63 Comments

Difficult to judge. Wasn't that the time period that freely printed money funneled into the industry and the amount of content exploded? When hiring goes crazy with other people's money, you can afford all kinds of extravagances like ping pong tables, massages, and hiring large numbers of improbable writers who make you feel good about yourself.

I suspect the absolute number of white writers went up during that time period too.

When the fed turned down the money tap, and the critical and fan complaints about bad shows hit simultaneously, and the WGA went on strike, and chatGPT ...well let's wait and see what 2024-2028 shows. Maybe I'll be surprised.

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Hiring went up in 2017-19, down in 2020-21.

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Well that'll bite 'em in the ass then

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Could this trend be reversed?

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If the law school intake is a guide (it's a different service industry, but still) - NO.

I think DEI will try to outlive Trump and wait till Dems will be re-elected again, for reasons of economy. 2026 or 2028 latest.

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The left awaits Gavin Newsom. I expect a $3 trillion Newsom presidential campaign, much of it coming from Hollywood.

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Maybe, maybe not. I think at some point the disillusionment that built-up in high-tech will expand to Hollywood. The Hollywood industry is associated with higher risk than high-tech, and there is little the US Government or the Chinese can do to offset the losses associated with DEI.

Newsom is dyed in the wool DEI, as good as they come. The pro-Hamas support from the DEI doesn't help. There is nothing DEI can do about it because it's a feature, not a bug.

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It’s now wall-to-wall unwatchable pap.

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It does kind of seem like the golden age of Prestige TV went away, but I haven't been following it closely and I think there were outside causes like COVID making filming difficult. Steve would probably have a better sense.

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When the no. 1 scripted TV show gets less than 15 million viewers, Prestige TV is impossible. Also, there was a lot of bad TV in past decades but everyone has forgotten about it.

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Television has certainly become atomized and more competitive. The days when the Ed Sullivan Show with the first American performance of The Beatles can get over half the television audience is long gone.

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Reminds me of an old article on The Onion:

"Affable Anti-Semite Thinks The Jews Are Doing Super Job With The Media"

https://theonion.com/affable-anti-semite-thinks-the-jews-are-doing-super-job-1819566603/

Back before DEI, when The Onion and Hollywood actually put out good content.

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I was looking around for a photo to illustrate my post of good screenwriters and I kept coming up with the Coens or Larry & Jerry or the Epstein twins who wrote "Round up the usual suspects." I looked for Robert Bolt on the set of "Lawrence of Arabia," but didn't find one.

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If I put "great screenwriters" into Google, it gives me 51 famous film writers, starting with Aaron Sorkin, Billy Wilder (a more plausible #1 than Sorkin, but then again did Wilder ever make a fine hit movie out of an airport book about baseball statistics?), and Nora Ephron.

I doubt if that's the best list of the 51 greatest screenwriters, but it's not terrible and not obviously ethnically biased. I count 21.5 Jewish screenwriters out of 51 (Oliver Stone being famously half Jewish-American, half French-Catholic: not a bad pair of cultural backgrounds if you want to make movies.)

That seems pretty plausible: Jews being extraordinarily high-achieving in movie screenwriting, but not quite a majority of the top names.

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And so the whites went into right-wing, Trumpian politics. Hence why Trump and Trump-like politicians are trouncing opponents verbally, visually, and memetically: the angry, talented white males are trying to shove them in to end the madness that took away their jobs.

And the DEI hires who took their place in Hollywood tanked IPs (and continue to do so), gave didactic political messaging that turned everyone off and against The Message (cue Critical Drinker's voice), and woke normies up to the fact that affirmative action is a truly abused horrible idea.

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As Steve points out, they even turned on the glamour industries at the end of Obama. In this last election a lot of silicon valley overtly turned out for Trump. I guess no one likes it when it's directed at them.

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One thing I've long hated about South Park is how they mock "hillbilly" blue collar whites who complain about immigrants with the "They're stealing our jerbs [sic]!"

For all the basedness of the creators, their white-collar, soft-handed refusal to see that white working class folk really get hammered by immigration (illegal and legal) and have legitimate grievances and portaying them all as stupid racist inbreds is really quite angering.

No sympathy in their hearts because its not a threat to them, the South Park Creators, so its clearly not a threat at all!

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Yep, that has been a bizarre blind spot for libs going back decades. I think back in the 1970s white collar libs figured out they had to choose between blue collar workers and blacks as their fetish objects and they picked blacks.

