But like a snake eating its own tail, the film industry’s autophagy can go on indefinitely.
The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences—the industry’s central nervous system—had been founded in 1927, and now it had 8,469 voting members. It had tried over the years, and especially since Donald Trump’s election, to catch up with the zeitgeist, inviting into its ranks a record number of new members who were black, Latino, women or foreign-born.
NB: Later on, a source quoted in the article makes the shopworn claim that Hollywood’s diversity worship has a money motive. When we get there, keep the above excerpt in mind. The film industry defines “the zeitgeist” with the Death Cult and is not just willing, but eager, to cut out the other 75 percent of the country.
But that wasn’t going to cut it any longer.
So, in September 2020, the Academy launched its Representation and Inclusion Standards Entry platform (or RAISE). For a movie to qualify for Best Picture, producers not only had to register detailed personal information about everyone involved in the making of that movie, but the movie had to meet two of the Academy’s four diversity standards—touching on everything from on-screen representation to creative leadership. (An Academy spokesperson said “only select staff” would have access to data collected on the platform.)
The Academy explained that movies failing to meet these standards would not be barred from qualifying for Best Picture until 2024. But producers are already complying: In 2020, data from 366 productions were submitted to the platform.
Meanwhile, CBS mandated that writers’ rooms be at least 40 percent black, indigenous and people of color (or BIPOC) for the 2021-2022 broadcast season and 50 percent for the 2022-2023 season. ABC Entertainment issued a detailed series of “inclusion standards.” (“I guarantee you every studio has something like that,” a longtime writer and director said.)
To help producers meet the new standards, the filmmaker Ava DuVernay—who was recently added to Forbes’ list of “The Most Powerful Women in Entertainment” along with Oprah Winfrey and Taylor Swift—last year created ARRAY Crew, a database of women, people of color, and others from underrepresented groups who work on day-to-day production: line producers, camera operators, art directors, sound mixers and so on. The Hollywood Reporter declared that ARRAY Crew has “fundamentally changed how Hollywood productions will be staffed going forward.”
More than 900 productions, including “Yellowstone” and “Mare of Easttown,” have used ARRAY Crew, said Jeffrey Tobler, the chief marketing officer of ARRAY, DuVernay’s production company. Privately, directors and writers voiced irritation with DuVernay, who, they said, had exploited the “post-George Floyd moment.” But no one dared to criticize her openly. “I’m not crazy,” one screenwriter said.
He might not be crazy, but handing over cast and crew hiring to hysterical cultists is. Despite the temporary easing of government medical tyranny last year, Hollywood’s box office take remained below 1992 levels. Cape flicks fueled by mostly white Pop Cultists took pride of place, while diversity stunts flopped.
The point can’t be overstated: It’s not about the money.
But the result has not just been a demographic change. It has been an ideological and cultural transformation. We spoke to more than 25 writers, directors, and producers—all of whom identify as liberal, and all of whom described a pervasive fear of running afoul of the new dogma. This was the case not just among the high command at companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu, but at every level of production.
Anyone who still thinks you can have a demographic change without a simultaneous ideological and cultural transformation is either stupid or willfully ignorant.
How to survive the revolution? By becoming its most ardent supporter. “Best way to defend yourself against the woke is to out-woke everyone, including the woke,” one writer said. Suddenly, every conversation with every agent or head of content started with: Is anyone BIPOC attached to this?
The old-timers accustomed to being on the inside—and the (non-BIPOC) up-and-comers afraid they’d never get there—were one-part confused, one-part angry, and 10,000-parts scared.
“Everyone has gone so underground with their true feelings about things,” said Mike White, the writer and director behind the hit HBO comedy-drama “The White Lotus.” “If you voice things in a certain way it can really have negative repercussions for you, and people can presume that you could be racist, or you could be seen as misogynist.”
Howard Koch, who has been involved in the production of more than 60 movies, including such classics as “Chinatown” and “Marathon Man,” and is the former president of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences, said: “I’m all for LGBT and Native Americans, blacks, females, whatever minorities that have not been served correctly in the making of content, whether it’s television or movies or whatever, but I think it’s gone too far. I know a lot of very talented people that can’t get work because they’re not black, Native American, female or LGBTQ.”
One can be pardoned for indulging in schadenfreude over Boomers who subverted cinema cowering in fear of the golem they made. Koch’s “I’m all for X level of degeneracy and racial vengeance, but Y is going too far!” is indistinguishable from the impotent bleating of your average Fox News bow tie-Con.
Although one Hollywood group isn’t so impotent when it comes to having their grievances redressed. Let’s look at the recent Academy Museum of Motion Pictures controversy.
But, oddly, it’s missing any mention of the small band of mostly Jewish emigres from Eastern Europe, who created the film industry. The people without whom there would be no entertainment industry.
