Hollywood Is Burning Over Politics

Rob Bonta is destroying what he cannot command

Grok AI: Rob Bonta laughs maniacally as Hollywood burns

Entertainment news site TMZ reported yesterday that Paramount Pictures, the last major studio still mainly based in Hollywood, is leaving California. The move is a death knell for the local film and TV/streaming entertainment industry, which had already experienced a severe decline in recent years. Just 18 percent of film and TV content was even being made in Los Angeles, anymore.

“Hollywood as we know it, is over”, film critic Chris Gore said on X in reaction to the news. “And Los Angeles, and California for that matter, will continue the most rapid decline in modern history.” A report from the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation’s Institute for Applied Economics that leaked last week shows that 58,000 jobs, $21 billion in economic activity, and $1.17 billion in annual tax revenue could be lost.

Bonta leads a 12-state coalition of Democrat AGs who are trying to stop the merger of Paramount and Warner Brothers despite the fact that both the federal government and the EU have approved the merger. Nor is Bonta swayed by either Gov. Gavin Newsom, or Xavier Becerra, who is running to replace Newson, exhorting him to settle out of court. The pleading of LA Mayor Karen Bass and LA County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, both far-left Democrats, for a quick resolution has not swayed Bonta.

Hollywood has been disunited on the matter. Russell Hollander, National Executive Director of the Directors Guild of America (DGA), as well as Matthew Loeb, International President of the IATSE union for stagehands and crew, signed a joint letter to Bonta in August warning that work was drying up and productions were already being put on hold due to the litigation. Cinema United, the association of theater owners, has also supported a fast settlement.

‘Woke’ Hollywood is on the other side of the issue because David Ellison, CEO of Paramount Skydance, and his father, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, are perceived as friends of President Trump. Thousands of celebrity signatories to open letters, including Jane Fonda, Ben Stiller, J.J. Abrams, Bryan Cranston, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Mark Ruffalo, and others, have asked Bonta to block the deal. Many of them fear that CNN, a Warner Bros. property, will be managed by Bari Weiss under the Ellisons.

Writers Guild of America, which also sued separately, the Hollywood Teamsters, and SAG-AFTRA have also opposed the merger. All three have roiled Hollywood with long strikes or threats of a strike in recent years, halting production and contributing to the decline of the industry in Los Angeles. “The 2023 strikes threw napalm on the already flailing industry and showed how the overwhelming groupthink of entertainment industry workers has led it to its own demise”, an anonymous industry insider wrote in July.

The Brahmins of entertainment are “willing to let Hollywood die before re-focusing from politics and morals to art and commerce.” For more than a decade, the culture of Hollywood has consistently undermined their profitability through DEI hiring, especially in the writers’ room. Every established franchise has been subject to feminization, so that “qualia overtook quality.”

When the force became female, the mostly-male Star Wars audience stayed away, and no new, ‘modern audience’ replaced it. Men with decades of experience in making hits have been subject to systematic discrimination in the name of equality, while the new, female staff have presided over the rapid decline of viewership. YouTubers now regularly out-perform far more expensive content, so that Nielsen has been forced to change the way they report ratings.

Nobody was allowed to give fair warning this would happen, even though the consequences were obvious. Dissent was quashed. Groupthink took over. Far-left values were enforced everywhere, on everyone. For all their talk of diversity in recent years, viewpoint discrimination became so endemic in current Hollywood that conservatives have been forced to keep their views to themselves and meet in secret.

Actress Patricia Heaton recently told Andrew Gold about her own role in creating a private network, Friends of Abe, to help conservatives find each other. “You could say to somebody, ‘Are you a friend of Abe?’ or ‘Are you FOA?’ And if they said, ‘Yeah,’ then you knew there was another conservative or independent, or someone who is not a Democrat, that you could talk to without feeling like you were going to get in trouble at your job.”

It was actually Gary Sinise. He approached me and my husband and said, “Hey, would you guys host a couple people to come over?” And he was like, how many people are you thinking? 20 people, 30 tops. And it was like Kelsey Grammer and Jon Voight and Ben Shapiro… All it was, was fellowship. We weren’t raising money for candidates. We didn’t go protest anything. It was just to go hang out, be able to talk freely without worrying about losing your job, and to let other people know who was safe on a set. So people would come to these FOA meetings and they would see people that they worked with and they were like, “Oh, you’re FOA.”

Paramount is reportedly considering Austin, Nashville, and Atlanta, where the culture is quite different from Los Angeles, as their new bases. Corporate officers have reportedly looked for “about 400,000 square feet of space in the Tennessee capital that it could move into in two to three years”, which gives us an idea of the time frame for such a move. “However, no existing building there has a vacancy that aligns with the company’s needs and timeline,” so the company may have to spend as much as $3 billion on new construction.

If that is the less-expensive option compared to staying in California, it underlines just why David Ellison is ready to leave. Production costs in Los Angeles are extremely high compared to the new locations. In fact, it is cheaper for a producer to fly an entire cast and crew to a foreign location than to shoot a film in southern California.

Bonta has called Paramount’s threat to leave the state “blackmail”, but just who is being extorted, here? “We cannot comment on a company’s plans,” Bonta’s office said in a statement responding to the story yesterday. “It’s no secret that Paramount has been making this threat, despite its alleged commitment to California and Hollywood.” In fact, it is Bonta’s litigation that has threatened those commitments to make 30 films a year and keep most production in Los Angeles. He has no power to make Paramount stay, only the power to make them leave.

Bonta also lacks power to stop the merger deal under the Clayton Act. What he does have is the power to drag the merger out as long as possible, even all the way to the Supreme Court, while he ultimately loses the case. Bonta walked away from negotiations with Paramount in August, blaming the company for supposed leaks to the press. “We’ll continue to apply the law without fear or favor”, he lied, “and continue to be open to coming to the table for good faith discussions.” This is gaslighting from a deeply-self interested politician.

Hollywood is in broad decline because of politics. Politics prevent Hollywood from returning to profitability. Politics are now getting in the way of any plan to rescue Hollywood from itself. Patty Quillin, the wife of Netflix co-founder and former CEO Reed Hastings, is a major donor to Rob Bonta as well as his wife Mia Bonta. Netflix was the bidding rival to Paramount in the sale of Warner Brothers, a saga bound up in politics, including sensational congressional testimony by co-CEO Ted Sarandos.

Nithya Rahman, the LA city council member running against Karen Bass in November, also opposes the merger. Political power is the real purpose of the opposition. Bonta and Rahman are happy to let Hollywood die as long as they get to rule over the ashes. Political science calls this the Curley Effect. They would rather see Warner Brothers cannibalized for spare parts than let the merged companies create content that makes money by reflecting values that are not left wing progressive ones.

No move to the sensible center, where the money is made, can ever be allowed. Woke Hollywood would rather watch everything burn than change. Rob Bonta is their man.