Jason Blum joins The Ben Shapiro Show to discuss the controversy surrounding the release of his latest film, The Hunt, and the Harvey Weinstein trial. Jason Blum is an American film producer and screenwriter best known for his critically acclaimed horror film Paranormal Activity and the box office smash BlackKlansman. He is also the co-creator of Blumhouse Productions, a production company that holds many staggering box office records, including the record for the biggest wide release box office flop from a major studio. Jason has also produced films such as Get Out, Blackkklansman, and Black Widow. He is a frequent guest on Comedy Central and The View, and is a regular contributor on the Larry Wilmore Show and has been featured on HBO s Hard Knocks and The Late Night with Seth Meyers. In this episode, Ben and Jason discuss the recent controversy surrounding The Hunt and its release, Harvey Weinstein's trial, and how liberal biases affect Hollywood and Hollywood's decision to release The Hunt as a feature film. The Hunt is out in theaters this weekend, and will be available on all major platforms on Nov. 22, including Amazon Prime Video, Vimeo, and Netflix. If you haven t watched the film, you can catch it on Amazon Prime and Vimeo. Subscribe to the show on the Apple Podcasts app or wherever else you get your favorite streaming service. you re listening to the Ben Shapiro show. Ben Shapiro is on the airwaves on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Thanks for listening to Ben Shapiro's Sunday Special! and Happy Listening! Subscribe and Retweet Ben Shapiro s Sunday Special on Apple Podcast Subscribe? Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices and other links to our social media platforms. Leave us a review and share the podcast on iTunes if you re a supporter of the show on social media or share our podcast on your podcast on the podcast and other platforms! Ben s Sunday special on the show Ben s thoughts and thoughts on the Ben s Monday s and Ben s Tuesday s and Wednesday s and other things Ben s and much more! Thanks Ben s Thoughts on this week's episode of The Ben s on The Ben Show on - Ben s Friday s and his thoughts on The Daily with Ben s Outlaw on . Monday s & Ben s on the weekend
00:00:00.000Hollywood created a certain way information is consumed.
00:00:06.000One of the reasons Trump, President Trump, was elected was because The way that we consume information has been changed by the media industry across Hollywood and New York.
00:00:18.000A couple sets up a camera in their home to capture a supernatural presence haunting them.
00:00:23.000A family fights to survive the night when the U.S.
00:00:25.000government makes all crime legal for 12 hours.
00:00:28.000A black man goes to his white girlfriend's house and discovers their sinister plans for black people.
00:00:33.000These are just a few of the high-concept films produced by Blumhouse Productions, founded by Jason Blum.
00:00:39.000At 35, Jason Blum moved to Los Angeles and found himself producing a micro-budget horror film called Paranormal Activity.
00:00:45.000The film ended up being made for only $15,000, and then soared to over $190 million at the box office, making it one of the most profitable films of all time.
00:00:55.000Fast forward a decade and a half, and Jason's production company, Blumhouse Productions, holds many of these staggering box office records, Academy Awards for Whiplash, Get Out, and Black Klansman, as well as the record for the biggest wide-release box office flop from the major studio.
00:01:09.000Jason credits his success and his ability to take risks with his business model of low-budget, high-concept films, generally of the horror variety.
00:01:17.000He likes to stay relevant and stay political.
00:01:20.000His latest film, The Hunt, focuses on a group of wealthy elites hunting deplorables for sport.
00:01:25.000The original marketing of the film received a ton of backlash, even garnering flack from President Trump himself.
00:01:30.000Following the awful news of mass shootings in Ohio and Texas last August, Jason pulled the film from its original release date.
00:01:36.000But there's been tremendous buzz about the film ever since, now being marketed as how quote, the most talked about movie of the year, is one that no one's actually seen.
00:01:44.000Today in our conversation, we talk all about the controversy surrounding the release of The Hunt, how liberal biases affect Hollywood, and the trial of Jason's colleague and former boss, Harvey Weinstein.
00:02:05.000This is The Ben Shapiro Show, Sunday special.
00:02:07.000Very excited to welcome to the show today, Jason Blum.
00:02:10.000Just a reminder, we'll be doing some bonus questions at the end with Jason.
00:02:12.000The only way to get access to that part of the conversation is to become a member.
00:02:16.000Head on over to dailywire.com, become a member, and you'll have access to all of the full conversations with every one of our awesome guests.
