Hey Hollywood, Wakey, Wakey!

What Four More Years of Trump Means For Us

Made with Dall-E. Looks like the morph in ‘The Terminator’

As we all begin to appear from beneath the bedcovers, unwind our fetal positions, and let the sunlight enter our eyes again, it’s probably time we take stock of where we’re headed, and what the next four years might mean.

In many ways, it will be business as usual. I for one will be taking in far less news than I have in the past, as… well… we’re entering into a time of unprecedented shift in our system. 

It’s not that people voted for Trump, it’s that they voted to give a single leader complete, absolute power. By holding the Presidency, the Senate, the House of Representatives, and a 6 to 3 majority on the Supreme Court, Republicans, and more specifically Donald Trump can enact virtually any agenda they choose. The US Electorate has, for all intents and purposes voted itself into an Autocracy.

One can argue that Democrats are not any better. That may or may not be true. Obama had the Senate and the House but didn’t use that power to end the filibuster, which stymied large parts of his agenda. He was not willing to move outside the traditional norms of Governance. 

On the other hand, given the rhetoric that Trump has filled our ears with for the past 10 years, the 30,000 confirmed lies of his first term, and his attempt to overturn his loss to Biden using insurrection, it’s hard to imagine what he won’t do to advance his agenda and keep himself and the current Republican majority in power permanently. Think the Politburo in Russia or the CCP in China.

If you’re still reading and not back under the Comforter, I’m not here for a political rant. I’m writing to let you know how I see our new system of Government’s effect on Hollywood, creativity and Entertainment. There are good things and bad, so I’m trying to be as objective as possible about both.

The Hollywood Bedfellows: While most of Hollywood’s power elite are mum on their politics, it’s a bit of a dirty little secret that they secretly hoped for a Trump win. There are the obvious players that have made things known, especially WB’s David Zazlov, and WME’s Ari Emmanuel. It’s not hard to see in this era of mendaciousness, that the rich get richer by following the money, and right now the money flows towards the power of Trump to make things easy or hard for them. They’re hedging their bets. We’ll see if they get burned, but they have a few things Trump controls that they’d like to see go away.

The DOJ - Anti-Trust go bye-bye now: During the Biden administration, the DOJ got very active with Anti-Trust investigations. There was a judgment against Microsoft/Activision Blizzard acquisition. Also, investigations of Google, Apple, Live Nation/Ticketmaster, and last but not least Meta.

There were suggestions that the DOJ should be going into Hollywood itself with potential investigations of Studios, Streamers, and Agencies. "The Entertainment Strategy Guy" wrote a fantastic article about this in August. “Here’s a 7 Point Plan to Save Hollywood Workers and the Marketplace.” Just three months later, it seems a quaint notion, but he has a lot of good ideas.

All of this goes away. The DOJ, no matter who runs it (I’m not convinced Matt Gates will get confirmed,) will be at cross purposes to Trump’s natural tendencies towards deregulation and unchecked free market Capitalism. In essence, anything goes no matter the effect on consumers or the people who create the content.

This means consolidation at an unchecked pace: With no regulation, guardrails, or threat of Anti-Trust, the incumbent richest players will be free to buy up smaller companies through anti-competitive practices and diversify into areas that traditionally are a conflict of interest.

An example of this, CAA’s current lawsuit against Range Media. A brief description; CAA is a Talent Agency, RangeMedia is a Management Firm. The legal function of a Talent Agency is to procure work for their clients. The function of Management is to negotiate and produce for those clients, which is why many Artists have both. CAA is accusing Range of procuring work. This is happening because so many Agents were laid off during and after the Writer’s Strike. They mostly became Managers, where they did what came naturally. They began procuring work for the clients.

What is interesting here is that while Range has been procuring, CAA has been negotiating and producing in various forms from financing to producing films by proxy. If I were CAA, I would be hoping for a judgment against themselves. Once the blurry lines are gone, they will be free to start buying up Management companies and doing everything. I hope I’m wrong, but probably not.

