Herewith some HE reactions to “Hollywood’s New Rules,” a just-posted article by Peter Kiefer and Peter Savodnik, and excerpted in a 1.11.22 HE article titled “Hollywood Is a Woke Prison Colony“:
It’s “interesting” and approvable that Keifer and Savodnik have managed to cobble together a portrait of totalitarian woke terror in Hollywood (inclusive hiring mandates, BIPOCS are saintly and sainted, cultural shifts, only white guys get punched down upon, the Academy’s “woke house” museum).
But of course, this is nothing that hasn’t been noted or noticed or mentioned in a hundred different ways by Awards Daily or Hollywood Elsewhere or George Orwell or, in their private, never-to-be-publicly-acknowledged realms of inward meditation, any number of industry veterans with half-honest inclinations, at least with themselves.
Keifer and Savodnik have based this article upon traditional shoe-leather and notepad reporting (including actual on-the-record sources like Howard Koch, Jr. and Sam Wasson), and that is commendable.
But you can also sense or sniff out the presence of scores of creatives and producers and screenwriters and peripheral, lower-level sources who were too terrified to even answer K & S’s emails, texts and phone calls.
This is a good article but the notion of a massive class-action, anti-discrimination suit by Hollywood white guys? That’ll NEVER happen…please.
I’m assuming that the unnamed editor-in-chief of The Hollywood Reporter, referenced in the opening paragraph, is Matt Belloni, whose precise title between ‘17 and ‘20 was “editorial director”. The source of this story was a THR employee who heard Belloni’s pitch and noted the derisive responses of THR staffers. It certainly wasn’t Belloni himself.
The piece is primarily composed of scraps and inferences and tidbits. Yes, Keifer and Savodnik have only scratched the surface. They certainly haven’t found a Hollywood equivalent of a Howard Beale or a Jay Bulworth who doesn’t give a damn and is just coughing up the real truth and let the chips fall where they may. But it’s a good honest stab at “the terror.”