Why Old Hollywood Needs To Go Away For Good

Hollywood has a problem and it’s time to finally expose it for what it is. 

For decades, Tinseltown has had a more than checkered past filled with stories and incidents regarding toxic culture, abusive behavior and unacceptable actions. 

You know, everything Ray Fisher accused Joss Whedon of doing on Justice League. 

Throughout the two and a half years of the Release the Snyder Cut movement, there have been whispers, indications and in some cases second hand accounts of some awful things that took place during the reshoots for Justice League when WB hired Joss Whedon to take over the film from Zack Snyder, who stepped down due to family tragedy. 

From the beginning, we were told that it was a minor move for Whedon to help finish Snyder’s vision for the movie, and that what we would see on November 17,2017 would indeed be a culmination of Zack Snyder’s vision, unchanged and not tampered with. 

Everyone except me at the time(I came around months later) admitted that was a lie the night we all saw the movie. Then the whispers started, and the picture they were painting wasn’t just about how much of Snyder’s vision had been changed by Whedon, Geoff Johns and WB in general, but also about how poisonous and detrimental the environment of that movie became during the reshoot process. 

We know Ben Affleck wasn’t happy, because not only did he step away from his planned Batman movie that he was going to write and direct, the Justice League process actually sent him spiraling in his personal life, to the point where he had to walk away completely to get himself on track, by his own admission. 

We know that attitudes toward Geoff Johns and Joss Whedon were contentious to say the least with cast and crew since the whole production occurred, and ultimately the abject disaster of the situation got Johns, Jon Berg and others fired from their positions in charge of DC Films, which still didn’t soften the attitudes at all for people involved in the process that now flat out loathe those guys to some degree. 

We now also know that Ray Fisher decided to go public with his displeasure for the situation, and made his feelings for Joss Whedon abundantly clear, while also implicating Johns and Berg as complicit in his behavior. 

When this all happened on Twitter, it took over the DC fandom for the rest of the day, understandably so. 

For me, I literally thought this: “Just another day in Hollywood.” 

This is hardly the first time I’ve ever heard of toxicity and abuse occurring on movie productions between directors, producers, cast and crew. If anything, it’s almost an exception when it doesn’t happen on some level in Hollywood, which is the entire problem. 

There is an old culture with respect to Hollywood that shoves open disrespect and dismissal of talent concerns under the rug for the sake of achieving that bottom line in the ledger. It doesn’t matter how upset your actors are, how depressed your writers and creatives have been, how bigoted and sexist the crew openly is. At the end of the day, you have a movie to finish and sell and the lily white executives in that boardroom are going to do whatever they feel is necessary to make sure it gets finished and sold the way they want it to. 

If that means hiring all white leads with higher salaries instead of brown leads bought on the cheap, that’s what they’re doing. 

If that means casting the supermodel that looks great with less clothes on instead of the classically trained actress with demonstrable range, that’s what they’re doing. 

If that means rewriting pages of a script in mid-filming to dumb the story down for the audience, or hiring trailer companies to edit the final cut to hit a runtime edict and make sure bonuses are paid out, that’s what they’re doing. 

If that means greenlighting projects for the same handful of directors every time instead of giving fresh new talent a shot to succeed because they think they’re too great a risk, that’s what they’re doing. 

If that means murdering the art form of cinema and being a complete jackwagon to everyone around you for the sake of a bottom line in a ledger, that’s what they’re doing. 

That’s what they’ve always been doing. 

Seriously, you don’t have to look hard to find horror stories about how Hollywood has treated many creatives over the years. Five minutes on Twitter is enough to find some doozies from verified accounts about what executives have told them over the phone, what casting directors have told them in auditions, and what producers have said to them on set. Everything from “you’re too urban” to “you’re too hot and I can’t work with you because all I want to do is have sex with you.” 

That’s not made up, people. That’s real garbage that has been said to actors and actresses on these sets more often than not, and those are tame compared to most of what actually is said. No, it’s not all movie sets clearly, but one movie set filled with abusive toxicity is too many. 

