“The first thing I’d say [is that] online we’ve got to embrace nuance over outrage. We’ve got to get past an outrage culture of reading things simply and making really broad conclusions about them, and instead ask questions and try to listen to each other better. Generally, we just aren’t doing a great job of listening to each other online. I don’t think in the end it’s very helpful for the overall quality of discourse.” — YA superstar John Green (Paper Towns, The Fault In Our Stars) talking to Refinery 29’s Sabrina Rojas Weiss about YA headliner Andrew Smith getting beaten up on Twitter for stating that his novels aren’t that invested in female characters because he “was raised in a family with four boys, and I absolutely did not know anything about girls at all.”

Friendo: I don’t like Tiktok. I don’t know this guy or why I should care. Even assuming he’s right. He seems potentially dangerous
HE: Of course he’s right! Are you kidding me?
Friendo: People are too angry.
HE: It depends what you’re angry about.

@jotojavin Wrong on So many levels. In the words of Pink Floyd “leave them kids alone” #doctor #sons #boys #physical #girls ♬ original sound – JoToJaVin

HE sez: This guy was justifiably enraged that the doctor in question, a follower of radical wokester protocol, was, by asking his nine-year-old son about gender identity, encouraging the kid to begin an inner dialogue about who or what he might actually be deep down.

By asking for an answer to this question, he felt that they were “planting a seed” in the poor kid’s head by way of psychological subterfuge. Kids are very malleable and influencable, of course, and he strongly objects to this nine-year-old being dropped into “this shit,” as he puts it.

Look at Zoomers — 15% or 20% identify as trans or gender fluid or gender ambiguous on some level. They’re saying this, of course, because they want to be cool (or certainly not UNcool) and they want to merge with the social flow of their peers for safety’s sake.

The guy, in short, is an Average Joe traditionalist, and if you ask me Average Joe traditionalism is an okay thing. It’s not the only mindset by which to process and respond to the sometimes bizarre nature of social standards in 2023, but it’s certainly a legitimate one.

Especially when you consider that doctors only began to ask average nine-year-old boys about their gender preference…what, a couple of years ago or three? And that nine year old boys were NEVER asked about their gender preference before ‘20 or ‘21, and in fact weren’t asked the same by family doctors and physicians during the entire immigrant history of this country (and were almost certainly never asked this by caregivers in Native American communities prior to the mid 1600s) and were never asked this by caregivers and physicians for HUNDREDS and in fact THOUSANDS of years in various European, Middle-Eastern, African, Aboriginal and Asian cultures around the globe.

Okay, this Average Joe dad is angry and alarmed, and there are some of us who don’t relate to his manner of speaking & would prefer that he state his objections to gender questioning in a more measured and thoughtful and college-campus-y way, but this rattled fellow DOES have many THOUSANDS of years of tradition in his side of the ledger. You have to give him that.

To put it bluntly, kids have been taught and guided and disciplined in a certain general way through the millennia, and then along came trans theology and activism TWO or THREE YEARS AGO. And this guy is saying, quite reasonably, “what’s up with this?” and more precisely “WHAT THE LIVING FUCK IS GOING ON HERE, MAN?”

“Cancel culture” is as real as the nose on your face, and speaking of noses mine is bruised and swollen after being slugged repeatedly by the woke terror brigade (“We need safe spaces”) over the last two or three years. I’m saying this not as a grotesque rightie but a sensible left-center moderate and a respectful, longtime fan of John Ladarola‘s “Damage Report” with The Young Turks. Ladarola needs to (a) bite his tongue and (b) apologize to all concerned.

It feels funny to be agreeing with Tucker Carlson’s essay about Matt Damon. As everyone knows Damon was recently all but lynched for remarks he shared with Rolling Stone‘s Peter Travers ten days ago. “There’s not a single sentiment in [what Damon said to Travers] that’s not defensible or that 90 percent of the American population would find over the top or outrageous,” Carlson said. “It’s all within bounds or it would have been last year. [But] because a handful of Twitter users don’t like it, the rest of us have to pretend that Matt Damon is somehow guilty of something awful, and if we don’t pretend, we may ourselves be seen as collaborators in whatever crimes he supposedly committed and forced to share his punishment.”