00:02:22.000Jason, thanks so much for joining the show, dude.
00:02:29.000And by the way, the fallout from coronavirus will probably not be anywhere near as bad as the fallout from you actually being here in the first place.
00:03:06.000The Hunt is about, the country is so polarized.
00:03:11.000And I had, you know, I did a lot of research on you before I came in here because I was told that.
00:03:18.000And I looked at what you've said and done.
00:03:20.000And all you've expressed is a conservative point of view.
00:03:23.000I believe a lot of things that are different than you.
00:03:26.000Probably we have many more things that are in common and share many more beliefs than our political beliefs.
00:03:32.000And the idea that we can't talk to each other or I can't go on your show makes me furious.
00:03:38.000So I want... I've been looking forward to it.
00:03:41.000I'm ready for the blowback because it doesn't... I am on the other side of the aisle that you are, but there are people who are on my side who are, I think, way, way too far out there, and people who are on your side are too far out there, and we gotta kinda...
00:03:55.000Come together and talk to each other, even if we disagree about things.
00:04:11.000I mean, really, just from the trailer.
00:04:12.000This was not meant to be what a lot of people on the right, including President Trump, immediately took it to be.
00:04:17.000So for those who don't remember, the trailer for The Hunt comes out.
00:04:20.000It is very obvious from the trailer for The Hunt that it is basically a comedic remake of The Most Dangerous Game with Folks on the wild left hunting down rednecks on the right, hunting down the red state Trump supporters.
00:04:33.000And it's not supposed to be a wish fulfillment of the left.
00:04:36.000It is, I mean, obvious from the trailer.
00:04:37.000And the right immediately takes that as, no, no, no, this is just typical Hollywood wish fulfillment.
00:04:41.000It's a bunch of people rooting for Hillary Swank playing the Upper West Side liberal, shooting down these good, noble Americans from the heartland.
00:04:50.000And it was clear that wasn't what it was from the first place.
00:04:51.000Were you kind of surprised by the reaction?
00:06:54.000It was obvious from the trailer what it was and what it was not, but then I saw the movie and then it was clearly what the trailer was, meaning it makes fun of both sides.
00:07:01.000The way I've described it to people is it's basically a Mel Brooks film with extraordinary levels of violence.
00:07:07.000And for conservatives who have been complaining for years about the standards of political correctness in Hollywood, have been complaining no one will ever make Blazing Saddles again, nobody will ever be able to make The Producers again.
00:07:16.000This is a movie that really sort of revels in the stereotypes on both sides, and is making the argument that those stereotypes are basically stupid.
00:07:24.000That there are people who live up to the stereotypes, but that is not the majority of people, and that if you see everybody as the stereotype, then you're missing the entire point of the American debate.
00:07:31.000I think that's a fair way of characterizing the film.
00:07:38.000One of the things I agree with The Right about is that I think a lot of Hollywood, including myself, I would say, is out of touch with America, with the taste of America.
00:08:05.000That spins around in my head, and that's why I wanted to make Well, I mean, that does bring me to a question about how the movie process works in terms of politics.
00:08:11.000So I wrote an entire book a while back about bias in Hollywood, particularly in TV industry.
00:08:16.000There are a lot of folks in Hollywood, some who actually will openly acknowledge that they won't hire conservatives, that they will be just perfectly open about that.
00:08:23.000The complaint from a lot of folks on the right is that the system in Hollywood is systemically biased against conservatives, that you can't make conservative film, that if you are openly conservative in Hollywood, there will be blowback to you.
00:08:32.000What do you make of that critique of Hollywood in terms of its political insularity?
00:08:36.000I think that there's... I mean, I can't believe that someone would admit to not hiring a conservative, first of all, but also, secondly, just not hire a conservative.
00:08:46.000I mean, if you said that about anything, anybody, any other kind of group of people, you would be arrested.
00:09:05.000Some of the jokes in the movie are really over the top, and they're meant to be over the top.
00:09:09.000And now that people have seen the movie, what has been the reaction?
00:09:12.000I know my reaction was the same before and after I saw the movie, because it lived up to what I thought it was going to be.
00:09:16.000Were you surprised by some of the media reaction to the movie?
00:09:19.000Because on Rotten Tomatoes, it's hovering in the sweet spot of where actual good movies live, which is somewhere between 50 and 70 percent.
