Midway through the most precarious decade in film history, 63 percent of soundstages in Los Angeles are empty—a new low. Georgia isn’t what it was 10 years ago, and forget about Baltimore—Hollywood hasn’t regularly brought productions to Maryland since the early-2000s. Baltimore was played for Baltimore in Sleepless in Seattle, The Accidental Tourist, The Bedroom Window, Step Up, and As Good as it Gets. And what happened to San Francisco? Cities, our real world, are hardly present in contemporary cinema. It’s all fantasyland and Australia for Las Vegas.
The movies have driven themselves into irrelevancy because they have so little relationship with the world as it is. The reasons are obvious: the rise of test screenings, marketing surveys, and executives and corporate representatives who’ll always play it safe. It’s not surprising that Brady Corbet shot his American epic The Brutalist in Hungary: he could make it there for under $10 million, and it would’ve been impossible here. For There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson shot Texas for California. Today, it would be New Zealand.
Who knows how Trump will enforce a “100% tariff” on films shot outside the United States, but he says he “wants Hollywood to be happy,” and I believe him. He’s the first president since Richard Nixon with an intense relationship with film and especially (obviously) the entertainment industry. For Nixon, it was Patton, which he screened regularly in his darkest days; for Trump, it’s Sunset Boulevard, a movie full of “imbecile producers” who “can’t see that they have a star.” Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama all watched far more movies than Trump, but they were average moviegoers—I’m not sure they have intensely personal relationships with movies. Ronald Reagan was the movies, he screened plenty, it effected his policy to the extent that he lived in the permanent parallel universe that is “the movies.” But he never had a fixation or a movie that saved his life.
Before 7:16 p.m. Sunday night, this wasn’t a political issue. Bringing production back to America and Los Angeles has been the mainstream position since the pandemic, the strikes, and the fires. So many people are out of work, and the man many of them hate the most wants to help. What’s going to happen? What on Earth is that meeting with the studios going to be like? “I want them to be happy.” Could Trump and the movie industry really stem the tide of China’s growing global cinematic influence? Erich Schwartzel’s Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy was published in 2022; this isn’t a political book. Schwartzel writes about how Hollywood caved to pressure from China in in the mid-1990s in order to finally secure distribution there; voluntary censorship began, and incendiary movies like Seven Years in Tibet and Kundun were buried (“Disney executives didn’t consider it a big loss. ’It’s not like burying Raging Bull,’ Peter Murphy thought to himself”).
At the same time, China was doing what we did after World War II: sending satellite dishes to Africa with Chinese branding and programming. Their film industry’s booming: The highest grossing movie of 2021 was Hi, Mom! (Brian De Palma was not involved). Nothing against the Chinese, or any other country where “runaway productions” end up—but wouldn’t it be nice to have a healthy film industry in America again? What if the Maryland film unions were like what they were in the 1980s and 1990s? This isn’t a lost art, and anyone who says so is either too lazy or can’t play the long game. People still want to go to the movies and have the kind of profound, quixotic relationship with film that Trump apparently has. Malnourished as it is, we can’t let that parallel universe die. If Donald Trump wants to help, why bother getting in his way? He’s not complaining about foreign films or anything “woke” (yet). He wants exactly what “Film Twitter” wants: a stronger, more technically sophisticated, and inspired Hollywood. I’d like Hollywood to return to the center of the universe. Hey man, nice shot.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @MonicaQuibbits