Hollywood and the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon

Last month a study came out which suggested that Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs have had the perverse effect of increasing workplace hostility and making racial tensions worse. This is an example of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, more commonly known as “Recency Bias” or “Frequency Illusion”, which is a form of cognitive bias that causes people to notice a concept more frequently after becoming aware of it. In the case of institutional racism, this study finds, people exposed to DEI programs will often see racism even where it doesn’t exist.

Now it would be tempting to roll one’s eyes at the words “study finds.” After all, the “study finds” industry hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory over the last ten years, and as Kevin Costner said in JFK, “theoretical physics can prove that an elephant can hang from a cliff with its tail tied to a daisy”, but in at least one very specific case, I can tell you that this study is 100% correct. I’ve seen it happen right here in Hollywood, where I have lived and worked for 35 years.

First, a little historical context. Hollywood is (obviously) a politically Progressive industry and has been at the vanguard of the Civil Rights movement since its inception. Studio blockbusters about the evils of racism have been standard Hollywood fare going back at least as far as “No Way Out” (1950), “Bad Day at Black Rock” (1955), “The Defiant Ones” (1958) and “Judgment at Nuremberg” (1961). Sidney Poitier’s anti-racist trifecta “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”, “In The Heat of the Night” and “To Sir, With Love” was greenlit during the violent clashes over the passage of the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965), and released two years later, in 1967.

It can’t have been an easy decision for the major studios, which were even more reliant upon white audiences in the 1960’s than they are now, to greenlight those movies at a time when Bull Connor was setting police dogs and fire hoses on Civil Rights protesters in Birmingham, Voting Rights workers were being murdered in Mississippi and Martin Luther King was marching on Selma. Nor could it have been easy for movie stars like Paul Newman, Charlton Heston, Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis Jr, Marlon Brando and Burt Lancaster to march alongside MLK… but they did it, because it was the right thing to do. And for their courage, history has placed those studios and those stars on the right side of justice.

But you wouldn’t know it to work in Hollywood today, where the movie business is presumed by many to be more systemically and irredeemably racist than ever before.

So, what the hell happened?

Late in 2007 I was invited to a Rudy Giuliani fundraiser by a senior Hollywood executive who had once worked for the infamously ruthless GOP strategist Lee Atwater before coming to Hollywood. I was looking to get into California GOP politics back in those days (I have since come to my senses), so I wrote a check and gamely went out to a generic hotel ballroom in Century City… mostly because the great Dennis Miller was doing a set to warm up the crowd.

The next Fall, in the heat of the 2008 Presidential campaign I ran into this same executive in a bar and asked him his thoughts on the state of the race. I don’t remember exactly what he said but I do remember the message. He was voting for Barack Obama, he told me. He was inspired by the man and his message and he hoped that by electing Obama, we could put our long ugly history of racial animus aside and finally realize the goals of our founding documents which promised that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.

This hopeful aspiration was a common American refrain that year, especially in the movie business where, my Lee Atwater alumnus friend excluded, folks tend to lean Progressive and often come to Hollywood with hopes of changing the world for the better while they pursue riches and fame. And indeed Obama’s victory was almost universally cheered across Hollywood and hailed as the culmination of a successful sixty-year effort by the movie business to make good on the promise of America.

But there were those who were not happy with this positive development… a vast class of activists and racial grifters who saw in Obama’s election not the fullfillment of a promise, but the end of a lucrative gravy train. And so, this activist class set about making the argument that the election was not a sign that America’s racial wounds were healing but rather, that in spite of Obama’s ascension, America remained a dark and fallen nation incapable and unworthy of redemption. Furthermore, they argued, America’s fundamentally racist power structure not only continued to endure, but that racial disparities in America had never been worse, the oppression never more intentional.

Nowhere were these activists more successful than in the news media and Hollywood. Hashtag campaigns like #OscarsSoWhite convinced the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to upend the way members are invited to join and to place racial quotas on movies which aspire to a Best Picture nomination. Seemingly overnight, the industry became obsessed with finding ways to change legacy titles and characters in ways that would appeal to “modern audiences.” And Nikole Hannah Jones’ odious 1619 Project which placed slavery and racial subjugation at the beating heart of the American experiment had multiple suitors fighting for the right to create movies and TV shows based on her deliberately flawed historical conclusions.

These campaigns worked so spectacularly well that here at the tail end of 2024, Hollywood executives, creatives and representatives, fully in the thrall of Baader-Meinhof, see racism everywhere they look. Incredibly, it has somehow become an article of faith that what has always been America’s most Progressive industry, now actively schemes to prevent women and people of color from becoming successful. And in order to ameliorate this, we have fundamentally altered the manner in which movies are developed, greenlit and made in ways that have done great damage to the delicate art of filmmaking, to say nothing of the industry’s bottom line.

One of the most corrosive concepts to come out of the “anti-racist” movement in Hollywood over the last ten years has been the idea of “Representation.” This concept holds that audiences will not go to the theater to see a movie unless the characters “look like they do.” The idea behind “Representation” is comically ridiculous on its face. After all, white audiences lined up by the millions to see every movie Eddie Murphy and Will Smith ever made, just as black audiences lined up to see every movie Arnold and Sly ever made. But the idea has also proved irresistible to a Progressive Hollywood with an overactive sense of guilt over a past that is long gone and in spite of more recent and heroic anti-racist efforts it can no longer remember being a part of.

And the thing is, we’ve been doing this “Representation” dance in Hollywood for a decade now, and we have more than enough data available to conclude that not only is the practice hurting the quality of the movies Holywood makes, not only have the “new” audiences we were promised never actually shown up, but also that it is completely unnecessary.

To see how, we need to look at a wildly successful movie like “Kung Fu Panda” which removes race from the equation entirely, by telling a story where animals fill in for the human characters. No one in the audience for “Kung Fu Panda” was a panda (or a tiger, or a snake, or a crane for that matter), nor did anyone live in feudal China, and very few of us are practitioners of Kung Fu. And yet despite the fact that there is zero “Representation” in the movie, as the grifters define it, the movie has become a much-beloved animated classic, popular with audiences of every race, age, sex and creed.

This movie magic happened because the makers of “Kung Fu Panda” understood a fundamental truth… that big studio movies are mass entertainment, they are not a niche product. In order to be successful, that is in order to reach the largest possible audience, movies must explore universal themes and struggles that everyone can understand and appreciate no matter who they are.

“Kung Fu Panda” is about a character who feels like an outsider, who isn’t sure where he belongs and who has a dream that sometimes feels impossible to achieve. In the end, he has to find what is special and unique about himself and use that god-given gift to overcome overwhelming odds and save the day. There is not a single person reading this essay who has not felt like an outsider at some time in his or her life. And every single one of us has had to find what is special about ourselves in order to flourish in our lives. This is a universal theme which can be understood and appreciated by everyone in America… white, black, man, woman, straight, gay, trans, thin, fat, one-legged, one-eyed, one-horned flying purple people eater… whatever.

In the end, audiences did not identify with Rocky Balboa, John McClane, Riggs and Murtaugh, Indiana Jones, the crew of the Enterprise, Sarah Connor, Captain Steve Hiller, Cates and Hammond, Ripley, Chief Brody, Virgil Tibbs, Luke, Han and Leia, Agent J, or Axel Foley because of the color of their skin or what’s between their legs. We identified with those characters because the themes they explored and the struggles they faced were universal to the human experience.

This is how it used to be at the movies… back when everyone went to the theater every weekend, diverse movie stars were plentiful and Hollywood was making money hand-over-fist. And it could be again…

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