rather than return humbled by the wounded cries of hundreds of thousands of people like me whose favorite cartoon character as children was the delusional skunk — I remembered Pepé every time I found myself trapped in limerence, which was chronic until good therapy and age cured me of it — and ask Warners to reinstate Pepé, he wrote an essay declaring that after much deliberation, he was going to be more himself than ever as an act of self-love.
Another of Hollywood's self-destructive follies is also the best cautionary tale about the perils of an industry with unparalleled global span and influence being so resolutely and proudly unworldly: the temporary cancellation of the Golden Globes, an awards show run by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), an 80-year-old foreign charity that no longer exists.
The Globes were the warm-up to the Oscars and a completely free waterfall of positive PR that equally valued both TV shows and the sort of films the Academy deemed too low for inclusion. The HFPA donated tens of millions in annual profits to film-preservation organizations.
The accusation of a lack of nonwhite representation in an organization headed by a South Asian and a Turk wasn't quelled by simply reading the restrictions of the charity's charter, which limited membership to active foreign entertainment reporters based in Los Angeles.
Other countries don't share America's racial demographics. That reality was ignored by Hollywood, fueled by the same meritless, fevered victimhood that took out the lovelorn cartoon skunk. It became a classic xenophobic witchhunt.
When not even one of an imposed quota of thirteen foreign entertainment journalists of West African descent could be found — a number representing the 13% of America's Black population, not the rest of the world’s — who also needed to be star-fucking schmucks willing and personally wealthy enough to move to Los Angeles, the charity was forced to disband and sell the brand it had created in 1944 as a gift to Hollywood and a reflection of the HFPA’s love for filmmaking.
As an additional parting kick in the face from the zealot publicists who destroyed all that goodwill and free publicity — summed up in the saying “cutting off your nose to spite your face” — the HFPA was accused of unspecified "financial irregularities." Even if that were true about people forced to pay out of their own pockets for the privilege of covering Hollywood, where do you begin with that in a town awash in “creative accounting”? Most importantly, financial regulation is between the foundation and the IRS, none of anyone else’s business.
Those are but two of the most glaring examples of many well-intentioned missteps Greater Hollywood took in response to phantom threats to progressive beliefs. Others included taking work away from actors, the most beleaguered of all the struggling groups in entertainment, who happened to be born as the race specified or implied in the source material or cultural/historical settings, and giving it to another race that wasn’t underrepresented in the first place.
It’s not easy to admit you’re wrong even for the smallest mistakes. I love it: I consider the disruptive, educational sucker punch to my ego to be healthy. But that’s a reflex reaction from years of immersion in Eastern philosophical practices, the origins of modern psychotherapy, which has transformed my relationship with Existence completely.
When you have so much influence and position in the most prestigious industry in the world — do as many people care about the Nobel Prize as they do the Oscars? — it’s almost impossible to admit that the system you have been a part of, which execs and producers have supported enabled and believed in with religious devotion, is so dysfunctional that it’s causing the demise of theatrical releases, the cornerstone of filmed content. Only outside forces beyond Hollywood the Synecdoche’s control — the pandemic, the strikes, fickle audiences, streaming, no money, no movie stars — are to blame.
If what Hollywood is experiencing is as they say merely a temporary contraction, a correction because of overspending and all those external factors, and the status quo for theatrical releases comes roaring back in 2025, I will certainly eat my ego’s hat and apologize.
I will be disappointed that the new New Hollywood I’m hoping for will never happen, but that’s irrelevant if the format I’ve devoted a lifetime to survives. I’ll be fine.
However, enough industry observers agree with me to warrant keeping that hope going a while longer. The dysfunctions and bad behavior are real and need to be addressed.
The sort of New Hollywood films that might inspire a reboot of theatrical dramas and smart comedies weren't made by the private-equity minor leagues of today. They were a gamble by desperate studios strongarmed by the advent of television into making truly original, engaging content under the near-complete control of visionary directors, the only ones in a production meeting who own the title 'filmmaker.'
