Hollywood Won’t Really Leave Georgia

H ollywood and Georgia have disagreed before. Gone with the Wind producer David O. Selznick thought it would be a publicity coup to hold the December 15, 1939, premiere of his epic in Atlanta. But Atlanta was segregated, and blacks weren’t allowed in the Loew’s Grand theater. Selznick, sensing parallels between Jim Crow and burning anti-Semitism in Europe, was outraged. Clark Gable threatened to boycott the premiere if his friend and co-star Hattie McDaniel wasn’t welcomed there.

And both caved.

McDaniel wasn’t invited to preen with the other stars, and wasn’t even mentioned in the program. A few weeks later, when she won an Oscar for her performance back in California, she was forced to sit in a back room, away from her white co-stars up front. Sixty-six years later, George Clooney, blissfully unaware of any of this, boasted, in his Oscar acceptance speech, “We are the ones — this Academy, this group of people gave Hattie McDaniel an Oscar in 1939 when blacks were still sitting in the backs of theaters.” Yep, including in Hollywood.

This week, we were told that the Hollywood boycott of Georgia has begun. My prediction is that it won’t go very far. As a general rule, when Hollywood progressivism clashes with its financial incentives, it goes quiet about the former.

Opposition to Georgia’s new voting-reform law, which is being dubbed restrictive by those who haven’t read it (Dan McLaughlin swats down the hysteria and myths about it here) is the latest article of faith in the Democratic Party and its allies in the media and, increasingly, business. You can hardly call yourself left of center if you don’t conflate the completely routine reforms in Georgia with Jim Crow laws.

So producers Antoine Fuqua and Will Smith have yanked their upcoming $130 million project Emancipation, which is to star the latter and be directed by the former, from Georgia. In the process, they have cost hundreds, probably thousands of Georgians jobs that were to start when the movie launched in June. The pair haven’t announced where they intend to take the film, which is being produced by Apple’s new film unit. Louisiana, maybe? Oh dear, they have conservative politics there too.

Despite a threat from Ford v Ferrari director James Mangold never to work in Georgia (he doesn’t have a project under way there anyway), Fuqua and Smith appear to be alone among major Hollywood figures boycotting Georgia, which may be home to more major film productions than any state including California. (A study suggesting as much was released in 2016, but I couldn’t find a more recent paper.)

Fuqua and Smith seem insensitive to what actual Georgians are saying. Do they even care that they are acting contrary to the stated wishes of Martin Luther King Jr.’s daughter Bernice (“Please stop the Georgia boycott talk”), Stacey Abrams (“Please do not boycott us”), and Senator Jon Ossoff (“I absolutely oppose and reject any notion of boycotting Georgia”)? Filmmaker Tyler Perry, who has built his own $250 million studio in the state, suggests a Justice Department investigation rather than a boycott is the way to attack the new voting law, which he deems “unconstitutional” without clarifying which part of the Constitution discusses drop boxes and how water may be distributed to voters.

Hollywood has plenty of cover to continue doing business in Georgia. Which is what it really wants anyway, because Georgia helps movie studios do what has always come first in Hollywood: Make money. Hollywood is in Georgia for the same reason Nissan is in Tennessee and Amazon is in Alabama: It likes red-state economics. Is it willing to put up with red-state culture to save tens of millions of dollars? Probably. The whole point of liberal values is that simply mouthing off about them is enough. Remember when “inclusion riders” gripped the showbiz imagination in 2018 after Frances McDormand promoted them in her Oscar acceptance speech that year? In 2019, they were declared dead.

Maybe a few productions will exit the state. The vast majority will stay. Disney — which shoots its blockbusters in Georgia — is deeply entrenched there, and has long-term contracts to shoot a gazillion more Marvel movies there. Variety reports that “many Hollywood executives, producers and decision makers” have told the trade paper off the record that “the industry needs to take a backseat to local leaders like Stacey Abrams, and look at a larger picture outside the confines of Georgia.” In other words, Hollywood is going to lean on Abrams, and maybe even blame Washington for not intervening, but whatever happens, it isn’t terribly interested in hurting its own economic interests. Practically everyone in Hollywood is a member of one or more unions, from George Clooney to the electrician who plugs in the lights, but most films aren’t shot in Los Angeles. Shooting in places such as Georgia and Louisiana means cheaper union scales, plus more non-union jobs. Nearly 400 films and episodes of TV were shot in Georgia in 2019.

But if Hollywood wants to align its values with its production, an elegant solution awaits. There is a deep-blue state run by liberal Democrats that offers abundant filmmaking infrastructure and all of the right cultural signals: Weed is legal, abortion is a sacred right, and nothing ever reminds anyone of Jim Crow. If Hollywood wants to put its money where its mouth is, it could just go back to filming everything in Southern California. That’ll cost everyone millions, but surely Hollywood values principles more than profits. Right?