 I can't think of a better way to destroy a beloved character or franchise than to treat its fans like garbage, and yet that's exactly what Hollywood has been doing for the last several years, slowly wrecking decades of goodwill in the process. Again and again, major film studios, TV networks, streaming services, and other kinds of publishers make it clear that they have a great deal of contempt for millions of Americans. People who they used to try to appeal to as prospective ticket or subscription purchasers are now looked at with disdain because of who they voted for or what they believe. Their money is no good, and anyone who creates content that appeals to them, even unintentionally, is seen as toxic, radioactive even, a traitor to all that is good and decent in the world. This increasingly extreme mentality has led to the creation of a large number of shows and movies that seem designed primarily, or at least partially, to shame and mock a large percentage of the population, rather than being designed to entertain and enlighten them with good, thoughtful stories. This has become all the more obvious over the course of the last couple years, and unfortunately I think this shift in the way most of Hollywood has treated its audience has had a fairly predictable effect. An awful lot of people are just done. Today, we're going to take a look at how the entertainment industry got taken over by moralizing bullies who arrogantly believe their job is to save the world, and what we might do about it on this episode of Out of Frame. I'll get to where I think this all went wrong in a few minutes, but I have to start with a bit of personal history. Although I spend most of my time making videos and running a creative team now, I actually started my professional life as a film composer, not a producer, and when I was in music school, I noticed a distinct difference between two different types of artists. Some, like me, wanted to create art for other people to enjoy and generally viewed their audience as a primary customer. For this group, art is not just a means of expression that's meant to be shared, understood, and appreciated by everyone. It's a means of making a living, but there was always another group that thought they were better than their audience. It was almost like they viewed them as enemies, uncultured rubes, barely a step above the financiers and benefactors paying for everything, who, of course, are the absolute worst. These artists hate the very idea of art as a commercial activity, and most of the ones I've met over the years had a chip on their shoulder. I suppose you would too if you thought that exchanging money for your work was gross, but these two viewpoints lead to very different outcomes. The artists who think of their audience as customers tend to be decent entrepreneurs, deliberately crafting new creative works that other people might enjoy enough to be willing to pay for. Not surprisingly, those are usually the ones who have successful careers. On the other hand, my other classmates who scoffed at their audiences mostly became teachers and college professors or dropped out of the arts altogether. I can't think of any who actually found commercial success in their chosen medium. Another thing I've noticed is that the first group tends to be relatively well adjusted, grateful, and open to criticism. If a song or a video doesn't do as well as they'd hoped, they might be disappointed, but they'll also look at what they could have done differently and try again. They understand that it's not the audience that did something wrong. Besides, there's always another good idea, another opportunity, and it's a pretty good life being able to make a living creating art. At least that's my perspective. Conversely, I've often found that the second group blames the audience instead of themselves whenever their work doesn't land. The audience has no taste. They don't understand good art when they see it. They're the problem. In the end, this kind of thinking frequently becomes a clever excuse to justify creating non-commercial art. After all, it's not unpopular. It's pure. Thing is, for years, this attitude seemed to be limited to the most avant-garde artists, people creating the weirdest stuff that was never intended to be commercially successful. What's been surprising to see in the last few years, however, is how many people working in Hollywood seem to have adopted the same mentality, while still expecting to produce massive hits. When Peter Jackson was making The Fellowship of the Ring, he said something you'll rarely hear from a modern filmmaker. He said, We made a promise to ourselves at the beginning of the process that we weren't going to put any of our own politics, our own messages, or our own themes into these movies. What we were trying to do was to analyze what was important to Tolkien and to try to honor that. In a way, we were trying to make these films for him, not for ourselves. Today, it seems like almost every filmmaker and studio that reboots or adapts a beloved work is desperate to modify it in ways that serve their own political narratives, regardless of whether or not their ideology fits with the story or how much they have to change the characters and plot to make it work. And when fans pan the project and refuse to support it, the creators lash out. It's almost like they revel in antagonizing the very people they need the most. Worse, they often act as if the only reason fans might be disappointed in their work is because they're toxic bigots. I guess if you think everyone who disagrees with your political views is evil, that would make sense. But is it actually true? Probably not. Undoubtedly, the internet can be a rough place, and a lot of fandoms aren't exactly very charitable or forgiving when they don't like something. But then, they're also extremely generous with praise when they love something. As a creator, if you're going to benefit from adoring fans when you make them happy, it's hardly fair for you to get mad at harsh criticism when you don't. But a lot of pros have way thinner skin than they should, and they have more power to frame the narrative in the press than any of their fans. And it's easy to make them look bad. Each time this scenario replays itself, entertainment media hunts down a handful of the worst tweets and social