In today’s climate—in which inclusion and diversity are said to be so important—it was an especially ironic omission: The Jews were excluded from almost everywhere. Their success signaled the inclusivity and possibility that only Hollywood could afford them. The rise of the industry’s founding fathers should have been an inspiring origin story around which everyone in the community could rally. The link between then and now seemed obvious.
Most of the media that reported on the museum missed this. (Sharon Rosen Leib, writing in the Jewish newspaper The Forward, did not.) It was as if they wanted to pretend that huge chunks of Hollywood’s past hadn’t been airbrushed out.
Hollywood’s response to straight, white men who complain of discrimination is to brand them heretics against the Cult. What happens when “fellow whites” lodge similar complaints?
Howard Koch, who ran the Academy when it greenlit the museum, said the museum’s higher-ups had been made aware of their oversight. “Let me say that that wrong will be righted very soon,” he said. (This appears to be a six-week program on Jewish, Austrian emigres who fled the Nazis to make movies in Hollywood.)
An honest look at working conditions in the movie industry reveals a single group that’s expected to take brazen discrimination, foot the bill for everything, and keep their mouths shut. There’s no other name for those practices than anti-white hatred.
But here come the Death Cult coat holders to run interference.
Kevin Parker, a black talent manager at Artists First, said the skeptics miss the point. “This whole diversity thing—it’s about money,” Parker said. Artists First represents some of the most successful black people in Hollywood, including Jordan Peele, Tiffany Haddish, Regina Hall, Kenya Barris, the creator of “Black-ish,” and Marshall Todd, a co-creator of “Woke.” Recently, the firm moved from its old digs, in Beverly Hills, to a bigger office in Century City. “It’s good business to tell more stories from different perspectives, and that’s all this really is,” Parker said.
Of course, Parker’s spiel is all nonsense. If diversity were good for business, China wouldn’t be eating Hollywood’s lunch.
But contra the cockeyed optimist Conservative crowd, getting woke will not make Hollywood go broke. Enough of them saw the latest capeshit skinsuit to break records. Plus, the studios’ ownership of Big Brand X IPs means they can get all the loans they want indefinitely. Hollywood is now given over to fanatics whose one job is to desecrate the icons of Christendom and replace them with profane idols to themselves.
At this point, reasoned argument with Pop Cult paypigs has already borne its essential fruit. We have demonstrated beyond doubt that the manufacturers of pop culture hate their audience. The Doctors of the Church have written that, when reason fails, ridicule is a morally acceptable means of fraternal correction. We must now shame the paypigs to save them from themselves.
Happy, hopeful, and practical
Later that night, Mr. Niemeier received an invitation from Ava DuVernay herself. She offered to cast him as the Devil in her latest film, WYPIPO ARE THE DEVIL’S PEOPLE.
And she told him, “If you refuse the devil horns, you’re a racist.”
Brian
Moral question: how to ridicule without detracting? I want to correct my wayward brothers without alienating them.
xavier
“how to ridicule without detracting?”
In an earlier post, Brian pointed out that because they have won, they are openly doing their victory lap. Ridicule anything in the public record of which their is ample ammunition.
Scott W
Thanks. So utter contempt is licit.
xavier
“So utter contempt is licit.”
No, never. Contempt for another is contrary to charity and always a mortal sin.
Brian
Thanks for the correction. So mockery is licit or chiding? I’m trying to find the correct attitude.
xavier
This is a lot easier than you think. Whenever they rave about some modern crud, just put a pin in their balloon by showing complete and utter disinterest. I know I’ve done it many times and it usually diverts the conversation in much more fruitful places.
That’s my approach as well. Whenever I have to deal with normies who bring up Big Brand X, I just shrug and say, “It was fun back in college, but I’ve moved on.” Then I change the subject to whatever project I’m working on currently.
JD
Thanks. Utter disnterest and steering the conversation to other topics is the licit attitude.
I don’t subscribe to streaming services (other than Netflix which another family pays for) so it should be easier to move on. Sorry I don’t subscribe to that service do I’m unaware of this show.
xavier
I would begin by getting them into older media. Any older media, really. And here “older” can mean anything from the 90’s or before.
It’s not that that media is always better or that it isn’t subversive. A lot of it is crap and the attempt to destroy civilization through TV began in at least the 70’s. But what it does do is give a memory of what culture was like at the time. (Not that TV is an accurate representation of life in itself, but by seeing what is portrayed and what is not, how the audience reacts, what is considered new and what is not considered necessary to explain, etc. you get a good feeling for the widespread culture.)
If people only consume new media they can be brainwashed into forgetting even their own past. In light of the OP, I’m particularly thinking of people who say things like “these initiatives are necessary to correct the fact that black people have never gotten a fair shake at being on TV” despite growing up in an era where some of the biggest sitcom stars were Bill Cosby, Will Smith and Jaleel White.