I’m thinking about writing a Hollywood book about the deranged and hysterical media war against Peter Farrelly’s Green Book (‘18), but also about something bigger and broader — how the Green Book maelstrom launched the not-fully-concluded era of the woke baddie-waddies —- the censorious, ultra-sensitive identity fanatics who all but suffocated the film business during the woke terror era (2016 to 2024).

With the winds currently shifting and woke mentalism beating a retreat like Napoleon out of Russia, it’s now okay, I’m thinking, to write a book that recounts an honest history about how extreme progressive scolds tried like hell to murder one of the gentlest and most unassuming stories (and a fact-based one at that) about racial reckonings and journeys of self-discovery ever created within the Hollywood realm, and yet how the pissheads couldn’t quite deliver the death blow.

A book (which Sasha Stone was going to co-write with me…now she feels that we’re too far apart on the Trump factor) about how the uglies tried to bludgeon a good, modest little film…how they did everything they could to kill its chances in the Oscar race, and how they wound up failing…tough shit, assholes!

A book about a now-seven-year-old film that didn’t mine as much as gently explore a relatively dark and indecent era in American culture as far as the racial divide was concerned, and yet a film that played its cards just so…deftly, I mean…a film that fair-minded movie lovers fell for and which wound up snagging a Best Picture Oscar.

I’m talking about a film that made Manohla Dargis, Spike Lee, Inkoo Kang, Richard Brody, David Ehrlich and a whole army of progressive haters see red…a movie that led to a thousand cursings and spit-takes.

I’m thinking of a book would examine on a deep-dish, inside-the-beltway basis the blow-by-blow wokester campaign to disembowel Green Book, starting with the big ecstatic debut at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2018 and ending with Peter Farrelly’s film taking the Best Picture Oscar on 2.24.19, not to mention Mahershala Ali snagging Best Supporting Actor (traitor!).

Augmented, of course, by the usual backstory and perspective reporting — (a) a history of previous takedown campaigns, (b) the eruption of pernicious wokeism itself in ’16 or 17 or thereabouts, (c) a history of the actual 1962 Green Book road trip, (d) a history of the Green Book project. and the various participants, how it all came together, the initial marketing, how the woke resistance formulated, and so on…whizzing bullet by whizzing bullet, grenade by grenade,

I’ve already written a good portion of this saga in Hollywood Elsewhere…I must have tapped out 10 or 12 adversarial columns at the very least.

And yet the hysteria that swirled around Green Book during the last four months of 2018 and the first two months of ‘19 is not a story many people know. [Sasha wrote the next three or four paragraphs.] You’d have to be on the inside of the insular bubble that the Oscars and Hollywood have become….a political climate that began with the emergence of this warm-hearted, crowd-pleasing flick about friendship and tolerance, and yet ironically resulted in one of the screenwriters being banned from the ceremony, the film’s director persecuted on phony sexual assault charges, one of the actors called a racist and a general upending of the way the Academy votes on Best Picture.

The shock of the 2016 Donald Trump election sent Hollywood reeling, but the combination of rising activism and woke ideology collided with old-fashioned storytelling to create a firestorm that the film awards industry still hasn’t recovered from.

The trouble began to brew the year after Trump won the presidency, when La La Land was deemed “racist” and lost to Moonlight. It intensified the following year when Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was knocked out of completion because it, too, was deemed “racist.”

Green Book was the film that ignited a guerilla movement of woke scolding, instruction, obstruction and correction. 

Courtesy of CinnaJon, myself, Patrick Murtha, Spaceshiek, Jordan Ruimy and The Cinemaholic:

Cinnajon: “I had assumed Green Book was destined to be a Shawshank-like Best Picture also-ran, with middling box office, that takes on a second life when it hits cable. Now it sounds like the smear campaign may have provided an unexpected sympathy boost, which may buoy it to a much healthier first run than expected, if it remains in the driver’s seat. Wildly up-and-down trajectory to the finish line if this is how it actually plays out.

