In March, columnist Ashe Schow looked at the current generation of extremely fragile young people on America’s elite college campuses and asked the question “what happens when all these delicate snowflakes enter the workforce?” Schow takes the position that the snowflakes in question are in for a rude awakening, and as much as I would like to believe that, I think she’s wrong. I think it’s more likely that the workplace will bend over backwards to accomodate them. I believe this because we’ve seen it happen over-and-over again, even at iconic American institutions like Disney, Anheuser-Bush and the New York Times.
Not long ago I was clearing out some old files and found two pages I’d photocopied in 1997 from John Gregory Dunne’s essential first person account of the perils of moviemaking, called MONSTER. From those two pages (185 & 186) I was inspired to re-read the book. It was a revelatory experience.
I was lucky enough to get to know John a little bit in the mid-90’s, during the period when the events described in “Monster” were actually occuring. He remains one of the smartest men I’ve ever known, but he was also outrageously funny and his “fuck you and the horse you rode in on” letter writing skills were legendary. The two pages I’d photocopied were a reprint of one of those fantastic letters. I still remember reading the letter as it came out of the fax machine on the day he sent it and thinking “ho-lee, shit…” Another letter, this one not printed in any book, in which he took the piss out of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, was so savage that even 29 years later I can still quote it from memory.
John’s indefatigable confidence was something of a lifeline for a young guy trying to figure out how to survive in an insane business, perhaps the apotheoisis of insane businesses. I remember thinking of John, “here is a guy who has figured it out… who knows exactly who he is and who will happily tell you to go jump in a lake if you don’t like it.”
He was, in a word, tough.
As you read through MONSTER, that’s the impression you get of the Hollywood of then.
It was tough.
And so were the people. They yelled at each other, they used offensive language, they called each other names and every now and then, not often, but occassionally, punches were thrown. But once the war was over, the movie finally completed, all the money spent and made, those same combatants would assemble at the premeire party of whatever movie they’d been working on together when they came to blows, hoist a cocktail and “hug it out” before gamely marching off to the next battle to do it all over again.
Most importantly, the work product… namely, the movies… were consistently great in a way they have not been for some time now.
And it’s worth noting here in the era of “smashing the patriarchy” that it wasn’t just the men who were tough. Woe be to he (or she) who wound up crosswise with the likes of Dawn Steel, Nancy Josephson, Sherry Lansing, Toni Howard, Gale Anne Hurd, Sue Mengers or Julia Phillips (among countless others). The female executives of the era might’ve been more likely to do it with a smile, but they’d still rip the beating heart right out of your chest if they decided it needed doing.
Thirty years ago, we weren’t concerned with shoehorning superficially “strong and empowered women” into every movie, because we didn’t need to. We were surrounded by them every day and felt no need to use the movies to pretend they didn’t exist for reasons both political and cultural.
John Gregory Dunne preferred working with the most “demanding” Producers in town. Dunne called them “Bully Boys”, and in one critical passage in his book, he explains why they were his preferred busines partners:
“The clout of the Bully Boys allows them to act as a baffle between you and the studio, sheilding you from those mind-deadening omnibus meetings at which everyone present feels the necessity to say something … the bad behavior they seldom take the trouble to refute—a choleric reputation can be an edge in Industry interpersonal relations—rarely takes into account that they are usually smart. If you let them know you will yell back when they yell at you, then they are more prone to listen—or else they fire you quickly.”
To survive in the Bully Boys era, perhaps the last era when the movie business was still a healthy going concern, I quickly learned that the secret was to have “a thick skin”… to let them know you will yell back, in Dunne’s terms.
I’ve been called every name in the book. I’ve had things thrown at me. I’ve had my career threatened many times. A Producer once told me “I have plenty of time in my day to focus on making your life miserable”… I laughed and told him, “then you must not be a very good Producer.” I haven’t been hung up on very many times over the course of my career, but I always thought that one was well-earned.
In the end I did survive. The old adage about sticks and stones and names turned out to be true. The new adage, that words are violence, did not.
The Bully Boys are all gone now. Yelling and harsh language have become verbotten in Hollywood, a cancellable offense in a business where words were once the currency of the realm. And that’s fine, as far as it goes. There is nothing wrong with expunging excess or unnecessary cruelty and abuse from the movie business. But the thing about pendulums is that they swing. Soon we were no longer targeting only the vile predators like Harvey Weinstein, but also the more pedestrian Hollywood “Monsters”, very broadly defined as anyone or anything which makes anybody feel uncomfortable in any way.
Just how far has the pendulum swung?
