LOS ANGELES—On a crisp November evening three weeks after the election, about 600 local activists gathered on a sound stage at the old Mack Sennett studios in Silver Lake where nearly a century ago the Keystone Cops slipped on banana peels and dodged pies in the face. These avatars of Hollywood liberalism had just suffered a similar humiliation and had come to figure out how to pick themselves up and start all over again in Donald Trump’s America.
The crowd, which quickly overflowed the available seats and sat on the bare floor, had been convened by Beau Willimon, the creator of the Netflix series “House of Cards,” and a still-idealistic veteran of Howard Dean’s insurgent 2004 presidential campaign. As Willimon took the microphone, a gray scrim hanging behind him bore the projected exhortation: SIGN UP— ACTIONGROUPS.NET, a pitch for Willimon’s informal network of grass-roots efforts. The disheartened but tentatively defiant message of the evening: “I won’t quit—if you don’t quit.”
It was not supposed to be like this, a defeated army sitting on the floor of an empty sound stage grasping for a chance at political impact. This was the class of people who were supposed to have a reserved seat at the table at Hillary Clinton’s first White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Now, like the deep-pocketed celebrities and industry titans who by one reliable estimate had raised some $60 million for her candidacy here, they were suddenly out in the cold. On the floor.
The new relationship between Hollywood and the incoming White House was on stark display this month when Meryl Streep took to the stage at the Golden Globes to say—without naming the incoming president—that Trump’s mocking of a disabled reporter “broke my heart,” and Trump fired back in the New York Times and on Twitter, calling the three-time Oscar winner “one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood,” and just another of the “liberal movie people” he’d expect to attack him.
Zip Code 90210 and environs has long been one of the Democratic Party’s most reliable ATM branches, the town where rich liberals can feel better about being rich by contributing to causes that prove their liberal bona fides and let them rub shoulders with real power. Celebrities like Magic Johnson, Seth MacFarlane, Lionel Richie and George Clooney—together with moguls like Jeffrey Katzenberg, Bob Iger, Haim Saban, Barry Diller and Michael Eisner—had held dozens of fundraisers for Clinton, or entertained for free to support her, over the past two years.
Hollywood’s top Democratic players were all set to watch one fellow liberal superstar, Barack Obama, pass the torch to another, Clinton herself. They were planning their inauguration parties, polishing their résumés and, in some cases, measuring the drapes in embassies around the world. Instead, they faced a shocking overnight reversal, as if a big budget movie that the tracking polls had guaranteed would be a blockbuster inexplicably tanked on opening weekend with no warning. A cadre of megastars and megadonors that had counted on four or eight more years of Access Washington, that has been happily benefiting from the psychic and social rewards of the increasing intermingling of celebrity culture and Democratic politics, suddenly found the door to the White House slammed squarely in its face.
And the rejection came with an extra, and especially scary, sting: It turned out that the industry supposedly known for having its finger on the popular pulse didn’t understand America—“red America,” the “real America,” the “rest of America”—at all.
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The first thing to go was the parties. On the morning after the election, People for the American Way, the liberal advocacy group founded by Norman Lear, whose foundation and board members include Alec Baldwin, Kathleen Baldwin and Jane Lynch, promptly released a ballroom it had reserved at the Willard Hotel in Washington for an inauguration week party. Other groups followed suit.
Instead of galas, there were suddenly shivas. And earnest exercises in group-therapy-as-action like Willimon’s gatherings. One senior network executive held a Thanksgiving dinner for 22 people at which he put out cards with the contact information for organizations like Planned Parenthood and the Natural Resources Defense Council—causes suggested by HBO’s John Oliver in his post-election show. By the end of the meal, all were taken.
Other people started thinking even more strategically. Prospective donors have sounded out the possibilities of Electoral College reform, or nonpartisan congressional redistricting, or the best Democratic prospects for the 2018 Senate races. There has also been denial and cocooning, More than a few liberals report that they have faced the rise of the alt-right movement by just retreating and binge-watching the idealistic alt-reality of all seven seasons of “The West Wing.”
“My sense, in psychiatric terms, is that everybody is still ‘splitting,’” says a longtime political consultant to major entertainment figures, speaking on condition of anonymity so as not to offend clients. “They’re putting the election result on the shelf and are in some kind of denial, so they can just keep putting one foot in front of the other. It came as such a huge shock. People believed, understandably enough, that everything that could be done was being done and it was being done well.”
