Hollywood in a Trump era

PARK CITY, Utah — To get to a Sundance Film Festival, Hollywood never had to set feet in Trump country.

Like many gilded ski towns in a West, Park City is a magnanimous citadel in a sea of conservatism. Donald Trump won Utah by 18 points, yet here in Summit County he mislaid by 15. Flying from Burbank or Brooklyn to Salt Lake, afterwards by automobile into a mountains, celebrities and executives were absolutely in on-going territory.

But even during Sundance, that kicks off this weekend, a new domestic existence is inescapable. Trump’s coronation took place only hours before a opening parties, casting a relations cover over a festivities. Weeks ago, a Hollywood A-list danced with a Obamas during a White House. On Friday, that building was assigned by a male who offends all their political, dignified and cultured sensibilities.

Hollywood — that is to say, Hollywood’s magnanimous artistic category — feels threatened. “All of us in this room unequivocally go to a many vilified segments in American multitude right now,” Meryl Streep pronounced during a Golden Globes.

In a pages of The New York Times, Hollywood angst has many turn subgenre: Judd Apatow is in Santa Monica, stress-eating (“There’s so many things that are tough to hear each day that we do wish to have some Oreos”); Bill Maher is in Beverly Hills, self-medicating with ethanol and marijuana.

“This village was overwhelmingly anti-Trump, positively some-more so than a republic as a whole,” Andy Spahn, one of a tip consultants to Hollywood’s many absolute domestic fundraisers, told CNNMoney. “This is a village secure in speech, in community, in inclusiveness. There is a clarity some of those values might be threatened underneath a Trump administration, really directly. Some of that fear and angst is really personal and really credible.”

Questions abound: What is Hollywood ostensible to do? How is a artistic attention ostensible to respond? What is a purpose of magnanimous enlightenment in a Trump era?

On a domestic front, Hollywood, like most of a on-going community, is still in a formulation stages. “We’ve been articulate to all a centers of energy in Washington,” Spahn said, “from a Obama stay to a Center for American Progress to David Brock to Chuck Schumer, and we’re operative a proceed by how we can minister best going forward. The dirt hasn’t settled.”

But there is also a doubt of what Hollywood creates — a films and shows and other art it creates in response to a new reality. And with that, another question: Does it even matter?

The republic is polarized along informative lines. As maps published recently by The Upshot show, there is a Duck Dynasty America and a Modern Family America, and never a twain shall meet. When Streep done an interest to doubtful Americans — about how Hollywood was only unchanging folks like we and me — it wasn’t transparent they were listening.

“Both Trump and Obama are really most deputy of what America is, it’s only dual opposite sides of America,” Graydon Carter, a editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, told CNNMoney. “I don’t consider we can pronounce over your burble in this fragmented media environment. The days of ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’ and a final partial of ‘Mash'” — when Americans from all around a republic collected around their televisions to watch a same thing — “are prolonged gone.”

“The artistic category talks about a work as ‘culture,’ yet far-reaching swaths of a republic aren’t even tuning in,” Dr. Andrew Hartman, a author of “A War for a Soul Of America: A History of a Culture Wars,” said. “Modern Family? Nobody in Mississippi is examination that.”

Of course, Hollywood also creates, produces and owns many of a shows that are watched in Mississippi and opposite Trump’s America. “All of these things are entrance out of ‘liberal Hollywood,’ either it’s ‘Survivor’ or other existence TV, it’s a same artistic village that’s generating these manifold properties,” Spahn forked out. Like Streep during a Globes, he also reiterated that Hollywood’s creators “come from all over,” with “roots in Ohio and Indiana and Mississippi.”

“People infrequently forget that behaving — it’s frequency a pursuit where we join your fathers company,” he said. “You start with zero and we labor prolonged and tough to get a break.”

Still, there has prolonged been a clarity among conservatives that Hollywood’s magnanimous chosen force their values down America’s throats, and that view has grown some-more heated in new years.