Jeffrey Wells: “Last night’s win was at least partly a sympathy vote after the vicious SJW attacks. I suggested a few weeks back that the industry should vote for Green Book in order to tell those odious lefty Stalinist bullies to go fuck themselves, and by golly that’s what partly happened! The p.c.-MOTIVATED haters started all the trouble, all the hate. Their post-GG takedown attempts amounted to pure viciousness and ugliness. Last night the PGA told them ‘nice try, assholes, but no sale.’ Thank you, Inkoo Kang! Thank you, David Ehrlich! Thank you, Indiewire p.c. comintern!

Patrick Murtha: “Not only is this exactly right, Jeff, but I also suspect that 2019 is going to be a year of MAJOR backlash against the PC / SJW / woke crowd. Are you sensing this also? People are just getting fed up. It is perfectly possible to continue loathing Trump & Co. while also rejecting the wokesters.”

Spacesheik: “I loved Green Book — screw the haters. The audience I saw it with loved it as well (this was in November in an AMC theater at Tysons Mall, before all the hype). They enthusiastically clapped at the end. The film is highly entertaining, with some great performances all around. I’d watch it again. I was shocked when Peter Farrelly‘s name came onscreen, its the complete antithesis of everything he’s done before – and for that he deserves credit. You can dismiss whatever you want, but you can see the film was made with a lot of love and compassion towards that era and history.”

Wells response: “Check but Green Book wasn’t made with love and compassion ‘towards’ that era as much as with a frank attitude and acknowledgment that this was what the realm of 1962 was unfortunately like.”

Jordan Ruimy: “The fact of the matter is that Green Book is a crowd-pleaser like no other. All three times I saw it the audience applauded during the credits, which almost never happens. It has an 8.3 IMDB score, by far the highest of 2018 contenders and a much-coveted A CinemaScore. It has struck a chord with Joe and Jane Popcorn. The fact that it’ll spread into an additional 1000 theatres next week could make the case for it louder and clearer.”

The Cinemaholic: “I love Green Book but the PGA win is actually going to do more harm to film’s chances than good. The woke crowd is going to tear the film to pieces. I am waiting for Oscar nominations to see how it does there. If Farrelly and Vallelonga get nominated, you know that all the p.c. journalists will have a big meltdown again. Anyway, all this is so much fun. And yes, A Star Is Born is over. Roma will win Best Picture (as I have been maintaining since September).”

CinnaJon: “It seems like it’s already run the gauntlet of being torn to pieces, and is now emerging on the other side stronger and more embraceable than when it first entered the fray. The film could be the beneficiary of people reaching an exhaustion point with outrage culture. Voting GB is a pushback to all that.”

I don’t believe Ben Affleck was being entirely honest yesterday when he explained in writing that he asked Finding Your Roots producer Henry “Skip” Gates, Jr. to ignore the fact that one of his ancestors was a slave owner because he “felt embarassed…the very thought left a bad taste in my mouth.” That may well have been the case, but the main reason, I strongly suspect, is that Affleck feared — understandably, I would add — that the outrage culture crowd on Twitter would tar and feather him as a scion of a racist bloodline, however moronic that notion sounds.

If Finding Your Roots had decided to reveal this particular lineage, would it make a lick of sense for the p.c. crowd to scream “Affleck is descended from racists so he must be a closet sympathizer”? No, it wouldn’t. That would be a bone-dumb assumption, to say the least. But you know that at least some lefty Stalinoids would suggest this all the same. They won’t tolerate the slightest manifestation of anything that doesn’t express a morally correct, ethically forward-thinking representation of humanity or history in any film, TV show, political discussion or what-have-you. And they don’t want to know from nuance.

“Outrage culture” is running wild these days and Affleck, no dummy, is fully aware of the potential. Time and again the p.c. mob has read things in a kneejerk, cretinously simple-minded fashion and made absurdly broad conclusions as a result. For all Affleck knew, this “scion of racists” idea could become an urban legend like Richard Gere putting a gerbil up his ass, and it could affect his financial and creative future.