Now all they can say is why do these dumb racists keep voting against their economic interests?

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The white collar blithe mocking insouciance towards the blue collar folks and their miseries is of course something endemic to the human condition, and when the blue collar folk finally stand up and make a big fuss the white collar folk are surprised and scared, e.g the Plebians secession against the Patricians in Rome, or the sharp divide on the union movement in our own country. Its just so angering and saddening that even such bright incisive right-wingers like Stone & Parker could fall into the same trap after lancing all the other p.c. boils of our age.

Ironically, the situations where the white collar folks naturally cared most about blue collar folks as humans were traditionally in smaller wealthy households where the latter were either close servants and/or slaves, and might spend a lifetime serving a child they saw born in the master bedroom and be seen as an extended member of the family. E.g. in Gone With the Wind, Scarlett O'Hara, despite being a b*tch, has absolutely nothing but love and affection and tenderness for all the slaves who served her as a child and adult, and finds it shocking the Yankee carpetbaggers think Scarlett hates blacks.

For centuries, the "indomitably loyal, loving" servant was a trope in poetry, stage, and literature. Nowadays that's far too un-p.c., anti-woke to comprehend, except if its shown to be some form of Stockholm syndrome and not merely a natural human ordering.

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Right, that's why you have all the people assuming Sam and Frodo are gay.

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I think the thing is the Democrats started moving economically right at that point, and if you were going to fetishize blue-collar workers you might have to support unions and a higher minimum wage and so on.

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Great point. One of the great political changes in the last thirty years is the rightward shift of the Democratic Party on economic issues. "Tax and Spend" Democrats died out and were replaced by Clinton Democrats who are fine with lower taxes and profits. And I don't consider The Black Caucus and "socialists" like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as "Tax and Spend." They're just race panhandlers and scammers who want redistribution to people of their own color.

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"fine with lower taxes and profits" - there's an understatement. Why did Clinton sign the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the bedrock legislation intended to protect the middle class? The only reason I can think of is that there was some kitchen conversation where Bill or Hillary said, "you know, we could get really rich by letting the retail banks get into investment banking." And it mostly went unremarked, loke it was just "time" or something.

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As if white lefties know what white blue-collar interests are or care. They don't care. Every blue-collar white is Archie Bunker or Larry, Darryl and Darrell of the Newhart Show. Either deplorable and racist or very, very stupid.

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Well, unions and wages used to be one of their main issues. Those are blue collar interests.

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> stupid racist inbreds is really quite angering

Hits too close to home, n'est-ce pas?

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You look at naked picture of your sister when she was a pre-teen. Move along, kiddo.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtx0QV4-VxY

(I know there are criticisms of South Park below.)

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"Bigoted Audiences Only Want White Male Writers" is a future headline, we all know it.

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"The journalist and author of 'Noticing,' Steve Sailer, has issued a chilling call to TURN BACK THE CLOCK in Hollywood and promote White-male writers; anti-racism orgs ADL and SPLC issue emergency joint-statement denouncing Sailer and say will include him, alongside the Palestinians, in their forthcoming 'On the Wrong Side of History' listing for 2025."

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SPLC will never ever turn on on the Fakestinians

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How many movies are going for Oscars though? A lot of them just want to make money.

It's probably more the politics of the directors and everyone else; look how well they did with Top Gun: Maverick. They're leaving money on the table refusing to make white-guy movies.

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Yep.

And Steve S and his loyal readers, I'd advise not getting all focused on the "elite" colleges and graduate schools and the efforts to "roll back affirmative action".

I was accepted at Stern New York University Graduate School of Business (MBA) and earned an MBA in Marketing in 1989. Back then, Stern NYU was supposedly the #1 MBA Program in the USA with first year Stern NYU MBA's earning on average over $100,000 there first year out.

Not me!

Two years after graduation I moved back in with my parents and was happy to take a minimum wage job working in a Kinkos Computer Center.

I saw very few CIS Black American men there - mostly international Asian students and so so many American women. It was woke, anti ha White male feminist , LGBT that back stabbed me and ruined the few job leads I made on my own. I foolishly accepted an invitation from a woman Management Communication professor and all women TAs to attend the Vice Presidential Debate between GOP Dan Quayle and Dem Loyd Benson and all the Lib Woke Women were making rude comments that poor (not that bright) Dan Quayle was evil etc. I just made some comments that Dan was just a regular guy from Indiana and I was a regular guy from Illinois....