Those filmmakers responded to the Global North's zeitgeist, which demanded an honest exploration of humanhood in diametric opposition to the "aspirational" approach to dramas in the blockbuster era. Thanks to YouTube and TikTok, those demands have come roaring back, but Hollywood is too stuck on a step-and-repeat treadmill to pivot in response.
'Aspirational' is vested with lofty religious tones. It also means that whatever is aspired to doesn't presently exist, making it either a wish or an expectation. To twist an old Yiddish cliché about God and man’s plans, if you want to make a Buddhist laugh, tell him your expectations.
The reason rote progressive thinking rejects data-based evidence in favor of biased opinions and emotions is it's a killjoy for 'aspirational' if the data shows that what is aspired to already exists in abundance, or that the cause of what activists are fighting for or “standing with” is the true culprit vandalizing the social order and holding back the group it purports to advance.
Study after study has been coming out from Liberal academic groups that proves there has been no valid cause for deadly, destructive activism and crypto-Maoist cultural censorship for "sensitivity" reasons. Worse, data-based evidence states an inconvenient truth so terrible it must never be uttered: "It's not White men. It's you."
To fill the demand for diverse content that couldn't be seen on TV, New Hollywood also started releasing and marketing acclaimed foreign films as if they were made in America, with great success.
After blockbusters wiped out New Hollywood and restored creative control to executives for no business reason other than fueling the machismo of Speed Racers jockeying with each other for supremacy, up-and-coming filmmakers who resembled the brilliant auteurs lionized by cinephiles were passed over in favor of compliant directors of commercials.
Filmmakers coming up through the indie system, who proved agreeable and didn't exhibit the sort of scary temperamental traits common to most true artists across all mediums, were also welcomed to act as the glorified production supervisors executing the vision of anti-artistic businessmen that Hollywood directors had become.
A case that covers my points about non-English films with subtitles, content that speaks to conservatives, and corporate Hollywood’s selective intolerance is Mel Gibson. His self-financed The Passion of the Christ, which was aimed at a vast segment of the world’s population ignored by Hollywood and global filmed entertainment companies alike, was in two dead languages with subtitles.
It’s the highest-grossing R-rated film, or traditional adult content, of all time for 14 years until it was replaced by Deadpool, R-rated children’s content made for adults.
It was no fluke: Gibson repeated it with Apocalypto, another relative hit that didn't rely on Biblical mythology. It had no message, character arcs, name attachments, or White people. It was in a Mayan dialect with subtitles for the sake of authenticity, with the confidence that “the lowest common denominator” is not as dumb as Speed Racer doctrine has characterized it for 40 years.
"Nobody wants to read subtitles," Speed Racers say, even if they don’t read scripts as a proud badge of rank, only analysts' coverage of them; high-level execs are allotted discretionary funds to pay for coverage. In other words, the gatekeepers for what is approved or rejected aren’t making judgments themselves.
What did the Speed Racer kangaroo circuit court do when Mel Gibson displayed behavior consistent with mercurial creative geniuses in a drunken, racist rant that was secretly taped and leaked by a hostile spouse who had backed his ego into a corner? They sentenced him to director's jail for life.
‘Director’s jail’ isn’t one of my creative neologisms — that’s the name for it.
Credible allegations against Woody Allen for molesting his daughter first emerged in 1992. He directed 31 films between then and the release of a documentary made by his uber-progressive son in 2021, after which he was banished from the American filmmaking community, albeit reluctantly.
He continues to work in Europe, as does Roman Polanski, one of the creepiest people I’ve ever met but a great director nonetheless. The fact he once insulted and threatened me in Paris on behalf of his impotent gangster financier — I was so loved-up on Ecstasy à la Pepé Le Pew that I forgot my sexuality and tried to seduce his moll — has no bearing on the groundbreaking audacity of some of his films.