00:10:00.000Really, the answer is because you made jokes about people who don't like having jokes made about them, right?
00:10:05.000The movie actually is making fun of the critics.
00:10:08.000I mean, a lot of the critics have viewpoints about Red State America that are actually the parody of what It's exactly what you're parodying.
00:10:16.000So a lot of people see that and they go into that high dodging, that's not funny kind of stuff.
00:10:45.000Everyone talks at each other and no one listens.
00:10:47.000And I think one of the ways to get people to listen, and we're not going to accomplish big things unless we're working together, and one of the ways to get people to listen is to make jokes.
00:10:57.000And if you can make jokes and laugh at yourself and laugh at the other side, just like you said, you start to listen and maybe find a way, some kind of compromise to work forward on different things.
00:11:05.000I mean, frankly, one of the reasons I was impressed with the film is because, so it's written by Damon Lindelof, who obviously is of the political left.
00:11:11.000And then I don't know Nick Hughes' politics.
00:11:49.000Also, so you have a unique film production strategies, which is you don't make these huge 50 to 100 million dollar blockbuster movies.
00:11:56.000Your strategy is to pick good scripts that don't cost a fortune, then just make a fortune off of them.
00:12:01.000So how exactly did you hit on the strategy?
00:12:03.000I mean, because you have the money, obviously, the cash flow.
00:12:05.000How did you hit on the strategy of making movies that are in this sort of low budget to mid budget sweet spot, as opposed to the big movies, the big tentpole flicks?
00:12:13.000Yeah, so I was Working in the movie business for about 15 years, from 20 to 35, and I kind of had one foot in independent film and one foot in studio film.
00:12:22.000And really what you're talking about is the difference between independent and studio movies in terms of budgets.
00:12:26.000Average independent movies, 4 or 5 million dollars.
00:12:29.000Average studio movies, 75 million dollars.
00:12:32.000And I never was comfortable in either space.
00:12:36.000And I was really frustrated by the way studio films are produced, but I loved the way studio films were distributed.
00:12:43.000I made a crazy, I'm not crazy, I made an unusual movie for me called The Tooth Fairy, starring The Rock, right?
00:12:48.000That's the only studio film I ever made.
00:12:50.000And I had this very frustrating experience making the movie, but I saw how a studio distributed a movie.
00:13:02.000It's one person kind of drawing a DVD box and making the poster and making it's just so it's so hard to compete with the studios.
00:13:11.000And at that time, when I was 35, two movies that I worked on, very different movies, Paranormal Activity and The Tooth Fairy, came out at the same time.
00:13:17.000And the great and lucky thing that I had to happen to me during my career was that Paranormal Activity happened to me after I'd been at it for 15 years.
00:13:26.000And after I had that hit movie, Hollywood says, because Hollywood is addicted to money, Hollywood says, if you have a hit, make a more expensive movie.
00:13:34.000That's what every agent tells their director.
00:13:35.000You directed a $20 million movie, now you're ready for an $80 million movie hit.
00:13:41.000I think the larger the budget of a movie, like I said, I didn't like doing bigger, but the more every creative decision is by committee, the way you choose movies when they're $100 million plus is they have to be like other movies that were successful, and they have to feel like those movies.
00:13:56.000Three successful movies have to feel like that in the last five years.
00:13:59.000When you make low-budget movies, it's the opposite.
00:14:40.000Why hasn't the rest of Hollywood caught on to any of this?
00:14:42.000Why are they banking on these 200 million dollar movies that the Doctor Dolittles of the world when they can lose their shirts on?
00:14:48.000Well, I think it's a complicated, a little more complicated than this, but a big part of it is ego.
00:14:54.000And this idea of success means expensive.
00:14:58.000Like, if you're a big hot shop producer, you should be producing $150 million movies.
00:15:03.000And as silly as that sounds, that's a big part of it.
00:15:06.000Now, obviously, tentpole movies are a big part of the movie business, and Marvel movies, and Pixar movies, and Lucas, you know, Disney, it's a big, important part of the business.
00:15:22.000I think because Hollywood thinks bigger is better.
00:15:24.000How do you make choices about which sort of movies you want to do?
00:15:27.000So one of the big critiques of especially a lot of tentpole films now is that there almost seems to be a quota as far as we need this many women in the movie or we need this many minorities in the movies, that we need to make movies with this particular level of messaging in order to please the critics.
