Tinseltown Travelogue: A deplorable’s adventures in la la land, by Patrick Courrielche.
Tinseltown Travelogue is a three-part series exploring Hollywood’s stunning hypocrisy and institutionalized bigotry. This story, months in the making, comes on the heels of the explosive New York Times exposé of alleged sexual misconduct over decades by Tinseltown’s most celebrated producer, Harvey Weinstein, and further unmasks an industry in the midst of an ethical unraveling.
Instead of confronting Hollywood’s biggest “open secret” of systemic moral decay, Tinseltown’s elite have chosen to exhibit disdain for everyday Americans through brutal mockery and relentless attacks on their beliefs.
Wrapped in scandal and historic box office lows, something brand new is happening to Hollywood…it appears Americans have had enough. This is a Tinseltown intervention.
DEAR RIGHT WINGERS,
WE HATE YOU.LOVE,
HOLLYWOOD“Republican in the dictionary comes just after ‘reptile’ and just before ‘repugnant.’” – Julia Roberts, at a 2000 Gore for President fundraiser, organized by Harvey Weinstein. …
Believe it or not, in some Hollywood circles, being a conservative is more toxic than a grown man spooning in bed with other people’s kids.
If you think I’m exaggerating, you don’t know this town.
Growing up in its shadow, I’ve been in and around the Hollywood swamp for decades. …
I entered this gilded group as a man in transition. I identified liberal, but was quickly discovering my inner rightwing self. I’d been red pilled, and it forced my eyes open to a widely held, deeply rooted Tinseltown sentiment. And that is…Hollywood hates conservatives. I mean ¡HATES! them. My friends in Middle America think they know this already. Kathy Griffin beheadings, Snoop Dogg’s assassination porn, and every allegedly funny late night talk show host prove this nightly. But unless you live here amongst the glitterati, you can’t truly grasp how the intensity of that white-hot hate is woven into the fabric of this city. The facial expression when a typical La La Land leftist first learns that your politics are right-of-center is unmistakable. It’s a blank, expressionless stare, eyes glazed over, mouth slightly open – and all of this locked in position for a beat too long. It could have an emoji it’s so recognizable. …
(I’ve encountered that look in Canberra.)
Being of Mexican descent, my wife likes to say that we were initially shielded from knee-jerk bigotry by our brown cards. So I didn’t really feel the full force of the hate until a few years after the birth of my daughter – when my wife and I began butting heads with some prominent members of this monolithically liberal society. …
Our first major run-in seemed like a no brainer – confronting a grown man who cuddled other people’s kids…in bed. It was slam-dunk material.
It all started the way all of these affairs usually do – with a few of the Hollywood wives, the true guardians of this star-studded galaxy, gabbing away on a moms-only weekend retreat. In the midst of their morning powwow, a big time Tinseltown player’s wife brought up a touchy subject – one of the fathers creeped her out. Her daughter had been at a sleepover and told her she saw this creepy dad crawl onto the top bunk in the late of night to cuddle with a second grader…not his own. Another mom described a similar incident when her child did a sleepover at the same dad’s house. My wife chimed in with her own account of Creepy Dad red-flag episodes, including yet another time he napped with a different child – not his own – during a play date. …
Read it all. Fascinating cultural material. Just a few political points:
Hollywood’s elite aren’t just rich…to quote my wife, they’re “frich” – or fucking rich. Tinseltown is largely the playground of aristocrats, with many coming from generations of moneyed families. … Amongst the Hollywood elite, situations like these are dealt with very discretely – largely because money, real money, of which pretty much everyone has access to within this community, tends to change the dynamics of confrontation. …
We’d faced Hollywood bigotry towards conservatives before – dating back to my early days with Breitbart News. The morning after my first appearance on Fox News as a Big Hollywood contributor, I was gifted with a keyed car – which was later graduated to a tire slashing. The vitriol reached a peak when a neighbor came to our front door with a bat. Then during the 2012 campaign, a lovely liberal TV exec used my daughter to attack our politics – opening the door for another Hollywoodian to joke about her being raped. Yes…rape jokes…about a five year-old. …
“You hear the term ‘institutionalized racism.’ … What are the reasons behind Hollywood’s hatred of the right and why has it persisted? …
The audiences are turning off:
Since 2002, tickets sold at the domestic box office have dropped by over a quarter of a billion seats per year – and that’s while there’s been a growth in the population, and both an increase in the number of movies made per year and number of available U.S. movie screens. The Summer 2017 box office hit a twenty-five year low … Film piracy is growing and becoming normalized. In the home, entertainment sales have plummeted by nearly 50% over the past decade. Cord cutting, the phenomenon of people ending their cable service or never signing up for one in the first place, is accelerating at an alarming rate. And if the 2017 Emmys matching an all-time low in viewership says anything – it’s that Hollywood has a real problem on its hands.
Industry watchers like to blame these developments solely on disruptive changes in technology. But the downturn at both the theater and home box offices started before the proliferation of social media, the third screen, and streaming services. These new technological advances have no doubt played a role, but Hollywood ignores another obvious reason for its box office woes – its amped up rhetoric against the right. …
According to a 2011 Penn Schoen Berland poll conducted for The Hollywood Reporter, 52 percent of Republicans say they have avoided a movie because of the political views of its star – compared to just 36 percent in Democrats. …
I’ve seen Trump supporters turn to “purposeful piracy” – the act of watching Hollywood’s content without paying for it on grounds of principle. The “Boycott Hollywood” sentiment has measurably grown – as anyone that lurks through the comment sections of conservative media can easily witness.
hat-tip Charles
