A little bitching and moaning about Hollywood

We need triggering stories now more than ever.

I haven’t written much about it in this newsletter, but, in my life before long COVID, I worked in Hollywood. First at a broadcast network - an experience that inspired my novel, NSFW - and then at a literary agency, where I developed book-to-screen adaptations. I’ve been meaning to write a piece about the book-to-screen process and the real reasons so many projects die in development - it’s all shrouded in so much mystery, and even authors are often privy to very little about the process. When their projects die, they often receive explanations that range from inadequate to infuriating.

On the infuriating end of the scale: The author Jodi Picoult just posted a TikTok video about a just-canceled screen adaptation of her 2021 novel, WISH YOU WERE HERE, which had been in development at a streamer. Picoult doesn’t name the streamer, but a five second search reveals it’s Netflix. There are a million and one often annoying reasons that projects die in development, but the reason Picoult was given is a new low:

“With the new regime, they don’t want to do a storyline around Covid.”

@jodipicoultWhy more of my books aren’t movies…

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I have no way of knowing if that was the actual reason Picoult’s project got cancelled. Things get lost - or deliberately massaged - during the game of telephone, which generally goes: Network/streamer executive to agent to author.

But that this was the reason conveyed to Picoult is a giant problem on its own.

That they don’t know better than to say this part out loud is deeply disturbing.

Around Covid. As in, a story that takes place during the Covid pandemic and acknowledges the reality and devastation of it.

And: "regime.” Not administration, but regime. Chilling. And revealing.

Disclosure - I haven’t read the novel - but according to the jacket copy, WISH YOU WERE HERE is a novel about a young woman in NYC named Diana who has planned her whole life out and expects her boyfriend, a surgical resident, to propose on a romantic getaway trip to the Galapagos. Then Covid strikes. The boyfriend has to stay to work in the hospital but he encourages Diana to take the trip herself. She does, lots of things go awry, Diana learns new things about herself.

That…doesn’t sound controversial at all. Unless the mere reality of Covid’s devastation is a problem, a thing to be hidden because if we focused on it too closely, we might question, for example, why RFK and the MAHA gang are so intent on limiting COVID booster vaccines.

This preemptive acquiescence to revisionist history is appalling.

In case you want to believe that Picoult’s experience is a strange isolated example, I’ll offer another — in this season of The Rehearsal, Nathan Fielder recounts his discovery that Paramount+ had removed an episode of Nathan For You from its streaming platform. In the episode in question, Fielder discovers that the maker of a soft shell jacket he has worn in many episodes posted a tribute to Doug Collins, a Holocaust denier. Fielder then decides to create an outdoor apparel company of his own, Summit Ice, to promote Holocaust awareness. Summit Ice has raised millions of dollars for Holocaust awareness education, and Fielder calls it his proudest achievement - proof that a comedy show can make a real-world difference.

When Fielder asked Paramount+ about the missing episode, he was told:

the Summit Ice episode had been “taken down intentionally” due to “sensitivities,” he read off the emails. The decision originated with Paramount+ in Germany, where executives expressed being “uncomfortable” with “anything that touches on antisemitism” in the wake of the Israel/Hamas conflict, the emails stated.”

“Before long, the ideology of Paramount+ Germany had spread to the entire globe, eliminating all Jewish content that made them uncomfortable,” Fielder says, adding, “This is real, by the way.”

It is real: Fielder is correct that the Summit Ice episode is not streaming on Paramount+. The decision came “following a standards review,” a spokesperson for Paramount told The Hollywood Reporter.

“Currently on the Paramount app, there are 50 results for ‘nazi,’ 10 for ‘Hitler’ and zero for ‘Judaism,’” Fielder said. “We’ve been erased.”

THR re-created those searches, and Fielder is about right, give or take. The results for “nazi” though includes some kids shows that are definitely not about nazis, so it’s an imperfect system. A search for “jew” yielded four results.

The most interesting part of Fielder’s experience is how he reacted to it - which he recounts in The Rehearsal. He was furious and outraged but found himself being overly polite and expressing very little outrage. Because Paramount+ was at the time airing another show of his, and it hadn’t yet been renewed. And he didn’t want to upset the executives lest his career suffer. In The Rehearsal, he examines the regret he feels about his docile acceptance of the situation. Worth noting: he publicly discusses these feelings only after Paramount+ passed on renewing his other show. The Rehearsal is on HBO Max, which now also holds streaming rights for Nathan for You. And, to give credit where it’s due: the Summit Ice episode (S3 E2) is streamable there.

