A few weeks ago, Sydney Sweeney’s new film, “Christy” premiered with one of the worst box office openings in history.
Sweeney’s name has been in the press a lot recently after she appeared in an ad for American Eagle, which many rightfully felt invoked themes of eugenics. To make matters worse, Sweeney failed to condemn white supremacy in an interview with GQ.
Since then, she has become a hero online to white nationalists and to conservatives who think that the GQ interview was a signifier of Hollywood’s “wokeness” and the way in which conservatives are looked down on in Hollywood.
You don’t have to be a right-winger to realize that something is happening to Hollywood. Between August 2022 and the end of 2023, one in four workers in Hollywood were laid off.
Just last month, Paramount laid off 1,000 workers. Conservative cultural critics such as Nerdrotic see this as Hollywood reaping what it's sewn for plunging into wokeness. The phrase “go woke, go broke” has now become a favorite among right-wingers.
Conservatives have long viewed Hollywood as this place where “cultural depravity” runs amok. It’s sort of become part of the popular mythos of Hollywood in America’s cultural imagination. That’s part of the appeal of “blind items” and historical gossip columns. The notion is that these “coastal elites” with their “satanic” values look down on the good hardworking Americans of middle-America and attempt to lead the nation astray.
Is Hollywood’s crisis because of a century of immorality finally coming home to roost? Not quite. Like countless other issues, right-wingers seek a sociocultural boogeyman and ignore tangible economic ones.
An insightful feature written by Daniel Bessner was published in Harper’s last year titled “The Life and Death of Hollywood.” It portrays an industry falling victim to the economic precarity and corporate control that is reminiscent of so many other sectors of our economy.
An anonymous source, who is described as being the head of a midsized studio, is quoted as saying: “It is probably in the deepest and most existential crisis it’s ever been in. The writers are losing out. The middle layer of craftsmen are losing out. The top end of the talent are making more money than they ever have, but the nuts-and-bolts people who make the industry go round are losing out dramatically.”
To make a long argument short: Bessner discusses how during the Roaring Twenties, Hollywood was booming. However, when the Depression hit, MGM and Paramount Pictures cut their screenwriters' pay by 50%. With the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, the Screen Writers Guild was certified in 1938 and had its first contract guarantee a minimum of $2,500 a week in today’s money. With a vigorous antitrust policy pursued after the war, studios were barred from owning TV networks and vice versa, thus increasing competition. With the New Deal and the post-war economic consensus, you had a government that simultaneously pursued antitrust and pro-labor policies.
When Reagan was elected in 1980, the Reagan Department of Justice stopped enforcing New Deal-era antitrust law, and subsequently mergers and acquisitions became more common. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 only worsened this. By the late 1990s, with networks like HBO producing shows like “The Sopranos,” there was a “Golden Age of Television.”
After the Great Recession, we saw the rise of private equity in our economy, which prioritizes short-term profits. This has led to an obsession with intellectual property (IP), which explains the never-ending flux of sequels and reboots that predominate film today. This has happened as streaming services have grown exponentially, hollowing out movie theaters. Bessner points out that the rise of streaming was inherently unstable because its growth depends on how low and high interest rates are. When the article was written last year, half of TV writers were employed by streaming companies.
What does this mean for the future of storytelling? Right-wingers claim that there is too much social commentary in fiction. I’d argue the exact opposite.
Although it may seem contradictory considering the fact that I’ve laid out why the IP prioritization has ruined art, it’s telling that Todd Phillips’ “Joker” and Matt Reeves’ “Batman” films genuinely resonated. Inspired by films from the 1970s like “Taxi Driver” and “Klute,” these films focused on contemporary issues such as poverty and income and wealth inequality.
Like virtually every other sector of our economy, Hollywood has fallen victim to the parasitism of Wall Street.
Jacob Wojtowicz is the assistant features editor and can be reached at jacob.wojtowicz@ubspectrum.com
Photo: Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