00:15:44.000And so you end up with this sort of These movies that are politically designed to please everyone and end up actually pissing off everybody, right?
00:15:51.000It's in the Marvel movies where they'll sort of say, OK, well, we don't have enough gay characters, so we need a gay character.
00:15:55.000So we'll throw in this little hint of a gay character right here, just enough so that GLAAD won't be on our ass.
00:16:00.000And then not enough that it actually pisses off the 13-year-olds who are coming to the movie, or their parents, more importantly.
00:16:06.000So how do you decide how to make, because you're making controversial films.
00:16:09.000I mean, films that have something to say about our politics.
00:16:12.000I would say The Hunt is pleasing to people on the right, but obviously the politics of Get Out.
00:16:17.000I mean, I did a review of Get Out on my show.
00:16:22.000I thought the politics of Get Out, I was like, I don't understand what, like, I had serious problems, obviously, with the politics of Get Out.
00:16:31.000I mean, I thought that the racial themes of it were deeply off-putting to me.
00:16:34.000But you're taking those kinds of risks, so how do you decide which scripts you're interested in doing?
00:16:40.000Well, I think, to your point, when you're making a movie that, when you're making movies that are that big, they have to appeal to four quadrants, you know?
00:16:48.000So, very specifically, we have a meeting on Monday morning, we look at a script, we all come in, we talk about it on Monday morning.
00:16:54.000Someone has to love it, I have to love it, or someone at the company has to love it.
00:16:57.000We have to think it's scary or unnerving in some way, because that's kind of what Blumhouse means to us or to me.
00:17:03.000But then the fourth thing is, which is what I was talking about before, which is very different from how a studio greenlights a movie, is it has to feel new and different.
00:17:11.000And if a studio has a movie for a hundred—if I was running a studio and it was a $100 million movie and my executive head of production said, this feels great— It's new and different.
00:17:20.000I'd say for a hundred million dollars over my dead body.
00:17:24.000So I'm not, it's the only way it's not the studio system.
00:17:27.000It's just if budgets are that big, it's irresponsible to take risks creatively, big swings creatively, but you can take them on low budget movies.
00:17:35.000So right now, obviously, we're watching as coronavirus unfolds.
00:17:38.000Theaters in China are largely shut down.
00:17:39.000That obviously provides an enormous amount of money to Hollywood.
00:17:43.000You have theaters in the United States likely are going to shut down.
00:17:46.000If not en masse, then people are just not going because big crowds are bad right now.
00:17:51.000So, how does this change the model of Hollywood?
00:17:53.000Hollywood is already suffering with the movement from theater screenings to streaming.
00:17:58.000Streaming is an absolute threat to theaters, obviously.
00:18:01.000The revenue is moving in that direction.
00:18:02.000It's unclear whether that's even sustainable because Netflix is shelling out billions of dollars in making, basically just throwing anything at the wall that they hope can stick.
00:18:11.000Where do you see the future of Hollywood going?
00:18:12.000You see it fragmenting into a bunch of streaming services.
00:18:14.000Do you think that theatrical film is basically going to die?
00:18:30.000I think in the beginning of your question, I think, I don't know what's going to happen, but definitely, you know, one of the funny Corona is going to have much bigger effects on a lot of other things.
00:18:42.000But in terms of to answer your question, it's going to fundamentally, I think, affect the movie business because of not just while it happens, but when we're through it, which hopefully will be sooner rather than later.
00:19:10.000But I definitely agree with you that the movie business will look different after the coronavirus.
00:19:15.000With all that said, how does that impact genres like horror?
00:19:17.000So horror is a genre that almost demands to be seen with other people because the feeling of dread that exists when you watch a movie on your own, like if you're streaming a movie and you can just pause it at the scary part and go to the bathroom, that obviously radically changes how you film, how you see any of these films.
00:19:32.000The horror movie experience does require somebody in the back of the theater shouting, don't go into that, don't open that door.
00:19:38.000So how does that change the movie making from your perspective?
00:19:41.000Well, I don't think theaters are ever going to go away.
00:19:43.000I think people are going to go to movie theaters to see movies, just like people go pay $300 to see live theater when they could go to a movie, or people still go to the movies when TV was invented.
00:19:51.000I think the collective experience of going to a theater and taking in a movie, I think that's going to be around for a long time.
00:19:59.000I think there'll be less movies in theaters.