Hollywood knows it can get away with it though, because the executives that run the studios are in complete control. If you don’t fall in line, you won’t have a career and it’s easy for them to blacklist a creative over even the pettiest things because there’s no check and balance. No real competition. The Big 6 studios for decades had Hollywood in an iron grip, and if you wanted to make it, you played ball, no matter what they asked you to do. That’s how “Me Too” and “Time’s Up” became movements, out of those horror stories. 

Don’t look to the bloggers and the press for much help either because none of them want to lose their access to these studios and inside information. Most of them are not courageous enough to bite the hand that spoils them, which is why you get so many of them siding with the toxicity once allegations arise at some point.

The Justice League situation is just another example of this toxic underbelly, from what we’ve heard. Knowing what we know about what was done physically to that film, coupled with what we’ve heard about how Whedon, Johns and Berg acted while in charge, and it’s seriously just “old Hollywood” rearing its ugly, arrogant and entitled head once again. 

It’s time for that trash to be taken out. Seriously. 

If you’ve ever wondered why I root for The Streaming Age as hard as I do, this is a MASSIVE reason why. The antiquated, bigoted and ungodly superficial practices of Hollywood studios and executives have caused too many issues over the years. They’ve seen scripts torched, directors crushed, movies obliterated, all because the executives pandered to the business model only and neglected the art form, which a lot of audiences actually like to see. 

When you read further on how Hollywood executives act and operate, you wonder why every movie ever made isn’t just a Fast and the Furious clone, and that’s not bagging on that franchise because I enjoy it, but it is calling out studio executives for treating movies like they should all be one note and hollow as hell, and again there’s nothing that can be done to change it because the studios are in complete control. 

Then Netflix happened and threw an evolutionary wrench into the works. Not only were they providing original content that wasn’t just a reboot or a remake of something from 20 years prior, but people don’t even have to buy a movie ticket to see it. A monthly fee to watch it in the courtesy of your own home, whenever and however you want to. Audience control. 

It wasn’t seen as a real threat to the industry until Netflix started gaining attention at awards shows including the Oscars, and when they started luring top talent away from the traditional Hollywood system to work for streamers. Yes, they are still studios with executives and CEOs running a business, but all of them from Netflix to Hulu to Amazon Prime to Apple TV+ and many others have greenlit far more ambitious and original projects than Hollywood is willing to take a shot on. The day that Martin Scorsese took his three and a half hour gangster epic The Irishman to Netflix should have been the ultimate sign that things were changing as a whole, and it’s only getting bigger as more top talent sign deals with streaming platforms. 

That’s exactly what is needed to finally toss old Hollywood in the garbage. The traditional studio system and the old ways of doing things are long overdue to be discarded, and with that change also comes the removal of ultimate power from studio executives that have been mad drunk with it for decades. That’s not saying that every streaming production is going to be a bastion of good behavior and respect, but right now it certainly seems more likely to be the case than we have with traditional Hollywood. 

What’s to stop the streamers from adapting old Hollywood’s ways? Well for starters, they’re already more diverse in content and casting, even if only by a little. Because of the demand for original content to entice people to subscribe, more risks are taken by default on projects and castings that traditional Hollywood would scoff at in a second. So there’s proof that diversity and originality sells, and that’s already a major blow to traditional Hollywood’s toxic sensibilities. There are many other things to iron out and it’s hardly a perfect system, nor will it ever be, but it’s just what the industry needs to get everyone out from under the oppressive thumb of the traditional market share and its toxic patterns. 

That’s how I feel about it all anyway, and when you consider that next year we will see Ray Fisher’s true performance as Victor Stone/Cyborg on a streaming platform, you can see where the need for Hollywood to evolve out of its old ways into a new more accepting, less toxic paradigm, is absolutely essential to the future of filmmaking and for us as the audience, film watching.