Before Trump won a election, regressive columnist Ross Douthat argued that “the enlightenment industry” had turn so aggressively magnanimous that it had left everybody “outside a magnanimous tent” feeling “suffocated by a left’s informative dominance.”

“To flip from Stephen Colbert’s charming liberalism to Seth Meyers’s class-clown liberalism to [Samantha] Bee’s censor feminism to John Oliver’s and Trevor Noah’s lectures on American benightedness is to enter an relate cover from that a imagination struggles to escape,” Douthat wrote. “It isn’t only late-night TV. Cultural arenas and institutions that were always magnanimous are being prodded or dragged serve to a left. Awards shows are being pushed to strew their stately limousine liberalism and welcome a race-gender-sexual temperament bulletin in full.”

Erick Erickson, a regressive pundit, pronounced he concluded with Douthat’s conclusion, and that a enlightenment attention “seemed committed to silencing gainsay and determining that some views hold by around half a republic are hostis humani generis.”

“I consider Hollywood suffered underneath a suspicion that a republic had incited dramatically in their direction,” Erickson pronounced in an email. “Yes, we consider a republic has shifted a bit to a left, yet not as most as Hollywood thought.” He also bemoaned Hollywood’s bent to endowment films “that blemish a Hollywood itch,” yet do not have mass marketplace appeal. “They make cinema that make them feel good,” he said.

Hartman, who identified himself as a liberal, likewise argued that a Hollywood chosen “are not really politically shrewd in terms of bargain far-reaching swaths of America. They get together during awards shows and pat themselves on a behind and consider they’re vocalization for a partial of a enlightenment that is implicitly superior.”

“To me, Meryl Streep’s debate seemed culturally obtuse,” he said.

More than dual months given Trump’s overwhelming upset, Hollywood’s liberals haven’t shown most enterprise to strech opposite a ideological order

Samantha Bee, a late-night horde and element aim of Douthat’s column, told CNNMoney there was no devise to change her proceed since of Trump’s victory. “We’re doing a uncover that is vocalization to us,” she said. “We’re not creation a uncover formed on an algorithm of who we’re reaching or what a metrics are.”

Maher has likewise betrothed to give his magnanimous audiences a same thing he has always given them: “Let’s not go too distant with a changes, since what people are going to wish right now is comfort food,” he recently told Variety.

Like “La La Land,” that was all a fury during a Golden Globes, most of what people are buzzing about during Sundance this year seems to strengthen Hollywood’s picture of itself. Al Gore is in city to premier his latest meridian change documentary, “An Inconvenient Sequel.” The much-discussed comedy “The Big Sick” seeks to offer a new description of Muslim life. Outside a theaters, Chelsea Handler will be heading a Women’s Mar opposite a male she has described as “Our Predator-in-Chief.”

After Sundance, Hollywood will continue to siphon out blockbuster movement cinema like “X-Men” and “Star Wars,” in that a temperament of a heroes and villains is open to interpretation. (In a magnanimous imagination, “Star Wars” is a story of polyglot progressives fighting a restraint of an all-white fascism. In a regressive imagination, it’s a brute rope of patriots fighting a restraint of sovereign government.)

Meanwhile, Americans will increasingly stay home, where calm is on-demand and progressives can suffer joke and escapism while conservatives pleasure in existence shows and crime dramas. What’s blank is a common narrative, some clarity that we’re all holding partial in a same story.

So, what is Hollywood’s new story?

For years, film studios have capitalized on aged stories: Remakes of films that didn’t need to be remade; sequels that frequency lived adult to a originals; franchises formed on consumer products like Legos and video games.

Sundance is indeed one of a few places where new stories still get told. Soon, maybe — yet maybe not this year — there will be one that bridges a informative divide.

“Hollywood reflects what is function in a nation,” Spahn said. “There can be a prolongation loiter in terms of a time it takes to put a film on a screen, yet via a story and in opposite durations Hollywood has always reflected events in a nation.”

— CNN’s Sandra Gonzalez contributed reporting.

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