Hollywood Elsewhere was a thriving business and a happy workplace for roughly 13 or 14 years. After launching in August ’04 ad income …well, it was touch-and-go for a while but found its footing sometime in early ’06. And then it grew and grew…offering stability, adventure, intrigue, annual European travel and a thriving lifestyle.

The worm began to turn with the horrific election of Donald Trump in November ’16. From that point on and certainly by the end of ’17 and into early ’18, you could feel the first tremors of wokesterism, triggered by perceptions of obstinate patriarchal whiteness as represented by the various bad guys of the moment (the Trumpster mob, Harvey, Woody, Roman and all the other alleged ogres who were being called out, many deservedly so).

Before I knew it the furies were swirling all over the place…anything that smelled even vaguely of older-white-guy attitudes or viewpoints became a form of evil. HE’s ad income began to drop in ’17 and ’18. It’s been a hellish four years.

I was reviewing all this after stumbling upon a post about a private evening tour of the Louvre’s Egyptian exhibit. It happened on 5.13.17, or four and two-thirds years ago. Life is never a bowl of cherries, but things felt relatively happy and settled at this point. The calm before the storm. Here’s how it went…

HE’s own Svetlana Cvetko and David Scott Smith invited me to join them early Saturday evening at the Louvre. A connected friend of Svet’s escorted us inside to a restricted–access tour of the Egyptian exhibit. I had never before wandered through this world-renowned museum as an invitation-only cool cat. No crowds or lines to cope with. The Egyptian statues, sarcophagi, relics and artifacts were nothing to sneeze at either. The highlight was the 4000 year-old chapel of the tomb (or “mastaba”) of Akhethotep, a bigwig in the Old Kingdom who was close to the king. (Egyptian rulers weren’t called pharaohs until the New Kingdom.)

Svetlana Cvetko, David Scott Smith at Louvre cafe — Saturday, 5.13.17, 7:50 pm.

For at least four years I’ve been calling the Sundance Film Festival a wokester cul de sac…a dead end in itself, a dog in a box. Robert Redford‘s annual Park City gathering was alive and crackling between the early ’90s until 2016, pumping new blood and attitude into Hollywood and in some instances even reaching Average Joe multiplexes — 25 years of vitality.

Then the wokesters began to take over in ’17, and within a year Sundance had become a festival for woke purists. Or, as I wrote in ’18, “a socialist summer camp in the snow…largely about woke-ness and women’s agenda films — healings, buried pain, social ills, #MeToo awareness, identity politics, etc.”

I’ve said this four or five times, only to be met by a consensus view from the HE commentariat that boiled down to “aahh, pipe down… you’re just pissed off because they yanked your press pass.”

But now finally…finally!…a writer director has told The Ankler‘s Richard Rushfield that “the indie Sundance machine” has indeed woked itself into a corner, “creating films that no one wants to see…there’s a reason why you don’t have many indie breakouts because the stuff that has been deemed important is completely out of touch.”

Thank you!! Someone has finally joined me in saying how over the last four years the Robespierre contingent have all but poisoned the indie realm, which is annually celebrated in Park City. Indiewire would rather slit its collective throat that admit this, but now there are two of us…me and this writer-director guy!

Monday (12.27) update (NY Post via Deadline):

Last night (12.26):

Eight years ago Dallas Buyer’s Club, directed by the 50-year-old Jean-Marc Vallée, was one of the most talked-about Oscar contenders. In early ‘14 costars Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto won Oscars for their performances, and Vallée was suddenly a hotshot, prestige-level helmer.

Then he directed Wild (‘14), a Reese Witherspoon long-hike survivalist drama. Next came two HBO projects, Big Little Lies, which Vallée directed two episodes of while exec producing, and Sharp Objects, for which Vallée won an Emmy for direction.

Now comes a report that Vallée, 58, has been found dead in a cabin outside Quebec City. Regrets and condolences. Quite a shock.

When I was 22 or thereabouts I fell into a hot affair of the soul with a tall, quite slender 20 year-old brunette, at the time a junior at Boston University. She was a little bit taller than I (which was cool), and might have been the greatest hugger I’ve ever known. But going out with a woman nearly a full head taller…I don’t know, man.

…are almost certainly going to get killed in next year’s midterm elections. We’re all summing up 2021 in our heads and making lists about the highlights and misfortunes, etc. And the coming destruction of what’s left of a sensible liberal agenda…a destruction authored entirely by wokester identity-politics zealots…is pointed out chapter and verse in these six “New Rules” riffs, which I watched between 5 am and 6 am this morning.

There are many things I despise about the here-and-now in a social-political sense, but the “J’Accuse!” chorus of condemnation on Twitter has been near the top of my list for a good four years now. And right behind this (i.e., almost as bad) are the HE commenters who keep saying “man, you’ve lost control of yourself” and “is woke terror an obsession?” and so on.

The content in these six Bill Maher essays is 100% real, and the left isn’t modifying or toning down the rhetoric or the insanity. It’s getting worse by the cycle. They won’t listen.

The defeat of Virginia’s Terry McAuliffe was but an appetizer. Main course on its way.

We’ve all heard the famous story about Tallulah Bankhead flashing hairpie during the making of Alfred Hitchcock‘s Lifeboat (’44), and Hitch’s reply when told that some guys on the crew had complained and that he needed to ask Bankhead to show a little modesty. “Not my job,” Hitch allegedly replied. “This could be a situation for wardrobe, or it could be a makeup issue or perhaps even one for hairdressing.”

For me this story never quite lands because no sane or rational-minded Hollywood crew person (sound-stage professionals were entirely male in those days) would ever complain about being flashed. Who would be anti-social or arrogant or priggish enough to complain about such a thing? Ludicrous.

Another version of the incident (offered by Steve Hayes) was that the complaint came from a woman affiliated with the Catholic Legion of Decency who was visiting the set. But since when did such a person have anything to say about behavior or work practices during the shooting of a film? The Catholic Legion of Decency was about judging the moral nature of films awaiting theatrical release…right?

…but a 77% RT approval is certainly more than a passing grade. The IMDB crowd gives it an 8.3. The only resounding thumbs-down reactions are from Metacritic users — 5.6.