TENSELTOWN TRAVELOGUE
BY PATRICK COURRIELCHE
WITH ADRYANA CORTEZ
Tinseltown Travelogue is a three-part series exploring Hollywood’s stunning hypocrisy and institutionalized bigotry. This story, months in the making, comes on the heels of the explosive New York Times exposé of alleged sexual misconduct over decades by Tinseltown’s most celebrated producer, Harvey Weinstein, and further unmasks an industry in the midst of an ethical unraveling. Instead of confronting Hollywood’s biggest “open secret” of systemic moral decay, Tinseltown’s elite have chosen to exhibit disdain for everyday Americans through brutal mockery and relentless attacks on their beliefs. Wrapped in scandal and historic box office lows, something brand new is happening to Hollywood…it appears Americans have had enough. This is a Tinseltown intervention.
DEAR RIGHT WINGERS,
WE HATE YOU.
LOVE,
HOLLYWOOD
“Republican in the dictionary comes just after ‘reptile’ and just before ‘repugnant.’” – Julia Roberts, at a 2000 Gore for President fundraiser, organized by Harvey Weinstein
I’ve always known Hollywood despises conservatives. It’s hardly a secret. Lena Dunham, Sean Penn, Scarlett Johansson, Madonna, Whoopie, Stephen Colbert, Robert De Niro, Judd Apatow, Jennifer Lawrence, Rob Reiner. The list is a who’s who of pop culture… and endlessly growing. But I recently sensed a major shift in Tinseltown, and started making some phone calls to see if I was right. “It’s never been worse than it is now,” said a Hollywood veteran who asked not to be named. And why the anonymity? “The big mouths” – major Tinseltown producers are telling studios and networks not to work with anyone associated with Trump.
Welcome to the new #war on the right – Hollywood style.
People like me are foreigners in La La Land. The most unhinged voices in this liberal colony think we’re the worst scum imaginable – an idiotic, deplorable, irredeemable, unwashed clan they call right-wingers. Thankfully, many of us couldn’t care less what they think.. Andrew Breitbart warned of how much we were hated in this town, and set up Big Hollywood to even the playing field. And as the New York Times puts it – we’ve been “perfecting the art” of weaponizing their own words against them ever since.
The deplorable bunch in Hollywood is bigger in number than many think, but bullying tactics and blacklist fears have kept most in the closet. As a result, conservatives in Filmville seem as uncommon as a George Clooney hit movie…rarer than an unpilfered joke in Amy Schumer’s standup set. And believe it or not, in some Hollywood circles, being a conservative is more toxic than a grown man spooning in bed with other people’s kids.
If you think I’m exaggerating, you don’t know this town.
Growing up in its shadow, I’ve been in and around the Hollywood swamp for decades. At times I’ve flirted with Tinseltown – if you count dancing on American Bandstand, writing some unfunny jokes for Sarah Silverman and Tracey Morgan, producing a Questlove documentary, and hiring a shit ton of celebs to hype projects. But I’ve mostly made my bones in the art, fashion, and music scene. Nevertheless, success in its sister industries makes rubbing elbows with Hollywood’s elite inevitable.
That’s me above – nine months pregnant at a 2007 “Young Hollywood” fundraiser at director Brett Ratner’s mansion. I actually wasn’t in my third trimester – my wife was. I’m told it’s called sympathy weight.
As usually happens here when you enter parenthood, know a few “important” people, and have a little bit of cash, you find yourself inadvertently in a privileged Hollywood circuit – an endless parade of beginner theater plays, music recitals, dance performances, play dates, birthday parties, and parent socials where you hob knob with the real players that make this company town hum. As big as this sprawling city is, Hollywood is a surprisingly small community. You can’t push a Bugaboo around without running over the loafers of a talent agent, studio exec, screenwriter, movie publicist, film score producer or B-list movie star. Nearly everyone touches the biz in some way, shape or form, and is connected to the machine that produces the majority of the world’s traditional entertainment. It’s a club of sorts…where everyone knows each other.
I entered this gilded group as a man in transition. I identified liberal, but was quickly discovering my inner rightwing self. I’d been red pilled, and it forced my eyes open to a widely held, deeply rooted Tinseltown sentiment. And that is…Hollywood hates conservatives. I mean ¡HATES! them. My friends in Middle America think they know this already. Kathy Griffin beheadings, Snoop Dogg’s assassination porn, and every allegedly funny late night talk show host prove this nightly. But unless you live here amongst the glitterati, you can’t truly grasp how the intensity of that white-hot hate is woven into the fabric of this city. The facial expression when a typical La La Land leftist first learns that your politics are right-of-center is unmistakable. It’s a blank, expressionless stare, eyes glazed over, mouth slightly open – and all of this locked in position for a beat too long. It could have an emoji it’s so recognizable. Once this juicy morsel of info is acquired by the “wrong” person, they become Donald Sutherland in the final frames of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
The level of disdain towards conservatives needs to be experienced firsthand to truly be appreciated. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule. My wife and I have Hollywood homies, incredible mentors for our daughter, and regularly interact with “celebrities” who all happen to be tolerant liberals. We don’t care about their politics. But like citing Fox News as proof that liberals don’t dominate the media, these exceptions prove the rule.
Being of Mexican descent, my wife likes to say that we were initially shielded from knee-jerk bigotry by our brown cards. So I didn’t really feel the full force of the hate until a few years after the birth of my daughter – when my wife and I began butting heads with some prominent members of this monolithically liberal society.
Our first major run-in seemed like a no brainer – confronting a grown man who cuddled other people’s kids…in bed. It was slam-dunk material.
It all started the way all of these affairs usually do – with a few of the Hollywood wives, the true guardians of this star-studded galaxy, gabbing away on a moms-only weekend retreat. In the midst of their morning powwow, a big time Tinseltown player’s wife brought up a touchy subject – one of the fathers creeped her out. Her daughter had been at a sleepover and told her she saw this creepy dad crawl onto the top bunk in the late of night to cuddle with a second grader…not his own. Another mom described a similar incident when her child did a sleepover at the same dad’s house. My wife chimed in with her own account of Creepy Dad red-flag episodes, including yet another time he napped with a different child – not his own – during a play date.
Were the younglings distraught and in need of comforting? Maybe. But should a grown man spoon with them to calm their nerves? I think most parents, no matter their political persuasion, would answer absofuckinglutely not!
The impromptu story swap lit off a firestorm around the table – and moments later husbands’ cells started ringing because it dawned on the moms that at that very moment their baby daddies and children were at the same play date as Creepy Dad. To say that what came next was “mind altering” would be like saying Bruce Jenner had a makeover – technically true…but mildly understated.
A few of us dads unanimously agreed that the issue needed to be addressed. Where I come from, these types of matters aren’t handled so civilly. They more resemble the end of those ISIS propaganda videos where they capture an American journalist. But amongst the Hollywood elite, situations like these are dealt with very discretely – largely because money, real money, of which pretty much everyone has access to within this community, tends to change the dynamics of confrontation. This point cannot be overstated. Hollywood’s elite aren’t just rich…to quote my wife, they’re “frich” – or fucking rich. Tinseltown is largely the playground of aristocrats, with many coming from generations of moneyed families. Variety, Hollywood’s self-professed publication of record, boasts that its readers have the highest average household income of any magazine in America. The privilege this level of wealth bequeaths is something most people don’t even know exists. And in their defense, the frich are oblivious to it as well because they have been living it their entire lives.
Over a couple of days, Creepy Dad was confronted by each of us – offering no denial of the incidents, and in my case, coming off a tad coached. None of us was sure where it would go next, but a hint came when his wife, Mrs. Creepy, stepped in. Her message: showing “love” to children was not creepy, shame on anyone who thinks otherwise, and nothing was going to change in their household. According to her, we were the weird ones. A few days later, Mr. and Mrs. Creepy, in a seeming act of defiance, astonishingly hosted a “sleepover party” for six year-olds. It ignited a shit storm, the likes of which I’ve never experienced before – with word of our intervention spreading like wildfire. The only thing that travels faster than the speed of light is gossip through the Hollywood grapevine. Parents were frantic over Creepy Dad’s behavior. In the midst of the commotion, another Hollywood wife we didn’t really know came forward to tell us that Mr. and Mrs. Creepy were actually confronted several years earlier, by different parents, over disturbing behavior concerning children. Apparently, this wasn’t their first time at the rodeo.
At its peak, nearly everyone that approached us within this microcosm of Tinseltown expressed the opinion that the behavior was deeply inappropriate at best, and something far more nefarious at worst. Everyone involved, including my wife and I, wanted the controversy to end. But when it wouldn’t…we started to sense something was afoot.
In the real world, the outrage would have continued unabated until either The Creepies publicly repented and slithered quietly away, or were run out of Dodge by the angry villagers. But Mr. and Mrs. Creepy knew something my wife and I didn’t understand at the time – in Hollywood, there’s something more toxic than spooning in bed with other people’s kids.
