There has been a vibe shift in Hollywood over the last couple years. Conventionally attractive white people having sex have come back in favour (see: HBO’s White Lotus and Netflix’s The Hunting Wives); Caucasian celebrities are embracing their genetics (Sydney Sweeney’s genes); and studios continue capitalizing on 1990s nostalgia, bringing back classics like Basic Instinct and Sex and the City.
It all comes at the expense of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives of the last decade, especially in film and television, which have staunchly embraced minority groups’ stories. Many Disney/Pixar, Marvel, Netflix, HBO and Amazon projects have since platformed Black, Indigenous and Asian heroes. (Jews were early beneficiaries of this trend, but that fizzled out in the 2020s.)
Now, in keeping with the political return of Donald Trump, studios are swinging back in the opposite direction, focusing on white-centric stories. Creators like Mike White and the South Park team are openly rejecting “wokeism”. And Jewish stories—never fully a minority group, neither fully white—are, as usual, caught in the middle.
Sharon Waxman, the founder and CEO of TheWrap, recently wrote about the broader trend for the New York Times, and joins Phoebe on The Jewish Angle to discuss her piece and the ongoing changes happening in pop culture and politics.
Transcript
Sharon Waxman: There has been a very rigid groupthink around what is right, thinking, and allowed. And in terms of scripts and green lights, I don’t know that the Jewish identity fits into this question.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Hi, I’m Phoebe Maltz Bovy, opinion editor of The Canadian Jewish News. You’re listening to The Jewish Angle, a podcast from The CJN that looks at the complicated place of Jews in today’s cultural and political landscapes. And I’m delighted to have on today the acclaimed author and journalist Sharon Waxman. She is the founder, CEO, and editor-in-chief of The Wrap and was a Hollywood correspondent for The New York Times. Her recent op-ed in The Times with the really sticks with you headline “Hollywood is Hot, Horny, and White Again” gets at something we’ve been talking about a bit on this podcast already, like the vibe shift. We will talk about what all of that means and unpack it. Sharon, welcome to The Jewish Angle.
Sharon Waxman: Thanks for having me.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So I wanted to just start by asking you a bit about yourself because when I was looking at your career trajectory, a lot of people sort of start in kind of the entertainment realm and then maybe move into other areas of journalism. You’ve done the reverse. You started in a whole bunch of different areas of journalism. You were a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, among other things. How did you end up covering Hollywood, and what is it about it that captivates you?
Sharon Waxman: Yeah, well, so it’s interesting to be invited on The Canadian Jewish News podcast. My very first work as a journalist was for the Cleveland Jewish News in the city where I grew up, where I thought I would try this new thing that somebody suggested—try journalism. And I ended up in Hollywood because, very simply, I was kind of a victim of the early waves of contraction in journalism when the internet hit in the 1990s, and there were just no jobs to be had. And I’d wanted to be a foreign correspondent, and I was a foreign correspondent, as you pointed out, for over 10 years, but I couldn’t get hired in a full-time role. In fact, that was already the time when newspapers, which is what I was writing for, were starting to close all their foreign bureaus. So there really were no more jobs. So finally, I just tried to get a job anywhere that I could. And I got a job finally with the Washington Post in California, where I never had intended to go or live or had really ever set foot. So it was actually just a confluence of my desperation in needing a job and the opportunity that the Washington Post was willing to give me as they were expanding their coverage of culture, celebrity, and all of that, the force that that became. So I started out as a more general feature writer and then honed in more carefully on Hollywood as I got to know that beat. And I found it really interesting. And then The New York Times hired me to do just that.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: On the topic of your recent New York Times article, you’re writing about basically how there was this—and this is something that regular listeners of this podcast will have heard a bunch about. In the 2010s, there was this kind of, whether you call it wokeness, whatever you call it, there was this moment of this kind of hypersensitivity in culture. A lot of focus sometimes on a kind of “eat your vegetables” packaging on progressive messaging. Not just having diverse casts and creators, but also that works needed to have a certain type of message. And things seem to be changing. And that’s what you were writing about in this op-ed. I want to just jump in because it’s The Jewish Angle with the Jewish question about this, which is what I wanted to ask: what do you think it means for Jews that Hollywood is hot, horny, and white? Specifically, specifically, are Jews white in these definitions? And I would have assumed, and this is just going to be a little long because it’s a little bit complicated. So I would have assumed yes, because I think of things like Lena Dunham’s show Girls or the sort of retroactive 2000s reassessments of like Friends and Seinfeld saying these shows were “so white, so white.” And you know, I’m thinking like, well, they were, but you know, with a little asterisk, whatever. But then as you write about, there was that Sydney Sweeney jeans ad about her blue eyes being alluded to, you know, and even though, yes, you have that the American Eagle, Alfred Race has a Jewish owner, whatever, probably was not surreptitious Nazi messaging. There’s something else in the culture that’s this kind of veneration of a type of whiteness that excludes Jews potentially. So what’s happening?