Yeah, got smeared, back stabbed, black listed as a beyond the pale Fascist that wanted to bring back Negro Slavery and take away all the rights of women.

The Stern/NYU Alumi Magazine now is unreadable DEI, Woke, Lib from Cover to Cover. The President of Stern NYU MBA is a (Dot not feather) Indian and the first women president of NYU New York University as a whole is a stereotypical New Yawk Lib Je*ess - photos of her networking with the Clintons, Chuck Schumer, breaking glass ceilings etc.

So, my experience with earning this #1 MBA degree from Stern New York University was THE worst thing I ever did in my life. Being a CIS White male at Stern NYU or being an Stern NYU MBA alumnus is IMO the same as being one of the very, very few, non Je*ish CIS White males trying to get paid as writer in Hollywood.

As for what to do about this.

There has always been Talk, Talk, Talk in my life (I'm 64 years old) about (Always Old) Conservatives starting new media, new education institutions. But my experience has been that any moderately successful Ha Wite Conservative media like National Review, Fox News, the Hallmark Channel gets infiltrated, taken over by supposedly reformed (J) new Conservatives, Neo Conservatives, more Conservative Women, Gays and then "they fire" purge all the successful, talented non Je*ish CIS ha White Males :

Look at all the CIS ha Wite males that got fired, purged, Blacklisted from National Review when Bill Buckley got old and senile and turned over NR, Conservative Inc to there J Neo Cons:

Joe Sobron

Pat Buchanan

Peter Brimelow

John O Sullivan (War against Christmas)

Thomas Fleming

John the Derb Derbyshire

And let's be honest, this has nothing to do with the "Free Market" of ideas.

Tucker Carlson was the highest rated Fox News presenter (Meagan Kelly and Bill O'Reily were also very popular, brought in lots of $) but Tucker C pissed off AIPAC, the ADL, Chuck Schumer and all the Bush era J Neo Con war mongers such as Max Boot and David Frum.

It it's still up, check up the Tucker Carlson Fox News interview with Max Boot and some idiot war mongering General trying to push for World War III against Russia because Vladimir Putin like Saddam Hussein , Assad's Syria were all HITLERS.

Tucker Carson told Max Boot to his face that he should consider switching careers to become a House Painter or sell Insurance because all his Foreign Policy, military policies were disasters.

Sorry for that long post.

Yeah, I'm a bit bitter about my experience at Stern New York Graduate School of Business MBA and the anti CIS Ha White male Indians, Asians and especially woke Lib womyn.

JR

Left behind in Chicago

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'Ha' sometimes 'ha' means what?

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“ ha wite” is how Amren s Jared Taylor pronounces “ White”

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Indeed he does. Thanks

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Half the "new member" decline happens in year 2018, the other half in 2019-20? No further loss in 2021? The decline-trend almost entirely predates the George Floyd Riots; as three-quarters of the calendar-time for that 2019-20 decline predates the death of George Floyd, and then the losses stop in 2021.

(This is all taking Table 10 at face value, assuming the changes tie directly to the listed year.)

The big caveat is that this is "new members," of course. How long does one keep membership once one gets inducted? For life? For a period of x years? Several years of anti-white-writer policies in Hollywood could only affect the entire stock of card-carrying Guild members by a measly few points. (As so often, bad for the b.1980s and b.1990s sets but not bad for the b.1940s and b.1950s sets.) A correction in the mid-2020s could, in principle, balance things out.

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The Oscars So White hashtag campaign was started (by a fired Obama Administration official who was lucky to avoid jail) in 2015.

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It’s also kind of daft.

Black male American actors are per capita the best in the world. They are far more visible in movies and TV than minorities with larger populations like Hispanics.

Denzel Washington really rescued Gladiator II with a nicely camp performance.

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I think you are technically a member for as long as you want, but you lose the actual benefits of membership if you don't get any paying writing gigs for some number of years. I was looking at a Reddit thread on this topic and it had lots of stories of people like this one writer who has 10 emmys (or was it nominations) under his belt and just moved to a studio apartment. There has always been age discrimination in the business. I'm under the impression almost no one makes an entire exclusive career of being a TV/Movie writer

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> There has always been age discrimination in the business

For good reason

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Why can't the right do good movies? I think the crazy SF politics where the lefties got into power by selling their soul (and a lot of black people's lives) to Jim Jones. would be a fascinating miniseries.