Allen’s highest-grossing film over those three decades was Midnight in Paris, which made $151 million on a $17 million budget. Passion made $612 million on a $30 million budget, roughly twice Allen’s biggest hit.
Gibson’s case proves that the current orthodoxy is upside down and backward: It's all about great filmmaking, meaning gripping, politically neutral storytelling and authenticity, something that has become utterly alien to sci-fi and superhero-obsessed Hollywood, pun fully intended.
Who cares about dumb, drunken comments about Nazis? I wouldn't know where to begin with the very real damage of institutional homophobia on the acceptance of my nonconformist work.
I embrace the possibility that I might be the one who’s wrong about all of this. Having spent my entire career marked with a scarlet M for the sort of natural-born “maverick” Speed Racers scorn out of fear, I might easily be shifting the blame away from myself as a way of justifying the fact that I’ve remained largely unproduced, despite conforming my work to Studio System II standards for the minor leagues and receiving recommends from analysts that theoretically place me in the upper 1%.
Under the current conditions, I don’t bother wasting my time thinking even about developing projects anymore. I’m on a hiatus from the industry that might well become permanent. That has freed me to make an honest, forthright appraisal of the industry’s cultural assumptions and behaviors that have brought us to this point, and to formulate a few suggestions for a path forward.
SOME EXPENSIVE IDEALS
We shouldn't be surprised by the public's astounding embrace of Kamala Devi's laughter — I wasn't. The “joy” it has engendered is expanding like the birth of a supernova, going nowhere else but everywhere. It cannot be faked; its authenticity is so palpable Republicans are responding with “bah, humbug.”
What is shocking to misery-mongering Progressives is that Kamala Devi is laughing in the face of Charles Blow and his ilk; even as a second-generation Indian American, she knows what real oppression and social injustice look like. The response of Vaishnavites like her family, traditional followers of Vishnu’s avatar Krishna, the god of Love, is to chase away the extreme deprivations of life on the Subcontinent with laughter and joy that is radical for dour Calvinist Americans on both sides of the aisle.
What does a man who has never experienced anything more than theoretical oppression do with someone representing him who isn’t playing along, not even following the oppressed-woman, glass-ceiling script?
GenZ is all about authenticity. They also largely reject Hollywood's artless forgeries in favor of real experiences on YouTube and TikTok that try to explain the many befuddling complexities of modern life, rather than telling them how to lead a more moral life according to DEI’s divisive conditions.
Until we start making films that genuinely reflect the human condition, not an ideal of it, and reveal valid truths about our nature that defy the theoretical, we're never going to get people back in theaters for true adult content. Children's content made for adults is unsustainable.
Meaningful cultural change is difficult. It takes time and deliberation in all liberal democracies, to ensure that everyone’s case is heard and a consensus is reached. It cannot be imposed by fiat, or by subterfuge through the elite film seminaries and vetting by film-festival programmers.
For many years now, the most sought-after feature film scripts are “elevated genre,” a perfect example of trying to find new ways to make old ways new again. “Elevated” is like “curated,” borrowed hyperbole that serves to raise the value of something beyond what it is, making it pretentious. ‘Pretentious’ means attempting to impress by pretending to greater importance, making what it represents inauthentic.
The “independent” film production and distribution company A24 has built a formidable presence in Hollywood through “elevated horror.” In an interview with The A.V. Club, legendary horror director John Carpenter said about “elevated horror,” and by extension all elevated genres,
I don't know what that means ... [Movies] don't have messages. They have themes…. The good ones do.
