Of Hollywood and ‘the American People’: How Status Quo is Maintained

So what is the end-result of so many, repeated instances of ridiculously idiotic producers changing every intelligent, thoughtful aspect of my brother’s (and other writers’) scripts?  He starts anticipating their ignorance and just keeping it out of the original.  The reasons are obvious – it hurts too much to constantly have his creative work trashed by people that have no appreciation for creative thought, or challenging convention, or flipping stereotypes; so my brother saves himself some of the pain.  (*2)  He lets go a little bit.  The even sadder part is – when my brother tries to sell original scripts that are too “different” . . . he simply doesn’t sell them.  And he can’t really support a family on thought-provoking stories on paper alone.

Now, does he compromise his own morals to write the films he does?  No.  Never.  But he does end up having to “dumb-up” his scripts for the sake of the imaginary, “low-brow” American public.  And he does end up with white protagonists instead of the folks of color that he’d rather have.  (*3)

On a larger level – what does this mean?  Am I just trying to say that we shouldn’t blame screenwriters for the crappy state of Hollywood movies?  That it’s just the producers’ fault that the Hollywood media machine is a major reason stereotypes remain in place?  A little bit.

But it’s bigger than that.  Because we – people, in general – tend to gauge the prominent attitudes of our nation through our media.  When folks are trying to figure out what the majority of “Americans” believe, or like to see, we turn to popular media as indicators.   Makes sense, right?

Except it actually doesn’t.  Because the decks are stacked against us, as popular consumers of media.  Our options – in terms of large-scale media – are extremely limited, and the variety is negligible.  (*4)  Therefore, what “we” end up choosing is more a reflection of what’s being put out, as opposed to our actual tastes and beliefs.

For example:  say I go to the grocery store.  I want some fruit.  At the store, there are some apples, bananas, strawberries, and oranges.  I really want passion fruit.  But there is no passion fruit.  Somebody higher up decided that passion fruit wasn’t a big seller, so they don’t waste their time, space, or money.

So I end up buying an orange.  Then somebody else looks at that and says, “people like that guy really like oranges.”  They can say it’s a “hard” statistic because it’s flat data . . .  but I wanted a passion fruit.  And, maybe – if people got more exposure to passion fruits, were able to try them out because they were all over the place, passion fruit would become a big seller.  In fact, if they marketed it right, passion fruit would become a big seller.  But they’ve elected to market oranges, instead.  And so guys like me buy oranges.

Our pop media culture is the same: a ridiculous minority (a fraction of a fraction of a percent) of people are in charge of deciding what “we want to see,” and they provide for that. The problem is that the majority of these guys are ignorant fools and are completely out of touch with real people.  But, because they have the power of money and marketing – they can create the results they need to “prove” themselves right.  Again and again.

So are the “American people” really as ignorant and prone to prejudice as we all tend to think, based on what we see on a large scale?  Or is it just that the tiny minority at the top creates this ignorance and prejudice as part of this sick cycle of miscommunication?

And I’m not saying that Hollywood producers are evil.  I’m sure many of them have decent intentions and really believe that they’re right on this one.  Many of them are probably thinking – “I wish I could make an intelligent, thought-provoking movie that challenges the status quo – just once – but ‘the American people’ would never go see it . . . “  I bet that happens all the time.

But when money and power and the public are involved?  The right thing and what people really want is seldom achieved.   It’s all this strange, twisted feedback loop that reinforces all these beliefs that aren’t true and aren’t what most of us even really want – while convincing us that “everybody else” really wants it. (*5)

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