Fin: Donald Trump's surprising approach to Hollywood

Plus: A film that's not "suppressed," Oscar nomination reactions, down with Razzies, an A.I. nothing-burger, and more in this week’s notes column.

Your new ambassador (Lionsgate).

A few days before his second inauguration, Donald Trump did something bizarre, even by Trump standards: He announced that three actors, Jon Voight, Mel Gibson, and Sylvester Stallone, had been named “Special Ambassadors to a great but very troubled place, Hollywood.”

Their job? It’s to “serve as Special Envoys to me for the purpose of bringing Hollywood, which has lost much business over the last four years to Foreign Countries, BACK—BIGGER, BETTER, AND STRONGER THAN EVER BEFORE!”

This comes across like a typical Trump brainfart that he isn’t especially serious about, even before the revelation that Gibson, at least, wasn’t informed in advance about his new “ambassadorship” and heard about it for the first time from Truth Social like everyone else.

Leave aside that losing business to foreign countries isn’t the issue- Hollywood benefits from its movies opening around the world, and the problem is less that movies are moving out of Hollywood to foreign countries, as they’re moving to Georgia and other non-California states.

But something else stands out about this move.

If Trump were serious about leaning on Hollywood to do his bidding, he would be doing what he does in most other industries- trying to cultivate the CEOs and bosses. Do you think David Zaslav wouldn’t cave in if Trump put any kind of pressure on him to do anything? Zazlav, after all, has a lot more actual power than a trio of actors, aged 69, 78, and 86, none of whom are anywhere close to the height of their backstage clout.

There’s another thing that’s notable about this. For as long as I can remember, Republican politicians and conservative media figures have vilified Hollywood, depicted it as the root of all evil, and, more recently, tried to conjure insane conspiracy theories about everyone in the industry being a pedophile.

At this moment at least, Trump’s ask isn’t to reduce Hollywood’s influence, to put any pressure on it content-wise, or to arrest Tom Hanks for whatever QAnon thinks he did. It’s to… “bring Hollywood back… BIGGER, BETTER, AND STRONGER THAN EVER BEFORE!”

We have a Republican president, coming off an electoral win, with control of both houses of Congress, next to no guardrails, and a demoralized opposition. One nightmare scenario for that set of facts would be a push for actual government censorship of movies or Hollywood. Sure, all the precedent in the world goes against that — the Supreme Court, after all, has roundly rejected prior restraint — but with the current Court, you never know.

Now, maybe it’s because Trump is a long-time showbiz guy, always obsessed with actresses, celebrities, and gossip- and his understanding of those things is permanently stuck in 1985, which may explain why he’s elevating actors of yesteryear. But Ed Meese and the Reagan-era anti-smut regime, this certainly is not.

Could Trump pivot to going to war with Hollywood and demanding, say, a laudatory biopic about himself? The man is nothing if not unpredictable. But I’ve seen little indication that he’s heading in that direction.

Perhaps the bigger question is whether the Trump win and the perceived decline of “wokeness,” will lead to a “vibe shift” in what types of movies get the go-ahead, with no government pressure necessary. Probably, although I wouldn’t be surprised if those movies get greenlit, produced, and released, just in time for the vibes to shift back.