It’s nuts out there, really nuts. But Affleck didn’t want to characterize Twitter culture as stupid or deranged, which in itself could land him in hot water, so he decided to use the “really embarassed” line, which is true, I’m sure, as far as it goes. Who wouldn’t feel shamed by this knowledge, but then again who was walking around during the early to mid 1800s with the moral convictions of a decent 20th Century person, let alone a veteran of our own time? Not everyone, I assure you.

Rebecca Keegan‘s long-foretold hit piece on Sasha Stone (“How an Oscar Blogger Became a MAGA Darling“) dropped today.

It’s a diligent if superficial, half-tabloidy, rat-a-tat-tat thing that portrays Stone as a kind of political blunderer who has apparently alienated a few purse-string holders within Hollywood’s publicity, marketing and ad-buying realms by overplaying her MAGA allegiance. But the piece has no feeling, no soul, no intuition, no heart…no sense of grounded, shake-it-off honesty about the whole, tangled-up, identity-driven mess that we’re all living through.

Sasha’s perceptions about the destructive effects of Hollywood’s woke infection are 100% spot-on, but I’ve told her over and over that if she’d only confined her political jottings to riffs about woke ugliness and anti-cancel culture rhetoric and left Orange Beast out of it, Keegan & Co. would have never come after her. But Sasha felt too wedded to what she sees as the fundamental truth of things to back off even slightly. A victim of her own obstinate integrity.

Keegan’s piece is not technically inaccurate but it’s cheap, scolding and rather cruel in a brusque sort of way, and it couldn’t be more shallow, written in a “just the facts, ma’am” police blotter fashion while completely ignoring and in fact suppressing various underlying Big Picture truths…the vapors, aromas, and toxic social realities of our very own woked-up version of China’s Great Cultural Revolution…the superficially glamorous but rigidly instructive and punitive concentration-camp atmosphere that we’ve all been living under since ’18 or thereabouts.

On top of which the THR editors chose a somewhat unflattering photo of Stone to accompany the headline, and that really tells you where they’re coming from. Sasha has great eyes and a bountiful smile and a generally pleasing earth-momma radiance, but the THR photo makes her look like Bernadine Dohrn on the lam.

Friendo: “The impetus was obviously the ‘white power’ tweet. But since Sasha’s actual views are much more circumspect, what are they really saying about her? Since Keegan’s story accepts that the tweet was a sarcastic joke, what the Hollywood gatekeepers REALLY seem to be saying is, ‘You can’t call our identity politics out like that. That’s toxic.’

“Seriously — everyone in Hollywood and the media piling on Sasha is the quintessence of hypocrisy. I honestly don’t know how these people sleep.”

Keegan excerpt #1: “A quote from Sasha Stone is toxic now,” one executive told me, saying that their studio was pulling their ad dollars from Awards Daily. A representative for another studio said they would no longer invite her to screenings and events. ‘If she’s trying to be sarcastic,’ said a high-profile Academy member, ‘It’s not funny.’ HE sez: Ooohhh, no!!…an Academy member isn’t amused by Sasha’s sarcasm!! Talk about a damaging faux pas…off with her head!

Keegan excerpt #2: “While Stone has provoked reactions from cringe to outrage for her comments on race, gender and sexuality”…” HE sez: “Cringe and outrage” for speaking plainly and frankly about the smallpox epidemic of Hollywood’s identity politics, among other matters? There was no mistaking the fact that Lily Gladstone‘s Best Actress campaign was entirely about identity-brandishing; ditto Karla Sofía Gascon‘s forthcoming Best Actress campaign for Emilia Perez.

Keegan excerpt #3: “[Stone’s] white power remark may be the one to finally get her exiled from Hollywood. In some ways, the ostracism seems like what she’s wanted, living proof of her thesis on the left’s growing intolerance.” HE sez: Notice how Keegan hasn’t a single honest word to say about the cloud of Stalinist wokethink and how the only choice a sensible careerist has is to play along in order to survive?

