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Salvo 02.01.2021 6 minutes

You Guys Saved AMC. Now Save Movies.

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Build your own Hollywood—or else!

I’m writing this on a manual typewriter a fellow dissident smuggled into my cell here at Gitmo. No one told me booing the TV while Biden stared at the camera was a dangerous act of insurrection, so here I am. The weather’s balmy and the food’s fresh. Try the goat, it’s delicious.

Frankly, I don’t mind getting out of the house. I was stuck inside four walls with the kids for 10 months, so I’m treating this as a vacation—plus I got my COVID vaccine along with the other terrorists. Win-win! I don’t love the burka, but it’s helping my cellmate accept me. He’s pretty chill so far, except for the photo of Mohammed Atta hanging over his cot.

The only entertainment we have is a Roku TV in the rec room. The new TV series Bridgerton is popular with all the men. It’s dubbed, and my Pashtun is a little rusty, but as far as I can tell it’s some sort of skank porn remake of Hamilton.

Brace yourself, folx! After a year-long hiring spree of diversity-approved, anti-racist quota hires, including industry job openings that called for “Pacific Islander-nonbinary comedy writer” and “queer BIPOC show runner,” we are about to get hit with an absolute tsunami of terrible TV and movies. Entertainment designed by woke algorithm, scripted by BLM. You know, for kids!

Are You Not Entertained?

But wait, you ask: how could what’s coming be worse than what we’ve put up with for the last few years? Regrettably it’s true; standards have fallen. Studios can’t invest in the little extras, like story, production value, feelings. How can they? They’ve been forced to sacrifice most of their budgets appeasing the DIE anti-racism gods, who demand billion-dollar payoffs, script approval, and sign off on the final cut.

Did you know that GLAAD, the massive LGBTQ advocacy lobbyist, actually has deals with the studios to review scripts for “representation”? Their mission statement is “GLAAD works through entertainment, news, and digital media to share stories from the LGBTQ community that accelerate acceptance.” Seems fine, right? I’ve got no problem with people “sharing stories.” The more stories the better, right? Let the people decide, after all.

Except GLAAD is now 100% owned and operated by the trans lobby, and they don’t just want representation and acceptance. Nope. Like BLM, their goals are much more insidious. They won’t be satisfied with a few new Marvel superheroes who can fly through space but don’t know if they’re male or female. The true goal, of course, is to incinerate the bond between children and parent, degrade human morality, and erase patriarchal white supremacist traditions, like carbon-based life forms available in just two sexes and genders.

Think your children can find refuge in some nice Disney princess movies? Sorry, that coach has turned back into a pumpkin. The Frozen franchise ultimately failed because the feminist screenwriters couldn’t bring themselves to allow a straight white princess to enjoy a satisfying fairy tale ending. “Incel Elsa” is not a doll most four year-old girls want.

I think the entire Frozen brand started to melt when they turned witty Prince Hans into a murderer; the worst heel turn since Danaerys went nuts in Game of Thrones. The Brothers Grimm these people are not, but they are in charge of your children’s entertainment.

Meanwhile, Disney is almost finished retconning its “racist” theme park rides, like Jungle Cruise and Splash Mountain. Their goal, of course, is not simply to remove racist Audio-Animatronic figures of tribal headhunters and furry critters. Their goal is to remove the racism embedded deep in your complicit American heart. And if they can’t, then you, my dear, are next on the removal list.

This is why corporate entertainment is no longer entertaining: it is no longer made to entertain you.

It is made to correct you.

Attention GameStop Millionaires!

You diamond-handed bastards. You’re richer than Roosevelt! Time to put your filthy lucre to good use, my boys. You know who has all the money in Hollywood right now? The talent agents. They’re the ones buying all the $4 million dollar homes in the last few decent school districts in Los Angeles. Not that they send their kids to public schools, of course. The movie star era is over. Actors no longer call the shots. Those greasepaint monkeys have been reduced to hustling for any job they can take. But as the new Praetorian guard to the Empire’s narrative agenda, the agents are cashing in.

Not that talent agents have ever been decent human beings, but at least they used to be fun. They had the cool parties, the best drugs, and some still had excellent taste. Not taste in the high artistic sense, but in the popular. They could make discoveries. Finds. There’s a reason that 60-pound French dork Timothée Chalamet is in every single movie—they don’t know how to scout actors anymore.