A friend of The Creepies, another Hollywood wife, approached my better half as a sort of ambassador – attempting to explain away her friend’s conduct. When her flawed argument was rejected, Mrs. Ambassador let it slip.
“Well, [Mrs. Creepy] did say you guys were conservatives.”
Word was getting back to us that The Creepies, in a seeming attempt at deflection, were telling anyone that would listen that my wife and I were right wingers – unrelated intel anywhere but in La La Land. Within a matter of weeks, the spotlight had shifted from their creepy behavior to our politics. The turn was startling.
We’d faced Hollywood bigotry towards conservatives before – dating back to my early days with Breitbart News. The morning after my first appearance on Fox News as a Big Hollywood contributor, I was gifted with a keyed car – which was later graduated to a tire slashing. The vitriol reached a peak when a neighbor came to our front door with a bat. Then during the 2012 campaign, a lovely liberal TV exec used my daughter to attack our politics – opening the door for another Hollywoodian to joke about her being raped. Yes…rape jokes…about a five year-old. Back then, the instances of aggression were done by anonymous cowards or people that didn’t really know us well. But this time we were feeling the bigotry from some highfalutin Tinseltown players that we interacted with regularly. Sane people had suddenly gone mad.
When the dust settled, astonishingly it was The Conservatives, not The Creepies, who were on the outs. However, the level of bigotry would reach maximum velocity with the birth of the Trump campaign. In the heat of the election cycle, The Creepies and their hard-left minions were at it again – this time promoting, correctly, that we were Trump supporters. Hawaii group vacations were canceled, play dates postponed, and intimidation and public shaming commenced on social media. Parents even enlisted their kids in the warfare, posting images of them beating Trump piñatas, posing laughing at Trump’s nude sculpture, declaring idiot Trump voters were dead to them – and one talentless screenwriter fat shamed my wife on social media for all to see. So much for love trumps hate.
As disturbing as their behavior was, this story is not about the “outing” of The Creepies. Rest assured, we put them on notice and authorities were alerted. The inclusion of this anecdote was to illustrate one simple point: the venom toward the Deplorables is so toxic that some of Hollywood’s finest would rather (metaphorically) jump in the sack with a guy who spoons kids than with someone who is ideologically in bed with Trump. This blind discrimination needs to end because it’s not just affecting right-wingers based in Hollywood…it’s damaging the entire film industry and American culture at large.
Every so often an ambitious mainstream journalist will write about Hollywood bigotry towards conservatives – but without fail, it amounts to a fallen tree in the forest…it makes no noise.
“The media does a story on it maybe once or twice a year, it’s kind of the same story but different players, and there’s never any momentum from it,” says Christian Toto – a film critic and long-time chronicler of Tinseltown’s liberal bias.
And he’s right. There’ve been countless sprawling essays, passionate pleas, and angry petitions published on the subject. Secret Hollywood conservative groups pop up every few years – the Wednesday Morning Club, the Sunday Night Club, Friends of Abe – all to little or no avail. I’ve addressed the issue before myself, in 2011, and since then Hollywood’s hate towards conservatives has only deepened.
“You hear the term ‘institutionalized racism.’ Well I think this behavior is institutionalized in a way,” says Toto.
But why? What are the reasons behind Hollywood’s hatred of the right and why has it persisted? What has been the reaction from the people experiencing it? And perhaps most importantly to this company town, what is it doing to the business of entertainment?
Big Hollywood has given me the opportunity to delve into these topics. Many I spoke to feel I’m taking on the impossible – to convince Tinseltown that for the sake of their industry’s future, they must respect the deplorables.
A friend reminded me of Gregory Peck’s character, Phillip Green, in the 1947 film Gentleman’s Agreement. In it, Mr. Green is a journalist put on assignment to expose anti-Semitism in American society. Because so much had been written on the topic with little effect, the writer was hesitant to take on the story.
“What can I possibly say that hasn’t been said before?” asked Mr. Green
“I dunno. Maybe it hasn’t been said well enough,” replied his mother.
Worried that another story packed solely with charts and statistics would fall on deaf ears, he opts for a different route. He decided to pretend to be Jewish for six months to experience the bigotry firsthand. The nuanced bias, the unsaid but felt disdain, the out of nowhere attacks, the sometime violence, the fear of association, the blacklisting– and even the heroes that buck their peers. It all plays out in the movie. Mr. Green’s experience looked all too familiar.
The film inspired me to delve into this subject on a more personal level – by not just hearing from the thoughts of industry players, but also talking to “common folk” and chronicling my own encounters with some of the more triggered bubble dwellers. Mr. Green only lived six months as a Jew in anti-Semitic New York – I’ve spent eight years as a right-winger in bigoted Hollywood. I also want to get an understanding of how we got here, and far from the victimhood plaguing every corner of society – I’ll show how the deplorables are punching back…and winning.
This particular topic was near and dear to Breitbart News’ founder, Andrew Breitbart. And if this company town thinks disrespecting conservatives has no impact on its business, it’s spending too much time at the green pharmacy.
Since 2002, tickets sold at the domestic box office have dropped by over a quarter of a billion seats per year – and that’s while there’s been a growth in the population, and both an increase in the number of movies made per year and number of available U.S. movie screens. The Summer 2017 box office hit a twenty-five year low. And some of the largest theater chains have even turned to God for help – offering up their venues to congregations for Sunday services.
Film piracy is growing and becoming normalized. In the home, entertainment sales have plummeted by nearly 50% over the past decade. Cord cutting, the phenomenon of people ending their cable service or never signing up for one in the first place, is accelerating at an alarming rate. And if the 2017 Emmys matching an all-time low in viewership says anything – it’s that Hollywood has a real problem on its hands.
Industry watchers like to blame these developments solely on disruptive changes in technology. But the downturn at both the theater and home box offices started before the proliferation of social media, the third screen, and streaming services. These new technological advances have no doubt played a role, but Hollywood ignores another obvious reason for its box office woes – its amped up rhetoric against the right.
I’ve seen Trump supporters turn to “purposeful piracy” – the act of watching Hollywood’s content without paying for it on grounds of principle. The “Boycott Hollywood” sentiment has measurably grown – as anyone that lurks through the comment sections of conservative media can easily witness. This call to action tends to spike around award season – most notably in early 2017 after the infamous Meryl Streep Golden Globes speech…when she claimed that Trump callously mocked a man’s disability. Putting aside that reasonable people could, at a minimum, find her accusations to be flawed – her lecture enraged the right for another reason…its ironic and perverse timing.
Earlier that same week, a mentally disabled man was kidnapped and tortured. The perpetrators, who cut off a part of his scalp, live-streamed their evil deed – saying for the camera, “Fuck Trump!” and “Fuck white people!” For the Hollywood elites reading these words right now – it’s likely the first time they’ve even heard of this perverse hate crime. For The Right, it is not…and there’s clear evidence that they’re taking out their frustrations on Tinseltown’s bottom line.
Astonishingly, there appears to be no publicly available data on the political affiliation of moviegoers to show precisely how much Hollywood’s political rhetoric has affected the box office. Film exhibitors Regal, AMC Theaters, Cinemark, Cineplex, Harkin Theatres, National Amusements, and Bow Tie Cinemas, along with the National Association of Theatre Owners did not respond to requests for info. Marcus Theatres declined comment. B&B Theatres, primarily a Mid-Western theater chain, confirmed that they do not capture the political leanings of their moviegoers. And most surprisingly, a representative of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) confirmed that the organization does not track moviegoers’ political affiliation in its highly anticipated annual report on domestic theater attendance. With the rampant cases of celebrity diarrhea of the mouth disease, this oversight appears derelict at best. Maybe Christopher Dodd – a former 30-year Democrat senator and president of the MPAA at the time of this writing – doesn’t want to know how much Hollywood’s anti-conservative rhetoric hurts the box office. Film studios and theater shareholders, however, should be curious.
Thankfully, there is another snapshot that helps underscore the box office affect of Movie City’s political vitriol.
According to a 2011 Penn Schoen Berland poll conducted for The Hollywood Reporter, 52 percent of Republicans say they have avoided a movie because of the political views of its star – compared to just 36 percent in Democrats. And this is an important finding when looking at the likely political leanings of Hollywood’s stars.
When reviewing publicly published data for all actors nominated in 2017 for best actor/actress in a lead or supporting scripted role for the Oscars, Golden Globes, Screen Actors Guild Awards, and the Primetime Emmys, there wasn’t a single publicly verifiable right-of-center nominated actor out of the 240 potential awards. Not one. These are some of the most vocal stars in Hollywood because they are interviewed by media throughout the year as a result of their nominations. With the most prominent celebrities being almost uniformly liberal – Republicans are largely the only faction meaningfully affecting box office revenues based on politics. To Middle America, Hollywood has long been considered the enemy – and they’re acting on that relationship by closing their wallets.
