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When people talk about Hollywood as a liberal place or a liberal industry, they’re normally talking about the ideas that show up on screen or the candidates whom big stars endorse come election season.
And as a set of big, influential businesses, Hollywood has the ability to exert a very different kind of clout, one it deployed in Georgia last week, leading Gov. Nathan Deal (R) to veto a bill that would have given certain businesses exemptions from non-discrimination laws. But as powerful as the entertainment industry’s influence on politicians can be, cases like Georgia also cast a glaring light on Hollywood’s inability to confront its own progressive failures.
Gay rights have long been an issue that can turn out the entertainment industry’s top stars – posing for a portrait as part of the NOH8 campaign opposing California’s Proposition 8, which in 2008 amended the state’s constitution to ban marriages between same-sex couples, became practically mandatory for anyone who was anyone in Hollywood. And so it was no real surprise that big companies like Disney and organizations like the Motion Picture Association of America voiced quick opposition to the Georgia bill, a wave of legislation that would carve out space for faith-based organizations and businesses to refuse to serve lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people on the grounds of religious belief.
The entertainment industry also had a real stick with which to back up its opposition to the Georgia bill. Georgia, like many states, offers tax incentives to encourage movies and television shows to shoot in the state, rather than on studio lots in California.
And Deal has been a champion of those credits, saying in January that he opposed efforts to change them: “I am committed to protecting the film tax credits that make this type of blockbuster economic impact possible. Why would anyone want to make changes to our current system which would only infringe on an industry that employs thousands of Georgians, brings new business to our state regularly and generates billions of dollars in our statewide economy?”
Deal’s support for Georgia’s film and television tax incentives gave the entertainment particular leverage in this case. If “The Walking Dead,” or “Guardians of the Galaxy” had pulled up stakes and found another home state, Georgia wouldn’t only have lost the jobs, tourist dollars and general business revenue created by those productions. Hollywood’s departure would have struck a blow to Deal’s defense of tax incentives, suggesting that they weren’t actually a guarantee of Hollywood’s business.
That leverage might not always be a sure thing for Hollywood, though. Americans for Prosperity, Charles and David Koch’s advocacy organization, has been campaigning against incentive programs, succeeded in getting Michigan’s film production tax incentive program repealed last year after suggesting that “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice” needed money less than the state’s ailing infrastructure.
And in an odd way, the entertainment industry’s lobbying in Georgia is actually a useful illustration of the limits of Hollywood liberalism. It would certainly be somewhat inconvenient for big productions to move from one state to another, but with so many offering tax incentives, Hollywood has a lot of locations to choose from. Opposing so-called religious freedom bills is an easy way for big entertainment companies to assert their progressive bona fides without having to take much of a hit.
If only Hollywood was as quick to root out backwardness inside the industry as it is to condemn bias outside it. The evidence is overwhelming that both in front of the camera and behind it, Hollywood remains overwhelmingly white and male, embodying the kind of unequal outcomes the industry claims to oppose with the stories it tells.
Individual showrunners, including Ryan Murphy and Jill Soloway, have made public commitments to do better in hiring members of underrepresented communities to work on their projects. But some of the same corporate entities that threatened to pull out of Georgia have been slow to move beyond the usual suspects – youngish, white and male directors – when deciding who should get creative control of their biggest projects. And the reactions to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ proposed changes to voting membership ranged from support to outraged backlash .
In other words, Hollywood’s liberalism functions on the same pragmatic, public-relations-friendly grounds as many other industries. It’s one thing to take a stand when it’s good for your image and won’t cost you much. It’s another when your principles force you to take a hard look at yourself and the way you do business.
