The strike from the Screen Actors Guild is probably the dumbest thing we’ve seen in a long time. Many things are colliding simultaneously that will essentially kill the Hollywood industry. Yet, they seem brain-dead and numb to how the world sees them. As I always remind people, labor unions are all communist organizations, so the idea of stopping work through collective bargaining comes straight from Karl Marx. There is nothing “redeeming” or “American” about what they are doing. It’s essentially one set of radical lefties fighting against a bunch of New World Order studios who dance to the tune of BlackRock and the lefties of finance. One of the main reasons that Hollywood is so radically left is because that is what it takes to be one of the elites working in Hollywood. If you are a lefty, the studios might give you work if you are lucky. There are really very few actors and actresses who can make a living off acting in Hollywood. I know from personal experience and have seen this problem unusually close. And many years ago, I saw this collision coming, and here it is. Labor unions make motion pictures and television too expensive for a studio to produce. The residuals of production are too much of a pain in the neck, and essentially, we have arrived at a place where that cost just isn’t worth it to a studio. What it costs to make a movie and everyone involved just doesn’t justify the revenue stream. After Covid happened, this whole mess was exposed. Hollywood would need some kind of reset for their cost model. Yet the actors and writers who are now both on strike want things to be as they have been, which was never sustainable.

I’ve told some personal stories about Hollywood in other places, but not in this context. For most of my adult life, I wanted to be a film director, actor, writer, and producer. It was really the only thing I wanted to do from age ten to forty. And there were many times when I came really close to getting into that line of work. For years I had to pay fees to the Writers Guild and interact with that side of the business, which I didn’t like. Things were less political back then, so the politics of it was less of a concern. But there was one project with A-listers who were doing a project for RealD 3D that I met while at a film festival, as I was providing stunt work involving bullwhips as I was a member of the World Stunt Organization at the time. So they flew me out to Hollywood for a project involving some of the people from the Twilight movie series and Beverly Hills 90210. They gave me my own trailer, so I was being treated as the featured talent on the project with many veteran producers and actors, so I had a chance to see things behind the scenes. And what I learned, painfully, was that Hollywood was not for me. It was the union attitude that I had no tolerance for, and it was at that project in 2008 I realized that I was never going to work in Hollywood because of my disdain for unions. I couldn’t be in them and didn’t want to work with their rules. And the entire town was built on unionized labor. I had several conflicts on that particular project with unionized staff, and it became obvious to me that the unions had taken all the fun out of making movies. 

Ironically, I was there because of my hatred of unions because I was one of the only people in the world who had a very unique skill set that was willing to let RealD 3D screen capture my work, which would then go on to provide animation for films like Ironman 2 and the Immortals. The precise issue that the SAG members are striking on now is concerns over A.I. taking over acting and a loss of revenue regarding streaming services. Many people told me that if I did this project, I would never work in Hollywood again because once you gave the studios what they wanted, such as screen captures of me using firewhips, I would be done as a whip consultant for all future movies. After all, they wouldn’t need a person to perform that since they had all the footage from me that digital animators could then use for future projects. Well, my love was for telling stories, and if I could help make that easier, I was all for it. Many union members were on the set, but it was a nonunion enterprise because it was established as a pitch session. So I was nonunion showing what a potential pitch might do for a studio. The union people were there hoping to tag on to the project’s development. I was pro studio and certainly pro-RealD 3D. And as much as I liked the experience of being in Hollywood and working with people important in the industry, I grew very frustrated with the union mentality on that film set. So, when it was over, I made a decision that I would refocus my efforts. Barack Obama had just been elected; I joined my local Tea Parties in Cincinnati and put my efforts into those types of things. Largely because I witnessed the terrible burden that labor unions had placed on an industry I loved. But the problem had carried over into just about every element of politics in general.

When I saw the reasons for this latest strike of the SAG members being led by Fran Drescher, I knew it was the collapse of something that had been artificially propped up for many years. Movies cost too much because labor expected too many things, and studios had become too liberal over time because of their interaction with these communist unions and their liberal world order masters in finance. Conservative ideas weren’t even a consideration, and those are the people in the world buying tickets. So there was no way that the movie industry and television would last, and this strike would kill them. It will kill Hollywood, and it was a dumb thing to do. But it’s been brewing for a long time, and I have seen it from the other side and knew it would never last. Ultimately it is part of the collapse that is going on everywhere. People will not miss Hollywood. But Hollywood will miss the business. YouTube, in many ways, is far more influential. Some very serious people contacted me a few years ago about my life and wondered why I wasn’t making movies. And I explained to them that the entire industry needed to go through a reset period; this was before Covid. I told them that producing a movie wasn’t good business, and that I was doing other things that made much more sense. If you want to make a movie, you have to deal with unionized labor to get it into distribution, and that just wasn’t worth it to me. I told them that I’d see how things shaped up in the future. But under the union rules, it wasn’t fun, and I wanted no part of it. And now the industry is exactly where I said it would be. This is a sign of what will happen to the Liberal World Order and the Deep State in general. All these communist groups that have hidden in plain sight are falling apart. And the pain of it is their own doing.

Rich Hoffman