Keegan excerpt #4: “[Sasha] used to be a little bit anti-bullshit,” says one publicist who represents multiple Oscar winners. “She gave a real read. We appreciated that.”

Keegan excerpt #5: “[Stone] defended Ansel Elgort during the 2020 rollout of Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story when the actor was accused of sexually assaulting a 17-year-old girl (Elgort has denied the allegation).” HE sez: Accused of sexual assault without a shred of credible evidence or testimony, Keegan should have explained. For the alleged victim’s description of what happened “doesn’t sound like sexual assault at all,” I wrote on 6.19.20 . “The sex began as consensual if not eager-beaver on her part, but she felt badly afterwards. It almost sounds like an Aziz Ansari-type situation. In the real world, of course, a 20 year-old guy legally having it off with a 17 year-old is far from Polanski-ville.”

Keegan excerpt #6: “When Green Book was at the center of a debate over its racial politics and old stories about director Peter Farrelly and a tweet from co-writer and producer Nick Vallelonga surfaced, Stone was quoted in the Wall Street Journal decrying the ‘destruction’ of the filmmakers.” HE sez: Green Book‘s basic game plan was to tell a fact-based road movie about racial relations and values according to the prevailing values and attitudes of 1962. The fanatics were enraged that it didn’t tell the story from the perspective of 2018 woke sensibilities.

Keegan excerpt #7: “One of Stone’s few remaining friends is another self-styled anti-woke writer, Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells, whom she once dated and who is best known for having asked director James Mangold for nude outtakes of an actress and for writing about subjects like Emma Stone’s ‘slender, shovel-like feet” in a review of last year’s Oscar contender Poor Things.” HE sez: I humbly apologize for reporting that Emma Stone has “slender, shovel-like feet”, but this is a dead fact. As for Keegan’s other cheap ditty, which dates back to 2007 or 17 years ago…really? A single paragraph out of a private, 15-paragraph letter that I wrote to Mangold after two glasses of Pinot Grigio still matters to whom exactly? The Boogie Man? If Keegan were to tap out a capsule description of the 42nd President, she would write “Bill Clinton is best known for having been orally pleasured by Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office, and secondarily for not coming in her mouth but on her dark blue dress.”

Keegan excerpt #8: “Stone says she still plans to attend the Telluride Film Festival this Labor Day weekend, where she says people ‘tolerate her.” Come again? Stone “still” plans to do Telluride despite the compromising assertions in Keegan’s earth-shaking article? Don’t flatter yourself, Rebecca.

Among many others I recently participated in Scott Feinberg’s “The 100 Greatest Film Books of All Time” survey, the results of which popped in The Hollywood Reporter today (10.12).

What’s the next great topic for a Hollywood expose or tell-all? Six years ago I suggested a book called “Super-Vomit: How Hollywood Infantiles (i.e., Devotees of Comic Books and Video Games) Degraded Theatrical and All But Ruined The Greatest Modern Art Form“?

Here’s another idea — a recent-history book one about how censorious, ultra-sensitive wokesters all but suffocated the film business during the woke terror era (2016 to present)?

Here are the books I put on my top-25 Feinberg list:

(1) Sam Wasson’s “The Big Goodbye” (making of Chinatown book)

(2) Stephen Bach‘s “Final Cut: Dreams and Disasters in the Making of Heaven’s Gate”

(4) Mark Harris‘s “Pictures at a Revolution”

(5) John Gregory Dunne‘s “The Studio”

(6) Leo Braudy‘s “The World in a Frame”

(7) Thomas Schatz‘s “The Genius of the System”

(8) David McClintick‘s “Indecent Exposure”

(9) Otto Freidrich‘s “City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s“,

(10) Julie Salamon‘s “The Devil’s Candy,”

(11) Jack Brodsky and Nathan Weiss‘s “The Cleopatra Papers”

(12) David Thomson‘s “Suspects“ + “The Whole Equation

(13) William Goldman‘s “Which Lie Did I Tell?”

(14) Peter Biskind‘s “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” and “Down and Dirty Pictures.”