Andy Spahn, perhaps Hollywood’s leading fundraising consultant to the powerful, with clients like Katzenberg and, over the years, Steven Spielberg and David Geffen, says, “I have seen numbness, fear, resolve—I don’t think there’s a consensus.” Spahn cut his teeth as a Hollywood politico 40 years ago as political director for Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda, and in recent years has been L.A.’s most prominent liaison to both Obamaland and Clintonworld. “There were people who went through a period of disbelief, others who were in fear about what this might mean, and then those like us who immediately are focused on, ‘OK, what do we do now?’”
Spahn’s clients and contacts were involved in giving or raising a large share of Clinton’s total estimated Hollywood haul, and Spahn himself, a longtime leader of educational and cultural contacts with Cuba, was a logical candidate for ambassador to Havana. He is far from the only one whose job prospects and ambitions changed overnight.
“I have a stack of résumés on my desk” that aren’t going anywhere, says one prominent Democratic fundraiser who had been vetting and funneling résumés for a Clinton administration-in-waiting.
Another longtime consultant to major celebrities acknowledges that the Hollywood mood is sour, with some of the town’s biggest stars arrayed in a circular firing squad at the Clintons, the media, FBI director James Comey and one another. “The people I’m close to are mad at everybody,” he says. “And when they get over being mad at everybody, then they start pointing fingers at everybody. People are really mad. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
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What is it about Hollywood and politics? Celebrities have been lending their names to political candidates and causes ever since Bing Crosby endorsed Wendell Willkie in 1940 and Frank Sinatra helped really break the prevailing code of noninvolvement by coming out strongly in favor of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s reelection in 1944. But as an industry, Hollywood has relatively little at stake in politics, and comparatively little to gain from any president in today’s largely deregulated media environment.
There was a time when Hollywood needed major legal and regulatory help from Washington—whether on anti-trust rules governing studios and talent agencies, or syndication policies for television programming—and moguls like the late Lew Wasserman of MCA and Universal cultivated presidents from Lyndon Johnson to Bill Clinton. Those battles were mostly won (or in some cases, more or less lost for good in the wilds of the internet), so for most entertainment industry figures, stars and executives alike, today’s rewards are more psychic and emotional: face time with the president, a sleepover in the White House, a ride on Air Force One, a seat on the Kennedy Center board.
“The thing about the creative community, they don’t want anything from government,” says Ken Sunshine, a veteran publicist who represents clients like Barbra Streisand, Ben Affleck, Leonardo DiCaprio and Natalie Portman. “You know why the chemical industry is involved politically. You know why the oil companies are. Why is the entertainment industry involved? Whatever copyright issues that may be governmentally related are bipartisan. People are involved because they want to make the world better, and frankly because they share the values of people like the Clintons, as opposed to some of the folks on the other side.”
Given the reliably deep blue political cast of California itself, not to mention Beverly Hills and Brentwood, there is also considerable peer pressure in the industry not only to be progressive but to be seen as being progressive, by showing up for the right causes—Darfur, abortion rights, clean energy, AIDS eradication—and offering up the right endorsements.
Still, at least a few moguls are already treading gingerly, feeling out the new opposition to see whether they can remain a part of the conversation and make their views and priorities heard in Washington.
Disney chairman and chief executive Robert Iger, who raised money for Clinton, accepted an invitation to serve on Trump’s bipartisan “strategic and policy forum,” which also includes such Democratic donors as JP Morgan Chase & Co’s Jamie Dimon and is to be chaired by Steven Schwarzman, chief executive of the Blackstone Group investment bank. Asked about Iger’s participation, a Disney spokeswoman sent a statement in his name, explaining, “The forum provides a nonpartisan approach to key economic policy issues, reflecting an array of individual perspectives from a cross section of industries. I welcome the chance to be part of the important discussions about the most effective ways to grow jobs and expand economic opportunity in America.”
Iger’s not the only one willing to try a dance with the new team. Leonardo DiCaprio took two post-election meetings with Donald Trump and his daughter Ivanka to press his views on climate change. It’s not clear how much his star power carried: The second meeting happened the very night that Trump was naming Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a prominent skeptic of climate change, to head the Environmental Protection Agency.
