This will be fun; I could do it every day for years.  I’m not sure how useful that would be, but I’d enjoy it.  And that is explaining to Democrats why they lost the 2024 election.  The first answer is that election fraud was harder for them.  They still cheat in many places, have been caught, and will get into trouble over it.  In these areas of the country that have still been counting ballots weeks after the election in November of 2024, there is only one reason: introducing false ballots to change the outcome.  And in those places, voter ID is a problem, and so are the mathematical trends.  You don’t win in all these national elections, and, in strange places, trend the other way.  That might happen in random spots, but not like this.  Many of these House and Senate seats were stolen for Democrats to keep those two government bodies from sliding even further to Republicans.  It will be easy to prove, and the Trump Justice Department will be able to prosecute those cases efficiently.   But the point remains: if Democrats can’t cheat, they can’t win.  That also makes this perspective that has been going on with Democrats about Hollywood even funnier.  They believed that Hollywood support from celebrities and the visual effects ads they had access to with people like Steven Spielberg would turn people toward their side.  Yeah, that was never going to happen, and I’ve known that for a long time from very personal experience with Hollywood.  They don’t have that kind of power, and they never did.  They only illusioned themselves by talking about these things within their inward culture. 

I just finished reading a great book I promised myself I’d read if Trump won the election.  And boy, is it a real treasure; it’s the autobiography of the film producer Howard Kazanjian, ‘A Producer’s Life,’ and it was a wonderful experience.  I rarely get to read something that good, and it’s not a book intended for mass audiences.  Maybe only 100,000 people worldwide would be interested in it, and most of them would likely be film students.  The book came out in 2021, but I was too busy these last couple of years, even with all my reading, to sit down and enjoy a book like that.  Howard is one of my favorite film producers of all time, and he’s been close to some of my favorite movies, from the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films to Cool Hand Luke and The Wild Bunch.  He worked with Hitchcock and many big-name Hollywood directors through the latest golden age of cinema, from the late 70s to the early 80s.  He told many stories about things that have gone on behind the scenes in many movies that I found fascinating, and I wouldn’t let myself think like that because of all the other stuff politically going on.  There wasn’t time to enjoy anything like that, so the first thing I did once Trump was elected was give myself a bit of a vacation and read a few books like this that I had been thinking about for a long time.  In it, Howard essentially confirms everything I have been saying about Hollywood.  Much of the appeal of that industry is fake, in front of the camera and especially behind it. Hollywood is about creating illusions, not truth, and in this climate of free media and free speech, anything phony is going to be rooted out and rejected.  Someone should have told the Democrats that, but they were so obsessed with their ability to make images that suckers buy in a darkened theater that they missed the trend.  And they have lost miserably because of it.  And they aren’t making any corrections to change anything, which is fine with me.

All this has provoked in me remembrances of my exposure to Hollywood culture, and I quickly learned how phony it was.  I was always just as interested in what happened behind the camera as I was in front of it, and quickly, you see what kind of mentality goes on in these Hollywood productions.  Most people in the industry do not think like Howard; he’s one of the great ones, but most think people are so stupid that they can manipulate the thoughts of mass society with the Hollywood image.  They miss the whole point, and the entire industry misses the truth.  Because they purposely live in a kind of entertainment bubble, they don’t get to talk to real people much, except when they do press junkets and comic cons and lose touch with reality.  I tasted that when I worked on projects, and a producer gave me my trailer to reside between takes. The line producers pamper you with union-standard assumptions.  I thought it was all interesting and for me, a dream come true career wise, but not very practical or sustainable.  I have the opposite way of viewing things as they do; I expect the people being photographed to be good people, turn on the camera, and capture a little bit of their natural essence, and that what is sold is worth investing your time and energy into. 

Ultimately, that’s why the Hollywood machine could never overtake Trump: He isn’t just an image; he’s a lot more in real life than what a camera can capture.  And Kamala Harris’ people thought that if they raised over a billion dollars, they could purchase an image and that voters would be dumb enough to buy it like they would the next Hollywood blockbuster.  That if the movie preview was good but the movie sucked, that people would still buy it.  And, of course, they didn’t.  Reading that book about Howard Kazanjian reminded me of how out of touch many in the movie industry are, even when they are the best in their field.  Ultimately, Hollywood is too slow and clunky to be relevant in the modern world, which is one reason their industry is dying.  The unions will not allow them to keep pace with YouTube content creators, and that’s where entertainment is headed.  People aren’t going to wait for three years for movie content anymore, teased well in advance.  And they aren’t going to buy the Hollywood product of making an image of a president of the United States without the substance of doing anything meaningful as a leader.  It all comes down to public opinion, and just because Hollywood can make an image, they can’t make people buy into it.  That is precisely the trouble the woke new Captain America movie is struggling with regarding test audiences.  The producers won’t be able to cut together enough coverage to fix the film because its merit is terrible, just like Kamala Harris.  More fancy camerawork won’t change the fact that people don’t like the characters in bad situations.  What would you expect if it’s a woke storyline coming from Disney these days? People aren’t going to buy it.  And they rejected Kamala for the same reasons.  Hollywood couldn’t make her.  Hollywood was, and will always be, a reflection of what people want to buy.  Not the creators of what people do buy.  That is a lesson Hollywood has never learned, which is why they are now perplexed.  And also why I do not work in that industry.  I can’t do the phony thing, for me, it has to be real.

Rich Hoffman

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