(15) Charles Fleming‘s “High Concept: Don Simpson and the Hollywood Culture of Excess,”

(16) William Goldman‘s “Adventures in the Screen Trade”,

(17) the audio version of Robert Evans‘ “The Kid Stays in the Picture”,

(18) James B. Stewart‘s “Disney War“

(19) Peter Biskind‘s “Seeing is Believing”

(20) Thomas Doherty‘s “Hollywood’s Censor” (the book about Joe Breen)

(21) Jake Ebert and Terry Illiot‘s “My Indecision Is Final”

(22) Nancy Griffin and Kim Masters‘ “Hit and Run: How Jon Peters and Peter Guber Took Sony for a Ride in Hollywood“,

(23) Bruce Wagner‘s “Force Majeure“,

(24) David Thomson‘s “Warren Beatty and Desert Eyes: A Life and a Story“

(25) Nathaniel West‘s “The Day of the Locust”

“All great black leaders get killed.” — quote from Warren Beatty‘s Bulworth (’98).

As it turns out Beatty’s Senator Jay Bulworth, one of the blackest white politicians who ever served in a fictional feature, gets killed also — shot by an insurance industry villain played by Paul Sorvino.

Bulworth is a Democrat from California and a total liberal establishment guy with all the usual noble sentiments and allegiances (photos of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King on his office wall) that have never amounted to much.

The film begins with Bulworth in deep despair and sick of all the bullshit. The film is basically about Bulworth saying “fuck it” and and just stating plain and straight how things really are, and hang the freakin’ consequences.

Friendo: “Last night I rewatched Bulworth for the first time since it came out in 1998 — a quarter-century ago. Very funny, totally outrageous, sometimes cringe-worthy and…oh, yeah, Halle Berry was totally hot.

“I got to thinking how this film would be received today. I know you’re gonna say the wokesters would go off on it, but maybe, just maybe, they’d see it for the satire it is. And maybe they’d understand that it asks the question ‘What would happen if a politician finally told the honest truth about our political system?’

“On Rotten Tomatoes the film has a 76% approval rating, but not one of the critics listed is black. So how did black critics (outside of Elvis Mitchell) view it? How many influential black critics were even around back then?

“I know that black audiences didn’t attend screenings of Bulworth in droves, despite its focus upon black culture and featuring quite a few black characters. Maybe they felt vaguely alienated by Bulworth’s remarks about black behaviors (‘If you don’t put down the malt liquor and chicken wings and get behind someone other than a running back who stabs his wife, you’re never gonna get rid of someone like me!’). Or maybe not.

“Either way Bulworth, which cost round $30 million to produce, ended up with a relative slender gross of $29 million. It obviously didn’t connect with certain segments of the public for certain reasons. The only segment that seemed to support it were white, well-educated urban liberals.

“Bulworth has to be one of the most audacious mainstream films ever made. I think it deserves a reassessment.”

Warner Bros. Discovery, under the command of untrustworthy buccaneer David Zaslav, has begun to weaken and undermine Turner Classic Movies, beginning with 100 employees (overseen by Kathleen Finch) cut loose. TCM general manager Pola Changnon, a 25-year veteran, is ankling TCM.

I feel the same outrage as everyone else, but can someone help me understand Zaslav’s thinking? He talked a good supportive game during a panel discussion at the 2023 TCM Classic Film Festival, and now he’s whipped around and wreaked havoc.

Zaslav doesn’t have an apparent argument with TCM’s film lover programming — he does, however, seem to have a beef with TCM’s spread sheet, due to on-demand streaming and new financial realities. But TCM represents a fundamental faith among movie-culture fanatics, and killing this channel is wrong, wrong, terribly wrong.

I’ve never once watched the Turner Classic Movies channel — really, not once — but I recognize the value and importance that it occupies in the hearts of film lovers everywhere.

So the dinky eyebrowless gremlin in charge of Warner Bros. is gutting TCM, one of their most beloved brands?

What an utter nincompoop. pic.twitter.com/iVG64Perqv

— Movies Silently 🐀 (@MoviesSilently) June 21, 2023