Throughout this series we’ll look at how we’ve got to our current situation. While delving into the origins of the infamous Hollywood blacklist, we’ll uncover how Movie City became dominated by one political party…and discover precisely why many of its citizens view conservatives with such hostility. We’ll explore how Tinseltown’s bigotry is changing both its economics and the behavior of the right. And all along the way we’ll attempt to provide solutions to fixing Hollywood’s floundering business model.
This series is a Hollywood intervention. Contrary to popular opinion, the right loves movies and are suckers for a good TV show. When the left attacked Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper – Breitbart News and its readers were at the forefront of its defense…and it went on to shatter box office records. When North Korea threatened Sony Pictures over distributing The Interview – the Republican Party offered support in its release. When We’re the Millers was getting pummeled by liberal film critics – it was the Rustbelt that made it a raging success. The right loves Americana – and there’s nothing more American than the motion picture…which is why we give a shit.
But make no mistake about it – this is not a victim-laced plea to Movie City…it’s a friendly warning. We are at a critical moment in the history of entertainment. Tinseltown’s monopoly on escapism is over. Now more than ever, the audience has options. And if the deplorables aren’t respected – they’d rather watch the industry collapse like a “dehydrated” Hillary than spend one more penny making their enemies richer. Anyone that’s been paying attention has seen this sentiment brewing. We are attempting a course correction. Hollywood…this is your notice.
Still from Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
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PART TWO
ATTENTION ALL TRUMP VOTERS, IMMEDIATELY EXIT STAGE RIGHT
Conservatives once roamed free in Tinseltown…back in the Golden Age of Hollywood. Studio head Louis B. Mayer was an outspoken Republican. John Wayne, Walt Disney, and Gary Cooper sat right-of-center…as did Ginger Rogers, Clark Gable, and Cecil B. DeMille. The Right played a prominent role in those early days. But now this company town is run almost entirely by liberals, and has been for over half a century. How were they able to make it a one-party city? “It’s the social part. It’s the personal,” said an industry veteran. “It’s psychological warfare.” In other words, leftists attacked social circles to freeze out conservatives.
I’ve seen this in action…when family “friends” – American Sniper screenwriter Jason Hall and his wife – started their own little war on women against my wife.
In late January 2017, my better half was reaching her wits end. President Trump had just been inaugurated, and what we were fast learning was that every time there was a major Trump development, the attacks on us from the most triggered Hollywood liberals spiked. In those moments, it becomes open season on the #MAGA folk. We typically enjoy a fight when provoked, but this time our little daughter was starting to feel their hate. I grew up dirt poor. My wife’s family comes from less than that just south of the Mexican/American border, but still managed to get here the way everyone should…legally. Suffice it to say, neither of us was well versed in dealing with the unhinged Tinseltown frich – or “fucking rich” to the uninitiated. Emotionally shaken, my wife turned to a friend – a seasoned Hollywood elite – to get some insight on how to navigate the situation.
Her buddy – a private school bred princess who literally matured around the likes of Michael Jackson in LA’s premiere zip code – listened to my wife’s tear-filled account of how our daughter felt under siege by Trump haters. In hindsight, confiding in someone who’d just marched in the anti-Trump Women’s March may have been ill advised – even if she was a trusted friend. If my wife were listening close enough, she would have heard the Body Snatcher howl as she set down the receiver.
Within a few hours her virtue-signaling screenwriter hubby, Jason Hall, barely gave my wife time for the tears to dry before he was on Facebook publicly ridiculing her for an article I’d written. Just a day earlier I’d published a Wall Street Journal OpEd arguing that the failing National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) needed to be replaced with an arts council to better serve the needs of the creative community. This was a subject I knew something about. Andrew Breitbart sponsored me for a Pulitzer for a story I’d broken on the politicization of the NEA. The articles led to the resignation of a high-ranking NEA official and new White House-issued conduct guidelines.
My wife, who at the time didn’t really express her political views on social media, proudly posted her husband’s new piece on Facebook. Mr. Hall responded – posting an odd image of a hairy-faced woman.
“Is it Jason’s mom?” my wife quipped. “She’s got his same resting bitch face.”
“Nah,” I responded. “She looks far too feminine to be his mother.”
After a quick perusal of his social media posts, we deduced it was intended to be a Trump impersonator dressed in drag. Ironically, the screenwriter for one of the biggest conservative movies in years was glaringly anti-Trump. Mr. Hall followed the post with the outrageous claim that I was trying to “kill the arts.” Either he didn’t peruse my NEA article, or reading comprehension doesn’t come default in screenwriters.
Fast-forward a few months, and it was Mrs. Hall’s turn to take a few unprovoked punches at my wife…and our daughter. Having just received news from our doctor that my wife had no new tumor growth, my better half posted on Instagram how she felt privileged to watch our daughter grow up. When you’ve battled near death and come out on the other side, you gain a new value for time. Mrs. Hall, who at times is embarrassed of her white skin color, responded to the post by mocking my wife’s “privilege” – and suggested my daughter would fall on bad health due to Trumpcare. Politicizing a post about our daughter was low, but par for the course for the triggered left. Ridiculing a brown woman’s “privilege,” whose parent literally sold gum at the Tijuana border, when you’ve grown up in a mansion surrounded by global music superstars…well, that unlocks a whole new level of clueless. Daddy’s money couldn’t save Mrs. Hall from the beast lurking inside my wife. The beast delivered the same verbal uppercut that propelled her out of da hood, and that was the end of that. Mrs. Hall has since been seen hangin’ out with Mrs. Creepy.
If this social media skirmish seems minor, you don’t know how this company town works. In his last big screen outing, Jason Hall was nominated for an Academy Award for his adapted screenplay American Sniper. In Movie City, an Oscar nom puts you in God category – guaranteeing VIP status on the coveted “cocktail party” circuit. So being shamed by these Tinseltown elites for all mutual friends to see sends a message to your Hollywood social circle: act accordingly.
This is one of the ways Hollywood stays liberal – by making a public example of right-wingers. It doesn’t matter if your rise comes on the back of massive support by conservatives at the box office. Right-wingers, even friends and especially Trump supporters, must be Scarlet Lettered and humiliated. But anyway, be sure to catch Jason Hall’s directorial debut with Thank You For Your Service – a movie about Iraq and Afghanistan induced PTSD…out October 27th. And spoiler alert… Amy Schumer is in it. (Jason Hall did not respond to a request for comment.)
“Coming off of the House Un-American Activities’ actions in the early 50s I think caused everybody to move to kind of a left position.” – Clint Eastwood
The view that Hollywood is run almost entirely by liberals is not just a myth…it’s scientifically verifiable. Every year starting in 2016, The Hollywood Reporter publishes the “THR 100” where they rank from 1 to 100 the most powerful people in entertainment. The list includes more than one hundred names because some ranks have multiple people. For example, the 2017 ranking has Brad Pitt and his partners in Plan B – Jeremy Kleiner and Dede Gardner – occupying rank #48. Rupert Murdoch and his two sons occupy rank #5.
By mining publicly published information – including campaign finance data, public statements, and verifiable social media accounts – one can reasonably conclude the political leanings of Hollywood’s most powerful…and the ratio is telling.
* By analyzing the campaign donations, public statements, and verifiable social media accounts of The Hollywood Reporter’s 2017 Most Powerful People in Entertainment
The most powerful people in Hollywood identify as left-of-center compared to right-of-center by a ratio of almost 26 to 1. And as we’ve already seen, out of the 240 available nominees for lead and supporting actors in a scripted role at Hollywood’s top award shows, there wasn’t a single verifiably right-of-center actor. Not one.
When blacks claimed a lack of diversity approaching this level of disparity for just one award show, a national debate branded #OscarsSoWhite swept the nation. Not so much as a peep has been heard from the media about Movie City’s snub of rightwingers.
As the one-and-only John Nolte would say, the science is settled. Hollywood is a one-party city.
How did Tinseltown become so damn liberal in the first place? Its leftward lurch can largely be traced back to one era – the age of the so-called Hollywood Blacklist. This period started in 1947 when nine screenwriters and one film director appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to answer to their Communist Party ties. When the group, who came to be known as the Hollywood Ten, refused to answer, each were found guilty of contempt of Congress, sentenced to a year in jail and blacklisted by the film studios. The banishment subsided in 1960 when one of the ten, screenwriter and communist Dalton Trumbo, was openly given screen credit.
Hollywood has long glorified the blacklisted filmmakers of this time. The Front starring Woody Allen. Guilty by Suspicionstarring Robert De Niro. Trumbo starring Bryan Cranston. The era is usually characterized as a conservative led witch-hunt against heroes of free speech. But like our current fake news-loving mainstream media, Tinseltown has hidden a big part of the story. Why? Because it exposes how the left first made Hollywood into the liberal colony it is today.
At the birth of Hollywood’s film industry, the entire enterprise was plagued with conflict. Municipal and state censorship boards, patent enforcers, and decency groups all threatened to block film producers’ from freely making and exhibiting their movies. To fight back against this opposition, the Hollywood studios of the time decided to join forces through trade associations, like the Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA), to focus their defense. As trying as those early battles were, working together had a notable benefit for the studios…it created major roadblocks for all future newcomers. By the late 1920s, the film industry was already becoming an oligopoly – where, through collusion, an industry reduces competition and eventually is dominated by a very small number of players. The barriers to entry have been so enduring and impenetrable that all of the major studios that exist today have their roots in this early era.
