HEH: Bring Back the Hollywood Asshole!
And that is the ultimate lesson here. We do not need a new Coppola. We need a new Robert Evans. We need a studio head constructed out of parties and vice, with infinite taste and style. Someone artists feared and loved, who may not have had a soul, but had the genius to find the people who did.
So this is what we need you to do with your elite MBAs and high SAT scores: Get back to being a meritocracy. Drop the affectations. Best, most profitable idea wins. Hire crews and staff based on excellence, not what your favorite Harvard admissions counselor would love. Build movie stars. Learn what the poors want — people in flyover states who make less than $300,000 a year. Make sure those movie stars do not offend those poors by insulting Jesus or Tom Brady.
You are part of a great legacy. The Movies. You know: the great American cultural export created by Jewish Eastern European garment tradesmen. Honor them by wearing expensive clothes, making expensive movies, entertaining as many people as possible and selling millions of electric Hulk toothbrushes.
The executive’s job is to be the brilliant, greedy, tasteful money animal who funds the dream, and pretending otherwise is what broke the business. The business forgot it is supposed to be a hit-driven, star-driven, spectacle-driven machine, not a lifestyle brand for coastal creatives.
They have been calling you a suit like it is an insult.
It isn’t.
It’s the job.
Wear the suit. Be a suit.
Beginning in 2010, Hollywood rejected lucrative DVD and Blu-Ray sales for streaming, ending the ability for movies that didn’t make at the box office to earn a second chance in home distribution. From 2017 to 2019, powerful Hollywood execs were routinely #metoo-ed into oblivion. In 2020, Hollywood shutdown the movie business to curry favor with Fauci and Birx. In 2022, L.A.’s Academy Museum of Motion Pictures tossed the Jewish founders of Hollywood right down the memory hole. Then in 2023, the Writers Guild went on strike. The product became increasingly weird and woke. Going to movies went from being a near-weekly experience to something families did once or twice year to see event movies such as Top Gun: Maverick, “Barbenheimer,” and The Odyssey. No matter how big of a schmuck he is, the Hollywood asshole has his work cut out for him to turn the industry around.
UPDATE: The movie industry is broken. “Last year, just three studios – Warner Bros. Discovery, Disney and Universal – accounted for nearly 70 percent of domestic box office takings. Hollywood’s share of what Americans actually watch is around 95 percent plus in theaters (by revenue) and 85 to 95 percent in streaming viewing time. They own your butt and your eyeballs and that’s not changing anytime soon. But behind the rosy headlines and inside the plush boardrooms in Beverly Hills and Century City and Burbank, the hope of 2026 looks more like cope. A lot is going wrong all at once, and a huge transition is not-so-quietly under way. The agent did not mince words. ‘Streaming has ruined the business. It’s the reason Shari Redstone sold Paramount for peanuts. It’s why Warner Bros. was forced to sell. It’s why Comcast is looking to exit streaming.’”