00:20:02.000There'll be maybe less of a selection.
00:20:05.000Or I should say, there'll be many, many fewer movies in theaters with a window.
00:20:10.000And I think there may be many more movies in theaters, but they only last for a week or two.
00:20:14.000And I think horror, it was going to continue to work.
00:20:21.000For better or for worse, kids are going to want to go collectively to a movie theater to be scared at a horror movie.
00:20:26.000And to your point, horror specifically is, people watch it on streaming, but it is almost impossible to be scared watching a horror movie on streaming.
00:20:35.000Less for the break, but more because almost any other genre, other filmmakers would be very mad if I said this, but almost any other genre, you can look down and look at an email and look up, you're not going to miss too much.
00:20:45.000But the way, you might, maybe on comedy with a joke, but maybe I think even horror is more.
00:20:51.000The way a scare, a good scare, the way James Wan or Lee Wannell does a scare, it's super choreographed.
00:20:57.000You have to be paying attention all the way up to the scare for the scare to work.
00:21:01.000And if you look away for 10 seconds, a minute before the scare happens, the scare won't be scary.
00:21:07.000So in that way, you know, you're really right.
00:21:09.000Like watching a scary movie at home, it's never going to be scary or never going to be nearly as scary as it is in the movie theater because people don't lose their focus when they're in the theater.
00:21:17.000I mean, horror is immersive in a way that other genres just don't have to be.
00:21:21.000Because as you say, like you could look away from the screen on any of these other movies.
00:21:24.000You do that like right before the jump scare and you miss the entire jump scare.
00:21:45.000Yeah, because everybody's going to be spending tons of time at home and they're going to be streaming everything.
00:21:50.000But at the same time, right, I mean, just before this coronavirus panic happened, there was a lot of talk about whether Netflix was even going to be viable into the midterm, just because how are they even making their revenue?
00:22:00.000Like there are only a certain number of people on planet Earth who are going to be paying into that service.
00:22:04.000And they are expending such enormous amounts of money to bring new content all the time.
00:22:08.000And also because of the binging effect, you have to generate so much content.
00:22:12.000Because everything is now generated in 10 hour blocks as opposed to two hour blocks, how can you continue to pay people this much money in terms of production fee and then continue to maintain a studio?
00:22:22.000Something has to give here. - I don't know on Netflix.
00:23:26.000I think the worry for Netflix, too, is as you have so much choice in streaming, why are you not going to subscribe to Netflix for a month, watch what you need to watch, cancel, then do Apple.
00:24:09.000- Fantastic, so what makes you want to do political film and step into the hornet's nest? - I don't, I wanna do good, scary, entertaining, visceral, fun movies, that's first and foremost.
00:24:19.000If there happens to be kind of a, I'm a political person, if there happens to be a political bent to it, I'm attracted to that, but it's not a priority It's not a mandate for the company.
00:24:28.000My executives aren't sitting with filmmakers saying, like, what issue do you want?
00:24:32.000Issue-oriented movie do you want to do?
00:24:47.000Topic I want to do about global warming.
00:24:49.000I say we're in trouble because You can't I think it's virtually impossible to make a fun entertaining movie and think of the topic first I think you have to think of it.
00:25:00.000That's like super scary and whatever and if you can fold politics into that Jordan thinks about race all the time clearly He was he was brought up by mixed-race parents And so he thinks about it's something that is on his mind all the time So get out came out of his head, but right in the key and peel sketches, obviously Yeah, clearly.
00:25:32.000Where we did exactly that is Barry Levinson lives on the Chesapeake Bay, which is very polluted, and he wanted to make a documentary about the Chesapeake Bay.
00:25:43.000And his agent said, you know, you should make a documentary.
00:25:46.000You should make a horror movie about the Chesapeake Bay, and many more people will see it.
00:25:55.000It's funny you should say this, because this has been my lead advice to conservatives who say they want to get into film.
00:26:00.000So one of the great complaints of conservatives about Hollywood, again, is not only that it's politically biased, but why aren't there more conservative films that get made?
00:26:08.000And what I always say to them is because conservatives have kind of a dolphin brain when it comes to entertainment, which is they say that they are interested in conservative entertainment, but then when it comes time to fund it, they're like, well, I'd actually rather invest in fracking.
00:26:20.000And then when it comes to what they want to watch, what they actually want to watch is the same stuff that everybody else Wants to watch.
