Hollywood Gadfly

1. Catherine Breillat 2. Leni Riefenstahl 3. Lana and Lily Wachowski 4. Terry Zwigoff 5. Sidney Lumet 6. Lindsay Anderson 7. Jean Renoir 8. D.W. Griffith 9. Terry Gilliam 10. Carol Reed

That’s not what you said previously You simply attacked POC fellowships And if you’re not willing to attempt to quantify or track that data how can you speak to inequality? What’s it based on?

What? What’s dishonest in what I said? What arguments? I’m attacking them how? Who’s “we?” You’re a very strange person. If anything, one of my main arguments is that panethnic terms like POC aggregate dozens of different populations together, who have vastly different class backgrounds and educational attainment. Because of this obscuring and ignoring of class differences, opportunities are then often given to elites within those subgroups, who share only cosmetic features with the marginalized. The wealthy Chinese NYU alum instead of the poor Black ADOS kid from Detroit, who are both included in terms like POC. In a more enlightened vision of social justice, one that accounted for class, those opportunities would be focused on the actually marginalized, who have stronger historical grievances, like Native Americans and Black ADOS, who are more likely to be poor. All too often opportunities that, in my opinion should be going to those actually marginalized populations, actually go to people from wealthier subgroups, like Indians, Nigerian or Chinese immigrants, who have vastly higher educational attainment, and, in the case of the Indians and Chinese, have even higher average wealth and median income even than the white population. These wealthy populations gentrify terms like BIPOC (which I prefer because it centers black and indigenous people), and take opportunities that, if redistribution is the intent, should be going to the people that actually really need it based on, I don’t know, things like median income and average net worth. If we’re going to have racial preferences, those opportunities should go to ADOS and Native filmmakers, who are historically poorer based on discriminatory policies like Jim Crow and Redlining, and a variety of other factors like broken treaties with the Native population. Those historical harms didn’t affect other POC immigrant populations, who mostly came after the 1965 immigration reforms. They still experience racism, but I feel that it can’t be fairly compared to the structural legacy that still lingers behind Black ADOS and Indigenous Americans. Are you really defending wealthy NYU grads who lie about their budgets to look poor simply because they fit into a term like POC, which is so broad as to include 85% of the global population? But perhaps you’re not referring to my essay Survival of the Richest. This is one paragraph towards the end: “why on earth are dozens of nonprofits supporting these people when that money could be going to filmmakers who are actually poor and marginalized, who could not afford to attend the world’s most expensive private schools while also funding their own films? Is that really social justice? Why are HBCU graduates, for example, so rare among competition directors, next to the NYU/Columbia crowd at Sundance? Why are there so few people who didn’t go to college at all?” So why am I a racist for saying our film institutions should be supporting more HBCU grads? Please enlighten me. If you need an hour or two to read the 7,000 word essay I wrote on class, race and social justice in modern hollywood, I’ll wait.

This is low key the best Hollywood anonymous account because he or she always brings the receipts when talking about film & TV industry trends-- in this case the artificially created hype around spec sales.

Hope everyone who’s going has a great time at @austinfilmfest this year! Always a super fun time. Sadly I won’t be going this year or anytime until they move it off Halloween weekend. Trick or treating with my kids is way too valuable and memorable to ever miss…

“It’s the only class I took at Harvard where people would call each other out for not having done the reading.” Harvard students are lining up to take Hum 10: “Applications (essays required) shot up 40% this fall with 180 incoming freshmen vying for 90 spots.” “The class is definitely not for padding the GPA. Students read a hefty book a week and write regular essays. There is no pass/fail option. Digital devices are verboten, and attendance is taken in every lecture (pink slips for those who arrive late).” “In their applications and in interviews, students expressed the urge to be forced to tackle classics they otherwise wouldn’t read, the need to combat frayed attention spans and the desire for an antidote to The Machine. Several mentioned with disdain that people who aren’t in the class wondered why they didn’t ‘just Chat the books,’ i.e., use AI.”