Call Me By Your Name had such a huge social impact, especially on GenZ, that it created the lone young male movie star in the world right now. It broke all the rules of modern American dramas:
it ends with a decidedly downbeat tone, i.e., the opposite of uplifting or even hopeful;
it’s about a same-sex relationship between an adult and what Americans consider a minor, making it amoral, a defiant stance against idealistic, doctrinaire aspirationalities, even though Elio was the age of consent in Italy and many American states;
the hero has no discernable character arc — “sexual awakening” is a misnomer because, by that age, all bisexual and gay men are so awake to their attraction to other men it causes insomnia;
the come-to-Jesus monologue is audaciously replaced by an anecdote from Elio’s father that ties his son’s experience to his own romantic loss and longing for another man, the most original cinematic father-son bonding moment in memory that was also entirely possible in that era;
its message is that heartbreak, particularly when caused by the circumstantial rupture of a romance, hurts like a motherfucker and causes profound grief that can last a lifetime, as it did for me, the surviving boy in the story it might well have been based on — in other words, it’s realistic, not idealistic.
Above all, it was authentic; again, it was likely based on a locally famous true story that took place in the American expat community in Italy at the time. It’s not just I who can vouch for its truthfulness; the majority of same-sex-attracted men everywhere have had similar experiences.
By examining a specific aspect of the human condition via an international story that rejected aspirational American sameness of experience as lensed by coastal elites, CMBYN was also truly inclusive, thereby broadening its appeal.
Practically speaking, CMBYN was a European production made in association with American producers, starring American actors. It’s unlikely that it would’ve been made exclusively in America in the current culture; however, it would’ve been in the New Hollywood era, when the unflinchingly authentic Midnight Cowboy won Best Picture.
I asked ChatGPT if the reason CMBYN did $4 million worse at the domestic box office than Moonlight — another gay-themed romance that was by no means as good according to my New Hollywood-ized standards and professional eye, largely because of the moralizing and dreary social-justice tropes — was because it was about a romance between an adult and a teen.
It replied that perceived amorality had little effect on returns. It was a matter of wider distribution rather than CMBYN’s distributor Sony Picture Classic’s platforming approach for “art house” films:
As a young and ambitious company, A24 was keen to prove itself in the competitive indie film market. This hunger led to more aggressive distribution strategies and marketing efforts compared to Sony Pictures Classics, which is an established player with a more traditional and cautious approach. A24 took more risks to ensure Moonlight reached a wider audience as part of building its brand reputation.
In short, A24's innovative marketing, strategic release, strong awards campaigning, and the broad thematic appeal of Moonlight helped it secure a wider release compared to Call Me by Your Name. Although both films were distributed by respected indie labels, A24’s willingness to push boundaries and experiment played a significant role in Moonlight's broader theatrical reach.
After winning an undeserved Best Picture Oscar against La La Land for purely socio-political reasons, not merit — an uncomfortable thing in a meritocratic society where the word 'best' is specific, unnuanced — it went on to crush CMBYN international box office returns, too. Its Best Adapted Screenplay award had nominal impact by comparison.
White Lotus, essentially an extended New Hollywood film descended from Woody Allen and John Cassavetes, has been so influential on the American zeitgeist that it has revived the tourism industry of Italy. Like CMBYN, it’s a cultural co-production that includes the perspectives of the local inhabitants of its setting. That helped it blast light on the modern American condition while honoring and including the surrounding culture, with subtitles. It also takes apart the lunacy and hypocrisy of critical social justice with the deadpanned glee of Edward Scissorhands.
I was in Miami when Pedro Almodóvar's The Skin I Live In came out. Not his best work, but it starred Antonio Banderas, one of the few Hispanic actors to cross over to Hollywood in a real, Desi Arnaz sense, meaning his name recognition could secure financing and a green light.
I assumed it would play on a couple of screens somewhere in Miami-Dade. The director was a true auteur and a household name in the Spanish-speaking world, and 75% of the county's residents — or 1.75 million out of 2.5 million people — spoke Spanish.
It didn't play on a single screen. It's likely owing to the practice of platforming “art house” dramas and smart comedies by releasing a film on a small number of screens in major cities, all of which share Liberal English-speaking American assumptions that are for the most part not in line with the Hispanic community’s — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is an anomaly from New York City.
The Skin I Live In opened on 6 screens in art houses in English-speaking neighborhoods of major cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. With a lukewarm box office, there was no sense in increasing screen saturation.
