Robert De Niro ranted. Bette Midler blared about “autocracy.” Lea DeLaria declared war. But Donald Trump, though convicted in New York and shot in Pennsylvania, is still marching toward Milwaukee, where the Republican National Convention begins tomorrow.
Meanwhile, George Clooney called for a new Democrat nominee. Rob Reiner seconded the motion. Damon Lindelof went all in, calling for a donor strike. But their forsaken champion, Joe Biden, is still slouching toward Chicago, intent on securing his party’s nomination at the Democratic convention next month.
When this mess resolves—as it must, sooner or later—Hollywood might want to rethink its political habits. Because the current approach clearly isn’t working.
Hysterical displays on social media or the red carpet don’t win votes. More, they become click-bait for right-leaning sites like Breitbart.com, which has made a cottage industry of logging and highlighting celebrity political tantrums.
Getting De Niro, Midler, DeLaria and friends to tamp it down would be a start for those Hollywood Democrats who want to be taken seriously by their party of choice.
But that might be the easy part.
Much harder, but more interesting, would be an effort by the big donors to put aside the simple, knee-jerk tribal behavior that led to the current embarrassment.
And make no mistake, it is deeply embarrassing that people as sophisticated as Clooney, Reiner, Lindelof and many more were publicly endorsing and raising money for Biden only days before his performance at the June 27 debate made clear what less beclouded observers had known a year—that Biden was caught in an age-related decline.
The details aren’t particularly important. What matters is that big Hollywood players, who are supposed to have the inside track, called on the rest of us to support a candidate whom they would abandon two weeks later.
With that reversal, their credibility died; and belated calls for a more viable candidate won’t bring it back. What’s needed, when this is over, is a reboot—a revised way of looking at the relationship between Hollywood and Washington.
As Peter Bart pointed out last week, that relationship has changed a great deal over time—including a long-past generational shift from the days when some studio executives thought Jane Fonda too far left to be safely cast in Fun With Dick and Jane.
In the Forties, Hollywood went to war alonside Roosevelt. Later, it split over the black list. For John Kennedy, Movieland was a playground. With Reagan, it actually provided a president.
Sometime in the 1970s, the contemporary, progressive connection took root with what they used to call, in the Warren Beatty/Gary Hart era, “Hollytics.” Policy talk and personalities circulated on kind a loose cocktail party circuit in which Hollywood’s open checkbook played an increasing role. By the early1990s, when journalist Ron Brownstein mapped the interface in a book, The Power and the Glitter, the prevailing attitude—never mind those conservative counter-players in the Wednesday Morning Club—was summed up by a familiar invitation to conversational confidence, “We’re all Democrats here.”
Conformity was pretty much taken for granted. When I was a production company executive at Sony, no one seemed to think twice about telling me that my deal would be renewed, but it would cost me a $200 donation to the Clinton campaign. I paid, though I was planning to vote for Jerry Brown at the time. Then a senior company executive tapped me to attend some sort of political caucus, to support his wife’s bid to become a Democratic convention delegate. I did, but eventually re-registered as a ”decline-to-state” independent.
In the Bush years, things got more strident. Invited to a small Hollywood gathering with Howard Dean, I had to sneak out a side door. The rising vehemence was way too much for me.
Eventually came Trump, and then the Covid lockdown, which, together, forged the angry, social media- and money-fueled uniformity that now passes for political culture in the entertainment world. The reflexive need to crush Trump inevitably led to self-delusion or deliberate concealment of Biden’s weakness. The give-and-take of an earlier era, when Lew Wasserman and his Universal crowd, for instance, played both sides gave way to a doctrinaire intensity.
For the good of Hollywood and the rest of us, that monoculture needs to break down. That doesn’t mean Democrats have to support Republicans. It’ll never happen. But Ari Emanuel, a true political sophisticate, was clearly onto something when he noted in Aspen that donors were suddenly shifting their sights from the presidency to House and Senate races.
That’s a step in the right direction, back toward the somewhat looser, idea-and-policy driven ways of the vaguely remembered past. Think twice, look closer, kick it around a little before you write the check.
A next step might be as simple as a conversation with somebody on the other side, in lieu to those diatribes on X. You don’t have to agree. But it can’t hurt to know what they’re thinking. They might know something. They might even save you from pratfalls, somersaults, and embarrassing reversals in the Op-Ed pages of The New York Times.