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A real question for the entertainment industry moguls who have had a prominent seat at the table in the Obama administration and were expecting perhaps an even bigger role in a second Clinton presidency, is whether Trump’s presidency will pose a kind of crisis of conscience—or confidence—for their business, or for the mass culture products they produce.
Trump’s team does have some industry ties, but they’re neither deep nor wide. He has a long and lucrative partnership with the reality TV show czar Mark Burnett, who helped propel Trump to nationwide celebrity and is helping to plan some of his inaugural festivities. Trump has said he will remain an executive producer on “The Celebrity Apprentice,” which he co-founded with Burnett. Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s pick as Treasury secretary, is a former Goldman Sachs investment banker who has enjoyed some success as a co-financier of Hollywood movies with Brett Ratner and James Packer, but is viewed with skepticism by some industry professionals and has never been seen as a major player here.
The synergies between Washington and the Hollywood fundraising-industrial complex will look a lot different under a Trump presidency than they would have under a Clinton restoration. And so, presumably, might the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which in recent years has become a near-seamless fusion of entertainment and politics.
A few Scott Baios, Gary Buseys and Jackie Evanchos on the Trump side do not equal the raft of Matt Damons, Ben Afflecks, Meryl Streeps and Sally Fields who would have peopled a Clinton celebrity Cabinet. Partly as a result of this reality, Trump’s victory has prompted not only anger and recrimination in Los Angeles, but a certain amount of soul-searching as well. It turns out that, at least in the short term, Trump’s skills at entertainment outstripped Hollywood’s own—a reality that Streep herself acknowledged in summing up his campaign performance as one that “stunned” her, “not because it was good. There was nothing good about it. But it was effective, and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh, and show their teeth.”
A prominent network executive summed up the sense of shock in the industry to me. “One thing interesting is that people in L.A. and Hollywood, we supposedly have our finger on the pulse of the American people,” he said. “And one of the things that people feel truly rocked by now—truly rocked—is that those of us who spend our lives anticipating and understanding the tastes and the preferences of the American people suddenly have to wonder whether what we’re feeling is causing us to make, for a large part of the audience, the wrong thing. And that the agenda a lot of our creators have is a reinforcing loop of a lot of things that people have just rejected.
“Because,” the executive added, “people here exist in a closed feedback loop and writers’ rooms that are similarly liberal, where nobody voted for Donald Trump. So their feedback is completely distorted on the meaning of this, and what to do about it.”
Hollywood is always a bit surprised when a Christian-themed movie or a red-meat patriotic film like “American Sniper” becomes a hit, because such works embody a basic conservative value set that most of the industry doesn’t share.
“Everyone sits around the writers’ rooms or on a notes call and nods in agreement and that’s how we get shows like ‘Transparent’ and ‘American Crime Story,’” says Quinton Peoples, a writer and the producer of shows like Hulu’s recent Stephen King adaptation “11-22-63” and TNT’s “The Last Ship,” who also happens to be that rarity in Hollywood, a practicing Christian. “Now, I’m not arguing that’s a bad thing. I’m just pointing out how it works. Then we have a bunch of awards shows to pat each other on the back and talk about what a challenge it has been to bring the ‘truth’ to television.”
“I can’t count the times I have gone out with pitches that represent the point of view I grew up with in small-town Texas, only to find there is no appetite for something that is derisively referred to as a red state show,” Peoples adds. “Because no one can go to a kids’ birthday party over the weekend and brag about the great numbers they are getting with their ‘Dukes of Hazzard’ reboot. And at the end of the day, that’s what they want on a personal level: to have someone whisper as they pass, ‘That’s the “Black Mirror” guy.’ ”
Some of liberal Hollywood’s most recent forays into electoral politics clearly backfired. Joss Whedon, creator of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and director of such hits as “The Avengers,” produced a video for his pro-Clinton Save the Day super PAC last fall, featuring a raft of stars like Robert Downey Jr., Don Cheadle, Scarlett Johanssson, Martin Sheen, Mark Ruffalo, Julianne Moore, James Franco, Neil Patrick Harris, Stanley Tucci and Rosie Perez insisting that the country was facing “one of the most important decisions in its history,” with Downey cheekily saying, “The only way we can prove that to you is by having lots of famous people” repeating just how important it is. The video was meant to be a hip, ironic outreach to wavering voters, including millennials. But in the cold light of defeat it can be read as just smug.