Not being lazy and willfully unworldly by opening it on many more screens in Spanish-speaking markets at the outset would've made all the difference in the world. ChatGPT identifies 55 cities and neighborhoods in America with a high enough Spanish-speaking population to support a film released and marketed to them.
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For dramas to explore meaningful aspects of human nature, they must not be idealistic, aspirational, or made within specious sensitivity guidelines that serve no purpose but to marginalize the vast majority of audiences who are by now well aware and wary of social-justice ruses.
Since when has it been a good idea in any industry to make products not according to what the market needs, but what the makers believe in? Considering the cost of goods sold for movies as products, thems some expensive ideals.
I propose a reversal of the current evaluation criteria of a "makeable film": if a script adheres to current social-justice doctrines, moralizes in any way at the cost of being engaging and entertaining, or isn't in line with the shared experiences of mankind as a whole so that it may speak to them inclusively, measured by observational data, it should be rejected.
The only dramas and smart comedies that should be approved are those that would've been made during the New Hollywood era, updated with modern, truthful insights into human nature and the socio-political dynamics of the world as a whole. That would not include “lensing” history to maintain legacy narratives of oppression that are no longer valid.
By never leaning on identity politics, Kamala Devi has already gone so far in moving the zeitgeist away from identity politics. Still, old habits die last; it’s unlikely that Hollywood, and the minor leagues especially, have the full measure of how deeply social-justice assumptions have burrowed in and corrupted the system.Script analysts and “creative executives” shouldn’t second-guess what audiences want to see by filtering them according to whether a script has a precedent. Again, that strangles originality in favor of mitigating risk. Reasonable risk should be embraced, not dismissed with communal assumptions that aren’t grounded in objective data that hasn’t been rigged to guarantee an outcome, such as, “Audiences don’t like dramas,” a dominant genre for decades until Speed Racers deemed them “unmakable.”
“Creative executive/producer” is a contradiction in terms that puts people with predominantly managerial-analytical skills on a par with people with true artistic talent. This is an ego-boosting, prestige-grabbing roleplaying game that must end for the sake of the final product. Creative decisions should be made by creative people, business decisions by businesspeople.
TV’s model places writer-producers, a.k.a. showrunners, who have not only shepherded a project through development but actually created its blueprint, at the head of the production team. It has been enormously successful; writers tend to be cerebral and adaptable, accustomed to managing the expectations of many people with differing expectations and tastes.
In theatrical features, which use the same process as TV following a far less complicated narrative structure while spending way more money, unless they’re writer-directors, they’re treated like garbage. A Reddit post from a week ago, linked at the end of this piece, tells a tale of woe that is so common at first I thought it was a spoof of a cliché.
The TV model needs to be adopted by feature films. Top-heavy above-the-line budgets, paying people who have no idea how to make a film more than those in the trenches making it, need to be pared back to TV scale as well, that money put back on the screen or preferably into another project.
No executive deserves to live better and with more financial security than the people who create the product he depends on for that security. Most of them do.No film needs five or six writers to deliver as many rewrites of a genre piece made within strict boundaries. Yet it’s par for the course. Not only is it intrinsically belittling and disrespectful to writers, it’s a waste of money. Any “creative executive” who is so insecure that he needs that many rewrites from different studio-approved writers, all trained to deliver the same kind of script, has no place in the process.
Script analysts are already being assisted by AI, a recommendation I made in an essay I posted about the collapse of Hollywood in August 2023. My assessment was that humans cannot be replaced because AI isn’t sentient; in other words, it can’t feel or have real experiences and emotions, all an essential part of a creative process that requires replicating the human condition. After initial concerned pushback when ChatGPT rolled out, that fact seems to be more broadly understood and accepted.
Part of my criteria for AI analysis would be comparisons to worldwide markets, a complicated database to assemble but it’s essential for true diversity. While this seems to imply that I’m recommending that scripts be measured according to box office precedent, I’m not: it’s using data to determine if a script might have appeal in other places, to avoid mistakes like not opening a Spanish-language film made by a household name in Hispanic communities in the 55 areas of the country that can support a theatrical release in Spanish, rather than platforming it as an “art house film” in elite English-speaking Liberal enclaves with completely different sensibilities.
