From “Hollywood’s New Rules,” a just-posted article by Peter Kiefer and Peter Savodnik, available via Bari Weiss‘s “Common Sense” Substack:

“Hollywood, like many industries, does have a clubbiness about it. And pretty much everyone on the inside insists it should open up to those who had, for decades, been kept out. But the heavy-handed mandates, the databases, the shifting culture — in which pretty much all white men were assumed to have gotten their jobs because they had the right tennis buddies or ZIP code or skin color — raised the possibility of a new kind of clubbiness.

“The result has not just been a demographic change. It has been an ideological and cultural transformation. 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 out-woke everyone, including the woke,’ one writer said. Suddenly, every conversation with every agent or head of content started with: Is anyone BIPOC attached to this?

“Maybe it’s 15 percent about the belief that it will bring more people into viewing content, and 85 percent about the fear of being attacked on social media or in places like the Hollywood press or The New York Times,” a writer and producer said.

“You’ve got to be insane not to have at the forefront of your mind all of these racial and gender and trans issues when you’re writing something. You have to worry about the impact that everything you do will have on your career. And that has an obvious chilling effect on creativity.”

“There was a feeling, among those who didn’t hew to the new orthodoxy, that it was becoming harder not only for certain people to find work but for a certain kind of content — ballsier, more provocative — to get made.

“They were scared of what was happening. The fear, one prominent director said in an email, is ‘the audience stops trusting us. They begin to see us as a community twisting ourselves into a pretzel to make every movie as woke as possible, every relationship mixed racially, every character sexually fluid, and they decide that we are telling stories set in a fantasyland instead of a world they know and live in. If that happens, and they decide to throw themselves instead into video games 24/7, we will lose them.'”

The audience will stop trusting us? Baby, that train left the station four or five years ago, minimum, if not earlier.