Declan Hayes
Trump's decision to subsidise Hollywood is further proof that his economic policies are a mess but that his plans to kill off woke America remain firmly on track.
Trump's decision to slap tariffs on foreign films and to subsidise Hollywood is further proof, if proof were needed, that his economic policies are a mess but that his plans to kill off woke America remain firmly on track. As Hollywood is a bastion of anti Trump Wokeness, killing it off will be to Trump's political advantage.
Trump's three Hollywood ambassadors are 86 year old John Voight, 78 year old Sylvester Stallone and 69 year old Mel Gibson, while his most venomous Hollywood critic is 81 year old geriatric Robert de Niro, who belongs along with the others in an old folks' home. De Niro recently starred in the action packed crime thriller, The Irishman, which was woefully short of action because De Niro and 82 year old Joe Pesci, its lead actor, are both fit for the knackers' yard as, of course, is 82 year old Hollywood fossil Martin Scorsese, who directed it.
Although Alzheimers will cause Scorsese and Gibson to forget more about movies than the rest of us will ever learn, they should long ago have yielded the field to younger players, who can reach out to the key, younger audiences, who actually pay to watch movies and buy the popcorn, franchised goods and other crap cinemas sell to make ends meet.
Not only are Trump's Hollywood ambassadors too old to hit first base with their core audience but Hollywood itself is dying on its feet. And they are not my words but those of Hollywood ambassador Mel Gibson in this Fox News interview , where Gibson explains how Hollywood has priced itself out of the market. When it is cheaper for Gibson to fly an entire crew to Europe for three days than it is to shoot around the corner in Los Angeles for a day, Hollywood has a major budgeting problem on its hands.
That problem is accentuated by Hollywood's efforts to hit its core four quadrant demographic, to still appeal to both males and females above and below the key 25 year old dividing line. Though blockbusters may have been able to do that in the past, it is infinitely much harder to do it now as those market segments have been further fractured along ethnic and other lines, and recent WOKE flops like Snow White have landed Hollywood further in the mire. When Hollywood cannot even showcase a simple child's story like Snow White to children without smothering them in boring WOKE lectures, it is obvious Hollywood is on its last legs and young, talented producers and actors have not the sufficient space to operate there.
But it is not just Snow White. Consider 55 Days at Peking, the1963 movie about the Boxer Uprising or Zulu, the 1964 blockbuster about the British extermination campaigns in South Africa. Good luck selling crap like that today in South Africa or China, where domestically produced Chinese movies like Lost in Thailand and The Battle at Lake Changjin top the box office. For what it is worth, I enjoyed Lost in Thailand, which is a Chinese comedy with Chinese actors working their way through a typically shallow Hollywood plot and a cocktail of madcap mishaps that kept the punters laughing from one end of China to the other. The Battle of Changjin was just Chinese Audie Murphys, John Waynes and Steve McQueens hitting the Yankee black hats for six during the Korean War.
Nothing particularly new or novel in that, or in the hundreds of movies the Australians produced before striking box office gold with The Man from Snowy River, Mad Max and Crocodile Dundee. Or indeed in South Africa's The Gods must be crazy, which had me rolling around the aisles when I first saw it many moons ago. The point about all those movies and the soapies I have watched throughout Southern Europe, Mexico, Japan, South East Asia and the Arab world is not only is there oodles of local talent, all striving for their place in the sun but they all have large and receptive audiences, and Snow White and The Irishman do not pass muster for them.
Although Jackie Chan's successes in Hong Kong, China, Europe and then in Hollywood show that cross pollination is possible, that is not what Hollywood wants. Hollywood wants to go back to the big budget movies of Audie Murphy, John Wayne and Steve McQueen, where the Chinese and Mexicans are good only as pig-tailed, sombrero-wearing black hats to be mown down by Wayne and his Green Berets buddies. That ship has sailed and the good people of Ghana, of all places, agree with me on that.
The problem in Ghana is they feel the Nigerians are colonising them by poaching their actors and smothering their own film industry by offering cheaper Nigerian fare. Although I haven't watched a lot of Nigerian films, I enjoy listening to Nigerian church music as it is so vibrant and it symbolises the African creativity that is bubbling to the fore not only there but all the way to South Africa which has a vibrant film editing industry and some great locations and enough lions, elephants, leopards, rhinos and buffalos to add spectacular local colour to whomsoever wants to shoot a revamped me Tarzan you Jane movie there.
Although we can skate by India's Bollywood and Nigeria's Nollywood for the sake of brevity, let's just say Hollywood's botox brigade have passed their sell by date by evey criterion and some we cannot yet imagine but Russian children like Betsy and Maria Yankovskaya and their contemporaries in China and all of Southeast Asia can. Though I have no idea what those kids would hope to see at the box office, I do know that the old fossils of Hollywood and the Oval Office haven't a clue either and that is another reason why the future belongs to the up and coming producers, directors, actors, costume makers and general factotums of Moscow, Beijing, Mexico, Manila, Bangkok, Joburg and Durban.
Here is the influential Hollywood Reporter, Rolling Stone and MI6's Guardian newspaper expanding on those and related points with respect to China, co-productions and tax breaks. And, though I am including them for the sake of completeness, my bigger point is that Betsy and Maria Yankovskaya and their contemporaries in China and the rest of Asia don't care about them or their Snow White wokeness. They want to dance and, as Hollywood cannot move beyond Fred Astaire, Jimmy Cagney and the great Ginger Rogers, they, along with kids in the Americas and Europe, will get their inspiration and their kicks from the up and coming movie studios of Bollywood, Nollywood, Manila, Moscow and China's Hengdian World Studios which, though the world's biggest studio set, has a totally different and much more flexible model than does the fossil that is Hollywood which, like its stars, is too old to learn and too set in its ways to adapt to today's market. Perhaps Bollywood will make a musical about Hollywood's demise and Chinese and Russian kids will dance to its soundtrack. Who is to know, and who is to care?