In that essay, I suggested that the worldwide filmed-content industry as a whole, not just the English language, adopt three independent programs that would act the way the three credit bureaus do for credit scores.
ChatGPT identified nine programs currently being tested. It whittled them down to three forerunners:
Prescene: Known for its comprehensive coverage and predictive analytics, which could set a standard for objective and detailed script analysis. It appears to have the broadest scope for gauging originality and authenticity.
ScriptSense: This tool is heavily utilized by Hollywood studios for its efficiency and security features, making it a reliable option for large-scale script evaluations.
Avail: While still emerging, Avail offers a promising suite of tools designed specifically for the executive side of the industry, combining productivity with advanced AI capabilities.
Script analysts should be independent departments of studios, networks, and streaming services that do not answer to development and creative executives.
They have one mission: is the script good enough to be produced?
If it’s a “consider,” it’s automatically added to the lower tiers of a slate ranked by genre and budget, not punted back to producers and writers with recommendations and best wishes.
If it’s a “recommend” then it goes into fast-track development immediately within certain parameters, also run through AI, not punted back to await packaging and financing.
Producers and writers with a recommended script would have the option to withdraw it from the company’s slate and to go out to as many options as they want.
If writers without producers are submitting the script themselves, they should be paired with independent producers and execs looking for material, again with no obligations. This is about giving all talented creatives a fair shake, not just those who tick the right boxes by status in the industry, which is based on too many luck-based variables to be a meaningful assessment of a project’s value.I can’t even begin to list the obstacles to getting a project produced and distributed. Those who know, know. It’s insane, not to mention cruel and unusual punishment, setting filmmakers up for failure. The entire end-to-end process to be taken down to its components and examined carefully. System adjustments should be made to those steps that are onerous; right now, that means all of them.
Development of minor league projects should be moved from New York to London where they have a broader worldview. It’s also a better gateway to the rest of the world, naturally inclusive in a real sense. L.A. is an out-of-touch cultural backwater while New York is limited to English-language projects within the limited parameters set by a culture informed by elite Northeastern institutions that is as completely out of touch, as reliant on formulaic parameters as the Marvels.
Talent agents have no place in determining whether a film is made. Just as writers forced the Big Four to stop packaging and financing projects, either quotas need to be eliminated as a conflict of interest, or another system is put in place to eradicate it.
Now that celebrity has little real influence on financing, agents' opinions about scripts are more irrelevant than ever; there's no need for them to have script analysts. They're already legally bound to inform their clients of an offer. If agents are too important to cover the script themselves, they have no place in the conversation about it, much less so much influence over its chances of being made.In no new New Hollywood should a semi-literate narcissist like Jessica Chastain have power over whether a film gets made — there are far too many like her. It should be made based on its merits.
Expanding the available casting pool will make everyone’s life easier, and give legions of overlooked actors a better chance of being given a fair shake in the spirit of true inclusion.
By all means, cast the Jumbos with recognizable names; the tentpoles and franchises will be fewer and farther between, anyway. Just because I’m advocating for more equitable treatment of other genres, doesn’t mean I want the blockbusters gone — fewer releases will only enhance and restore their specialness as anticipated events. Either it’s Dune or Star Wars, or it doesn’t get made and the budget for expensive wannabes is decked toward more diverse, truly original content.The label “art house” translates as “box office kiss of death” to distributors and theater owners. It’s one of those self-fulfilling denigrating terms that gives a film a lowered probability of success. It should be used specifically for art films made by experimental filmmakers like Harmony Korine or David Lynch.