00:26:25.000And so, the only kind of films that you can get conservatives to pledge to see are either openly religious films, so it's basically an altar call, or politically overt films where, again, it's sort of, like, you'll do better off a documentary that's openly conservative than anything that's subtle.
00:26:38.000Because there are films that have fairly conservative themes.
00:26:41.000I mean, one of my colleagues here, Andrew Klavan, famously suggested that The Dark Knight had some pretty conservative themes about government surveillance and the role of government surveillance in American society and all of this.
00:26:50.000But conservatives, Who are interested in film tend to think of the thematic first, because they're thinking through that prism.
00:26:56.000They should think of their childhood first, or their, you know, some intimate story, or some story that they're attached to.
00:27:03.000And then, if they're interested in getting conservative values out there in entertainment, that will bleed through.
00:27:09.000But they have to think of the story first.
00:27:11.000So how did you get into this industry in the first place?
00:27:13.000I graduated college in 1991, and my roommate was Noah Baumbach, who's a writer-director.
00:27:19.000He and I were roommates in college, and we were roommates in Chicago.
00:27:28.000I learned more about producing from doing that than anything else.
00:27:33.000And Noah wrote this script, which was initially called Fifth Year, which is about four guys who loved college so much they made up excuses to say they're an extra year.
00:28:28.000I produced a bunch of independent movies, most of which were really, really not good.
00:28:34.000And then this connects to where we started, which is I got to being 35.
00:28:38.000I got lucky enough to get involved with paranormal activity and kind of forced the tooth fairy to happen.
00:28:44.000And that was the genesis of Blumhouse.
00:28:47.000When those two movies came out, I stepped back.
00:28:48.000I said, hey, I think that what I want to do is make low budget scary movies because you can get a studio to release them, but make them weird and different and subversive.
00:28:57.000And I always say that we kind of sneak these Sundance dramas almost into the skin of a genre movie to get them distributed.
00:31:01.000So we have to talk about your politics, since obviously we're talking about the politics of the hunt.
00:31:05.000So you look at the state of politics in America right now, and you said earlier that you think that there's more that brings us together than sort of divides us.
00:31:13.000It's a contention that I think is largely true.
00:31:15.000I used to place a lot of my faith in people who are politically oriented for the future of the country, and now I think that all the people who pay no attention to politics are basically That's our future.
00:31:50.000I think the government should provide a safety net, which I know is different than what Republicans think.
00:31:57.000I think if people can't manage in society for what whatever reason, they're lazy or any other reason that you could come up with, if they're on the street, we should take care of them in the most basic way.
00:32:13.000But everyone in this super rich country should at least have a room to live in and a hot meal or whatever.
00:32:19.000And I would be more than happy if me and all my rich friends paid more taxes to help that happen.
00:32:25.000So California is the perfect state for you.
00:32:34.000I was happy to live here until I got hit with that 13.3% top tax rate, and I looked around at the fact that the government services that I supposedly am paying for have not materialized in any actual way.
00:32:44.000It was going better a couple of years ago.
00:32:57.000And I mean, again, I think on principle, very few people disagree with the idea that we need to take care of people who literally can't take care of themselves.
00:35:20.000So when our movies hit certain thresholds, we pay immediately and I film it and I send it to the recipient of the check.
00:35:26.000We've done that for a long, long time.
00:35:28.000And over the years, I've paid out an enormous amount of money in profits to third-party participants, to actors and directors who've worked on our movies.
00:35:34.000So now, it's very easy to get famous people to work for nothing up front because we have a great track record of paying them.
00:35:41.000I mean, are you the only honest person in Hollywood?
00:35:44.000I mean, everyone's heard of Hollywood accounting and double bookkeeping happening here.
00:35:47.000So were you the only person who just decided to not cheat people?
00:36:17.000- So President Trump, there are a few, Hollywood obviously despises President Trump.
00:36:22.000One of the things that is very weird about that is just that Trump is a Hollywood creation in the first place.
00:36:28.000- All true. - Like the fact is that Trump is a person who was not wildly successful at business, Hollywood decided to portray him as wildly successful at business and excellent at firing people.
00:36:37.000It turns out that he actually, it's actually one of the things he's worst at as president.
00:36:43.000He'll find ten different ways to get people to try and fire themselves.
00:36:46.000He'll fire people while they're on the toilet.