Sharon Waxman: You’re raising a whole lot of points about whether being. Whether Jews are considered white or not white, and that’s a very broad and very deep and very thorny issue. I was writing about the fact that Hollywood has swung away from this hyper-progressive, hyper— you know, hyper-woke. There has been a very rigid groupthink around what is right thinking and allowed. And in terms of scripts and green lights, I don’t know that the Jewish identity fits into this question. Cause it had a lot to do with blackness, brownness, gayness, transness. As I point out, there were series. There was a lot of very, I’d say in the 2010s, a lot of very deliberate and thoughtful and intentional greenlighting of stories around trans characters, trans storylines, Native American shows written by a Native American. These are things that you really didn’t see a lot of. And I’ve had also people come call me up or write me and say, well, why didn’t you write about Taylor Sheridan and the whole Yellowstone thing? And it doesn’t mean that every single thing in Hollywood was greenlit with a woke mindset, but there certainly was a very big impact of people thinking I need to be an anti-racist. That sort of came in the wake of George Floyd’s death—or killing, I should say. But it was before that as well, that these ideas that were basically liberal ideas of let’s be open to other experiences, let’s be open to other identities. So, for example, I tend to look at things in kind of arcs of time. And part of that has to do with my getting older and having the benefit of seeing a decade and a decade and a decade. Someday you’ll see that too, but you’re too young now.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I’m 42. I see some decades, but you’re gonna.
Sharon Waxman: See, you’re a. I think you’ll see. It’s funny how as I’ve gotten older, time just kinds of collapses and I start to see, oh, well, that century was about that, you think, in centuries. But in terms of my own experience, it’s really easy for me to see now what I didn’t see in the 1990s when I wrote a book about the filmmakers who were marking the decade and who were really changing the culture. And that is a book called Rebels on the Backlot. Oh, I had it right over there. And it’s about six filmmakers who defined filmmaking culture in the 1990s. And it’s Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, David O. Russell, David Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Spike Jonze. I’m glad I remembered all of them. I wrote the book so long ago. They’re all white guys. And I was very conscious at the time that I had six white guys and nobody who would fit into my thesis who was of color or a woman.
When I’m thinking about doing a second version of this book in the 20s, it’s all about filmmakers of color. It’s Ava DuVernay and Ryan Coogler and Guillermo del Toro and Ryan Murphy, who’s white but gay. And very much that infuses his work, that kind of sensibility. And those were the new stories, those were the new experiences. It’s like we had mined the white guy experience for a long time. It’s kind of tired. And Hollywood is on the hunt for new ideas. At the same time, it goes together with this virtuous feeling of “I am expanding the lens and I am finding new audiences,” which is also true. The Latino audience is massive; it’s underserved. The black audience is really substantial. It was underserved, but deeply from this perspective of “we are doing the right thing.” And then that kind of evolved and morphed and kind of slid over into this feeling of “these are the only stories that you can consider, and if you don’t, you’re transphobic, you’re homophobic, you’re not being a good anti-racist.”
I think there is a fatigue with that. And I’ll throw women’s stories in there too, which is to be regretted because we need a diversity of stories. And so I think it’s just about this pendulum swing.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I agree. Jews certainly did not ever fit into it in the sense of being considered a marginalized group to be lumped in with the other ones like trans people.