CMBYN, Moonlight and Almodóvar aren’t art films; they’re low-budget dramas. They’re only that low budget because they were given the label “art house” at the script stage, thereby figuratively strapping them into a wheelchair to run a marathon, only to be labeled as “anomalies” or “flukes” once they succeed.No more platforming films that aren’t really art house. Give lower-budget dramas and smart comedies a fair chance with healthy screen saturation.
The festival circuit should have no place in the distribution process. It’s expensive for filmmakers and relies on the buy-in of American minor league film seminarians who need to undergo as large a cultural change as the Speed Racers fawning over Jessica Chastain in the main house.
Festivals should return to their original purview of screening films that audiences might not see in theaters, a program-selection criteria that is in direct conflict with a film needing theatrical distribution.
Sundance should take over AFM’s spot but move it to Hollywood, centered around the shuttered Arclight Cinema. As out of touch and dismissive of the costs to true indie filmmakers as always, the Institute is looking to relocate to one of five remote locations, therefore making it inaccessible to the sort of struggling filmmakers they pretend to foster by forcing them to pay for travel and accommodation.Studios should set up marketing and distribution deals with minor-league films at the outset, and treat them no differently from Jumbos. New Hollywood films didn’t have to go through the festival circuit and win to be released, so why should lower-budget dramas?
They can make decisions for distribution plans based on focus groups conducted across a wide demographic both domestically and internationally — how hard it is to sync a screening in Soeul with one in Burbank?
An alternative for production companies of a certain standing would be to have direct access to theaters to manage their own distribution. For this, they would need to have their own marketing budgets for campaigns created by accredited independent entertainment marketing companies, and press managed by similar PR firms, a system that is halfway in place already.For the Oscars to be truly inclusive and diverse, a third or half of Best Picture nominees should be non-English speaking.
The entitlement to adapt stories belonging to other nations in American English is a basic, egregious act of cultural appropriation that is nothing less than hypocritical in DEI-fied Hollywood.
Films set in other countries should be in the languages of those countries. Napoleon would’ve been a far better film if it had been made in the language he spoke, starring French actors — there’s a world of difference between an American and a European that isn’t nuanced. There are 320 million French speakers in the world; how is that not enough to justify making it in its original language? The French are so sophisticated that most can understand the kind of archaic, highly formal style of their language spoken in that period.Trailers shouldn’t be pegged exclusively before the kind of film the audience is watching. They should represent a wider variety. People watching Avatar should also be aware that Call Me By Your Name is an option.
Above all, the pervasive attitude throughout Hollywood culture needs to be completely overhauled. How can people who embrace such casual venality, lying, backstabbing, crassness, abusiveness, and general sleaziness with pride or grim acceptance dare to moralize on behalf of humankind?
I remember first watching Entourage with my boyfriend twenty years ago (yikes!). After a typically reprehensible Ari Gold sequence, he said, “Wow! This is just like your life.”
It’s worse than ever, in large part thanks to how that show normalized and glamorized that behavior. The basis for that character, Ari Emmanuel, is still out there, all the wealthier and influential, reverently quoted in media.
If anyone dares to state the obvious, “That’s not right,” they’d be met with a shrug and, “That’s Hollywood.”
Let me ask this: What does any of it have to do with filmmaking? If the answer is “nothing,” into the dumpster it goes.
In change management, incremental change is when an organization recognizes an existential need for transformation and begins to tweak the small stuff without making much difference, what I call "coming up with new ways to make old ways new again."
The sort of truly transformational change that theatrical releases need to survive requires a complete overhaul of Hollywood the Synecdoche's culture and systems — out with the old, in with the new. It's far more difficult, painful and risky, and takes a long time to take root effectively enough to produce results.
Better get on with it, I reckon, put some of that Borg-like singleminded action that has worked as one across the industry to marginalize truly diverse, original voices and blacklist filmmakers who have exhibited corporate-unfriendly behavior — under the combined duress of being in the trenches of production and fending off intrusion from an oxymoron known as "creative executives" — to productive use for a change, literally.
That there was meta to my point as an example of necessary transformational change.