With this near-monopolistic power, some abuses followed – including studio executives cheating writers out of screenplay credits. So in 1933, the Writers Guild of America, then known as the Screen Writers Guild, formed to establish criteria for doling out these important recognitions. On paper, the effort appeared laudable. However, the union’s covert mission was far more Machiavellian – they wanted to control the supply of screenplays for the entire movie industry. If they controlled the documents on which movies were made, they could wield that power to force studios to submit to their demands – including control over film content. The problem was…the most active players in the Writers Guild were literally communists. Its first president was John Howard Lawson, who shortly after the formation of the guild was named the head of the Hollywood division of the Communist Party USA. He would later become one of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten.
“John Howard Lawson enforced the Stalinist line in Hollywood,” says Allan H. Ryskind in his revealing book Hollywood Traitors. Writers under Lawson’s thumb couldn’t just freely write…they had to ask for permission from The Party. Lawson even reviewed screenplays before the studios. In one instance, when a screenwriter published an essay about how politics should stay out of their art – Lawson wrote a scathing rebuttal, entitled “Art is a Weapon”, arguing that the writer’s thoughts betrayed Marxism. The offending screenwriter literally crawled to repent before Lawson and Dalton Trumbo at a Communist Party meeting.
“In Hollywood in the thirties, the Communist Party was barely distinguishable in policy and activities from the noncommunist Left,” claimed Sheila Schwartz in her 1982 book The Hollywood Writers’ Wars. After the Writers Guild won a prolonged fight against studios and the rival Screen Playwrights union to be recognized as the sole union representing screenwriters, the radical left within the guild, who now were the ranking members, took the reigns. Many members started sensing this power shift, including Morrie Ryskind – legendary screenwriter of many Marx Brothers movies and a key player in winning studio recognition for the guild.
“The top honors for an unswerving [Writers Guild] commitment rightfully belong to that bloc in our midst who hoped to use the guild as the power base that would enable them to bring all facets of the motion picture industry under the control of one all-encompassing super union which would be controlled by and serve the purposes of the Communist Party,” said Morrie in his autobiography I Shot an Elephant in My Pajamas. Now in control of the Writers Guild, the far-left began squeezing out those that didn’t think like them. They were pioneering the greylist conservatives face today.
“The radical liberals were going to take over our business,” John Wayne once stated describing the environment at the time. “They were getting themselves into a position where they could control who would do the writing.” Their power was so entrenched that one communist screenwriter, who witnessed his colleague crawl before Lawson to repent, wanted to quit The Party but didn’t know how because, “[the communists] were placed in strategic positions throughout the industry…withdrawal from them would have meant professional and economic suicide.”
So in 1944, Morrie Ryskind along with Walt Disney, Clark Gable, Cecil B. DeMille, Gary Cooper, and later John Wayne, formed the first Hollywood conservative group to fight the industry’s takeover by the radical left. Called the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA) – in essence, the group was attempting to resist the future that Hollywood has become. If purging communists from Hollywood were a fool’s errand, as many now want us to believe, you couldn’t tell from the heavyweights it attracted. Leaders throughout Hollywood asked Congress to look into the growing Red infiltration into their industry.
“The thing that I resent the most is that [the communists] are able to get into these unions, and take ‘em over,” stated Walt Disney to the House Un-American Activities Committee. “And I feel that they really oughta be smoked out and shown up for what they are…” This was no light matter. Stalin killed millions of his own citizens. The communist threat in America was greater than Islamic extremists today because many in power positions were aligned with their cause, including in Tinseltown. “The Party [Hollywood communists] wholeheartedly embraced…was pledging to overthrow the U.S. government, by force and violence if necessary,” states Morrie’s son Allan H. Ryskind. No wonder the rise of the hammer and sickle adorned Antifa seemed to be welcomed by some within Hollywood.
Actor Orson Bean knows more than most about this era. The 89 year-old comedy icon found himself on the blacklist in the 1950s. He wasn’t actually a Communist Party sympathizer – he considered himself a “little lefty.” But he attended a communist event because he was, in his words, “horny for a Communist girl” that wanted to go. “I wanted to show her I was politically aware,” he says, in his signature vocal flair. At the time, Orson was everywhere. He was a regular on the Ed Sullivan Show. He was acting in dramatic programs on television. CBS produced a pilot for an Orson Bean Show. But when his name hit the blacklist, all of that went away. He was banished from TV and film for a year.
Orson is a case study in how the blacklist ensnared innocents. But even after his ordeal, he is clear on how the era got kicked off. “The blacklist of people on the left grew out of a defacto blacklist of people on the right within the industry,” recalls Orson. “There was communist directors, members of The Party, who only would cast you if you were also a member of The Party, or they were trying to woo you as a member of The Party. A lot of rightwing actors…were really furious at them. So when the Cold War happened…these rightwing actors, who had been seething for years about the way the communists were infiltrating the Hollywood business and were infiltrating the unions too, took their revenge. I don’t think that story’s ever been written because it’s not attractive for the Left.”
Orson isn’t alone in remembering this lost history.
“Morrie Ryskind, who was a Pulitzer Prize winner, couldn’t get a job because he didn’t think exactly like these fellows,” recalled John Wayne.
After testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee as a “friendly witness”, the extraordinarily talented Morrie never received another offer from a studio again – and neither did other screenwriters that testified against communism in Hollywood. When the “official” blacklist era ended, liberals continued where they left off – freezing out conservatives…to far better effect.
“I think there’s a reverse blacklist, even today,” said director and Hollywood Ten member Edward Dmytryk in Hollywood on Trial, a 1976 documentary about the blacklist. “I think that the liberals who are riding high, are going in the opposite direction. I think some of the fellas back then, who were on the reactionary side, are having a tough time getting jobs now.”
This greylist has been fully institutionalized. “The Writers Guild of America, my union, is at a minimum 99 percent leftist liberal and, like me, socialist,” said screenwriter and MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell in 2003. In the wake of the blacklist era, the left gained complete control of La La Land using a tactic they now vilify on the big screen. In a sense, it’s a weird tribute to Morrie Ryskind, John Wayne, Cecile B. DeMille and the others concerned about how the far-left storytellers could use movies to rewrite history.
“Being not a communist is grounds for dismissal now,” says Gavin McInnes about being a right-winger in showbiz. The co-founder of Vice Magazine, Gavin is unquestionably one of the funniest people on the planet. From the founding of Vice in 1994 until he left in 2008, its comedic voice was his voice – and it was one that comedians wished to emulate. “Their brand of humor is what I would do if there were no ‘standards and practices’ on TV,” said Jimmy Kimmel about Vice during Gavin’s helm.
After leaving the magazine due to creative differences with his partners – he came up against Hollywood’s liberal enforcers. “Jimmy Miller is Dennis Miller’s brother. He’s one of the biggest managers in comedy. He managed Will Ferrell, Jim Carey. He took a real shining to me after I left Vice,” says Gavin. “Things were going great. And then he found out I was right wing. He didn’t ‘X’ me per se, but it’s exactly like being known as a pedophile…no one likes a pedophile.” (Jimmy Miller did not respond to a request for comment.) Since the election of Trump, even with his star on the rise among the right and a new show on CRTV, his entertainment peers have become even more intolerant. “I’ve lost 100% of my friends that are in comedy. I’ve lost 100% of my celebrity friends.”
This ploy keeping Hollywood a liberal bastion is subtle, but extraordinarily effective – smoke out right-wingers and their sympathizers, spread the word of their apostasy, freeze them out, repeat. This process is seen in every crevice of Tinseltown, and it quietly teaches a lesson to all watching.
An early example of this was John Milius. The extraordinary screenwriter known for Apocalypse Now, Conan the Barbarianand his gift with dialogue – including Dirty Harry’s “Go ahead, make my day” – became a target of liberal film critics after the success of his 1984 movie Red Dawn, which showed communists as villains. Set in an alt-history where the Soviet Union raids the U.S., the invaders are defeated by armed high school students in a bloody ground war.
“That was the point where [film critics] said, ‘He’s gone too far. Now we’ve got to shut him down,’” said Milius in the 2013 documentary Milius. The rightwing-minded screenwriter never fully recovered from the critic backlash. “I’ve been blacklisted probably since [Red Dawn]. I’ve been blacklisted as surely as anybody in the 50s. I should have made twenty more films.”
Mel Gibson’s epic 2004 movie Passion of the Christ was by every measure a massive success. The $30 million budget grossed a whopping $611 million global box office. Yet after playing Jesus, the then-rising star Jim Caviezel claimed offers dried up and many in the industry began shunning him. And the film critics, almost uniformly liberal, savaged the movie.
Fast-forward to the era of Trump, and the far-left enforcers are working overtime.