media comments and broadcasts them as if they're the norm, meanwhile ignoring substantive criticisms as if they don't exist. Take the fan reaction to Amazon's Rings of Power or Wheel of Time series, or to Netflix's version of Cowboy Bebop. Look at what people really took issue with versus what got the most attention. Also note what doesn't get much attention, how the creators themselves interact with the fans. When directors like Tycho Atiti, writers like Chuck Wendig, or actors like Brie Larson belittle their fans, they're not exactly doing themselves any favors. Rich, out-of-touch, blue checkmark celebrities punching down against nobodies on Twitter? Taking criticism isn't that hard, and if you're going to have a career in the arts, you should probably get used to it. Of course, when I've looked at these situations with a more cynical eye, I've often wondered whether or not a lot of this is simply a marketing tactic. I talked about this a bit in a previous episode, but increasingly it seems that every time a new movie or show comes out, part of the promotional strategy is to highlight some aspect of the story, characters, or meta-context that will spark controversial opinions online. I get it, buying ads is expensive, and the more anger you can incite on the internet, the more likely some of the earned media surrounding your film will go viral. It's a decent way to get some free publicity and take up space in people's heads, but I don't actually think it's all a matter of strategy. I think what we're seeing reflects a genuine shift in what entertainers believe about their role in society. Prior to the troubles of the last couple years, I often used to attend the South by Southwest Conference in Austin. For those who aren't familiar with it, it's a massive multi-week event that brings together some of the top names in film, music, interactive media, and technology. As part of its amazing film festival, the event features panels and speakers from some of the most successful figures in the entertainment industry. Some of these sessions are technical, but the keynotes especially are often more about the individual's ideas and philosophies. Rogue One director Gareth Edwards gave one of my favorite talks, focused mostly on his love of Star Wars and his thoughts on storytelling. That was cool. What's less cool is how many of these keynotes end up being a soapbox for ideological rants. In 2017, transparent creator Jill Soloway gave a keynote that was essentially a lecture on gender identity politics. I was there. At one part of her talk she asked all the men in the room to stand up. We are going to use the power of PowerPoint to do a feeling body experiment, so I'm going to ask all of the men in the audience to stand up. I did. Just kind of getting your body men and just look at the slides and try to feel these things with me as I say them. She proceeded to show us images of boys and men, but narrated these images with statements that were meant to describe the way that women are raised in our society. Keep in mind that she's reversed what she assumes are standard gender roles, so while we were seeing images of men, she's asking us to imagine growing up as women. And they tell you you can be anything. You can dream about being anything and you wonder why they don't tell the girls they can be anything. Maybe because they already are everything. A little while later she asked the women to stand up and did a similar thing for them, showing them images of young girls and women while describing what she imagined men are told as they grow up. She starts by suggesting that boys and young men are praised for everything they ever do, from their ideas to climbing trees to throwing a football. As she progresses through the story she describes a world where men take up all the space in the world and even though men control everything and own everything, they need even more space in the form of man caves. Again, keep in mind that she's reversed gender roles here. I can't speak for everyone, but one thing I promise you I've never done is stand around with a bunch of dudes complaining about how hard it is to be a man. That would be excruciatingly boring, but okay. You can watch all this on YouTube, but to put it mildly, it was a very bizarre experience. Frankly, none of what she presented as the standard male experience was particularly familiar to me. In fact, most men and women I've shown this video to have said the same thing, but at the end of the talk, Soloway announced that her real mission was to advance what she called the topple principles, as in topple the patriarchy throughout the entertainment industry. The first of these principles is, our revolution must be intersectional. This is a demand that new film and TV projects be politically activist in nature, from an explicitly leftist intersectional feminist point of view. That's a perspective that sees virtually all of human interaction as a power struggle between different, sometimes intersecting identity groups, and which defines those groups by their comparative levels of privilege or oppression. This is deeply illogical, inherently divisive, and leads to severely flawed conclusions about the world, but that's a discussion for another time. It's just important to note that this is what a lot of people in the industry, like Jill Soloway, genuinely believe. Her list concludes with principles over product, meaning that the activist goals are more important than making money. And while it's true that this is all just one person's opinion, South by Southwest generally represents the leading edge of the industry, and there are a ton of sessions like this every year. Plus, there were thousands of other entertainment professionals in that hall with me, and the applause sent a pretty clear signal. Point is, people who have a massive influence on our culture have shifted away from caring about the craft of creating, entertaining, engaging movies and shows towards creating multi-million dollar PSAs, pushing a specific message. Everything from what stories are getting told, to who is allowed to work on the projects, to casting choices, to what's being distributed and promoted on major networks and streaming services is all being filtered through this ideological lens. Unfortunately, this approach has the tendency to absolutely wreck good