What the *$#% can we do?

In a time when freedom of speech is in peril, it’s imperative that we stop self-censoring, stop pre-obeying the Trump administration’s radical attempt to rewrite history and deny science and make so much of America worse again. And by we, I mean not just writers - many of whom hardly need to hear this message and are actively, urgently writing important stories and searching for outlets to air/publish them - but, more critically, the people in charge of deciding what work makes it into the world.

Stories matter. They change minds, deepen empathy, expand understanding. They’re one of the most effective ways to expose people to new ideas and potentially change minds.

Harm-based Storytelling

In his new book OUTRAGED, the psychologist Kurt Gray writes about the sources of moral judgments and how common ground might be reached between liberals and conservatives. His theory is that everyone’s moral judgments stem from feeling threatened or vulnerable to harm. The question of what a particular group/person conceives of as threatening is what leads to division. Given that, how to find common ground?

As Elizabeth Kolbert writes, in a New Yorker review of Gray’s book:

“He starts with the don’ts. A big one is: Don’t imagine that facts are convincing. Gray cites a study from 2021 in which researchers argued with strangers about gun control. Half the time, the researchers tried to bolster their case with facts. The rest of the time, they offered stories, one of which involved a relative who had been wounded by a stray bullet. (The relative, though made up, was presented as real.) The encounters were taped, so that the conversations could later be analyzed. Strangers who were offered anecdotes were, it turned out, much more willing to engage with the researchers than those offered data were. The group that got stories also treated their interlocutors with more respect.

Gray’s takeaway from this is that the best way to reach across a moral divide is with a narrative, preferably one that features suffering: “Respect is easiest to build with harm-based storytelling.”

Harm-based storytelling is an interesting term. Is the idea to scare people into changing their beliefs?

That’s certainly what the far right have done - with all the fear-mongering about murderous immigrants. It seems easier to make people afraid of something than it is to alleviate their fears. Easier to imagine fear-mongering anti-vaxxers convincing young parents not to vaccinate their children than it is to imagine doctors armed with data trying to convince those same people of the safety of vaccines.

But maybe the move for those of us who believe in truth/science/history/etc is not to roll out more facts but to tell more stories - affecting stories, relatable stories, fictional stories - about the very subjects that the Trump “regime” is trying to erase.

Writers can write those stories. And they are. But writers only have so much agency. It’s the corporate wing that controls what gets published or aired - and they are the ones who need to grow a backbone and lean into sensitive subjects, not away from them.

It’s not that I expected Hollywood execs to have more guts. I know the machine too well for that kind of magical thinking. When I was 23 and idealistic, I had visions of working my way up the ladder and making change from the inside.

Then I grew disillusioned and wrote a novel inspired by that disillusionment. A sort of burn it down book; I didn’t anticipate going back to working in Hollywood. But less than a year before the book was published, I did just that. I worried about the highwire act of being honest while not torpedoing my career. I needn’t have worried. Turns out you can tell The Hollywood Reporter that you think Hollywood is irredeemably fucked as an industry and the whole thing needs to be burned down and rebuilt from the ground up, and people will smile and laugh and nod agreeably and nobody will take you - a young woman smiling through her anger, sharpening her words to a point on the page - seriously enough to get upset.

“I mean, I’m really in a place of, “Let’s burn it all down.” I think there’s no such thing as an ethical Hollywood institution, or an ethical institution period. Definitionally, they’re not ethical. They protect themselves, that’s how they’re created. I bought into this idea that, “Here I am fighting for change from the inside, I’m going to advocate for voices that aren’t in the room.” That’s such extreme cognitive dissonance. Because it requires believing that even if you’re playing the game, you’re not actually playing it. It’s not special to Hollywood, it’s basically every corporation. It’s our government.” - me, to The Hollywood Reporter

It’s hard to believe that this newsletter - which will probably be mostly read by people who agree with me - will have much of an impact on anything. This thought was disheartening enough that I almost didn’t write the piece. But then I realized, if I don’t write it, then I’d be doing exactly the thing I’m so opposed to. So, here it is.

In better news: Zohran Mamdani!!!! Giving me a shred of hope for the future.