Sharon Waxman: Well, like you’re putting it, you’re putting in a different way—not to be lumped in, to be validated.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I’m saying this was not… Yeah. So this is what my own book was about in part. The Perils of Privilege from 2017 is about privileged accusations, like “your privilege is showing” and so forth. But I write about how Jews fell outside of that framework and were sometimes held up as epitomizing privilege and what that’s all come to mean. But I think, yeah, today it’s complicated. On one hand, on the left, there’s this kind of ramping up of that sort of thing, sometimes related to the Middle East, sometimes not, while at the same time on the right, there’s a whole different thing. What I wanted to ask though, more about the kind of culture war stuff generally, because I’m thinking a lot about Justine Bateman, the actress and filmmaker, who tweeted right after Trump won that people weren’t going to have to walk on eggshells anymore. I think this did get at something real about the emotion, whether it was exactly at that time or just evolved over time. But I’m trying to sort out whether we’re seeing kind of a sense of relief at entertainment not always having to function as a kind of “eat your vegetables” op-ed type function, or whether we’re maybe seeing a turn to a new right-wing narrowing, maybe even censoriousness. I wonder this because of an area I’m more familiar with than Hollywood. I’m very familiar with old Britcoms. There’s a lot of speech suppression in academia now, right? Where there had been speech suppression in one direction, now there is in a different direction, and arguably a lot stronger. But is there renewed artistic freedom or renewed freedom to put business interests first? Or are we looking at outright pressure to produce conservative content, even if that’s not what audiences want?
Sharon Waxman: No, it isn’t that there’s right-wing pressure to produce non-woke material. It’s this sort of exquisite antenna about the zeitgeist that Hollywood generally feels, intuits and boasts. It takes the sense of the moment and builds that into the product it’s making, and it impacts that zeitgeist. It’s a two-way directional thing—reflecting it and affecting it. In this case, I think there’s a sense that a page is being turned. Trump’s election, which was unexpected in liberal circles, was a shock. I think the message that worked in the Trump campaign—about trans people taking over culture—seeped into the mindset of centrists in Hollywood. That’s why someone like Brian Grazer, who was very much a liberal, admitted recently that he voted for Trump, which was shocking. There are others who were generally Democrats and voted for Trump because they didn’t trust Kamala Harris. If there are people talking to me who are powerful forces, like Brian Grazer, an influential person in the industry, that means there’s some sense that maybe the pendulum swung too far left.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: You’re—
Sharon Waxman: That is some sense that maybe the pendulum swung too far left. I don’t think it’s right for the country, and it’s going to impact everything they do. Where the Jewish question sits in all of that is complicated. I’m working on a piece, appropriately for The CJN, about the Toronto Film Festival and a Jewish documentary about October 7th. The documentary was invited and then disinvited for a reason like the Hamas footage wasn’t licensed.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Yes, we have covered this in The Jewish Angle. Not on this specific podcast, no, but keep going.
Sharon Waxman: So, this is already upon us. There’s a strange tension within the liberal community between Jews who are liberals on one side and those in Hollywood who feel betrayed by their progressive compatriots. Then there’s the idea that any story involving a positive message about Jews or Israel is not allowed to be told. It’s definitely a force going on. I don’t think it’s related to the woke, anti-woke thing.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Oh, really?
Sharon Waxman: I don’t.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I think it’s so related. It is this whole thing of Jews and DEI, and Jews feeling adrift. That gets weaponized or exploited in some way on the right, moving from DEI for everybody but Jews to a kind of sensitivity only to Jews from the right under certain circumstances. I think it’s wrapped up together, but it’s not neatly summarised.
Sharon Waxman: Well, it’s complicated because there are so many Jewish stories and culture portrayed in shows and movies—from Mel Brooks on, and Mrs. Goldberg a hundred years ago. A friend did a documentary about Mrs. Goldberg. I knew nothing about her, but she was a very famous Jewish star, a television star in the early 20th century, early days of television. So, that is so much part of the fabric of the entertainment kind of machine that I see a difference between that and the sort of woke conversation of being more inclusive in stories that had not been able to be told before. Like stories, you know, gay marriage or, you know, sort of normalizing or black culture, things like that.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Yeah, I get what you mean. I think what I’m saying is, I think it’s all interwoven in a way that’s complicated. Where Jews, like, not to always do the David video, “Jews Don’t Count,” because I don’t think it’s so simple as that. Jews should count. It’s just, like a different whole conversation. But there could only be one conversation for a time. I wanted to talk about, you make a really good point in your article about the difference between Hollywood’s sort of partly cosmetic embrace of diversity and the largely unchanged reality of who’s actually in charge. I’ll quote from your piece where you’re talking about the backlash: “That’s possibly because the leadership in Hollywood remains overwhelmingly white and male.” So, I want to unpack this a bit. Just because what decision-makers want and what audiences do isn’t always aligned. And you write another quote, “In the end, Hollywood is in the business of giving its audience what it wants, not what it thinks it should want.” So, there is a way that the hypersensitive 2000s and 2010s were off-putting to many, including many women and many people of color. And I know a lot of them, a lot of these people are my friends, a lot of them are myself personally. But there was also genuine enthusiasm for greater representation. So, I guess what I’m trying to disentangle here is like, is there an extent to which this backlash isn’t finally, the people will get what they want? And the sensitive antenna, you know, sussing that out, as verses a bunch of white men freed up to do things that are of interest to white men.
