via breitbart:
Hollywood’s “old boys club is dead,” writes the Free Press. “But a new one—with its own litmus tests and landmines—is rapidly replacing it. ‘This is all going to end in a giant class-action’.”
The outlet spoke to “more than 25 writers, directors, and producers—all of whom identify as liberal, and all described a pervasive fear of running afoul of the new [woke]dogma.”
“Best way to defend yourself against the woke is to out-woke everyone, including the woke,” one writer told the Free Press, which would go a long way towards explaining the self-humiliation Stephen King and Rob Reiner engage in daily by way of Twitter.
How do you out-woke the woke? Easy. “Suddenly, every conversation with every agent or head of content started with: Is anyone BIPOC attached to this?”
For those who don’t know, “BIPOC” stands for something-something people of color.
Plus:
One showrunner said, “It’s gotten to the point where I won’t give notes on a script any longer to a woman or person of color.” Why? He’s terrified of being accused of racism.
Another showrunner said, “You’re not allowed to pick your staff anymore, and studios won’t let you interview anybody who isn’t a person of color.” He added, “I’m sitting in a room trying to run a show with a collection of people I don’t totally trust.”
The “room” is the writer’s room, which, for obvious reasons, is “supposed to be smart, funny, nasty, a little bawdy, the kind of place where people can make jokes and riff and wonder aloud and vomit out ideas that might become an unforgettable scene.”
Hollywood showrunners wanted more socialism — welcome to East Germany, fellas; enjoy the Stasi!
From the Free Press article:
It is important not to lose sight of the backdrop against which all of the above has happened. On this, pretty much everyone agrees.
Over the past decade, the streaming services have upended old business models and imposed a new ruthlessness on an industry that was already pretty ruthless.
For years, the real money in Hollywood came from the television channels that broadcast reruns and old movies; residuals meant creatives were paid handsomely. But with the rise of Netflix, Amazon and other streaming services, that model collapsed. And the vast majority of creatives had to make do with less.
Now, most people in the industry do not earn enough to support a family of four in Los Angeles. As money has gotten tighter, people have gotten angrier, and things have gotten uglier. “I’d say all that probably expedited the radicalization,” a longtime Hollywood creative said of the shifting marketplace.
As veteran TV producer Rob Long wrote in Commentary last month: The Good Times Lasted a Century.
Today, the worst thing you can do for young people trying to break into show business is encourage them. The number of movies in release has never been smaller, and studios are still trying to figure out the economics of the feature-film business in the age of streaming. They have only recently discovered that spending $100 million on a feature film that goes directly to streaming is a money-loser—but then so are multi-episode series that sit, unwatched, on the servers of Netflix, Hulu, Peacock, you name it.
An ambitious young person chasing a show-business bonanza in 2022 needs to be content working in an environment with no big production deals, much smaller episode fees, and a television “season” that lasts six episodes. A writer on a current multi-season television series may eke out the equivalent of an annual salary in the $75,000 range, which in the late 1990s was what a lot of writers were paid per episode.
Hollywood has been able to right the ship before; Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is a story of the film industry reinventing itself twice in the space of a decade. First with a group of Young Turks (Coppola, Scorsese, Altman) supplanting a dissipated old Hollywood guard who spent the 1960s chasing its tail trying to recreate the success of The Sound of Music with a series of musicals that flopped as public tastes changed in the 1960s. Then when the Young Turks spend the next ten years creating a series of dark, European-themed films to mostly medium success, along comes Steven Spielberg and George Lucas to reinvent the B-picture and Republic serials as Hollywood smash hits for suburban audiences.
Who will be person who breaks the woke logjam, and start consistently creating product that doesn’t alienate audiences?
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NFL Makes Bengals Fan Take Down Sign Making Fun of Wokester Roger Goodell
GOOD. Limited Run Games canceled an employee to appease the woke mob – it’s not going well for them.
h/t Ed Driscoll