Adult Swim canceled Million Dollar Extreme’s show in December 2016. The ratings were stellar, but it came under fire after a Buzzfeed hit piece branded the comedians pro-Trump. However, the outcry didn’t come from the public. It came from fellow liberal comics. The comedy troupe now claims to be completely blacklisted from mainstream television.
In early January 2017, an anonymous email went out to members of the Directors Guild of America (DGA) suggesting that they would be blacklisted if they worked on the TV broadcast of Trump’s inauguration. Recipients thought the message was sent from someone of rank at the DGA. A union spokesperson confirmed with Breitbart News that they performed an investigation and were unable to identify the perpetrator of the email.
When actress Nicole Kidman made the fairly benign statement days before the Inauguration that Americans should move on from the election and unite in support of the new president – third-generation TV writer Joss Whedon played the enforcer of Hollywood’s one-party system by mocking Kidman’s looks, and labeling her a “Puppet for Trump.” Seemingly fearing further retribution, Kidman quickly backed off her statement.
In March, when asked by Jimmy Kimmel if he’d attended Trump’s inauguration, actor and self-professed conservative Tim Allen hesitantly replied yes, joking that he had to answer carefully in a Hollywood that was acting like 1930s Germany. The liberal mainstream media savaged him for his statement, and his TV show, Last Man Standing, with the second highest viewership for a comedy on ABC, was canceled within months. The initial reason given was “scheduling” issues. But the “issue” may have been with ABC’s head of scheduling, Andy Kubitz – who decides whether a show lives or dies, and also happens to be decidedly anti-Trump. (When reached for comment, Disney maintained their denial that politics played a role in the cancellation of the popular show.)
The Deep Hollywood enforcers are everywhere, at every level…ejecting the deplorables while fortifying the liberal wall. It’s a process they’ve been employing and perfecting since the 1930s, with undeniable results.
When the reality of Tinseltown’s one-party system sets in – the question of “why does Hollywood hate conservatives” is easily answered.
Hollywood doesn’t hate the right because they think they’re racists. Hillary Clinton called former Ku Klux Klan member Robert Byrd her “friend and mentor”, reportedly called a black servant the n-word, suggested blacks were “super predators”, and her husband not only made racially insensitive remarksabout Obama, but golfed at and was literally a member of an all-white country club. But Hollywood still wanted to hoist Hillary and her husband back into the White House.
Hollywood doesn’t hate the right because they’re misogynists. They wanted to make the man who invented the intern-flavored cigar the first First Gentleman. Their 2016 candidate’s “philanthropic” foundation took millions from countries known for their horrific record of violence against women. Hillary serially attacked the ladies who claimed her husband raped and/or assaulted them. When Trump’s lewd hot mic moment hit the news cycle, celebs were on script with Oscar-worthy displays of disgust. But when a recording of Hillary surfaced laughing about getting the accused rapist of a 12 year-old girl off – the seasoned actors forgot their lines…as they did for decades about Harvey Weinstein’s alleged assaults.
Hollywood doesn’t hate the right because they’re homophobes. Celebrities flocked to the Women’s March…organized by a Muslim activist who advocates for Sharia Law – the same Islamic-based ideology that condones the capital punishment of gays and seeded the hate that led to the slaughter of almost fifty gay Americans at an Orlando nightclub. Hillary didn’t support gay marriage until it was politically expedient in 2013. And Tinseltown’s 2016 candidate wanted to massively increasethe intake of an ideology that throws gays from rooftops, with no way of knowing whether they’ve adequately vetted out that corrosive belief.
Hollywood doesn’t hate the right because they’re anti-illegal immigrant. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama voted for and supported the Secure Fence Act of 2006 that provides the legal mechanism to build a border wall, an Act that then-senator Obama praised. Obama spoke out forcefully against illegal immigration, and Hillary herself said she supported deporting illegal immigrant lawbreakers and building a barrier at our Southern border. President Trump’s positions on immigration are basically President Clinton’s positions on immigration – the latter being Hollywood’s original god king. And contrary to their rhetoric, Hollywood actually loves building walls around their families – they just don’t call them walls…they call them private schools.
Hollywood doesn’t hate the right because of its skepticism on apocalyptic global warming climate change. Their ambassador of green living, Leonardo DiCaprio, has the carbon footprint of Godzilla. Hollywood applauds climate films by Al Gore – who made his fuck you money by selling his cable network to an organization funded by fossil fuels. The Clinton Foundation took millions from the oil rich countries of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. And we all know how much Hollywood loves Leo, Al, and Hillary.
Hollywood doesn’t hate conservatives because they think they are actually racists, sexist, homophobic, anti-immigrant, climate deniers. No. They hate the right for the same reason that the Crips hate the Bloods, the Hutu hate the Tutsi, the Tijuana Cartel hates the Sinaloa Cartel, and New York Mets fans hate the Yankees. It’s tribal.
After the unions won studio recognition, the far-left firmly planted its cartel in Tinseltown by methodically eliminating rival conservatives on their turf…and they’ve been printing money and pummeling culture with one perspective ever since. Movie City only elevates those that will continue professing the Left’s supremacy – or will at least remain quiet while it’s being promoted. Deep Hollywood invokes the tribal triggers of racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, anti-science, and homophobe whenever their power is being threatened. And if any well-meaning Tinseltowner publicly shows even a whiff of support for the right – especially President Trump – their membership to this gilded enclave is either suspended or revoked.
In a recent interview with Adam Carolla, Silicon Valley’s Jimmy O. Yang described a time he spoke with a studio executive, trying to understand how an actor is selected for a part. “I’m like ‘oh does it really matter how many Instagram followers somebody has?’ And then she was like, ‘I do check the Instagrams to see if there’s anything weird. If they get drunk everyday, or if they’re a Trump supporter. Then I don’t know, I would have a hard time.’”
If that isn’t a defacto blacklist, then what is?
Robert Davi is a four-decade veteran in Hollywood, and one of the few right-of-center talents with the cajones to speak his mind. It just takes one conversation with this gifted character actor to know he’s seen all Tinseltown has to offer…and take. When the topic of blacklisting came up, it touched a nerve.
“Look. I know there’s a blacklist. There’s a blacklist! Everybody should stop the bullshit [pretending] there’s not a blacklist! There’s a blacklist,” he said with the guttural force that reminds you why he’s in this business. “It’s acceptable in Hollywood. And nobody’s doing anything about it. There’s a blacklist! Alright?!”
It’s a fact of life for conservatives in La La Land. So to survive, they operate in one of three modes. There’s the attacked. This is talent that lets their politics be known…and gets dutifully pummeled for it. “We’re kind of like the turd in the punch bowl,” says Phelim McAleer, a journalist and filmmaker. “People don’t want to be seen with us in some respects.” To survive here, you need to be resourceful – something Phelim and his partners Ann McElhinney and Magda Segieda have figured out. They broke the record for crowdfunding on Indiegogo for their film about the serial killer abortionist Kermit Gosnell.
Next are the old-timers. These are proven actors and filmmakers that let their politics be known, have been in the business for a while, and as a result are largely immune from attack. Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Jerry Bruckheimer – these are the cream of the crop…and without fail kept their politics quiet until they reached icon status. This is where all righties hope to get some day. Few do.
Finally, there’s the closeted, or what my Hollywood veteran friend calls the “don’t ask, don’t tell” contingent. This includes newbies, below-the-line workers (i.e. gaffers, cameramen, set designers, etc.), as well as heralded actors and filmmakers. Mulholland Drive is riddle with rightwing road kill, so in the closet is where most conservatives are forced to live to remain gainfully employed. This set doesn’t advertise their politics – so their names will go unwritten here.
Right-wingers have been battered by Tinseltown for decades, and for most of that time with little to no real consequence. In fact, ridiculing conservatives has been a well-worn path to Hollywood stardom. For years, with every putdown, box office numbers rose, cable subscriptions multiplied, and home video rentals soared. There were few ways to fight back…but then some cavalry started trickling in. Limbaugh arrived. Matt Drudge and Hannity followed. AM radio blew up, and Andrew Breitbart showed the power of New Media. Social networking connected it all, and new tech innovations are now breaking down the once-insurmountable walls of Tinseltown’s near-monopoly. Most conservatives in Hollywood have been forced into the closet, but the new right throughout the country is, as they say, “woke”…and are a tad pissed. The beauty of it is, they’ve now got options, and have recently learned a valuable lesson: Slugging back is fun. A lesson they applied to game-ify an attack on one of Hollywood’s loudest Trump bashers.
PHOTO SECTION
1. John Howard Lawson still from “Hollywood on Trial” (1976), James Gutman/David Helpern Jr. Production, An Irwin Meyer and Stephen R. Friedman Presentation, Cinema Associates (III).
2. Walt Disney still from “Hollywood on Trial” (1976), James Gutman/David Helpern Jr. Production, An Irwin Meyer and Stephen R. Friedman Presentation, Cinema Associates (III).
