Hollywood

2017: The Year Hollywood Fought Trump and Lost Its Moral High Ground

Hollywood opened 2017 at war with Donald Trump and closed it mired in the Weinstein scandal, beaten on climate and the travel ban, and stalked by Netflix and Amazon.

Husam Sam Asi 31 December 2017

Hollywood ends 2017 in worse shape than it began it. It is still shut out of Washington, home to its enemy Donald Trump. Its studios face an existential crisis as box-office revenue shrinks and the streaming companies grow more powerful. And it is mired in sexual-assault scandals that have brought down some of its most prominent figures and stars.

At the start of the year Hollywood was in a state of panic, apprehension and gloom after Trump’s surprise victory over its ally Hillary Clinton in the presidential election. In interviews, its stars and executives told me of their shock and of their anger at the American people, above all at the many women who had voted for a man accused of misogyny, of hostility to Muslims and Mexicans and of denying climate change.

After the shock came the awakening. For the previous eight years Hollywood had worked hand in hand with the White House and its occupant, Barack Obama. Suddenly it found itself preparing to fight on several fronts against a conservative president-elect, in defence of the liberal and democratic principles it embraces and backs with its money, its political lobbying and its films.

Press freedom and the abuse of power

Meryl Streep opened the first front from the stage of the Golden Globes in early January, as she accepted the Cecil B. DeMille Award for her achievements as an actress. Without once speaking his name, she accused the president-elect of being a bully.

“It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter, someone he outranked in privilege, power and the capacity to fight back,” Streep said. “When the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose.” She went on: “We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call him on the carpet for every outrage.”

The room answered with warm applause, and so did the media, which were fighting a fierce battle of their own with Trump. He accused most news organisations, the leading ones above all, among them CNN, NBC, The New York Times and The Washington Post, of publishing fake news. He threatened them with lawsuits and stirred up his supporters against them at his rallies and on Twitter.

Soon after Streep’s speech, Steven Spielberg set aside a film he had been preparing and cast her in The Post, a warning about Trump told through an earlier conservative president’s war on the press. It is set in 1971, when Richard Nixon tried to stop The New York Times and The Washington Post from publishing secret documents which revealed that successive American governments had no intention of ending the war in Vietnam, then still raging.

The film had to be made at this moment, Spielberg told me when we met to talk about The Post. The time was right, he said. He had brought together Streep and Tom Hanks, her co-star, and the three of them agreed that the story had to be told now and could not wait a year or two, because people’s ears were open to stories of this kind.

On 5 October the press turned on Hollywood. Its guns, trained until then on Trump’s outrages, swung round. It began by exposing allegations of abuse of power and sexual assault against Hollywood’s most important producer, Harvey Weinstein, one of Trump’s fiercest opponents. Weinstein has denied having sex with anyone without their consent. Hollywood responded by casting him out and denying all knowledge of his conduct.

Friends and collaborators such as Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and George Clooney condemned him in the strongest terms and disowned him. Some acknowledged that they had known him as a man who chased women, and all of them denied knowing anything about harassment or rape. Actresses who had been close to him, among them Jennifer Lawrence and Streep, said that he had never assaulted them and that they had known nothing of his behaviour towards other actresses.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences expelled him, and the Producers Guild of America moved to do the same. It made no difference. The scandal spread and became a torrent that swept up dozens of Hollywood executives and stars who faced accusations of their own, among them Dustin Hoffman, Brett Ratner and John Lasseter. The most prominent was Kevin Spacey. He apologised in public, and Ridley Scott still cut him out of All the Money in the World and reshot his scenes with Christopher Plummer, alongside Mark Wahlberg and Michelle Williams, who, Scott said, came back without pay.

For all its efforts to denounce and disown the accused, Hollywood no longer holds the weapon of moral credibility in its confrontation with Trump. Its stars found themselves on the defensive, their political and social causes pushed aside. Clooney, though, refused to let Hollywood alone be held to account for the sexual harassment of women.

He told me he did not accept the argument about Hollywood’s moral responsibility, because the moral credibility of the whole country was in question. The same behaviour, he said, had been seen at Fox News, in Washington and from the president himself.

Streep, who had lit the fire of the war on the abuse of power, was left to admit that her liberal colleagues were no better than her enemy Trump. People had to demand of their friends and political allies, she told me, the same standard they demanded of those they disagreed with.