Instead, the average talent agent spends his time Botoxing his waxed scrotum, bundling donor money for Kamala Harris 2024 fundraisers, passing bribes to Adam Schiff to look the other way as he smuggles COVID vaccines to their rich friends and Salvadoran nannies, and packaging fully woke BLM-scripted shows for the streaming networks. That wonderful script you wrote? The TV pilot you and your partner have been slaving over? Lol. Lmao. Learn to code, loser!

Make Entertainment Great Again (MEGA!)

My plight is real. There are a trillion content platforms and nothing I want to watch. My kids chat with friends on Discord and play games. My husband streams wristwatch and gun reviews on YouTube. Me? I don’t remember the last movie I saw. Maybe Contagion, but that was pure research.

Poor Gen X. We had it too good. We were forced to see two, three movies a weekend in summer just to keep up. These are mostly now considered family classics. (Except for Howard the Duck.) They get remade over and over, unsuccessfully (Ghostbusters, Star Wars). Our four Christmas movies (It’s a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story, the original Grinch, and Home Alone) have an average age of 50.

And it’s not just that there’s nothing to watch. There’s nothing to read, either. A novelist friend told me last year that he got heat from his publisher because his manuscript had “too many white characters.” He also helpfully got a note that his portrayal of a non-white character was “problematic.” A literary agent at a New York agency was fired last week after someone discovered she had a Parler account. The only books on the bestseller lists are Harry Potter, still, and of course, the Bridgerton books. No Pashtun translations of those yet, unfortunately.

Hollywood Reshuffle

Hey, Reddit army: what was the point of saving the AMC movie theater chain if you’re only going to show buddy flicks about young white feminists who get raped by sexist lacrosse players and have to take a road trip to procure late term abortions, along with their trans queer disabled immigrant drag queen best friends? (These are actual plot elements of actual movies and series in the last couple years. The abortion road trip is a whole genre unto itself.)

The bar is so low. You can make the movies. We can make the movies. We have better ideas, better jokes, more interesting stories. We are not constrained by their rules. We don’t care about race and gender quotas—those are not story elements, those are story killers.

The truth is, it’s already starting.

Amanda Milius, the brilliant daughter of notorious conservative screenwriter John Milius, directed the #1 documentary of 2020. Watch The Plot Against the President  and you’ll understand the popular resentment against the corrupt hacks who pretend to “serve the people.” It’s that good.

Earlier this month, another remarkable shift took place in the world of film distribution.  Independent producer Dallas Sonier premiered his new drama Run Hide Fight, a thriller billed as “Die Hard in a school shooter scenario.” How did Sonier, a conservative, find a platform to promote and launch the movie? Simple: he partnered with Ben Shapiro and the movie launched on the The Daily Wire website. No distribution fees, no movie theater contracts, no giant studio necessary. A friend who is working on an upcoming movie with Sonier said he talked to him after the premier and he declared it a “revolution.”

Here’s the secret to making popular four-quadrant entertainment that attracts the widest possible audience: don’t be political. I don’t just mean avoid overt wokeness. I mean make apolitical art. It of course becomes political because of its refusal to be political, but that’s their problem.

Imagine making movies for a giant underserved audience in an obscure, forgotten land. Overlooked by the coastal elites, this place has lots of children but barely goes to the movies anymore, since the movies are gross. Now imagine that this audience already speaks English, so no subtitles are necessary! You can use American actors! Now imagine this audience is crying out for movies to fill their abandoned AMC movie theaters, which just reopened post-vaccine.

So sharpen your pencils and haul out your Selectric typewriter, because, as Kamala says, we’ve got work to do.

Where we’re going, we won’t need speech codes.

Send Care Packages

The linebacker-sized night warden (pronouns: they/them) is about to check my cell, so I gotta go before they hears these keys clattering. If you’d like to send me a care package, you may do so care of Peachy Keenan, VIP Cellblock 52A, East Building, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Feel free to send snacks and magazines. I also forgot a burkini. Oh, and raisins! The guys here are always talking about all these raisins they’ve been promised for some reason. Adiós!

The American Mind presents a range of perspectives. Views are writers’ own and do not necessarily represent those of The Claremont Institute.

The American Mind is a publication of the Claremont Institute, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, dedicated to restoring the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life. Interested in supporting our work? Gifts to the Claremont Institute are tax-deductible.

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