00:36:47.000He'll fire people in ways that put him in impeachable territory.
00:36:51.000Hollywood created President Trump in a lot of ways and then became very, very sad that they had created President Trump and Frankenstein's monster came back to the castle.
00:36:58.000So, what words do you have for Hollywood for having brought President Trump to the world?
00:37:29.000One of the things that's fascinating about President Obama... Hollywood created a certain way information is consumed.
00:37:38.000And I think Trump, one of the reasons President Trump was elected was because The way that we consume information has been changed by the media industry across Hollywood and New York.
00:37:52.000I think that part is... The building up of his image.
00:38:06.000But actually, this gets to sort of a deeper point, which is one of the things that's fascinating about the interaction between Hollywood and D.C.
00:38:12.000is that in D.C., People from Hollywood are the celebrities.
00:38:16.000In Hollywood, people from DC are the celebrities.
00:38:18.000And there is this feeling in Hollywood, I mean, again, I've grown up here my entire life, that the people that Hollywood people want to meet are not really other Hollywood people.
00:38:28.000So President Obama was actually more of a Hollywood star to Hollywood than he was even just, you know, a statesman or a politician or anything.
00:38:35.000He was, in a certain way, Trump's entertainment persona is almost like a bizarro Superman version of Barack Obama.
00:38:44.000I mean, President Obama was very media savvy.
00:38:46.000President Obama was very heavily involved with Hollywood.
00:38:48.000President Obama campaigned with movie stars.
00:38:49.000He brought movie stars to the White House.
00:39:07.000I mean, Fox News really started to blur the line between information and news and entertainment.
00:39:14.000Now CNBC, now they all do it, by the way.
00:39:16.000I'm not suggesting that Fox News is the only company that does it now.
00:39:18.000Now it's across I'm talking slightly different than what you're saying, but I think one of the things Hollywood is very guilty of is blurring the lines between news and entertainment or truth and fiction.
00:39:36.000And that, for sure, is something that Hollywood did.
00:39:39.000What do you think Hollywood's attitude toward intervention in politics should be?
00:39:43.000So we've seen this kind of break out into the open with, for example, Ricky Gervais just hammering people at the awards shows, saying, listen, you're a bunch of Hollywoodites.
00:39:51.000You know, you're going and doing business with China.
00:39:53.000Tim Cook from Apple, while you're sitting here bitching about President Trump and his policies toward China.
00:39:59.000Everybody in this audience is very rich and has spent five minutes reading a book, and now they're talking politics.
00:40:05.000I think there's a lot of Americans who watch that and agree with Ricky Gervais.
00:40:08.000What do you think that Hollywood's attitude should be toward political involvement?
00:40:12.000And not even just being involved politically on a personal level, but in terms of sort of promulgating political messages more broadly?
00:40:20.000Well you asked a lot of questions there.
00:40:22.000I think Ricky Gervais, if you're saying do I think Hollywood is hypocritical, I think wildly, wildly, wildly.
00:40:34.000Do I think Hollywood should probably dip its toe less into politics and more into keeping its eye on the prize, which is entertaining people?
00:40:59.000I think Hollywood is entitled to be political.
00:41:01.000What I don't like is when Hollywood gets preachy, and that bothers me.
00:41:06.000I try not to do that, and that bothers me.
00:41:07.000I think when Hollywood gets preachier, and when Hollywood says, we're right and you're wrong, That irks me.
00:41:14.000So in a second, I want to ask you about an area where Hollywood finally did get it right, but originally got it wrong, namely the Me Too movement, because you've come up as somebody who Harvey Weinstein was afraid of, something you should be inordinately proud of.
00:41:25.000I mean, if I were you, I'd be more proud of this than any movie I'd produce.
00:41:27.000Yeah, now I'm worried that people are saying, now here's where people don't read the facts.
00:41:31.000I'm worried you saying that I should be proud of it.
00:41:33.000Some people, some people are not going to understand it.
00:41:36.000Hollywood had a red flag list for people he was worried about who were talking badly about him, and I was on the list, and I'm happy that I was on it.
00:41:44.000And you should be inordinately proud of that, obviously.
00:41:47.000Everybody should have been calling out Harvey Weinstein for what he was for years.
00:41:51.000Why do you think it was that he wasn't called out for years?
00:41:54.000I mean, the fact is the casting couch, unfortunately, was a way of life in Hollywood for a hundred years.
