Hollywood

Activists bemoan a lack of A-listers on the picket lines

Amonth after the actors’ union joined the Hollywood writers’ strike the first flush of defiance has faded and the sniping has set in.

“I’m not going to name names, but there have been so many times where the photographer turns up 15 minutes before someone famous arrives,” said a screenwriter who has been marching outside the Warner Bros studios in Burbank, northwest Los Angeles, since the beginning of May. “You know it’s not a coincidence. It’s obvious they have been tipped off.”

THE multi-million-pound record sales of the most successful recording artists are surely an indicator of how much our society has valued their art, thoughts and considerations on all matters. From Peter Gabriel to Bruce Springsteen, Coldplay to Billie Eilish, Western music artists have taken huge financial reward from highlighting what they saw (and still see) as repression, planetary injustice, moral harms and sometimes torture and death for those that society deemed beyond the pale.

In 2022 things apparently got so emotionally charged that many recording artists signed the Global Citizen pledge, calling for increased focus on poverty and climate change.

Last week, I watched my Criterion Blu-ray of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019) and was shocked when the Netflix logo appeared.

I had forgotten The Irishman was a Netflix movie — a streaming feature funded, produced, and distributed by a streaming outlet.

NEW YORK (AP) — TV late-night comedy scribe Greg Iwinski, 38, was still only an aspiring writer when Hollywood writers held their landmark strike in 2007-2008.

But as he manned the picket lines Wednesday — the day the current strike hit its 100th day, matching the length of the previous one — he was keenly aware of all the history involved.

Hollywood is simply not loved by a huge segment of the general public who’ve learned to ignore LaLaLand. I doubt I will ever feel deprived of their product.

Similar to Trudeau’s pissing match with Big Tech people wish both sides could lose.

The Hollywood writers’ strike is entering day 100, and the far-left Washington Post would like to share some tales of woe about a group of people who hate us.

One writer is down to her last three months of savings.

Another writer has had to return to his old job as a man-whore gigolo male escort, where he clears $8,000 to $10,000 a month.

Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, and the rest of the leftist late-nighters have been off the air since May.

Has anyone noticed?

I didn’t even know that left-wing bigots like Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers were airing reruns, which tells you just how little impact these woke echo chambers have nowadays.

To be honest I didn’t know they were MIA.

A new poll shows that while Americans support the striking Hollywood writers and actors more than the studios, a clear majority of Americans either do not care or feel ambivalent about the situation.

Surveying 1,002 adult Americans between July 28-30, the Los Angeles Times/Leger poll showed that the striking writers and actors do not have majority support, even though 60 percent of those polled admitted they had “somewhat” of an understanding of the grievances due to mass media coverage. Only 38 percent of Americans polled sympathized with the strikers while just 7 percent sympathized with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP).

I can’t say I care. Hollywood earned the public’s antipathy having deliberately squandered the goodwill of so many of us “little people.” 

Experts have been predicting the demise of Hollywood for as long as Hollywood’s been around. Not me.

People love stories. They love movies and TV, and that will never change. But the entertainment industry is in serious trouble today, primarily because it has painted itself into several corners. There will always be a Hollywood, but what the industry looks like in five or ten years could be very different from what we see today.

A NEW phenomenon is sweeping the digital stratosphere – the movie double bill of Oppenheimer and Barbie, kitschily named on social media ‘Barbenheimer’. 

A film about as grim a subject as the invention and deployment of the first atomic bomb seems a strange pairing with the story of a pink-clad plastic doll whose goal is to empower women. Barbie, manufactured by Mattel, has seen her status bolstered under licensing and distribution deals with the entertainment conglomerate Warner Brothers and an array of global brands including Chanel, showcasing their out-of-reach (to us mere mortals) products in almost every scene.

Life is so good that, according to various box office projections, the groomers at Disney have just released another expensive flop into theaters.

This flop is called Haunted Mansion (2023). It cost a whopping $150 million to produce. Once you add in promotion costs, you’re looking at a $225 to $250 million investment that’s about to open somewhere between—lol—$25 and $30 million.

Haunted Mansion also feels like the most Disney movie ever. Get this… It’s a remake of a 2003 movie based on a theme park ride.

Maybe you noticed that for the first time in 63 years, both the writers and actors’ unions are striking together. With TMC, Netflix, and the summer weather, perhaps not.

Most of us minions have other pressing concerns like paying our bills and buying food while coping with record inflation that the woke left now calls “Bidenomics.”

Disney’s upcoming live-action adaption of the 1937 film “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” made by “Barbie” director Greta Gerwig and featuring a non-white Snow White and racially diverse, multi-gendered, size-inclusive dwarfs, is about to be another girl-boss blockbuster committed to dismantling yet another beloved classic tale.

This has mega-flop written all over it.