The environment and climate change

During his election campaign Trump scorned the science of global warming and climate change and dismissed it as bogus. He promised to cancel the Paris climate agreement, scrap the environmental protections introduced by his predecessor, Obama, and halt alternative-energy projects. Hollywood answered with features and documentaries that warned people of his anti-environmental policies and their destructive consequences for humanity and its planet.

Darren Aronofsky warned of the destruction of the environment in mother!. Alexander Payne proposed shrinking human beings to curb the overconsumption of the Earth’s resources in Downsizing. The former vice-president Al Gore laid out the devastating consequences of global warming in An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, and Arnold Schwarzenegger campaigned for the protection of the oceans in Wonders of the Sea.

Meryl Streep delivers her Cecil B. DeMille Award speech at the 2017 Golden Globes — Meryl Streep challenges Donald Trump in her Cecil B. DeMille Award speech at the 2017 Golden Globes. Image: Golden Globes.

Schwarzenegger told me of his faith in people and his belief that they would flock to see these films, which would move them to love nature and the world and to defend them against Trump. Trump, the former governor of California said, would eventually grasp the importance of protecting the environment. Nobody should wait for him, he added, because movements for change come from the people, and the people would force it on Trump and the politicians.

The people ignored these films and stayed away, and the films failed at the box office. Trump, meanwhile, kept his promises to his supporters. He pulled the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, moved to revive coal mining and set about dismantling Obama’s environmental rules and alternative-energy projects.

Arabs and Muslims

Arabs and Muslims were the beneficiaries of the battle between Trump and Hollywood. The president’s hostility towards them helped to improve Hollywood’s view of them, and it opened doors that had been closed to them since Hollywood was founded a century ago.

At the Sundance Film Festival at the start of the year, a bidding war broke out over The Big Sick, a comedy about a young Muslim man who falls in love with a white woman, starring the Pakistani-born comedian Kumail Nanjiani. Amazon paid $12 million for it, one of the highest prices of the festival. The critics praised the film and it took more than $55 million at the box office.

20th Century Fox also released The Mountain Between Us, a studio film starring Kate Winslet and Idris Elba and directed by an Arab, the Palestinian Hany Abu-Assad.

Arab directors and producers such as Abu-Assad and Sam Esmail acknowledged that their chances of directing and producing in Hollywood had improved greatly. The studios, they said, had become interested in their own authentic point of view and no longer leaned on an orientalist gaze when they dealt with Arab and Muslim subjects.

Trump won even this battle. At the beginning of December the US Supreme Court allowed his ban on entry to the United States for citizens of six Muslim-majority countries to take full effect.

The fight for survival

The greatest threat to Hollywood’s existence comes from mobile devices and from streaming companies such as Netflix and Amazon. Trump is the lesser danger. Phones and streamers have drawn audiences away from cinemas, and shares in cinema chains have plunged on the stock markets. AMC, for example, has lost more than half its value this year.

Big-budget films such as The Mummy, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Justice League, The Dark Tower, Transformers: The Last Knight, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword and Baywatch collapsed at the box office, and this summer’s takings fell by about 15 per cent on last year. The losses have left the studios in a financial squeeze that makes them prey for rich technology and telecoms companies. AT&T, the telecoms giant, has agreed to buy Time Warner, the parent of Warner Bros., and in December Disney agreed to swallow the 20th Century Fox studio.

One of the founders of DreamWorks nevertheless sounded optimistic when I asked what he expected of Hollywood’s future. Technology, he said, was creating changes that nobody could have imagined seven years earlier, smartphones above all, and they were transforming what people could get hold of and how they behaved. Children and young people no longer looked at television; they used their smartphones for entertainment, which he called an astonishing change. He saw in it a challenge and a very big opportunity.

Hollywood has faced existential crises before. Many rushed to predict its ruin when television arrived in the 1950s, then videotape in the 1980s and the DVD in the 1990s. Hollywood managed to turn each of those challenges into a profitable business. Television swelled its income by buying licences to broadcast its films, while videotape and DVD carried those films to a wider audience and created new revenue. Can Hollywood turn the present existential challenge into a profitable opportunity, as it has before? The answer may come in the year ahead.

Sources: PBS NewsHour; Reuters (via Anchorage Daily News); USA Today (via Flickering Myth); TheWrap; Al Jazeera; Fortune.