One of the recurring features of the Mike Holman novels I’ve been writing over the past couple of years is the regularity of their content coming to pass in real life, and the latest, Blockbusters, which is available here at The American Spectator in serialized form, is no different.
Blockbusters essentially games out a scenario by which an application of a large amount of capital toward the idea that control of entertainment media transforms the film and TV industry into something very different and far more successful. It’s sort of a Get Shorty-meets-Wall Street-meets-Secret Of My Success.
It’s a lot of fun.
But one of the factors animating the story is the putrescent wokeness of an industry that is utterly out of touch with its audience and simply refuses to entertain. (RELATED: Supermen Not Wanted in Leftist Bizarro World)
No, that’s hardly a radical concept. We all know that the very small number of gatekeepers who decide what gets made into movies and TV shows is largely monolithic as to ideology, and that it’s more important to most of them to push an agenda that their elite friends agree with than to entertain the public. (RELATED: After ‘Snow White,’ a Chance to Replace Hollywoke)
But it’s rarely so in-your-face as in the case of a column appearing at Variety on Tuesday.
And here’s the advice Schneider is giving the industry: get woker, go broker.
Michael Schneider is the executive editor covering television for that publication, one of two major organs covering the entertainment trade. He’s not some clown in his mother’s basement — it’s fair to call him an opinion-maker in Hollywood.
And here’s the advice Schneider is giving the industry: get woker, go broker.
The column’s title is “As Fascism Takes Hold in the U.S., How Will — and Should — the TV Landscape Depict Our Real-Life Horrors?” I’m not kidding.
In it, Schneider touts the great achievements of agenda-driven programming like Will and Grace, The West Wing, and The Handmaid’s Tale for having normalized gay marriage, giving us “a hopeful vision of what a White House could look like,” and being “chillingly accurate in predicting where we would end up,” respectively.
It misses him completely that most of the country found at least two of the three utterly cringeworthy; even The West Wing jumped the shark into babbling preachy leftism and wasn’t particularly missed when it finally went off the air. Schneider hails those shows as examples of activist entertainment without recognizing it’s the single most prominent factor in the death of the film and TV industry as a primary driver of American culture.
He thinks what Hollywood needs is more cowbell.
In the coming months and years, the reality of our situation will need to be embedded in many shows (particularly, but not limited to drama) that traverse our real world. Will political dramas depict the crumbling of America’s place and influence in the world? Will legal dramas take on the ICE invasions of our cities? What about the attempts to silence journalists? The move to erase the sometimes ugly truth about this country’s history? The stripping of diversity, equity and inclusion standards? How corporations, in self-interest and self-greed, are bending at the knee to please our rulers? The assault on our higher learning institutions? The defunding of scientific research?
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. These aren’t normal times, so we can’t rely on normal stories in our TV shows.
This is someone desperately in need of psychiatric counseling; that much is surely true. The problem is that his rantings can’t be discounted.
We’ve been through this before, you know.
During George W. Bush’s eight years as president, Hollywood conducted a full-on demoralization campaign, particularly through film. It wasn’t an accident that, feature after feature, the studios released was a post-apocalyptic tragedy.
It’s an impressive list…
Ever Since the World Ended (2001)
The Last Man (2002)
28 Days Later (2002)
Reign of Fire (2002)
Numb (2003)
Terminator 3 (2003)
Dawn of the Dead (2004)
Post Impact (2004)
Lost: Black Earth (2004)
The Day After Tomorrow (2004)
Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004)
Land of the Dead (2005)
Æon Flux (2005)
Children of Men (2006)
The Signal (2006)
20 Years After (2007)
I Am Legend (2007)
28 Weeks Later (2007)
Resident Evil: Extinction (2007)
WALL-E (2008)
Doomsday (2008)
City of Ember (2008)
Tooth & Nail (2008)
The Road (2009)
Zombieland (2009)
Terminator Salvation (2009)
Knowing (2009)
2012 (2009)
To be fair, the genre kept going strong during Barack Obama’s first presidential term, but of course, many of those projects were greenlit during Bush’s time in office.
And when Hollywood wasn’t proselytizing the end of civilization, it was making box office fizzle after box office fizzle in an attempt to poison public opinion against the war in Iraq — which, in retrospect, might have been a mistake, but it ought to be remembered that all of Hollywood’s favorite politicians were right on board with going in. People going to the movies to be entertained were instead subjected to preachy leftism in films like Stop-Loss, Rendition, Body of Lies, In The Valley of Elah, Lions For Lambs, Jarhead, and Redacted.
And when it was over, Barack Obama was president over an utterly exhausted and demoralized American public.
That was a Pyrrhic victory, though, because American affinity for movies has never really recovered. And as film and TV have only gotten more woke and more preachy, audiences have melted away into other pursuits.
We don’t need Hollywood like we used to.
They don’t seem to understand why it happened. It doesn’t look like the trade press is going to be much help in figuring it out.
And if the studio suits listen to Schneider, there won’t be a Hollywood at all anymore.
Let’s not forget that there are shockingly few film projects actually being made in Southern California. Other states have taken production away with tax incentives that California’s stupid communist politicians didn’t bother to compete with, and independent film companies like Angel Studios are beginning to proliferate, with larger and larger projects winning audiences away from failing studios.
The time is coming when that tide submerges the legacy film and TV industry. Particularly given that legacy corporate media itself is melting away as major entertainment conglomerates shed loser properties — a good example is MSNBC’s hilarious rebrand into MSNOW, which comes about because Comcast is unloading several of the unmarketable cable channels it owns into a spinoff company called Versant.
The corporate infrastructure and mechanisms of control by which people with Michael Schneider’s worldview have sought to influence American culture — or even got the idea that it was possible — are going away.
That’s a good thing. Even if there isn’t a concerted effort by the other side to capitalize on the woke self-immolation Schneider advocates.
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