How cultural snobbery went to the Left Coast

This is a very good article which first appeared in The American Prospect on how the American Left was tagged with the cultural snobbery/”elitist” label (class warfare anyone?) which I forgot to include in yesterday’s list.

This response letter I found at The Washington Monthly, which had linked to the TAP article, pretty much explains how Hollywood and the mass entertainment industry works as it does. Indeed, you can find the 1% in more places than just Wall Street:

“As a certified member of the “left wing Hollywood writers,” (member of the WGA for 26 years) I believe I have a few answers for this.

Forget all the questions about McCarthyism, since nobody actively working in Hollywood (i.e., people under 40) have a clue what McCarthyism was, other than when (if) they go to a meeting at the local Guild office and see pictures of people who are about the age of their great-grandparents, who they know nothing about since to them an “old” movie is anything made before 1985 and most of them do not watch Turner Classic Movies. So they aren’t out to get revenge on the working class for supporting Old Tailgunner Joe. They barely know who he was.

What happened in Hollywood over the past 30 years is that the system changed. People like myself, who really did come from a lower-middle/working class background, can’t break in any more because we can’t afford to work for free for however many years it takes. Myself, like many others way back when, I was able to learn the business while paying the rent and buying food regularly because I was fortunate enough to get hired to work for Roger Corman. One didn’t get paid much, but did get paid enough if you worked fast enough, and if what you did was good enough to get made you got to work some more and pay your bills while learning. We who went through it call it the “Roger Corman Film School,” and it’s got a pretty good list of grads, none of whom could repeat that today.

That system has been dead for at least the past 20 years.

What happened is that Hollywood became “cool” as a career destination for the upper classes back then. Starting in the early 1990s, kids with trust funds became the majority graduates of USC, UCLA and NYC Film Schools. They came to Hollywood and were willing to work as (unpaid) interns. All of a sudden, the people in those low-paying jobs one learns the ropes in were confronted with the worst kind of low-wage competition: no-wage competition. Why hire someone who needs $500 a week to survive when you can get someone with an Ivy League degree who will work for free????

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