Indeed, a common theme of conversations with Hollywood liberals in recent weeks is that they have been missing something, that they need to work harder to understand the feelings and concerns of voters in the broad heart of the country, whether by somehow reaching out on an individual basis to friends and relatives in red states, or by reading “Hillbilly Elegy,” J.D. Vance’s memoir about his upbringing in Appalachia, which has become a kind of ur-text for liberals belatedly seeking to understand the disaffection of tens of millions of their fellow Americans. It would be easy enough to mock this impulse as a fatuous, too little, too late recognition of what any viewer of “Duck Dynasty” already knew in his heart, but one hears it repeated over and over with utmost sincerity.
Some of the angst has been channeled into positive energy. The actress and writer Claudette Sutherland, best known for playing Smitty the secretary in the original Broadway production of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” attended the Willamon event and reported “a remarkably diverse group of people,” with a mood that was “impressive, hopeful and passionate,” adding: “This way of categorizing was important because, since every single aspect of government is under assault, it’s difficult to maintain focus.”
“I would say the feeling is a combination of shock and awe and terror,” says Lara Bergthold, who got her start working for the Hollywood Women’s Political Committee more than 25 years ago and has, as a consultant, since attended to the political interests and causes of prominent liberals including Norman Lear and Rob Reiner. “And I do think that a lot of people have resolved that for a lot of people in this town who came from different backgrounds—they didn’t grow up in Hollywood, they grew up in some other part of the country and they have middle-class backgrounds—that the ability to write a check is great, but it’s not enough.”
Still another prominent entertainment industry leader, who over the years was a major fundraiser for both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, believes it’s time for fresh blood—not only among national Democratic candidates and office-holders, but in the Hollywood donor community that was dominated this cycle by people like Spahn and his longtime client Katzenberg, a co-founder of Dreamworks. There is at least some feeling that a Hollywood community that once held itself out as new and hopeful has become just as entrenched and guilty of analog thinking as the Washington establishment that Clinton represented and Trump railed against.
“I’ll tell you one thing people are thrilled about is, they’re not going to hear from Jeffrey Katzenberg every four minutes,” this person says, referring to the tireless efforts of fundraising bundlers like Katzenberg who prevailed on Hollywood colleagues to cough up not just the hard-money maximums of $2,700 each for Clinton’s primary and general election campaigns but to tap their personal networks again and again for more. “I think people kind of feel that there should be a new group of people in the forefront, not the same old people the Democrats have been pushing— including Nancy Pelosi. You’re certainly not going to have any change with people who don’t look like change.”
Still, this mogul acknowledges, “I think people are very disappointed that Hillary did not win. Nobody that I talked to thought Donald Trump had a chance, and he won. For the things that left-leaning people in Hollywood care about, Jeff Sessions as attorney general is reason enough to be afraid.” And Trump has, unnervingly, shown a willingness to extend personal fights to specific celebrities or shows, not only going after Streep, but directly criticizing Arnold Schwarzenegger, the new host of “Celebrity Apprentice”—from which Trump makes money—because Arnold spoke out against him as a candidate. Not every White House has been as Hollywood-friendly as Obama’s, but it’s fair to say that neither has Hollywood really been in open warfare with a sitting president—even Richard Nixon, who may have loathed liberals but loved John Wayne and John Ford, Ginger Rogers and Jackie Gleason.
The immediate challenge for Hollywood liberals now is how to matter, how to signify, when their party is out of power. Will the collective frustration be channeled into a competition to show just who is the biggest anti-Trump crusader in the pack? At least one prominent industry consultant suggests that some people already feel the best strategy is to do everything possible to drive Trump’s poll numbers down in the next two years, in the way that Congressional and Tea Party Republicans worked to undermine Obama with implacable opposition in his first two years, leading to the Republicans winning back the House in 2010.
And what will be the impact on Hollywood’s real product, entertainment itself? Will there be a rash of programs like “The Real Housewives of Trumbull County, Ohio,” where the CNN contributor Van Jones has already plumbed voter sentiment? A spate of feel-good, shoot-’em-up anti-terrorists thrillers echoing the Reagan era’s “Rambo”? Or given Hollywood’s inveterate propensity to turn its gaze inward, perhaps we can look forward to a batch of bittersweet romantic comedies about suddenly alienated power brokers and image-makers trying to find their way back to a place in the sun.