Hollywood pretended to be woke because execs were convinced it was the latest profitable fad. Studio execs and producers are about the least woke people imaginable. The only thing they care about is tax-free revenue.
On the other hand, nobody will miss movies that were woke for the sake of being woke. Forced diversity is as bad as no diversity.
"How dare those insufferable woke Gen Z'ers trying to get us to accept a marginalized community into our society. What were they thinking?"
The wokeism of Hollywood had nothing to do with Gen Zers or inclusivity or diversity.
It was just another cynical grab at tax free profits by a bunch of suits, only it wound up losing them a vast amount of that precious, precious revenue.
You really think Hollywood executives give a shit about any minority aside from the 0.1 percent?
Well, thankfully the worst of this Wokeness strom seems to have blown over. Don't know if it was fueled by old ladies in Florida or Gen X'ers, but there does seem to be a segment of the population always earger to be pissed off about something.
It astounds me that anyone thinks or claims Hollywood is woke.
Hollywood is MBAs and corporations and stockholders. It's soulless psychopaths and sociopaths who would eat their own babies for more revenue, profit and power.
It has no interest in the product it churns out, so why would it care if minority needs are satisfied?
"He who take the King's shilling do the King's bidding."
If someone is paying you to write, they may have a social agenda they are trying to promote. If you don't agree, remember to smile and try to get a good price for your creative integrity.
Pixar, Disney and Bud Lite have deep pockets and have paid for their adventures in social engineering.
I may be completely naive, but can someone explain the bad things about recognising systemic problems in a system or society that marginalises and dusadvantages sections of the community? Perhaps I am missing something?
"...can someone explain the bad things about recognising systemic problems in a system or society that marginalises and dusadvantages sections of the community?"
Not sure anyone can give you a definitive answer to anything much related to this issue, but I can say I have two significant problems with the craven and vacuous Hollywood attempts at "woke".
1. They're very low quality efforts,
2. they're shoehorned into almost everything, appropriate or not.
Nobody who matters is against inclusion, diversity, acceptance, tolerance, etc., but not everybody believes absolutely every single movie and TV show has to be about those things. Especially when it's obvious 'Hollywood' sees woke as just another cynical cash grab scheme to be milked dry and then abandoned.
"If someone is paying you to write, they may have a social agenda they are trying to promote."
In most cases the people paying you don't have any agenda beyond generating profit for themselves. If they're pushing "woke" it's because they believe there's a buck to be made from it.
"If you don't agree, remember to smile and try to get a good price for your creative integrity."
Anyone who doesn't agree with the perceived agenda but willingly writes for it anyway has no grounds to complain.
"I do not like this show and its agenda, but the producers pay me well, therefore I continue to do whatever they ask me to. But I'm better than them."
"Pixar, Disney and Bud Lite have deep pockets and have paid for their adventures in social engineering."
Much of the blame can be laid at the filthy stinking feet of social media. Left, right, black, white, brown, gay, straight, old, young, rich, poor, and everything else: all poisoned by the extremism of a few lethally toxic loudmouths with way too much influence on society.
"...The idea of connecting bad writing and poor corporate morals to the overall concept of social justice and equality (Woke) seems like poor logic."
Yes, it is a terrible idea, because doing that risks weakening general support for "woke" ideals.
The push-back against Hollywood style woke isn't because of a resistance to woke ideals. It's because everyone knows Hollywood doesn't give a shit about those ideals and is instead cynically exploiting them in a bid for yet more untaxed revenue.
Who wants to endure hours of low quality on screen woke moralizing by-and-from people with no morals of any kind?
You'd think Hollywood would want to put out products which resonated well (or better) with consumers. Why risk the bottom line (profits) by going off into the weeds to moralize?
The main issue a lot of corporations had with "wokeism" is that it looked like they were pandering to a mostly silent majority rather than a highly vocal minority. It actually turned out to be the other way around because the online world isn't an accurate proxy for the real one.