The essential American soul might be what D.H. Lawrence said, but it's also many more descriptors than those, most of them overwhelmingly positive. What Hollywood the Synecdoche and its self-flagellating minor leagues, in particular, fail to see is clear to everyone else: it's already the most aspirational soul in the world, bar none. That soul is the cement in this country's foundations, set long before the Republic was founded — it's what caused its foundation in the first place.
Take it from a voice of that soul: it is immovable.
In what sort of culture is the maverick outsider the radically authentic person whose work makes observations presented in believable and identifiable narratives with insights that arise organically, not by fiat of doctrine, that commonly elicit the reaction, "I never thought of it that way"?
Yet they’re mostly merely Emperor’s New Clothes pattern-recognition observations based on what is observable and evident, unclouded by the specious mendacities of social theorists. The reason people haven’t thought of it that way is usually because they’ve been misguided by assumptions and empathy-exploitative narratives that tap into their own insecurities.
If Hollywood the Synecdoche desperately needs to make authentic content to revive theatrical releases made for adults, the most prestigious sector of its business, how much longer can it afford to look at the authentic creator as the "difficult" maverick? Can it afford to keep in place insurmountable obstacles to his progress, when he needs to be the norm?
The only thing that is radical about him and his work is he's telling it like it is objectively and from a broader worldview, rejecting opportunistic idealism that is so much fantastical Wakanda; what audiences really need at the dawn of Kamala Devi’s laugh is raw, authentic Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee, updated to meet currently social realities and assumptions, no matter whose collective delusion it might trespass against.
That it takes a reckless amount of career-risking bravado to be authentic and tell it like it is shouldn't be the case, either. In Russia, certainly, but not in America.
Ironically, most of Hollywood the Synedoche doesn't really believe in that idealism. They're merely too afraid of change, their heads too deep in the sand to understand that it's inevitable, held hostage by the irrational fear of baseless social activism. That’s understandable, completely normal, why they will continue to find new ways to make old ways new again until circumstances beyond anyone’s control force transformational change.
I could easily be wrong. The industry might well rebound next year and carry on manufacturing well-made mediocrity and indies that mistake idealism for substantive insights into the human condition, which in reality doesn’t know Left from Right and is only worsened by the conviction that it must.
Kamala Devi represents a more radical revolution than people yet realize. It’s not just her shocking authenticity and joy in the face of the same-old “democracy’s at stake!” Liberal glumness — note how that sentiment has already receded into the mists of the convenient collective memory of self-righteous pessimists.
She’s underscoring how accustomed we’ve become to the sort of traits that I’ve listed above, that Hollywood finds glamorous about itself: “casual venality, lying, backstabbing, crassness, abusiveness, and general sleaziness.”
Trump embodies all of those qualities. As I pointed out in a piece written a couple of days after he was elected in 2016, Trump represents modern Americans as the rest of the world sees us. Conservatives have embraced it — they enjoy being jerks, no other reason for it.
Liberals lack the self-awareness to see Trump in themselves, even after the wretched excesses of the social-justice movement that nobody was held accountable for. Conservatives are right that it has been a shocking double standard.
It’s symbolic that Hollywood darling Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new religiously titled book The Message — someone give him a wedgie, please — will probably be number one on the New York Times bestseller list this week. From Coleman Hughes’ takedown in the Free Press last week, it sounds delirious. Like Charles Blow, Coates is professionally the anti-Kamala’s Laugh — I’ll bet she rattles him to the core.
No matter how much they give to Liberal causes, the Speed Racers, the minions of Studio System II: Meaner, Dumber, With Agents, and much of Hollywood the Synecdoche for all English-language filmed content are by far the most Trump-like of industries. It’s a triple scoop of fakery on a plastic waffle cone, topped with a melting orange spray tan — not a good look on anyone.
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The Reddit post. Look at the Snoovatar’s expression — why so miserable? And yet there is no Hollywood unless schmucks like me wake up every morning to write, often for free. Tell me more about your social injustice…