PART THREE
HOLLYWOOD…MEET THE DEPLORABLES
As the ground operatives stood calmly on the dusty country road, snapping shots of their prize perched high above the dry sunlit field – a few Intel agents, remotely monitoring the situation, smelled trouble brewing. The entire team was foolishly communicating over unsecured channels during a live operation. Why the break in protocol? Being on the cusp of punking Hollywood’s loudest Trump basher was just too tempting.
“You dumbasses, we should’ve stayed silent until we were long gone,” fumed one agent.
But the odor of danger hadn’t reached the ground unit until they shifted their camera from the field to the lone house in the pasture. That’s when they too got a whiff.
“Some faggot tweeted the owner of the house,” blurted Intel to the field operatives.
“The people are outside,” the field operatives nervously replied.
At that same moment, listening to a police scanner, Intel heard a call come from precinct dispatch that confirmed their worst fears. “700 Moon Creek Road, Blue Dodge Neon taking pictures.” The property owner had just alerted the cops, who were now in route.
“Get the fuck out of there! You’ve been made,” barked Intel.
But any opening of a quick getaway disappeared. The cops had already closed in, driving up as the ground operatives stood conspicuously on the small country road – with surveillance equipment in tow.
This was it. The entire operation, methodically moved forward by hundreds of operatives, was now on the verge of being completely compromised. Pranks were nothing new to these guys, but this time it was different. It was personal. They’d aimed their vast intelligence agency at Hollywood, and in particular, God’s gift to the arts…Shia LaBeouf. And when they did, Season Three of the Internet’s greatest reality show – He Will Not Divide Us – went into full swing, ultimately showing Tinseltown just how far the people it routinely insults will go to fight back. Before the web series was over, there’d be a celebrity arrest, gang intimidation, indecent exposure, alleged assaults, vandalism, gunshots…and yes, even hurt feelings – all in route to the most remarkable game of capture the flag that the Internet has ever known. And to a legion of online viewers – it was simply must watch TV.
“I’m supposed to be studying for a test tomorrow, but I’m on here instead lol,” claimed one riveted web viewer as the ground team was facing arrest.
This is the new age of entertainment…where Hollywood’s only credited role is in playing the victim.
After two generations of being pummeled by La La Land, the newly constituted right is punching back with a force that has Tinseltown scrambling. Up to 2002, the right took the hits from Hollywood, but continued to open their wallets. That year, domestic-tickets-sold reached a modern all-time high. But as America entered the Iraq War, the environment in Hollywood took a darker than normal turn.
“I can remember at a table read, the day after Bush was reelected in 2004,” recalls Peabody award-winning actor Nick Searcy. “Somebody at the table read said, ‘I was so furious this morning I stuck my head out the window and screamed why doesn’t somebody assassinate this man.’ And I was like…there’s a lot of people that agree with you but they’re mostly called terrorists.”
In the early years of the new millennium, Hollywood entered a more vitriolic stage of bashing the right. And combined with its shift to a global box office which had just began eclipsing the domestic for the first time – Tinseltown started paying even less attention, and respect, to the other half of the country.
Sources: MPAA, Deadline.com
In an apparent response, U.S. moviegoers began shunning Movie City with its pocketbooks – with the Right turning away at a much higher clip. By 2016, domestic ticket sales have fallen by over 250,000,000 tickets per year from its 2002 high – a downward trend that started before the proliferation of social media, the third screen, or streaming services…and a decline that happened with an increase in population, quantities of movies made per year, and number of operating U.S. theaters. And 2017 isn’t looking any better…with the summer take at a twenty-five year low. The box office isn’t the only place feeling the pinch either. Cord cutting, the phenomenon where people are terminating their cable services, is accelerating, and home entertainment sales have plummeted nearly 50% over the past decade.
But where the old right was content with closing their wallets to Hollywood, the new right thinks stopping there is the stuff of cucks. This politically incorrect movement has galvanized in a way that was unheard of just a few years ago. Instead of the Kum Ba Yah rallies of yesterday’s Tea Party, this new right prefers a more active approach. They bombard film reviews with negative grades, inundate show sponsors with calls to drop their advertising, and hit the most hate-filled celebrities with a flurry of boycott campaigns usually only seen coming from the left.
No longer afraid to be called racists, sexists, homophobes, Islamophobes, or xenophobes – because they know they’ll be branded these no matter what – the new right is going directly after their perceived enemy, rejecting traditional content, creating their own entertainment, and organizing on a scale that should make Hollywood take pause in their daily putdowns. Social norms are no longer barriers, and some are even willing to flout the law…all to even the playing field. These are the fruits of Tinseltown and Big Media’s years of abuse, and nothing shows this phenomenon better than the Internet sensation He Will Not Divide Us. It’s a cautionary tale for the kind of blowback Hollywood celebrities should learn to expect if they continue to disrespect The Deplorables.
The whole ordeal started rather innocently in mid-January 2017 when, during an Instagram-live rant from his car, a visibly distraught Jaden Smith, the scion of Will Smith, was seen succumbing to one of the heaviest pressures in the life of the privileged…the DMV. In his melancholy brain dump while waiting for a driving instructor, this oppressed artist from the mean streets of Malibu declared that he wanted to move out of Los Angeles because there was just no one there willing to support youth creativity. A few days later he joined Shia LaBeouf of The Transformers fame in tweeting the vague remark “He Will Not Divide Us.”
By 9am on January 20th, at the same time that the Presidential Inauguration Ceremony kicked-off, the cryptic message became clear, as Jaden stepped up to a live streaming camera mounted on a white wall outside an NYC museum, chanting the same phrase. Minutes later, an image of the anti-Trump protest was tweeted to his then roughly six million Twitter followers and within six hours, what initially started as a solo protest grew in number to fill the entire museum lot housing the live stream.
That could have been it – a single-day, perfectly executed protest starring two products of Hollywood. But it wasn’t to be just a one-day soiree…it was scheduled to last the entire length of President Trump’s term. There are possibly only two people with the composure to keep a protest of that length civil. The Dalai Lama was busy. Shia LaBeouf wasn’t – and he was destined to show Hollywood the lengths to which some on the right are willing to go to seek revenge.
After Jaden kicked off the protest, Shia joined in, setting off the kind of media fanfare that we’ve all come to expect for anything anti-Trump. “Shia LaBeouf Launches Four-Year-Long Trump Protest Live Stream With Jaden Smith,” screamed a Variety headline. “Shia LaBeouf Kicks Off 4-Year Anti-Trump Live Stream,” added Deadline. Instead of just pointing out the usual “what if we did this to Obama on the day of his inauguration” hypocrisy, the opposition reacted more aggressively. In a matter of just twenty-four hours, Trump supporters from 4chan, the wildly (and sometimes perversely) politically incorrect online chatroom that gave birth to the infamous hacker group Anonymous, coopted the live stream and began triggering Shia so hard that by day five the confused actor was arrested for reportedly attacking a man that was his own supporter.
The live stream trolling was so effective that the museum hosting the protest ended the exhibit after just three weeks. It was an undisputed win for Trump supporters, and it looked like the end of the shenanigans. But the web series sensation got renewed for a Season Two when Shia LaBeouf moved the live-stream from New York to Albuquerque, New Mexico.
It was doomed from the outset.
With the humor instinct of Sinead O’Connor, Shia stepped to the camera in a rage that was something to behold – talking with such fervor that he had to wipe the saliva shooting out of his mouth from the camera. “You’re our president, but we’re watching – you fuckin’ liar! He will not divide us…He’s working with fuckin’ Russian spies!”
With an 18th Street gangsta – thought to be the largest transnational criminal gang – by his side, Shia taunted the “Nazi” trolls to come down to the protest. Within the first few days, two people flashed guns, two others flashed genitals, and there were several near fistfights. But despite the intimidation tactics, the trolls kept arriving to trigger the celeb. In less than a week, gunshots were heard off camera. Shia’s tweet was soon to follow. “We have taken the stream down after shots were reported in the area.”
Game over, right? Not quite.
With Jaden now nowhere in sight, Shia came up with the brilliant idea of continuing the anti-Trump protest by placing a flag emblazoned with the words “He Will Not Divide Us” in an undisclosed location, with a camera live streaming it for the remainder of Trump’s presidency.
The anonymous users of 4chan, or “anons” as they call themselves, often operate like a mercenary intelligence agency – analyzing satellite imagery, audio, and various other online data sources to attack their targets…not unlike the characters from Mission Impossible. For kids that have both grown up on the Internet and learned to hate Hollywood right back – this activity is their version of escapism…replacing traditional TV shows and films. The anons took Shia’s new live stream as an invitation to capture the flag – and were determined to take it down and replace it at all costs…even if it meant breaking a few laws.
Hundreds of anons began the arduous task of analyzing the live stream for clues to its whereabouts. Within minutes they pulled up images of Shia at a diner in Greeneville, Tennessee just days before the feed went live. But their biggest hint came moments later. Contrails.
