Tinseltown Travelogue: Meet the deplorables, Part Three, by Patrick Courrielche. Part one was reviewed here, part two here.
After two generations of being pummeled by La La Land, the newly constituted right is punching back with a force that has Tinseltown scrambling. Up to 2002, the right took the hits from Hollywood, but continued to open their wallets. …
That’s when the western media really turned up the volume of PC, about 2004.
In the early years of the new millennium, Hollywood entered a more vitriolic stage of bashing the right. And combined with its shift to a global box office which had just began eclipsing the domestic for the first time – Tinseltown started paying even less attention, and respect, to the other half of the country.
In an apparent response, U.S. moviegoers began shunning Movie City with its pocketbooks – with the Right turning away at a much higher clip. …
The right strikes back:
But where the old right was content with closing their wallets to Hollywood, the new right thinks stopping there is the stuff of cucks. This politically incorrect movement has galvanized in a way that was unheard of just a few years ago. Instead of the Kum Ba Yah rallies of yesterday’s Tea Party, this new right prefers a more active approach. They bombard film reviews with negative grades, inundate show sponsors with calls to drop their advertising, and hit the most hate-filled celebrities with a flurry of boycott campaigns usually only seen coming from the left.
No longer afraid to be called racists, sexists, homophobes, Islamophobes, or xenophobes – because they know they’ll be branded these no matter what – the new right is going directly after their perceived enemy, rejecting traditional content, creating their own entertainment, and organizing on a scale that should make Hollywood take pause in their daily putdowns. Social norms are no longer barriers, and some are even willing to flout the law…all to even the playing field. …
There follows a long and interesting story about Shia LaBeouf’s anti-Trump protest, “Shia LaBeouf Kicks Off 4-Year Anti-Trump Live Stream”. The live stream was of a flag “He will not divide us”. Three times the trolls from 4chan located the flag and took it down (New York, New Mexico, Liverpool UK), and Shia eventually gave up.
Movies now bomb when associated with anti-Trump bigotry:
When Ghost in the Shell starring Scarlett Johansson became a major box office flop, Hollywood postmortems pointed to a litany of reasons for the failure, except for the obvious – leading up to its release, the actress had been on an extended anti-Trump tirade, punctuated by an attack on the President’s daughter Ivanka. Her box office bomb Rough Night only underscored the problem – the unwashed half of America doesn’t approve of her brand of activism.
When Joy clocked in with lackluster numbers, and Passengers was a box office dud, some thought Jennifer Lawrence was just having a bad streak. But those of us on the right know her anti-Christian, anti-Trump bigotry has taken its toll on her mainstream box office appeal. And her latest bomb – mother! – appears to have sent the same message to the actress herself. She recently announced a two-year acting hiatus. …
Show business analysts have long been charting the demise of the movie star. Politically mouthy actors like George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Johnny Depp, and Jennifer Lawrence no longer provide insurance against a flop – as the growing list of their bombs reveals. This summer, the comedy sector nosedived like CNN’s credibility with four box office underperformers in a row. Can anyone guess why? Three of the four – Snatched, The House, and Rough Night – were all headlined by vehemently anti-Trump actors. Fifteen years ago, when Hollywood celebs pissed on half of America, there were no real repercussions. Now, the right returns the favor – it projectile vomits all over Tinseltown’s bottom line. …
Technology is cutting Hollywood down, opening up other options:
And technology has also created another incredibly disruptive line of attack on Tinseltown.
“That’s the Kodi box,” a Trump supporter recently told me when I asked what that AppleTV-looking hardware was at the side of the television. The device allows users to watch pretty much any film or TV show that has been offered digitally to the public…for free. The remarkable interface rivals Netflix. And along with Popcorn Time, an insanely popular app that allows you to stream content for free on Android enabled devices, some on the right are punching back at Hollywood through what’s being dubbed “purposeful piracy” to affect Tinseltown’s wallet.
Most of Hollywood is completely oblivious to these developments. Not a single person I’ve spoken to in show biz was aware of either the Kodi box or Popcorn Time. …
The boot is on the other foot — apologies are even being demanded from the PC crew!
In a September 2015 interview promoting her new movie Sicario, Emily Blunt quipped, “I became an American citizen recently, and that night, we watched the Republican debate and I thought, ‘This was a terrible mistake. What have I done?’” Breitbart News mined that quote from deep within the interview and made it the centerpiece of a story the same day. Within 72 hours, the newly christened U.S. citizen found herself on NBC’s liberal Today Show apologizing for disparaging America. If you’re going to backpedal that quickly, why go there? …
What now?
But even with the numbers painting a potentially dark future for the domestic box office and data showing a majority of Republicans have avoided movies based on a star’s politics, the industry hasn’t tried to moderate its loudest voices of hate. ..
If Tinseltown were smart, it would invoke the STFU protocol. Hollywood’s monopoly on entertainment is gone. There are other options. The industry needs to act accordingly. …
This type of blind discrimination in Hollywood must stop, or political violence will intensify nationally — and that’s not hyperbole. The city’s hometown bigotry comes out in its products — and radicalizes the divide. Tinseltown has thumbed its nose at conservatives for decades through its movies, sitcoms, talk shows, award shows, media, and public quips. It labels Trump Hitler, making all of his supporters by extension Nazis. And we all know how in vogue it’s become to punch a Nazi. Filmville reentered the silent era when Trump supporters were literally getting chased down, punched and bloodied during the presidential campaign. …
Besides signaling discrimination is justified, Tinseltown’s bigotry also sends another message to the public…it conveys that the industry is willing to flush its business model down the drain to maintain its ideological purity. Entertainment investors should take notice.
An enormous genre, with mainstream appeal, is being overlooked every year because the Hollywood establishment inhabits a liberal echo chamber with no access or knowledge of what makes the other half of the country tick.
There is ample evidence that anything of quality that appeals to the right, and is promoted through conservative media, ends up being a massive win. The success of Passion of the Christ was staggering. … Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper broke box office records for an R-rated film.
hat-tip Scott of the Pacific, Charles