You have to remember this Isn't just Disney shoehorning seemingly unwanted diversity into films, it's also Budwiser and Gillette completely misreading their audience with their promotional activity. It's the Democratic party pushing a campaign that some demographics felt demonised them. Right or wrong, justified or otherwise, it's hurt these organisations badly.
It did get preachy while hypocritical too, which Hollywood (and the movie industry in general) has been really good at for decades.
It's studio and network MBAs who let themselves be convinced by promotion and marketing teams whose research consists of reading whatever's trending on social media, and those trends are the result of a few self-serving extremists desperately chasing attention.
I mean, in all fairness, it did look like woke culture had more of a consensus than it actually did, and I think the ugly side of it was well hidden. It's amazing how fads pass. I remember when pretty much every other writer was talking about the Bechdel test like it was some sort of gold standard.
I remember when there was a run of teen films about girls having sex for the first time. That died off. But left behind the story fragments that teen girls may have desires like teen boys.
Filmmakers chase money. This sometimes leaves lasting change. Which is nearly always good.
Think of going back? No films like Parasite, we cannot Korean films in our cinemas. No "Hurt Locker" we cannot have a woman directors. Jordon Peele, no thank you. We can only trust aging white men.
Studios will always make what they think people want. They stop when popularity drops, romcoms for example.
I will miss inclusion if people think it is financially advantageous to be bigots.
The results of the recent election in the U.S. exposed a lot, and while I was surprised, it was much of what I expected: There is a large silent majority who does not agree or recognize most of what's being pushed socially and culturally by a vocal minority here in the U.S. and in the greater West, especially in universities and colleges. But that silent majority sure did turn out to be heard on election day.
I coach youth rec. basketball here in town. One of the prerequisites was to watch a concussion awareness training video administered by the U.S. C.D.C. (meaning this is the national video coaches in all fifty states would have to watch). So, I start this training and the cartoon character who is our narrator and guide first tells us his pronouns are "he/him". (Again, he's a cartoon.) From there, we enter a fantasy woke world where girls routinely play (American) football and all other sorts of nonsense. Now, I live in a liberal, diverse town in a (mostly) liberal, diverse state and this even amazed me, I can't imagine someone in suburban Missouri or rural Texas watching this. Their head might've popped off.
This is being interpreted as "anti woke" and a push back against inclusion and diversity (etc.) when, in the majority of cases, it's actually push back against shitty cash grab movies and shows that use woke as an excuse to exist.
Seems like many people are itching for a fight...A real cathartic name calling, hair pullilg fight fueled by righteous and indigant rage...subject of which to be determined later. gawd help us all.
As someone who leans left and wants to see progression, I'm angry with both fringes of the spectrum, who have managed to polarise things so much that we're now potentially headed backward.
Hollywood overcompensated for both good and bad reasons, and now it will likely overcompensate the other way, keeping us away from a sane and representative middle-ground that pleases the majority of people, most of whom aren't sitting there with their finger on the Twitter submit button, waiting to be offended.
Part of me is happy to see the opportunists get their fingers burnt though.
More than twenty years ago I worked on a major foreign production shooting in a small country with a state sponsored film board or council. Basically, the movie and TV business there was run by a tax-funded government department.
The film board executives were all Very Serious art gallery wine and cheese evening types with an activist bent, along with a smattering of bored rich wives.
Every movie and show was created and produced by their family and friends, and it all had to be profound, significant and worthy. Every woke trope was law, and everything they funded bombed like a Stuka, the millions "invested" flushed and gone every time with nothing to show for it.
I remember one much-hyped local production lasted no more than a weekend in theaters. In most of the nation's cities the take was actually zero dollars. Literally nobody wanted to see it or any of the other stuff at which they tossed that cash.
Anyone who dared suggest the film board fund a wider variety of movies and shows was ferociously scorned. Crowd-pleasing stuff was for unwashed plebs. The film board existed to drag the ignorant peons from out of the mud and they used the peons money to do it. Except the film board always failed, and probably still does.