Planes had been seen entering the live stream. So anon agents looked at published flight patterns, narrowing in on the airspace above Greeneville, to see if they matched what was being seen on camera. Within an hour and a half, they were able to predict when planes would fly into frame – eventually deducing that the camera was pointing northward to the sky above Greeneville, capturing three known plane routes.
Another agent used advanced geometry to guesstimate that the camera was sitting approximately six miles south of the flight pattern. And with audio from the live stream suggesting a nearby river and tires hitting a large seam in the road, they reviewed satellite aerial imagery to look for bridges crossing waterways. The search was narrowed down to areas along the Erwin Highway, near bridges that crossed the Nolichucky River. This work was done by hundreds of unpaid, giddy online users. But a new team was now needed to advance the search.
If you travel southeast down the Erwin Highway from the center of Greeneville, the town quickly transitions to a setting from a David Lynch movie – a seemingly quiet country vibe with huge, open green pastures, a mountain view off in the distance, and a beautiful swerving river traipsing through the county. After just five minutes from the heart of town, there really isn’t much. There’s a furniture shop that sits off the highway, with a rustic assortment that doesn’t scream modern. Near the river there’s a gas station and auto repair shop. The residents by the Nolichucky River live on huge plots of land. And besides some construction here and there you get the feeling that people from Greeneville have opted out of living around commotion. So being the epicenter of a divisive Hollywood protest was an unwelcome intrusion.
“He has a right to protest, I respect that,” said one of the members of the ground team who called himself Tennessee Outlaw. “But he is protesting a man that has traded a lavish billionaire lifestyle to try and fix the train wreck that has been building over the last 16 years. Just to have his whole family ridiculed. Made fun of. Called liars. Racists.” In his eyes, it was Shia that was the one dividing, not Trump – and he didn’t want this movie star bringing chaos to his quiet hometown of Greeneville.
Tennessee Outlaw had never been on 4chan, but within minutes of being contacted by an anon agent he didn’t even know, he agreed to hit the road in the dead of night in pursuit of Shia’s flag. That’s the kind of enemy the anti-Trump celeb inspired. He jumped in his car with his son, also a Trump voter, and began the conspicuous effort of honking down the Erwin Highway while listening for his car horn in the live feed playing on his phone – all while updating viewers in the anon chatrooms.
It happened at 12:37 AM. Incredibly, the horn and a faint voice came through the stream while nearing the Nolichucky River, just as the Intel team predicted. The online audience erupted. They knew they were close, but it was too dark to get eyeballs on the flag. The search would have to continue at daybreak.
The next morning, a new team of anon field operatives went to the area where the chase left off the night before. Within a few hours they got an eye on the flag, sending pictures and the address to the anons online.
Agents quickly identified the landowner through property tax records, confirming the owner to be a friend of Shia’s through her Twitter account. These hundreds of anons, with nothing but a live feed of a flag waving in the wind, found their prize. But unbeknownst to the field operatives, a supporter of Shia had been monitoring their communications in the public anon chatroom and started tweeting the owner of the property to warn them of the heist in progress.
Before they could fully grasped what was happening, Intel heard the call come through the police scanner from precinct dispatch. “700 Moon Creek Road, Blue Dodge Neon taking pictures.”
“Get the fuck out of there! You’ve been made,” barked Intel.
As the online viewers watched, riveted to the building drama, the cops cruised up to the field operatives on that dusty country road.
But just as it all appeared to be falling apart, another call came through the scanner. “They’re actually on Moon Creek Road,” said the cop to dispatch. “They’re not on anybody’s driveway.” And as quickly as the crisis started…reality sank in. The cops couldn’t do anything. No laws were being broken. The anon operation was free to continue.
The Season Three finale of He Will Not Divide Us swelled in viewership as word of the flag’s imminent capture spread online.
Now wise to being monitored by a chatroom intruder – field operations’ communication moved outside of public view. Intel agents carefully mapped out a ground passage to the flag, with an escape route that was impossible to quickly follow by vehicle from the flag property.
Anxious online viewers were in the dark to what was transpiring offline until 1:20 AM, when the flag suddenly lowered out of sight. “Flag is down!” posted the frantic audience. And just a few minutes later, it was replaced by the two items that were sure to trigger Shia: a “Make America Great Again” hat and Pepe the Frog t-shirt.
Less than two weeks later, a demoralized Shia mounted a new flag – this time on an “inaccessible” museum rooftop in Liverpool, UK. Within twenty-four hours, anon agents leapfrogged adjacent buildings to get to the flag. It was quickly removed by the museum at the advice of local law enforcement. Shia’s luck would not get better. When his new movie Man Down debuted in the UK just a few days later, one ticket was sold on opening night.
The story of He Will Not Divide Us is an extreme case showing the level of effort some factions on the right will expend to swing back against Hollywood. They’ve even game-ified their attacks. And with over 20,000 separate YouTube videos of the whole affair, garnering millions upon millions of views – a new type of entertainment is forming in the process.
This kind of blowback is now becoming commonplace…and it’s glaringly obvious why. If you get repeatedly punched in the face, or falsely smeared as a racist, sexist, Nazi, anti-Semitic homophobe – of course you’re going to slug back.
After her rise through conservative media, Amy Schumer claimed she was roleplaying as a racist Republican. When she went after Trump voters as “disgusting”, she became enemy number one of the new right. They began highlighting every instance of her alleged joke thievery. Her Netflix comedy special quickly became plagued with poor reviews – forcing the streaming service to change its grading algorithm to avoid future attacks. Then her newest theater outing, Snatched, underperformed. She would eventually back out of her commitment to star in a Barbie feature film due to “scheduling conflicts” – although some believe the studio made her step aside. And interestingly, Amy doesn’t appear in the trailer for Jason Hall’s Thank You For Your Service, even though she’s in the movie. No one should be surprised. If Michael Jordan slammed Obama voters, Air Jordans would see a major sales dip.
When Ghost in the Shell starring Scarlett Johansson became a major box office flop, Hollywood postmortems pointed to a litany of reasons for the failure, except for the obvious – leading up to its release, the actress had been on an extended anti-Trump tirade, punctuated by an attack on the President’s daughter Ivanka. Her box office bomb Rough Night only underscored the problem – the unwashed half of America doesn’t approve of her brand of activism.
When Joy clocked in with lackluster numbers, and Passengerswas a box office dud, some thought Jennifer Lawrence was just having a bad streak. But those of us on the right know her anti-Christian, anti-Trump bigotry has taken its toll on her mainstream box office appeal. And her latest bomb – mother! – appears to have sent the same message to the actress herself. She recently announced a two-year acting hiatus.
Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs biopic, starring Seth Rogen, was overwhelmingly predicted to be a box office success. Then, during the movie’s promotional push, Seth Rogen blasted off a “Fuck You @realBenCarson” hate tweet after the Republican presidential candidate suggested German Jews could have better defended themselves against the Holocaust if the Nazis hadn’t confiscated their guns. The blowback against the alleged funny man was swift. Steve Jobs became a bonafide flop-a-roo.
In the wake of an assassination attempt of GOP public servants by a Bernie Sanders volunteer, Central Park’s Public Theater decided to continue its Shakespeare in the Park performance featuring a brutal assassination of Donald Trump as Julius Caesar. Investigative journalist and rightwing activist Laura Loomer charged the stage as the knifing of the president was to commence, demanding, “Stop the normalization of political violence against the right!” Journalist and Trump supporter Jack Posobiec joined in as she was taken off stage.
The new right is beginning to use the tactics of the left – and most notably, they’re having fun doing it.
Show business analysts have long been charting the demise of the movie star. Politically mouthy actors like George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Johnny Depp, and Jennifer Lawrence no longer provide insurance against a flop – as the growing list of their bombs reveals. This summer, the comedy sector nosedived like CNN’s credibility with four box office underperformers in a row. Can anyone guess why? Three of the four – Snatched, The House, and Rough Night – were all headlined by vehemently anti-Trump actors. Fifteen years ago, when Hollywood celebs pissed on half of America, there were no real repercussions. Now, the right returns the favor – it projectile vomits all over Tinseltown’s bottom line.
With The Deplorables active revolt against Movie City in full swing, there is another monumental breach that should have Hollywood sweating like a whore in church. The barriers to entry that have kept the same film studios in power for roughly 90 years, are beginning to show cracks. Something new is happening with Amazon Studios and Netflix – both threatening the traditional distribution model with startling success. And if these brand new players can expand a field that has been limited to the oligopoly of 20th Century Fox, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Columbia, Universal, and Walt Disney Studios – there may soon be an opening for a deplorable-friendly studio to break the thought monopoly as Fox News did with Big Media.
And technology has also created another incredibly disruptive line of attack on Tinseltown.
“That’s the Kodi box,” a Trump supporter recently told me when I asked what that AppleTV-looking hardware was at the side of the television. The device allows users to watch pretty much any film or TV show that has been offered digitally to the public…for free. The remarkable interface rivals Netflix. And along with Popcorn Time, an insanely popular app that allows you to stream content for free on Android enabled devices, some on the right are punching back at Hollywood through what’s being dubbed “purposeful piracy” to affect Tinseltown’s wallet.