Consider this… for years, a friend of mine who is a partner at a firm which represents writers, directors and actors had a large bell installed on his office wall. Whenever an executive would close a big deal, they would run to the bell and ring it enthusiastically to the cheers and applause of colleagues up and down the halls.
Recently my friend was contacted by the dreaded H.R. department. Several assistants had complained about the bell. They didn’t like the public celebrations over clients making mutli-million dollar deals because it made them feel badly about their own financial situations. It was, as the saying goes, “triggering” for them.
The bell had to go.
The movie business is high-risk/high-reward. The people who are drawn to it, men and women both, tend to be aggressive over-achieving “Alphas” for whom the desire to win is a deeply ingrained characteristic. In that sense, gimmicks like my friend’s bell are great motivators for exactly the kind of people who succeed in high pressure environments like Hollywood because it fosters a healthy sense of competition. There was a time when at each ringing of the bell, the other employees at the firm, executives and assistants both, would resolve to become the next person who would ring it and then charge out into the world to manifest that resolve into reality.
But now, that’s all gone at my friend’s firm. These days, the excitement of closing a big deal happens quietly behind closed doors where no one is in danger of hearing anything about it. Everyone’s feelings have been properly sequestered away in their safe spaces. Contra Ashe Schow, the “snowflakes” won.
Have changes like this been good for the business? I’d argue no. To put it in sports terms, you might as well outlaw locker room victory celebrations in the NFL because it might make the other team feel badly about the fact that they lost. The catharsis of the victory celebration is, for the kind of people who love to win, the juice that makes the squeeze worthwhile. Take it away, and you take away some of the reason for pursuing victory in the first place. This is just basic human nature.
Earlier I said that to survive in the last great era of Hollywood, you had to be tough. By contrast, Modern Hollywood seems to foster a kind of studied anti-toughness… emotionally fragile creatives for whom even the mildest of strong language can trigger real emotional and psychological trauma… witness the ridiculous Dave Chappelle protests at Netflix, for example. These “Anti-Toughs” often co-exist tenuously alongside Executives who walk through their offices on carpets of eggshells and live in fear of being the subject of the next great #CancelCulture scalp hunt in Vanity Fair or Deadline.
The results for the industry, as exemplfied by the story of my friend’s victory bell, have been paralyzing. No one understands where the boundaries are anymore, because the boundaries are constantly changing in ways that would’ve made Lavrentiy Beria smile. What is acceptable behavior one morning, might be unacceptable by lunchtime that same day. And the risk of crossing a line is so great that no one dares to walk right up to the edge, which is often, as John Dunne might have said, where the best creativity is born.
I’m reminded of a scene from the original ROAD HOUSE… Patrick Swayze is holding a training session for his crew of bouncers and explaining to them that the patrons are going to call them names in an attempt to get a rise out of them. Swayze advises them to ignore the insults… “I want you to be nice”, he says “I want you to remember that it’s just a job, it’s not personal.” One of the bouncers-in-training counters “being called a cocksucker isn’t personal?” “No…” says Swayze, the interpersonal combat guru, “it’s two nouns combined to elicit a proscribed response.”
“What if my boss calls me a fucking idiot?” a young prospective Hollywood assistant might ask me…
To which I might respond, “are you?”
The thing is, most of us need to be pushed beyond our limits to find out what we are capable of achieving. If we are never exposed to the kinds of bosses who might actually push us beyond our self-perceived limits because our feelings might get hurt, we might never have the chance to reach our true potential. Hollywood used to make movies about this phenomenon all the time.
Unfortunately for Ashe Schow’s “snowflakes”, this is not the message modern Hollywood is delivering. Rather, like most American businesses, it’s telling young people that no job or boss should ever make them feel stressed, anxious, disappointed or overworked… that they must never expose themselves to the runaway success of others lest it damage their own fragile self-esteem… and that they should never, ever, have to work for a demanding boss. One result of this seismic shift in corporate culture is that fewer young people are being pushed to reach their true potential.
I suspect this will not have a salutory effect on Hollywood’s financial woes, nor on the quality of the movies it produces.
In the words of The Sundance Kid… “Well, we’ve gone straight… what do we try now?”
Now is a great time to pre-order Michael Walsh’s collection of essays “Against The Corporate Media” featuring 42 essays by Conservative industry professionals (including Kurt Schlichter, Andrew Klavan, Glenn Reynolds, and ME!) about how you can fight back against a media culture which dislikes you as much as you dislike it.
As you pointed out, the pendulum swings. It will swing back when the people in charge realize that the cost of appeasing the snowflakes is higher than the cost of offending them, and that there are people out there who can do the snowflakes' jobs without all the drama.
At one time called striving for excellence. Or simply-- Glory.