IOW, most people are fine with these outfits financing political agenda arthouse film if at the same time they're also producing movies people actually want to see. Especially when the people are involuntarily providing the financing.
That's how it is in my local area. The entire art scene is almost exclusively public-sector tax-funded projects. The projects themselves have very little to do with art and almost everything to do with politics, mostly identity politics, and tend to pull from cliques of university friends. The people involved aren't bad people at all, but the mechanism and selection is dubious at best. One of these organisations recently hosted some art production that was borderline insulting in its representation of the area at a time when tensions were high and was a blatant effort to pander to fringe politics. The problem is that not only is crap low-effort art effectively subsidised, creating an unfair advantage to some over others, the public appeal is next to none, other than the various other people being funded and pandered to be the same, or associated, organisations. I went to one gallery showing and it was literally film graduates pouring buckets of water onto pavements and art students dropping resin into buckets and dressing it up as some sort of statement. Everyone fit into a very narrow demographic that could be defined, sometimes with some effort, into a minority, be it racial background or mental state. I haven't been to a meeting/event yet which hasn't been swamped with political opinion, often devolving into spats over fringe opinions such as how intolerance shouldn't be tolerated or who is allowed to have dreadlocks. As mentioned, the public are mostly disengaged and take much more cultural ownership in the very few low budget films made within the area by indie filmmakers.
Here's the kicker though; I've reached out the local universities, both of which offer filmschool courses, as a writer-producer with multiple films under my belt, a large website platform trying to give people exposure, and a book endorsed by a former UTA director and it's tumbleweeds. I've never asked for money. I've offered my advise/insight to their students for free.
Hollywood pretended to be woke because execs were convinced it was the latest profitable fad. Studio execs and producers are about the least woke people imaginable. The only thing they care about is tax-free revenue.
On the other hand, nobody will miss movies that were woke for the sake of being woke. Forced diversity is as bad as no diversity.
I agree. It was mainly performative, badly executed, and highly politicised.
If and when the Diddy tapes come out we might learn some things about the "woke".
"If and when the Diddy tapes come out we might learn some things about the "woke"."
It's so great to have no knowledge about any of that stuff.
Nothing is forever...Bruce Jenner has returned to Factory Settings.
...
...
"How dare those insufferable woke Gen Z'ers trying to get us to accept a marginalized community into our society. What were they thinking?"
The wokeism of Hollywood had nothing to do with Gen Zers or inclusivity or diversity.
It was just another cynical grab at tax free profits by a bunch of suits, only it wound up losing them a vast amount of that precious, precious revenue.
You really think Hollywood executives give a shit about any minority aside from the 0.1 percent?
...
Well, thankfully the worst of this Wokeness strom seems to have blown over. Don't know if it was fueled by old ladies in Florida or Gen X'ers, but there does seem to be a segment of the population always earger to be pissed off about something.
It astounds me that anyone thinks or claims Hollywood is woke.
Hollywood is MBAs and corporations and stockholders. It's soulless psychopaths and sociopaths who would eat their own babies for more revenue, profit and power.
It has no interest in the product it churns out, so why would it care if minority needs are satisfied?
"He who take the King's shilling do the King's bidding."
If someone is paying you to write, they may have a social agenda they are trying to promote. If you don't agree, remember to smile and try to get a good price for your creative integrity.
Pixar, Disney and Bud Lite have deep pockets and have paid for their adventures in social engineering.
I may be completely naive, but can someone explain the bad things about recognising systemic problems in a system or society that marginalises and dusadvantages sections of the community? Perhaps I am missing something?
"...can someone explain the bad things about recognising systemic problems in a system or society that marginalises and dusadvantages sections of the community?"
Not sure anyone can give you a definitive answer to anything much related to this issue, but I can say I have two significant problems with the craven and vacuous Hollywood attempts at "woke".