00:41:57.000But why do you think that Weinstein was able to get away with it?
00:41:59.000- The second part of what I was gonna say is, I wish that it was true, what he said about me.
00:42:05.000I wasn't doing that because I didn't know, and I think a huge majority of the people around him didn't know it.
00:42:12.000I mean, I was relatively close to him, and I remember even a couple of lawsuits being settled.
00:42:20.000And I remember being very clearly told, you know, I mean, I was young.
00:43:04.000I mean, I think, you know, he was a brute, tough guy.
00:43:09.000But I don't think Seth implied he was breaking the law.
00:43:12.000I think there's a big difference between those things.
00:43:15.000So I want to ask you sort of what you think are the misperceptions that conservatives have about Hollywood generally.
00:43:21.000So, you know, I've brought a lot of sort of the conservative critiques of Hollywood to you and laid them at your feet and said, answer these questions.
00:43:27.000But what are the things that you wish that people in the middle of the country, that you wish that conservatives who are maybe anti-Hollywood, almost in knee-jerk fashion, knew about the Hollywood industry and the way that it works and the people who staff it?
00:43:38.000Well, the biggest thing, I think, and the most important thing, and the reason that I'm doing your show, is that all of Hollywood is not the same.
00:43:46.000I can be a liberal, but talk to you and be on your show and make a movie called The Hunt and make a movie for— I'd make even a movie with— if there was an amazing horror movie that came to me and it pushed a conservative value, I would make it.
00:44:00.000So I think that's probably the most important thing.
00:44:04.000One of the things that I've often said to conservatives, because I grew up in this area and I know a lot of people who are in Hollywood, is that you'd be surprised the number of people who either are conservative in Hollywood or who at least live normal conservative lifestyles, even if they politically disagree with you.
00:44:38.000Like, I live what is the archetype of a conservative, although I'm not a conservative.
00:44:43.000So do you have hopes that with movies like The Hunt that people will actually learn to laugh again?
00:44:47.000Because it seems like the biggest problem here, and this was true in the original reaction, then it seems true from a lot of the critics now, is that people just don't want to laugh at this stuff because they're almost happy with a world in which you can't make a movie like this.
00:44:58.000There's a whole group of people who seem happier not being able to tell jokes to each other and instead sniping each other on Twitter, which is just a garbage fire of dunking and being dunked upon.
00:45:08.000Do you think that there is going to be a reawakening of that mentality?
00:45:41.000If you make this movie, if you make this, if you do this, do you really want to deal with the controversy?
00:45:47.000I 99 times out of 100, not every time, but almost every time I say yes, because I think you have to keep Doing things and get the controversy until they realize that the controversy is not helpful.
00:46:14.000And the idea that everything has to be so rehearsed and you can't say anything without being attacked if it somewhat offends some group of people.
00:47:38.000Getting there was sloppy and messy and not fun.
00:47:41.000Yeah, no, I mean, I totally agree with this and I think that that is the fine line is between obviously there are some people I've been hit on the on the right for saying that there are some people who I think are indeed outside the Overton window.
00:47:51.000I don't think that means that they should be deplatformed or that they shouldn't be able to say what they want to say.
00:47:55.000They should be able to and then we should be able to talk about how dumb they are.
00:47:58.000But there are people who are clearly not within sort of the mainstream of public rhetoric.
00:48:02.000The problem is that we are shrinking that mainstream so small that if you don't fit inside this very tiny box than who exactly does.
00:48:10.000I mean, and that's been one of the problems for the right.
00:48:13.000I think that there's still litmus tests in Hollywood.
00:48:16.000I think it's a problem for the left, too.
00:48:18.000Yeah, well, it's certainly a problem for the left in terms of the right, I think.
00:48:22.000I mean, it seems like there's still some pretty significant litmus tests in Hollywood politically.
00:48:26.000Less so, I think, on sort of the pro-life, pro-choice stuff.
00:48:31.000I think I know some pro-lifers who are working in Hollywood.
00:48:33.000I think that, do you think Trump is a litmus test?
00:48:36.000How many people do you know in Hollywood who are working who will admit to openly have voted for President Trump?
00:48:42.000I think that is still a litmus test in Hollywood.
00:49:04.000I'm afraid that because I was a member of Students for Trump, that now I'm going to go to Hollywood, and that's on my Facebook page, and I'm not going to get a job.