Most of Hollywood is completely oblivious to these developments. Not a single person I’ve spoken to in show biz was aware of either the Kodi box or Popcorn Time. And now, in an attempt to boost home entertainment sales, studios are investigating hastening the time that movies are available for download after theatrical release. With the combination of Hollywood’s constant attacks, and the proliferation of these free content platforms – it’s possibly the dumbest idea yet to fix Hollywood. The quicker you make a digitize copy available for the public, the sooner it will end up on these platforms. Just look at the music business for where it will lead.
If Hollywood’s old guard truly hopes to strengthen its floundering business model, it really only needs to do two things to see a major bounce back.
The first, in technical jargon, is to invoke the shut the fuck upprotocol. The industry needs to reign in its most vitriolic talent by making bigotry towards the right a major career dampener. No one is saying celebrities can’t hold political views, or even speak about them. It’s the complete lack of respect for the Deplorables that’s biting them in the ass. And as media analysts have noted – Breitbart News has made exposing their hate into an art form…and the rest of conservative media typically follows our lead.
In a September 2015 interview promoting her new movie Sicario, Emily Blunt quipped, “I became an American citizen recently, and that night, we watched the Republican debate and I thought, ‘This was a terrible mistake. What have I done?’” Breitbart News mined that quote from deep within the interview and made it the centerpiece of a story the same day. Within 72 hours, the newly christened U.S. citizen found herself on NBC’s liberal Today Show apologizing for disparaging America. If you’re going to backpedal that quickly, why go there?
But even with the numbers painting a potentially dark future for the domestic box office and data showing a majority of Republicans have avoided movies based on a star’s politics, the industry hasn’t tried to moderate its loudest voices of hate.
“I think that there’s no one strong enough, like there was in the studio days, to say to the stars, ‘shut the fuck up,’” says Orson Bean. “Nobody’s got the balls, even the bosses, to stand up to this political correctness.”
This would be so easy. Hollywood’s shot callers just need to send a message to the Kathy Griffins of the world – continue your vitriol at your own peril. The right has been screaming for this solution. To show just how loudly, on the night of Donald Trump’s astounding victory, Breitbart News readers, known for their pro-Trump leanings, shared a story announcing his win 34,562 times on Facebook – a phenomenal amount compared to the average article on the site. Breitbart’s story on Kathy Griffin’s beheading of Donald Trump – an event that ripped the fabric of space-time in conservative media – was shared a remarkable 104,632 times. But the story that topped them all was an article headlined “Mark Wahlberg Tells ‘Out of Touch’ Celebs to Shut Up About Politics.”
That story was shared on Facebook by our readers an astonishing 871,107 times. It should come as no surprise that Wahlberg now sits atop the Forbes 2017 list of highest paid actors.
If Tinseltown were smart, it would invoke the STFU protocol. Hollywood’s monopoly on entertainment is gone. There are other options. The industry needs to act accordingly.
The second – and possibly hardest for this liberal colony to enact – is Hollywood must stop its institutionalized discrimination. This company town is diverse…if you think liberals, progressives, socialists and communists constitute diversity. Hollywood has become a content plantation policed by liberal supremacists. Woven into the fabric of this company town is a cult-like level of intolerance against the Right…even amongst friends.
My wife was recently invited to a going away party for an ex-Hollywood producer’s spouse. Mrs. Jason Hall, the wife of the American Sniper screenwriter we met earlier, also made the list. When Mrs. Hall saw my wife’s name, she went into action – gleefully disinviting my better half in a bitchy scene reminiscent of Mean Girls.
Before this election, my wife had no beef with this woman. They never had a disagreement, or exchanged a harsh word. They were friends that turned to each other in times of need. There was absolutely no problem until my wife conveyed to her that we were Trump supporters. Thankfully the Halls took off their masks, and we’re happy to have two less intolerant pricks in our life.
This type of blind discrimination in Hollywood must stop, or political violence will intensify nationally – and that’s not hyperbole. The city’s hometown bigotry comes out in its products – and radicalizes the divide. Tinseltown has thumbed its nose at conservatives for decades through its movies, sitcoms, talk shows, award shows, media, and public quips. It labels Trump Hitler, making all of his supporters by extension Nazis. And we all know how in vogue it’s become to punch a Nazi. Filmville reentered the silent era when Trump supporters were literally getting chased down, punched and bloodied during the presidential campaign. When their election dreams crashed like Michael Moore’s no-carb diet, celebrities like Judd Apatow, Debra Messing, and Sarah Silverman became unhinged when they seemingly condoned and encouraged the violent rise of Antifa during their terrorizing riots in Berkeley. Hollywood and Big Media’s dehumanizing of half the country has helped inspire anti-Trump zealots to pull people from their cars and beat, scar, torture, shoot, cripple, and perhaps even murder suspected Trump supporters. With all of this violence being silently condoned, was anyone really surprised when GOP congressmen were almost slaughtered while playing softball?
Where are the leaders in Hollywood to demand an end to this madness?
Hollywood…whether you see it or not, right-wingers and Tinseltown liberals are similar in many ways. We’re both tired of a political system that fails to meet the needs of Americans. We’re both worried about our country’s most vulnerable citizens. We both despise ill-conceived foreign conflicts. And we both want to correct a system that rewards political and corporate malfeasance while creating an uneven playing field for our people. We just have different prescriptions for the problems. Is what separates us on these issues worth devolving into a bloody tribal conflict? Of course not.
Besides signaling discrimination is justified, Tinseltown’s bigotry also sends another message to the public…it conveys that the industry is willing to flush its business model down the drain to maintain its ideological purity. Entertainment investors should take notice.
An enormous genre, with mainstream appeal, is being overlooked every year because the Hollywood establishment inhabits a liberal echo chamber with no access or knowledge of what makes the other half of the country tick.
There is ample evidence that anything of quality that appeals to the right, and is promoted through conservative media, ends up being a massive win. The success of Passion of the Christwas staggering. The Blind Side even survived a blind side from liberal film critics to smash the box office. National Treasurebecame a treasure chest of profits. The low budgeted comedy We’re the Millers, not even intended for right-of-center audiences, became a surprise conservative hit – beating out the blockbuster-budgeted, pro-liberal issue Elysium in domestic sales. Last Man Standing killed it for six seasons in the TV purgatory of primetime Friday night. Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper broke box office records for an R-rated film. Liberal media and celebrities attacked that flick. But no one promoted the movie, and defended it from its detractors, more than conservative outlets…with Breitbart News and its 45 million readers leading the way.
The problem is, no one in this company town is stepping up to shield others within the industry that want to build bridges. A major player – Clooney, Angelina, Denzel, Apatow, Streep, Damon, Spielberg, Freeman, Iger, Oprah, Lorne, and others – could speak out to help bring an end to the decades of Hollywood’s hate towards The Right. Tinseltown could organize a summit with all of the key stakeholders to start the process of coming together. It needs to be done because Hollywood will only recover when it starts giving The Deplorables the respect they demand…and deserve. Otherwise, if the maligning continues, The Right will ramp up its attacks on your product and create its own content until the need for Tinseltown’s output is ground to dust. Believe it Gatekeepers. It’s already happening.
So La La Land…I know there are some really decent people in this company town who happen to have liberal views. Some of them I know personally. This message is to you and your ilk. Don’t let the loudest, most unhinged voices define Hollywood any longer. Speak up. Marginalize their intolerance. You must recognize that the decades of bigotry towards The Right has had a cost – not just on Hollywood’s bottom line, and not only on the human beings living here or the Americans that take it on the chin with every insult. Hollywood’s bigotry towards The Right has also had a cost on the same liberal ideals you so cherish. Your worst nightmare was elected president…largely because the victims of Tinseltown’s hate felt they needed a bare-knuckled brawler to fight back. Contrary to what President Obama thinks…you built this. Hollywood’s one-political-party dystopia has contributed to its slow demise. Like it or not, diversity of thought will light up the box office – and put this company town back on track. The choice is yours. Stop the discrimination against The Right or expect the defacto boycott of liberal Hollywood to grow. That’s not a threat…it’s just an inconvenient truth. For the sake of a treasured American art form, choose wisely.
PHOTO SECTION (NOT ALL PHOTOS INCLUDED)
1. Still from “He Will Not Divide Us” live stream / YouTube.
2. Jaden Smith / Twitter
3. Jaden Smith / Twitter
4. Shia LaBeouf still from “He Will Not Divide Us” live stream / YouTube.
5. Clip from “He Will Not Divide Us” live stream / YouTube.
6. Still from “He Will Not Divide Us” live stream / YouTube.
7. Anonymous / 8Chan.
8. Anonymous / 8Chan.
9. Google Maps.
10. Clip from “He Will Not Divide Us” live stream / YouTube.
11. Amy Schumer / Jeff Bottari / Getty Images for Variety.
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