Google, Apple, and the rest will continue to consolidate, driving down creativity, while driving up costs unchecked by competition.

If you liked Inflation, you’re going to love Tariffs and Deportation: The campaign promise of Tariffs on pretty much everything produced abroad, and the deportation of 20 million illegal and legal immigrants will have economic consequences bordering on catastrophic.

It’s great that Georgia has a no-cap tax incentive for filming, and California is doubling its tax incentive program to $750 million. But, for example, if raw materials such as lumber and steel to build sets, and fuel to get to those sets go up by 60%, the US has essentially priced itself out of film production.

Tariffs are a mechanism to drive manufacturing and supplies back to the domestic market. Even if the US had enough lumber, steel, and fuel, which it does not, the simple principle of supply and demand would drive up the domestic prices just as high as the foreign products with the tariffs attached. It’s a lose/lose situation not just for Hollywood, but for every industry.

Add the currency exchange rates of film production-friendly cities such as Vancouver, Toronto, Mexico City, London, Prague, Budapest, Sao Paolo, Buenos Aires, and Cape Town…. you get the idea. 

With US Film Production Labor already the most expensive in the world, mess with Tariffs, and there is virtually no reason to shoot anywhere in the U.S. Unfortunately, it’s just game over.

As for immigration, if you’d like to see higher food prices, throw out the workforce that does most of the heavy lifting. Even if they were able to expel just 5 million immigrants, it would cause prices to skyrocket.

Remember, many legal immigrants who work as migrant workers are here on temporary visas. A portion of any deportation would likely be those workers either not getting their Visas renewed while here, or returning to their home country at the end of the Visa and trying to get another that gets rejected. Either way, mass legal or illegal deportation esno bueno, higher prices. 

A coming war on the media: We can already see how this is brewing. Everyone was perplexed by Joe Scarborough and Minka heading down to Mara-Lago to kiss the ring. I mean they’ve been calling Trump a Fascist for years and were been a major detractor during this election cycle.

However, Trump has repeatedly threatened to cancel the broadcast licenses of MSNBC, CNN, and others, so those companies are trying to get out in front of it. Trump is going to make examples of some people and entities, and they don’t want to be in that group.

Keep an eye on HBO and Bill Maher. HBO is a WB/Discovery property, so I can see Trump pal David Zaslov pulling the plug on Maher’s show and John Oliver’s left-leaning “Last Week Tonight.”

I also think it’s possible we could see the Networks using the decline of late-night talk show ratings to conveniently usher Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, and Seth Myers to the exit. It sounds far-fetched, but CBS, NBC, and ABC also have licenses to protect. They will do so any way they think they have to. This is life in an Autocracy. Dissent will be smothered in its sleep.

The Silver Lining - States Rights: The only upside to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, is that by turning the issue over to the States to decide, they have inadvertently turned over many other issues. Remember when Republicans were all about screaming “State's Rights!” Now it’s going to be Democrats screaming the same on everything from Immigration, to trade and taxation. 

In particular, keep an eye on California and New York. During Trump’s first term, he attempted to keep California Governor Jerry Brown from naming San Francisco and Los Angeles as “Sanctuary Cities.” Trump threatened to withhold Federal funding from the State. Brown replied, “That’s fine, we’ll stop paying Federal Taxes.” Trump had to be reminded by someone or another, that California’s Federal Tax bill far surpasses what it receives in Federal aid. The issue magically disappeared and Trump never brought it up again.

Look for the larger blue leaning States to call out any overstep by Trump in much the same way.

The only thing I am sure of is this; It’s going to get weird. There’s no way of telling what will actually happen. However, a weakened DOJ and deregulation as the policy will serve the largest and richest entities and leave the poor folk who voted for Trump, far behind. 

As with any major turn in a system, there will be opportunities in the cracks. We will need to look hard for them, as they’ll appear in places where we don’t normally look.

I usually say, “It’s gonna be fine,” and it is. It’s just going to get weird.