Hollywood

Producer Harvey Weinstein’s fall from grace handed Hollywood a golden opportunity.

Stars who preferred virtue signaling to hard work could now do something powerful, and necessary, for the culture.

Bring other Harvey Weinsteins to justice. And, as we learned in the weeks following Weinstein’s downfall, Hollywood is chock full of unsavory types.

And, sadly, so is the culture at large.

Coldplay, Kasabian, Kylie Minogue, Slash, Meghan Trainor, Tom Odell. It sounds like a Glastonbury line-up, but it’s actually a list of some of the acts who graced the kitchen of Spotify’s old London office. As the Swedish company grew to become the undisputed king of streaming, it would wheel in some of the biggest names in music to perform for its staff at lunchtime on Argyll Street.

So stunning was one Kasabian gig that some of the 200 or so people watching in the canteen were left in tears, an employee remembers. Another time, Coldplay turned up having just played to 100,000 fans in Sydney two days earlier. Odell enjoyed his canteen set so much, he carried on busking in front of the office.

After over a year, prosecutors in New Mexico are getting ready to formally charge Alec Baldwin for accidentally shooting dead Halyna Hutchins in 2021.

Baldwin is facing a maximum of five years in prison on involuntary manslaughter charges with a firearm enhancement.

He has vowed to fight the case – calling the charges a ‘terrible miscarriage of justice’.

I doubt he’ll do time.

After the deadly accidental shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on a Santa Fe movie set in 2021, New Mexico prosecutors have announced impending manslaughter charges against the Rust actor and producer Alec Baldwin, who held the prop gun as it discharged what turned out to be live rounds.

The film’s armorer who prepared the gun, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, will also be charged with involuntary manslaughter, and the production’s assistant director, David Halls, will plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge of negligent use of a deadly weapon, according to the Santa Fe special prosecutor, Andrea Reeb. The exact chain of who handed the gun to whom is disputed by the trio.

There is ample basis for a jury to convict.

Oh, the irony.

In 2018 actor Alec Baldwin joined a coalition of Hollywood celebrities in forming the “No Rifle Association Initiative,” which sought to reduce the National Rifle Association’s influence on American politics and society. In the wake of a horrific mass casualty shooting at the Parkland High School, the initiative sent an open letter to NRA’s then executive vice president, Wayne La Pierre, denouncing the NRA and accusing it of opposing “every single basic gun reform measure that might have saved lives” and vowing to “shine a bright light on what you and your organization do to America.”

Alec Baldwin could face 18 months in prison if convicted of felony involuntary manslaughter and did himself no good jabbering on and on about the case.

In October of 2021, Baldwin accidentally shot two people on the set of Rust, a Western he was shooting in New Mexico.

The death of Halyna Hutchins on the set of “Rust” in 2021 has special significance for Hollywood’s small community of film armorers. Like a lot of entertainment industry jobs, armorers occupy a highly specialized niche. It’s not the kind of thing you can go to school for, and there are no state certifications or license exams to pass. Getting into the profession tends to involve a combination of apprenticeship and old fashioned, right-place-right-time industry luck.

On top of their disgusting loyalty oath, the Sundance Film Festival, along with other left-wing festivals, have gone full McCarthyism by blacklisting controversial titles.

Alec Baldwin’s “recklessness”, and the failure of his production team to follow basic gun safety procedures on the set of the movie Rust, led to the decision to file a criminal charge against the US actor in the death of a cinematographer, prosecutors said.

Mary Carmack-Altwies, the Santa Fe district attorney, said Baldwin, and the movie’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, violated “all of the standards that we all have to follow if we have a gun in our hands” in the shooting death of Halyna Hutchins with a prop weapon during a rehearsal in New Mexico in 2021.

Disgraced actor Alec Baldwin refuses to accept any culpability for killing cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the “Rust” film set and will fight his manslaughter charges, his lawyer said Thursday — who insists “we will win.”

Baldwin, 64, will be charged with two federal counts of involuntary manslaughter for the October 2021 death of Hutchins, New Mexico District Attorney Mary Carmack-Altwies announced Thursday.

“After a thorough review of the evidence and the laws of the state of New Mexico, I have determined that there is sufficient evidence to file criminal charges against Alec Baldwin and other members of the ‘Rust’ film crew,” Carmack-Altwies said Thursday. “On my watch, no one is above the law, and everyone deserves justice.”

He’ll still get off easy. Real easy.

Baldwin and Gutierrez-Reed will both be charged “in the alternative,” meaning the jury will decide which of the two charges — involuntary manslaughter or involuntary manslaughter in the commission of a lawful act — they are or are not guilty of. Both felony charges hold a maximum prison sentence of 18 months and a fine of up to $5,000.

Hollywood sucks, America knows it, and according to the preliminary numbers, Tuesday’s NBC telecast of the Golden Globe Awards crashed to an all-time low.

Just how much has Woke McCarthyism destroyed award shows by perverting them into pompous lectures?

Hollywood is determined to self-destruct. I won’t stand in their way.

Between 2018 and 2022, movie theater attendance dropped in half, and I do not want to hear any excuses about the pandemic.

People will go to the theater to see a movie that appeals to them. Spider-Man: No Way Home proved this last year. Top Gun: Maverick proved it this year. Avatar: Way of the Water is proving it right now. And those are just the blockbusters.

The gulf between elites and audiences is eroding profits throughout entertainment and news media—but signs of correction are emerging.

After a decade of rapid growth, the nation’s media and entertainment complex is facing retrenchment and, perhaps, a necessary reappraisal. Firms are consolidating. Workers are being laid off at Disney, Warner Brothers, Paramount, CBS, and other production houses. News media firms like CNN, Gannet, and Buzzfeed are planning similar actions. In 2022, stocks in media companies lost $500 billion in value, and stocks in tech firms, increasingly big players in entertainment and news, suffered a reversal of an astounding $4 trillion.