David Ellison Sees the Writing on the Wall for Hollywood

A Pompeii resident looking out his window at Mount Vesuvius on August 24, A.D. 79 would have noticed something was amiss from the black smoke emanating out the top. He might have fled the city before it got destroyed, salvaging what he could. Movie mogul David Ellison has been observing the virtual darkness menacing Hollywood, and is taking steps to rebuild elsewhere.

Entertainment industry luminaries are going berserk over the looming Ellison merger of Paramount and Warner Bros studios. As usual with them, for all the wrong reasons. They warn about the resultant reduced production, fewer jobs, less competition (four major studios instead of five), and that Ellison may move the entire conglomerate out of Los Angeles. Which some astute insiders see as a good thing, given what the recent studio regimes and political leaders have done to the physical location and its workers.

“If Paramount — Warner Bros. leaves L.A., it’ll be game over for Hollywood,” declared TV-film director Joseph Kahn in a scorching Hollywood Reporter column last week. When you’ve lost The Hollywood Reporter, you should know the end is nigh. But because you’re in the entertainment industry, you probably can’t read the signs, since you understand nothing outside your business.

In fact, you don’t understand your business, or you wouldn’t have spent the last twenty years helping to wreck it. You’re likely a diversity hire replacement for men who knew the tenuous link between the economics, politics, and art of the trade. And you can do nothing other than rage and ruin until your own job disappears.

“The writers and actors warning you about consolidation do not live in the world,” wrote Kahn. “If they did, they would understand that nobody spends $110 billion to make less of anything. Corporations don’t merge to shrink. They merge to shove product into every screen, format, territory, and Botox hole available.” Kahn adds that many of Hollywood’s major intellectual properties — Star Trek, Harry Potter, DCU, etc. — are worth more than the entire studio infrastructure. “The valuation of Batman alone could buy Wayne Enterprises several times over.”

A real writer of any race or either sex could have mined gold out of this concept…. Not Gunn and Vanessa Baden Kelly, who throw racism and sexism at the viewer.

As for industry-dependent auxiliary workers such as set constructors, carpenters, makeup artists, deliverymen, and security guards, Democratic governance has made the cost of living unaffordable. California’s belated (2009) and tightly regulated film tax credits were insubstantial and restrictive compared to those of New Mexico, Texas, Georgia, and Tennessee. Ellison is considering Austin and Nashville as locations for his combined studio.

Yet when Republican-leaning Spencer Pratt ran for LA Mayor earlier this year partly on a save Hollywood platform — slashing location fees in half, waiving all staff and inspection fees for under two-million-dollar productions, police-fire department pre-approval for street closures, and clearing out the zombie homeless from these areas — practically every Tinseltown A-Lister came out against him, and for the Castro-loving Karen Bass (“The passing of the Comandante en Jefe is a great loss to the people of Cuba,” Bass proclaimed on the death of Fidel Castro.)

Bass’s celebrity endorsers and donors included Jane Fonda, Samuel L. Jackson, Don Cheadle, and J.J. Abrams. Abrams, in fact, had recently shut down his Bad Robot company in LA and moved it to New York City. Because the truth is Tinseltown elites couldn’t care less about the workers far from their posh neighborhoods. They know the “little people” would have it easier away from LA.

According to Kahn, “Crews can suddenly live in lower-cost states and afford homes and schools for their kids. They may have to pray to Baby Jesus a little more, but a little Holy Ghost Power never hurt nobody.”

It’s all about their left-wing agenda and Trump derangement. David Ellison, you see, is a Donald Trump ally. And this, the Hollywood VIPs can’t abide. The thought of a disturbance in the Woke drives them impossibly more insane than they already were. As does the fear they’d have to make way for some traditionalist, if not outright conservative, entertainment about alpha white men and romantic pretty women. This they cannot do artistically, let alone ideologically.

Certainly not Lanterns Executive Producer and staff writer Vanessa Baden Kelly, a DEI black female poster girl. Lanterns is DCU head James Gunn’s HBO take on the iconic secondary DC Comics superhero Green Lantern — after he lost them hundreds of millions on the woke Supergirl. All they had to do to win over new and old fans like me was respect the damn story and characters created by four talented white male artists.

Hal Jordan was a dashing test pilot who comes across a dying alien in a crashed spaceship. The alien is a member of the Green Lantern Corps, an intergalactic peacekeeping force whose members are enhanced by their individual power rings. The alien’s ring chooses Hal as his successor, and he becomes the Green Lantern of Earth. Twelve years later (historically the turbulent 1971), the Corps orders Hal to break in a new Lantern, John Stewart, a militant black man. After some initial friction, the two become friends and allies.

A real writer of any race or either sex could have mined gold out of this concept — two ideologically conflicted yet honorable male superheroes finding common ground while fighting extraordinary forces of evil. Not Gunn and Vanessa Baden Kelly, who throw racism and sexism at the viewer so hard, he’ll wonder why they bother saving such a morally polluted planet.

Their Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) is a depressed alcoholic. “I’m fearless because I’m broken,” he says, just what young male Green Lantern fans want to learn. The comic book’s U.S. Marine Stewart becomes the anxious product of a black activist girlboss mother, Bernadette, who even berates a Guardian (the Corps’ alien superiors) for their racism. “Asking a black man in America if he’s afraid is not a fair measure of will!” she declares. And if that blithering nonsense isn’t enough to click off a million screens, Baden Kelly’s delusional statement — “If the rings weren’t sexist, Bernadette would have been chosen.” — will be.

David Ellison’s Paramount-Warner Bros studio can’t get out of Hollywood fast enough.

READ MORE from Lou Aguilar:

Cuba Is Next

Andrew Klavan’s Find Me Nowhere Is the Cameron Winter Mystery at Its Best

Independent Publishers Are Saving the Books Big Publishing Won’t Touch

The republished and rebooted edition of my recent political thriller The Washington Trail comes out this Tuesday, September 8th, just two months before the shockingly timely sequel The Camelot Trail (November 17th). You don’t have to read the first book to enjoy the second, but you’ll enjoy it all the more — and strike a blow against woke slop.