Sharon Waxman: I don’t think it works that way. The white men. And it’s not only, but it is mostly white men who run the industry. They don’t just sit down and say, “Yes, we’ll make that movie.” No, they run a company and they have people who make those decisions. If there’s a very big movie, maybe it goes all the way up to David Zaslav at Warner Brothers. But most of the time, that’s going to be a decision made by the people who run the studio—Mike DeLuca and Pam Abdy. They have very diverse tastes, and their job is to give audiences what they want. These are businesses, and they’re run as businesses, and these are business decisions about what might make a billion dollars at the box office or what might drive subscriptions on HBO. Casey Bloys, who’s running HBO—I’m just taking Warner Brothers as an example, but you could take really any studio—is not making decisions at all on HBO about what do I think us white guys want.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: That makes sense. So that’s interesting. But I want to just follow up on that because another industry that I know better than I know Hollywood would be publishing, book publishing. And there, it seems like you have also the kind of, there’s the older higher-ups versus younger staffers types of conflicts that seem to be still ongoing, and that doesn’t seem to be obsolete. And it doesn’t seem that publishing has ever had a vibe shift. Or at least from what I’ve heard, it does not seem that that’s really.
Sharon Waxman: Has not had a vibe shift.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Not, not really the same way that Hollywood has.
Sharon Waxman: I mean, against wokeness, you’re saying, right?
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Right.
Sharon Waxman: Yeah. Well, it’ll probably come, I imagine. But because these pendulums don’t just work in one industry, they tend to work across society and culture in general. There is definitely a generational divide. Absolutely. The people who run the place, who see the signs, right, who notice Trump’s getting elected, who see that he’s cracking down, suing studios, launching investigations. They’re not immune; they’re not dumb. They’re seeing which way the wind is blowing, and it’s this combination of, like, probably it’s a little much. I cite the fact that the Pixar movies at Disney, I had a Disney executive who said, yeah, it seems like they’re a little bit too much of the same thing. You can see the Pixar movies have not done particularly well of late at the box office. There are lots of reasons why that might be. I have my experts on Pixar on my staff, and they are absolutely, I would say, talmudically knowledgeable about Disney and Pixar and more knowledgeable than I am. So, I wouldn’t say that that is the reason, but it is something that is noticeable.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: But I just wanted to ask just one last bit because I know we’re getting a little late. You talk about Trump suing companies.
Sharon Waxman: Yes.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So how is that not right-wing censoriousness? How is that not… it is market? Because that. So, that’s not the market wanting what it wants. That’s not audiences being bored by some kind of hyper woke.
Sharon Waxman: It’s bull, it’s intimidation. It’s not technically, it’s not censorship, but it’s more insidious than that. It’s very much aimed at a particular goal, which is to get the company, these entertainment and news companies, in line with what Trump thinks they should be doing. The point that I’m making in the piece, Phoebe, is that this is subtle and more complex, and it certainly did start before Trump got elected. It didn’t happen from the day he got elected.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Sharon Waxman, this has been fantastic. What do you want to promote and where do we find you?
Sharon Waxman: If you are interested in entertainment, culture, and the business of entertainment, I recommend people check out therwrap.com. Check us out. We’ve got very good reporting and very good columnists. Not just when I weigh in, there’s lots of other great voices on The Wrap.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Thank you so much, Sharon Waxman, for coming on The Jewish Angle.
Sharon Waxman: Thank you.
Show Notes
Credits
- Host: Phoebe Maltz Bovy
- Producer and editor: Michael Fraiman
- Music: “Gypsy Waltz” by Frank Freeman, licensed from the Independent Music Licensing Collective
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