Detraction is the unjustified revealing of another’s sin which you know or believe to be true. Its severity depends on the kind of sin revealed–mortal if the revealed sin is mortal and venial if what you reveal is venial.
You probably mean derision, aka scorn or revilement. That is making light of another’s misdeeds to unjustly shame him. It can be a mortal sin depending on the gravity of the misdeed, the station of the one derided, and the degree of hurt done to the victim.
That said, the moral character of an act depends on its motive. Christians are not barred from issuing fraternal correction, in fact, we are commanded to correct sinners. If some can best be steered away from error or pride through ridicule, it is not illicit to jest at their expense.
This only confirms what I’ve long suspected about modern TV and film: there are ideological requirements to work in a mainstream film studio now. Any objection to the requirements, and you’ll never work in that town again.
Hold on to those physical copies, everyone. The next step is sanitizing the older movies.
Call me paranoid, but I recently Re-purchased copies of The Hobbit and LOTR. I won’t be surprised it they go back and use technology to wokify the original stories.
I’m purchasing physical copies of old literature on Amazon for the same reason. It’s a given that they’ll wokify old fairy tales from the Grimms or Andersen, but what if they take it further? What if they steal Brian’s copyright to the XSeed series and rewrite it with a 100% diverse, 100% non-white cast? Or what if they wokify literal biographies like THUNDER BELOW and retcon the real life Admiral Fluckey as a lesbian black woman?
Brian, I’ve been following you for a while now. Even after reading your book, “Don’t Give Money to People Who Hate You,” I always thought that there would come a point where Hollywood would learn their lesson and get out of their Death Cult ways. I understand that that is not the case. I’ve stopped watching the last three Di***y capeshits and “galaxy battles” that came out. It’s just plain terrible and truly evil in their intentions. All my entertainment $ has gone to either older books from eBay or independent works that celebrate good and virtue. Thanks so much for these blogs that perfectly explains why modern entertainment is a mess.
Praise God for the grace of integrity!
More people need to study the history of EA. EA will buy an existing studio and pump enough budget in it to make the next project a success, but then exert ever-growing top down control that runs off the original creators, and each successive game is both worse and more a clone of whatever is popular at the time wearing a skin suit. When one loses money, they break apart the company and use the brand to prop up some subsidiary.
The flops are so legendary that you assume that they would figure out some way to break the cycle and keep an IP, ANY IP alive for more than a few years, but they never do.
Why? EA Sports. All they do is keep the game in a constant dev state and release the most recent stable bill once a year with an updated roster. They have indefinite deals with every major league, so if you want to play as an existing team, you have to pay EA Sports, and people do.
This generates a low cost, reliable positive on the balance sheet more than enough to cover a major flop. If you want EA to stop ruining things, you have to stop buying Madden, FIFA, etc. Not until that division collapses will the skin suiters ever be held accountable for tanking an IP.
Similarly, Cowboy Bebop was funded by people subbing for Seinfeld reruns. Wheel of Time was funded by people subbing for free shipping and collections of old movies. Countless IP skinnings will be funded by the latest Spiderman. You can’t stop it by not buying it. You can only stop it by not buying from the people who make it.
I happened to come across this interview from John Wayne that seems relevant:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR9nIMOrqy4
Two very relevant points:
-John Wayne is basically ridiculed by the interviewer for suggesting that the blacklist was necessary to keep people with anti-American views from controlling the industry; all at a time where boomers were making movies that attacked the core culture of America.
-John Wayne attacks High Noon primarily on the basis that it is rewriting the culture of the time.
-At the end of the interview Wayne mentions that the ideological purity tests (for adherence communist thought) were widespread even in the late 50’s.
The battle was actually being fought in the 50’s and 60’s. By the 70’s it was clear who had won, though they were in their subversion phase for the next 30 or so years.
Modern movie nerds still froth at John Wayne over his comments on High Noon to this day, which really goes to show you how right he must have been. Those who put no stock into the moral artistry of a film are really missing out on a whole dimension of storytelling.
And the blacklist must have gotten something right, since every single accused person turned out to be an infiltrator that then completely wrecked the industry.
Over the years my attention has gone more and more towards b-movies. I’ve put more and more stock into storytelling morality and b-movies, believe it or not, are frequently far more moral than the A-list projects you always hear ravings about. Even cheesy exploitative action movies like Miami Connection or weird sleazy films like Savage Streets have more to offer than anything coming out of the big studios today.
How many slow, ponderous “psychological” horror movies slathered in nihilism and anti-Christianity do you need to see, anyway? How many repackaged cape flicks covering the exact same beats, poses, and script clichés? How many “relevant” dramas about trumpeted up social issue based on a story that ends up made-up in the end? They are well past running on fumes. They are rolling downhill towards a cliff edge.
Man, if someone around here wanted to start making movies, I’d help write them in a heartbeat. The future is definitely not with Hollywood–it’s with the little guy.