1. They're very low quality efforts,
2. they're shoehorned into almost everything, appropriate or not.
Nobody who matters is against inclusion, diversity, acceptance, tolerance, etc., but not everybody believes absolutely every single movie and TV show has to be about those things. Especially when it's obvious 'Hollywood' sees woke as just another cynical cash grab scheme to be milked dry and then abandoned.
"If someone is paying you to write, they may have a social agenda they are trying to promote."
In most cases the people paying you don't have any agenda beyond generating profit for themselves. If they're pushing "woke" it's because they believe there's a buck to be made from it.
"If you don't agree, remember to smile and try to get a good price for your creative integrity."
Anyone who doesn't agree with the perceived agenda but willingly writes for it anyway has no grounds to complain.
"I do not like this show and its agenda, but the producers pay me well, therefore I continue to do whatever they ask me to. But I'm better than them."
"Pixar, Disney and Bud Lite have deep pockets and have paid for their adventures in social engineering."
Much of the blame can be laid at the filthy stinking feet of social media. Left, right, black, white, brown, gay, straight, old, young, rich, poor, and everything else: all poisoned by the extremism of a few lethally toxic loudmouths with way too much influence on society.
So we are pushing back against poor quality writing and bad movitation from corporations. Which is all worth pushing back.
But the idea of connecting bad writing and poor corporate morals to the overall concept of social justice and equality (Woke) seems like poor logic.
"...The idea of connecting bad writing and poor corporate morals to the overall concept of social justice and equality (Woke) seems like poor logic."
Yes, it is a terrible idea, because doing that risks weakening general support for "woke" ideals.
The push-back against Hollywood style woke isn't because of a resistance to woke ideals. It's because everyone knows Hollywood doesn't give a shit about those ideals and is instead cynically exploiting them in a bid for yet more untaxed revenue.
Who wants to endure hours of low quality on screen woke moralizing by-and-from people with no morals of any kind?
You'd think Hollywood would want to put out products which resonated well (or better) with consumers. Why risk the bottom line (profits) by going off into the weeds to moralize?
The main issue a lot of corporations had with "wokeism" is that it looked like they were pandering to a mostly silent majority rather than a highly vocal minority. It actually turned out to be the other way around because the online world isn't an accurate proxy for the real one.
You have to remember this Isn't just Disney shoehorning seemingly unwanted diversity into films, it's also Budwiser and Gillette completely misreading their audience with their promotional activity. It's the Democratic party pushing a campaign that some demographics felt demonised them. Right or wrong, justified or otherwise, it's hurt these organisations badly.
It did get preachy while hypocritical too, which Hollywood (and the movie industry in general) has been really good at for decades.
It's studio and network MBAs who let themselves be convinced by promotion and marketing teams whose research consists of reading whatever's trending on social media, and those trends are the result of a few self-serving extremists desperately chasing attention.
I mean, in all fairness, it did look like woke culture had more of a consensus than it actually did, and I think the ugly side of it was well hidden. It's amazing how fads pass. I remember when pretty much every other writer was talking about the Bechdel test like it was some sort of gold standard.
I remember when there was a run of teen films about girls having sex for the first time. That died off. But left behind the story fragments that teen girls may have desires like teen boys.
Filmmakers chase money. This sometimes leaves lasting change. Which is nearly always good.
Think of going back? No films like Parasite, we cannot Korean films in our cinemas. No "Hurt Locker" we cannot have a woman directors. Jordon Peele, no thank you. We can only trust aging white men.
Studios will always make what they think people want. They stop when popularity drops, romcoms for example.
I will miss inclusion if people think it is financially advantageous to be bigots.
The results of the recent election in the U.S. exposed a lot, and while I was surprised, it was much of what I expected: There is a large silent majority who does not agree or recognize most of what's being pushed socially and culturally by a vocal minority here in the U.S. and in the greater West, especially in universities and colleges. But that silent majority sure did turn out to be heard on election day.
