LEFT WING POLITICS ARE HURTING THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY.
Well, yes and no. As long as the big budget action, sci-fi, and superhero franchises are doing well overseas (read: China), the American entertainment industry feels that it’s quite well insulated from any conservative backlash in America, and can produce virtue-signaling duds such as Rob Reiner’s new anti-Iraq War film, which “racked up a whopping $41,000 in its first weekend,” as Emily Zanotti wrote at the Daily Wire this past Monday. Back in 2016, Indie Wire explored “How Rob Reiner Survived 20 Years of Bad Movie Making” — having the far left politically correct industry politics was key:
However, with films like “The Story of Us” and “Alex & Emma,” the impeccable taste that defined his peak years seemed to be AWOL. His real triumphs were in the political arena. He became a major fundraiser for the Democratic Party and chaired the California Children and Families Commission. He was successful, and dedicated, in a way few figures from the entertainment industry are; he later co-founded the American Foundation for Equal Rights, which spearheaded the challenge to California’s Proposition 8 that laid the groundwork for marriage equality. Just last week, he was stumping for green jobs and infrastructure investment on “Real Time With Bill Maher.”
As he admitted in a 2007 interview with the New York Times, his interest in politics began to detract from his career as a filmmaker. “People kept asking me, ‘How do you balance it?’” he told the Times’ David Halbfinger, “and the point is, you don’t.”
That NYT interview was timed to promote “The Bucket List,” a film that could have turned things around: Critics still found it broad and saccharine, but its global box-office take exceeded $175 million.
Instead, it became his last film to see a major release as Reiner’s career slid off a cliff. He didn’t make another film until 2010; “Flipped” took in $1.7 million. Next was “The Magic of Belle Isle” (2012), starring Morgan Freeman as a novelist who’s lost his inspiration; it barely cracked $100,000. (His last film, 2014’s “And So It Goes” starring Michael Douglas and Diane Keaton, earned $25 million.)
How Reiner can still get films made also dovetails well with Robert Tracinski’s theory regarding the hard left bias of the network late night TV hosts — in the later case, it’s the best way for the networks to keep what’s left of a inexorably shrinking audience.
Ultimately, Glenn has written that, “The thing is, the executives making these decisions aren’t so concerned with what their customers think, as with what their peers think.” And that’s been true in the television industry for a very long time. In the case of the movie industry, as the late Andrew Breitbart told Peter Robinson on Uncommon Knowledge in 2009, once the studio moguls aged and retired by the late 1960s, a new group of Young Turks were eager to storm the barricades:
[W]hile the left was never able to take over the White House while George McGovern was not able to be victorious, Hollywood was taken over by the left and they have never relinquished it and in fact I would argue that the right has abrogated its place in Hollywood because they were told that you are not wanted here anymore and they never fought for it. So I don’t know who I have more contempt for, the left for its totalitarian behavior of those that disagree with them or the right the conservative movement just for allowing it to happen and not to fight back.
In late May, regarding Roseanne Barr being fired by ABC, John Nolte, once Breitbart’s protégé at Big Hollywood, wrote:
I am furious at Roseanne Barr, seething mad… Not only for what she tweeted, but over the fact that we finally got one over on Hollywood’s blacklist against conservatives and conservative ideas, we finally had a top-rated TV show that took our ideas seriously, a monster hit, a cultural game changer…
And in just a few months Roseanne Barr fucked it all up, lost it all.
Shame on her.
What she said was racist and indefensible. This is ALL on her, not ABC.
Indeed.™