Trump To Bring Back Hollywood By Making Its Movies Way More Expensive To Shoot

Genius!

Trump’s favorite movie, though we’re betting he missed the message.

It is easy to forget in the biblical flood of stupid that has made each day of the last 107 days feel longer than watching one of those avant garde movies that’s just like eight hours of a slow zoom in on a lamp. But in addition to restoring the greatness of American manufacturing, shipyards, logging on public lands, trade, law and order, the military, universities that have gotten too woke, Washington DC, foreign relations, segregation and God only knows what else that we can’t remember off the top of our heads, there was one more cultural mecca that Trump wanted to restore to its former luster: Hollywood, land of make-believe.

A few days before he was inaugurated in January, our damp-brained president announced he had appointed three has-been actors as his “special ambassadors” to Hollywood. It was not exactly clear what Jon Voight, Sylvester Stallone, and Mel Gibson were supposed to do, exactly, besides help Trump restore “The Golden Age of Hollywood.” Presumably reanimating the corpse of Billy Wilder would be involved.

Then on Sunday, Trump announced his big idea with a post on TruthSocial. If we assume that his other big idea this weekend came about after he watched Clint Eastwood in Escape from Alcatraz, it makes sense that this one followed. Not only does he want to bring back the prison on Alcatraz, he also wants to bring back the Hollywood he imagines produced that movie in the first place.

Thus we got this:

Hoo boy. Let’s just begin at the beginning:

The Movie Industry in America is DYING a very fast death. Other Countries are offering all sorts of incentives to draw our filmmakers and studios away from the United States. Hollywood, and many other areas within the U.S.A., are being devastated.

The death of the movie industry has been prophesied for decades upon decades. We were hearing it in film school in the mid-90s. The entire entertainment industry is constantly in flux thanks to changing modes of production and distribution, technology, audience tastes changing, and a gazillion other factors.

Production fleeing Hollywood for cheaper places — Georgia, Canada, Romania — is an old story. There are ways to encourage filmmakers to bring it back to California, some of which lawmakers in California are working on with a couple of bills currently moving through the state legislature.

Then there is the Donald Trump way, which is to be as ham-handed as possible:

I am authorizing the Department of Commerce, and the United States Trade Representative, to immediately begin the process of instituting a 100% Tariff on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands. WE WANT MOVIES MADE IN AMERICA, AGAIN!

Because it’s Trump, it is probably an exercise in futility to make sense of this bafflegab. But we’ll give it a quick shot, simply because there was a 50-question pileup in our brain when we read his announcement.

He wants to tariff productions made by other countries? Or he wants tariffs on American-financed and produced movies that were filmed overseas? How would it work with a movie financed through both domestic and foreign sources? Does he imagine Chinese cargo ships loaded with DVDs that he can slap another tariff on atop the 145% tariff he already slapped on products from that nation?

How does one tariff a cultural product like a movie, anyway?

Is this tariff on top of the tariffs that Hollywood production studios and houses might already have to start paying on equipment that is manufactured overseas? Will MGM+ double its monthly subscription fee before we get around to watching seasons two and three of From?

We have some others, but we won’t bore you. Suffice to say, this is more nonsensical than his usual nonsense.

We were still noodling over all this when we learned that this idea might have come out of Jon Voight’s efforts to be Trump’s eyes and ears in Hollywood:

So far, Voight met with the Directors Guild of America, Teamsters and IATSE, sources tell us. The Writers Guild of America has not met with Voight, and it’s unclear whether SAG-AFTRA has entertained a conversation. [...]

The exact plan that Coming Home Oscar winner Voight, whose daughter is Angelina Jolie, has prepared for Trump is unclear, but sources with knowledge of his conversations with Hollywood insiders tell us they expect a federal tax incentive to be the main component.

Meanwhile, a California state senator who represents LA told Politico he’d first heard of the tariff idea from Voight himself recently. It is impossible to know if it was Voight’s idea, or if Trump just defaulted to his go-to plan, which is to slap tariffs on every fucking thing in the world and then claim that the money is already rolling in.

Whoever was responsible, the news appears to be causing Hollywood to freak out, at least as measured by headlines on Google News.

No matter what, we’re sure Trump thinks this will earn him the eternal gratitude of an industry he claims to hate because of its liberalism while also being desperately thirsty for its approval. He’d love it if studio chiefs came to the Oval Office and groveled for him to save them from whatever he thinks needs saving. So it will be fun to watch him have a rage coronary when people in LA keep defacing his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

OPEN THREAD.

[Deadline / Politico]

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