I coach youth rec. basketball here in town. One of the prerequisites was to watch a concussion awareness training video administered by the U.S. C.D.C. (meaning this is the national video coaches in all fifty states would have to watch). So, I start this training and the cartoon character who is our narrator and guide first tells us his pronouns are "he/him". (Again, he's a cartoon.) From there, we enter a fantasy woke world where girls routinely play (American) football and all other sorts of nonsense. Now, I live in a liberal, diverse town in a (mostly) liberal, diverse state and this even amazed me, I can't imagine someone in suburban Missouri or rural Texas watching this. Their head might've popped off.
...
This is being interpreted as "anti woke" and a push back against inclusion and diversity (etc.) when, in the majority of cases, it's actually push back against shitty cash grab movies and shows that use woke as an excuse to exist.
Seems like many people are itching for a fight...A real cathartic name calling, hair pullilg fight fueled by righteous and indigant rage...subject of which to be determined later. gawd help us all.
As someone who leans left and wants to see progression, I'm angry with both fringes of the spectrum, who have managed to polarise things so much that we're now potentially headed backward.
Hollywood overcompensated for both good and bad reasons, and now it will likely overcompensate the other way, keeping us away from a sane and representative middle-ground that pleases the majority of people, most of whom aren't sitting there with their finger on the Twitter submit button, waiting to be offended.
Part of me is happy to see the opportunists get their fingers burnt though.
More than twenty years ago I worked on a major foreign production shooting in a small country with a state sponsored film board or council. Basically, the movie and TV business there was run by a tax-funded government department.
The film board executives were all Very Serious art gallery wine and cheese evening types with an activist bent, along with a smattering of bored rich wives.
Every movie and show was created and produced by their family and friends, and it all had to be profound, significant and worthy. Every woke trope was law, and everything they funded bombed like a Stuka, the millions "invested" flushed and gone every time with nothing to show for it.
I remember one much-hyped local production lasted no more than a weekend in theaters. In most of the nation's cities the take was actually zero dollars. Literally nobody wanted to see it or any of the other stuff at which they tossed that cash.
Anyone who dared suggest the film board fund a wider variety of movies and shows was ferociously scorned. Crowd-pleasing stuff was for unwashed plebs. The film board existed to drag the ignorant peons from out of the mud and they used the peons money to do it. Except the film board always failed, and probably still does.
IOW, most people are fine with these outfits financing political agenda arthouse film if at the same time they're also producing movies people actually want to see. Especially when the people are involuntarily providing the financing.
That's how it is in my local area. The entire art scene is almost exclusively public-sector tax-funded projects. The projects themselves have very little to do with art and almost everything to do with politics, mostly identity politics, and tend to pull from cliques of university friends. The people involved aren't bad people at all, but the mechanism and selection is dubious at best. One of these organisations recently hosted some art production that was borderline insulting in its representation of the area at a time when tensions were high and was a blatant effort to pander to fringe politics. The problem is that not only is crap low-effort art effectively subsidised, creating an unfair advantage to some over others, the public appeal is next to none, other than the various other people being funded and pandered to be the same, or associated, organisations. I went to one gallery showing and it was literally film graduates pouring buckets of water onto pavements and art students dropping resin into buckets and dressing it up as some sort of statement. Everyone fit into a very narrow demographic that could be defined, sometimes with some effort, into a minority, be it racial background or mental state. I haven't been to a meeting/event yet which hasn't been swamped with political opinion, often devolving into spats over fringe opinions such as how intolerance shouldn't be tolerated or who is allowed to have dreadlocks. As mentioned, the public are mostly disengaged and take much more cultural ownership in the very few low budget films made within the area by indie filmmakers.
Here's the kicker though; I've reached out the local universities, both of which offer filmschool courses, as a writer-producer with multiple films under my belt, a large website platform trying to give people exposure, and a book endorsed by a former UTA director and it's tumbleweeds. I've never asked for money. I've offered my advise/insight to their students for free.
...
Pages