What, finally, has the dambreak success of Top Gun: Maverick taught us? Basically that mainstream audiences are sick to death of woke shit, and that if Hollywood is ready to dropkick that attitude and get back to the business of crafty, absorbing, grade-A entertainment minus the poison pill of progressive instruction, things may gradually get better.
News flash: Hollywood has gone mental over the last five or six years. You know what I’m talking about. Everything is about race, gender and sexuality now, backed up by the always looming threat of Stasi persecution. And it’s fucking nuts.
One practical way of addressing the awful and possibly turning things around (or at least sensibly counter-balancing the 2024 diversity rules) is to bring in a sensible person as the new Hollywood Diversity Czar. Don’t laugh, but I could be this Changer of Games if enough people find this reasonable. Seriously.
If appointed, fairness will be my basic policy, and statistical proportionality my mantra. and transcendence will always be a contemplation or, you know, a possible “thing.”
For I am “John Leguizamo” in a sense, and I’m also (ahem) “me” — a guy who’s lived, struggled and mostly profited in Los Angeles for nearly 40 years and who knows all about tristate-area attitudes (grew up in New Jersey and Connecticut, did hard time in 20th Century Manhattan and 21st Century Brooklyn) and who’s seen and spiritually merged with God knows how many thousands of movies good and bad (including most of the great classics as well as classic genre fare like The Hidden) and who’s dropped acid and mescaline and just, you know, mixed it up into one big bowl of ghoulash.
Because I’ve been up, down and all around. Because I’m one of the few bigmouth columnists who really and truly gets it…who not only grasps The Whole David Thomson Equation but The Whole Cosmic Equation, and am constantly passing along calculations, permutations and perceptions of same on Hollywood Elsewhere.
You think I’m kidding? Obviously I am but maybe I’m not. Who knows? I’ve seen it, done it, been through it all. I am a white guy, yes, but a cosmic white guy and there’s the difference. I have no axe to grind — only Krishna truths to tell. And I have excellent taste in shoes. And there’s no way I would have approved the reality–defiant casting of Daniel Ranieri and Briana Middleton in The Tender Bar.
Will I make mistakes? Probably. Who doesn’t? But I am fundamentally fair, and at the end of the day my policies and proclamations will help to restore a semblance of what the film industry used to be. We can’t go home again, but we can at least try to behave in a sane, practical, pro-popcorn manner.
How did I get started on this? One of the most fruitful ways to get going on a riff of some kind is to think of something kinda crazy, and then go into a state of creative denial by explaining and justifying the crazy in a way that almost makes sense. Or does make sense in a way.