storytelling, and that's without even getting into problems with tokenizing pre-existing characters, or making radical changes to serve the message. None of this is particularly surprising to me, by the way. Even back before 2010, when I lived in Los Angeles, you could see where a lot of the business was headed, and every friend I still have in the industry has dealt with these issues personally. Cancel culture and brutal enforcement of this new ideological orthodoxy has made everyone afraid. In a recent article, Peter Kiefer and Peter Savodnik wrote, We spoke to more than 25 writers, directors and producers, all of whom identify as liberal, and all of whom described a pervasive fear of running afoul of the new dogma. This was the case not just among the high command at companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu, but at every level of production. How to survive the revolution? By becoming its most ardent supporter. Best way to defend yourself against the woke is to outwoke everyone, including the woke, one writer said. The article goes on to quote writer and director Mike White as saying, Everyone has gone so underground with their true feelings about things. White notes that any indication you're not on board can really have negative repercussions for you. For an industry that still has a complex about McCarthyism, they've created the same chilling environment, and it's had a pretty depressing effect on the quality of their output. But the question is, what can we do about it? One option is just to accept that this is the way things are now, and try to enjoy what you can and ignore everything else. But I suspect a lot of you aren't going to be happy with that. Another option is to take the same approach that people like Jill Soloway, who is now Joey Soloway, by the way, have pushed for the film industry. Just demand that all the content you consume supports your ideology, and treat all other perspectives with contempt. With the rise of alternate social media platforms like Gab, Parler, and Rumble, that's pretty easy to do. It already seems like a parallel economy is emerging, with people on the left and the right watching completely different shows, using different social networks, watching their own news, and cutting themselves off from interaction with anyone who has a different viewpoint. And while I think it's fair to say that this is a direct consequence of the activists in control of the entertainment industry and censorship on the major social media networks, I don't think this is a good thing. It's not healthy for a society to have huge sections of its population that don't share the same culture, information, values, and experiences. The less we have in common with each other, the easier it gets to dehumanize people in the other tribe. Friends become enemies, families, and relationships dissolve, and we end up with a world where people aren't even allowed to do business with the heretics who don't toe the line. Roger Ebert once said, We all are born with a certain package. We are who we are. Wherever we were born, who we were born as, how we were raised. We're kind of stuck inside that person. And the purpose of civilization and growth is to be able to reach out and empathize a little bit with other people. And for me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy. This is what I love most about movies. But empathy isn't actually possible if truth is subjective and reality varies based on a person's intersectional identity. Empathy requires an objective shared reality. If your entire understanding of the world is dependent on whether or not you are a cis white woman or a gay black man or a member of some other group, then we are all permanently divided. We will never understand each other. And that leaves us with a cold, dark world that can't tolerate nuance or differences of opinion. But while I don't want to see every aspect of our society and economy split along political lines, it is true that the only thing that will ultimately make a difference is competition. More people need to break free from Hollywood's stranglehold on the production of new movies and TV shows and start making their own outside of that system. And ideally, they should do that by focusing less on lecturing their audience and more on telling engaging stories that are appealing to a wider range of people. Fortunately, the market will reward whoever figures out how to do that well. One of the most important and practical lessons I've learned after a lot of years working with economists and entrepreneurs is that the key to success in business is shockingly simple. You ready? Here it is. Find a way to create something a lot of other people want and figure out how to get it to them at a price they're willing to pay. Easier said than done, obviously, but that's really all there is to it. And it's just as true for artists as it is for plumbers and electricians. If you want to earn a great living or create a profitable business, your first priority has to be your customer. For most of its existence, the entertainment industry understood this. It was the best in the world at creating movies, TV shows, music, comics, and all kinds of content that hundreds of millions of people loved. The major studios and publishers dominated their competition because they were laser focused on making audiences happy by telling interesting stories. Somewhere along the way, the industry stopped caring about that, becoming more about promoting a political agenda than producing great content. And now, with so many great scripts and talented creators being boxed in by this restrictive ideology, there's enormous room for new entrepreneurs to take over. I have no idea who will get there first, but after decades of monolithic control by the gatekeepers in Hollywood, it's pretty exciting to see people making legitimate content outside that system. In a market economy, competition drives a tremendous amount of growth and change. And I think in this case, change is long overdue. And a special shout out goes to our associate producers. To Connor McGowan, Dan Rich, Matt Tabor, and Richard Lawrence, thank you. For everyone else, be sure to leave a comment, like this video, and subscribe to the channel. Join the continuing conversation on Discord, and follow us on all the social media. I'll see you next time.