A few moments in the past week reveal how Hollywood is choosing to return to the world. You tell me what they add up to.
• The Obamas, something of a royal couple of Hollywood, complete with a $50 million vanity production deal courtesy of their #1 fanboy Ted, curtailed their Martha’s Vineyard blowout of Barack’s 60th birthday party to a mere 200 people. Private jets, burning fuel faster than a California climate change fire, braved the Delta surge, leaving former staff such as David Axelrod and second-tier celebrity friends like Conan O’Brien and Larry David in the dust; with the extraneous, outer ring of celebrity friends cleaved away, the royal family honored the occasion in quiet dignity with only truly intimate celebrity friends that included Beyonce, Chrissy Teigen, Tom Hanks, Steven Speilberg and Bradley Cooper.
• The most widely circulated-on-Wilshire story of the past week was the New York Post’s reported tale of Ari’s ejection from luxe vegan hotspot Eleven Madison Park for his loud complaints about the slowness of the service, not realizing that the restaurant was noted for its elaborate two to three-hour service.
Some thoughts:
– What tragic assistant thought Ari could sit still for a three-hour dinner and booked him there?
– As usual with poobah misbehavior, we only find out about it when it happens in NYC because no LA publication – trades included – would’ve printed this.
– But if the story happened in LA no LA restaurant would eject a poohbah even if he ordered the entire wait staff rotisserie grilled and served to him with a turnip aioli. (Except that’s not vegan).
All of this, of course, happening concurrent to the only water cooler show of the moment – HBO’s The White Lotus, filmed at the establishment of entitlement, the Four Seasons Maui, whose decision-makers no doubt may not have fully realized the plot was a scathing indictment of white entitlement. The very people who jockey for poolside loungers during peak season at 6 a.m.
In an alternate universe, there’s a version of the COVID era in which trauma made America, and the world pulls together; where we watch horrors out of Afghanistan and come together, where disruption makes us see our differences are nothing compared to the common humanity that binds us together and gives us strength to overcome challenges as a community.
Clearly, in this universe, that’s not how it’s going down..
In Hollywood, the COVID disruption semi-short circuited about 15 other disruptions already in progress and the machine may already have been too broken to fix, like a Betamax in 2002.
Pre-COVID, Hollywood was struggling through a rolling series of upheavals – financial and cultural – with various degrees of success.
The uniting thread of all of this, the dislocations of the streaming wars to #MeToo, was the collapse of an old order built on entitlement and exemption from the normal standards by which the rest of the world operates and increasingly out of fashion. Until extremely recently, being a member of the Hollywood oligarchy didn’t just mean never having to say sorry, it meant never having to question whether there was any better way to do things than the way you and everyone you knew were doing it: any better way to make and to market films, any better way to treat the people who do it, any better way to look at who is allowed in that circle.
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