There’s a classic joke by Mort Sahl that never gets old, because progressives keep validating it: “World ends – women and minorities hardest hit.” As far back as 1988, Sahl was mocking the absurd penchant of the New York Times and other liberal newspapers to augment social divisiveness at every opportunity. The tendency mutated into the cultural epidemic known as wokeness, with Hollywoke a leading transmitter. Only now the joke’s on Tinseltown. A new actors’ strike began last week, and minority thespians will bear the brunt of it. They’ll be joining their straight white brethren whom producers cast aside for them. (READ MORE: The War of the Woke: Hollywood Turns on its Viewers)
By replacing the once majority straight white cast with a ridiculously disproportionate percentage of minorities, industry players alienated a commensurate portion of the audience. Not because of any racism or homophobia on the viewers’ part, but because they’re bored and bothered by having inclusion shoved in their and their kids’ faces. They’d like to enjoy seeing a group of regular straight white — or black or Asian — friends like most of them have without being made to feel guilty about it, with a clean conscience not even the co-creator of Friends can share. (READ MORE: Disney’s Ghost Haunts Woke Disney)
Last year, Marta Kauffman apologized for her durable hit’s lack of diversity. “I’m embarrassed that I didn’t know better 25 years ago,” Kauffman said, crediting the death of George Floyd to her awokening. “I began to wrestle with my having bought into systemic racism in ways I was never aware of.” She sought absolution with a $4 million donation to the African-American studies department of her alma mater (Brandeis). But here’s the irony. The reason Kauffman had four million bucks to spare was precisely because of the show’s lack of diversity. It depicted a circle of friends with whom people of all races and sexual preferences could identify. It was the industry’s hysterical wokeness that crippled it financially, making it harder to meet the strikers’ money demands (some demands such as AI likeness compensation are more easily granted).
No company has been more responsible for the collapse of entertainment revenue than Woke Disney, and last Thursday on CNBC, Disney CEO Bob Iger sounded the reality alarm. “It’s very disturbing to me,” Iger said. “We’ve talked about the disruptive forces on this business and all the challenges we’re facing … This is the worst time in the world to add to that disruption.” Iger naturally tried to put the blame on slow COVID recovery, but nobody who saw the woke-less Top Gun: Maverick become a record-breaking hit at the height of the pandemic buys that canard. Especially after Disney’s last four post-pandemic movie projects (Lightyear, Strange World, The Little Mermaid, Elemental) crashed and burned in a blaze of wokeness.
It was the industry’s hysterical wokeness that crippled it financially, making it harder to meet the strikers’ money demands.
Today, Disney suits are in such a panic over their imminent W-bomb, Snow White, they lied about the film. It takes three years for a major motion picture to go from approval to release. So, the live-action remake of the 1937 studio-building classic, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, went into production at the height of diversity fever. What the producers couldn’t sense in their Mouse House bubble was the traditionalist gale about to strike down Bud Light with hurricane-level winds. Those same winds are already swirling around Snow White.
The die is literally cast: a Latina Snow White (Rachel Zegler, fresh from the Spielberg remake flop, West Side Story), and seven beings who are not dwarves but various other minorities, including, of course, a black girl. On Friday, the UK’s Daily Mail published an on-set photo of the seven somethings, sparking the now common anti-woke criticism. A Disney spokesperson originally told the Daily Beast, “the photos are fake and not from our production.” Soon afterward, however, they totally backpedaled, admitting the pictures were indeed from their production but not official, as if that matters.
Consequently, little girls who adore the original will be as disinclined to see it as they were The Little Mermaid. They’re not prejudiced against Latinas like Zegler or blacks like Halle Bailey, but they love their Disney Princesses and know these actresses aren’t them, no matter how much the shell of Disney tries to force them down their throats. Why, those silly backward girls may even still expect some prince to impermissibly kiss Snow White and bring her back to life. How regressively patriarchal.
Regarding the new brown Snow White, Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire made an inflammatory observation. “Snow White is a 19th Century German fairy tale,” Walsh tweeted. “The name literally refers to the character’s skin color. This is what cultural appropriation looks like. Probably the most blatant case we’ve seen yet.”
As for the seven non-dwarves, that’s seven dwarf actors who won’t be whistling while they work, because they didn’t work. Because in Hollywoke, even some minorities are minorities. So, the movie will tank, and Disney will lose a lot more money, which could have gone to the striking actors but now never will.
And the film industry will continue to implode, or survive on independent features like Sound of Freedom ($27 million weekend gross, $85-million so far), which I recently reviewed here. The company that made it, Angel Studios, should have no problem paying its minority Hispanic actors, who portrayed good and evil characters, or the white actor who played a Hispanic, Bill Camp.
But there’s hope for the strikers. After all, they’re actors. They play tough guys on the screen, so they can do it in real life. Take Ron Perlman, who portrayed a gang biker in the TV series Sons of Anarchy. He had some words on an Instagram video for an unnamed Hollywood executive who disparaged the co-striking writers. “Listen to me, muther_cker,” Perlman said. “There’s a lot of ways to lose your house. Some of it is financial. Some of it is karma. And some of it is figuring out who the f___ said that. And we know who said that and where he f___ing lives.”
Happily, though, with both majority and minority actors now out of work, Hollywoke has achieved real equity at last.