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I guesstimated after seeing his third Batman movie that Christopher Nolan is "slightly to the right of the Duke of Wellington," or as he is now known as of today, Sir Christopher Nolan.

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One major reason The Dark Knight was beaten up by many critics (and still is to this day) was how evil Nolan depicted communist-terrorist groups. Luigi Mangioni is just another brainwashed Bane acolyte.

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From what I've read, Daily Wire was actually trying to do this. Not conservative by the standards of here, but definitely to the right of Hollywood.

Anyway, apparently the problem is once you work with them, you're obviously a conservative and you'll never get another Hollywood job-and the arts are always economically precarious. (There are famous examples like John Milius; the only counterexample I can think of was Clint Eastwood, who was partially riding on his success from an earlier era.) You actually have to throw enough money into the conservative ecosystem that they can survive on just that. No actor's going to take a job that's going to be his last.

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Well if they can't get a job anyway what do the non DEI writers, directors, etc. have to lose? Perhaps they could find a non mainstream niche to make a living in.

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Daily Wire is controlled opp. Israeli-Deep State created, funded, and promoted. Cuckservative-NeoCon to the core. E.g. when Pearl of Pearl Daily went on to argue for mandatory nationwide paternity testing for all newborns to prevent men from being saddled with child support for kids who weren't there's, loser cuck Michael Knowles went apesh*t, claiming Pearl was calling his wife a wh*re. Here's the clip: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/SoDtV6ZbVrk

As to Milius, he survived largely because (1) Jewish; (2) was close friends with all the greats of his age (e.g. Coppola, Spielberg); (3) the man could write a masculine scene for a picture like no other of his age. Anytime one of his director friends hit a wall with a scene that needed something macho, they called Milius up and he'd solve it in an incredibly artistic and yet simple way.

Eastwood survives by never taking a day off, by being a legend, by always bringing movies in under budget that make money, and because he's a social lefty: loves abortion (his ex-partner Sandra Locke k*lled their kid in the womb), fine with the homos, etc.

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Communists deliberately took over the industry. HUAC and McCarthy were not based on paranoia, but real subversion. We forget that testimony from the hearings confirmed communists infiltrated American films and worked to control their messages (e.g. Elia Kazan and Gary Cooper). Heck, John Ford was putting left-wing messaging in his films, and *Imitation of Life* was pushing "breaking down racial barriers" in 1934.

The Blacklist was the last desperate attempt to save the industry from total commie control. Once it crumbled, and the Hays Code was thrown out, the commies had full reign.

It remains so today. Do you think commies stopped once they got control? Now they just push down people on the right when they can.

And the movie industry in America is both a money-laundering scheme (organized crime heavily involved) and a monopoly on distribution. So they control what gets out, and only crooks rise to the top, and they are all *communist* crooks who ain't letting no Frank Capra or John Wayne or even a John Ford back in if they can help it.

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Movies matter less and less every day

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Tables 2 & 5 in the report tell us the following on all active WGA Guild members (not just "new members," apparently):

.

"Screen employment":

- 2010: 78.5% White-male.

- 2020: 55.5% White-male.

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"Television":

- 2010: 61% White-male.

- 2020: 34.5% White-male.

.

Total numbers of White males implicitly excluded as of 2020 is something like one thousand individuals (assuming little overlap between the 'screen' and 'tv' categories in the Guild).

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TIL Paddy Chayefsky died relatively young

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It could be argued that the explosion of non-white scribblers in the last few years was required to produce the mandated boom in crowbarring of-colour folk into every plot and advertisement. Maybe minority writers can keep a straight face and sleep nights better?

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I remember David Cole writing an article some years back pondering whether Jews in Hollywood would be considered white for diversity purposes.

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TV is made for girls these days, this was probably always the case on average but it has become more extreme.

Movies seem to be mainly made for children nowadays.

Gladiator II is an old-fashioned made-by-men-for-men type of thing. Thankfully it had no women doing fight scenes like in a superhero movie. But remarkably the two main male characters no female love interest (or indeed a love interest at all) throughout. I can’t help but feel it’s a sign of the times.

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FWIW, I've tried to avoid consuming new media for exactly this reason--I'll buy used books gladly, but won't shell out for a movie ticket or subscription service unless I'm entertaining someone else.

I think it was Niemeier who said, "Don't Give Money To People Who Hate You." Seems pretty reasonable.

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