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en route to the Walk of Fame, where he was planning to explain his actions

the man had told him he wanted to auction the star and raise money on behalf of the nearly dozen women who have accused Mr. Trump of sexual assault or sexual harassment.

Mr. Trump’s star, in the 6800 block of Hollywood Boulevard, has been the target of numerous attempts at defacement in the last several months.

Even when visitors do not try to deface the star, they sometimes use it to express their feelings toward the Republican nominee, like a young man who posed with both middle fingers extended above the star in this Instagram photo.

U.S. comedies account for only 10% of box office spending, compared to 25% in the U.S.

Hollywood action films are 44% of the box office in China (the latest Transformers release has broken just about every box office record in the country) as against 36% in the U.S.

Comedy is the least profitable genre for the studios.

And the ruthless profit machine that is Hollywood is responding. Fox in particular has scaled back its comedy output significantly (from 44% of releases in 2010, to just 8% this year). Disney is not releasing any comedies this year,

The WGA has two main objections. The most prominent is the creation in the past few years of quasi-production entities by the agencies — like Endeavor Content, part of the same holding company as the talent agency WME (William Morris Endeavor), or Wiip, supported by CAA (Creative Artists Agency). The creation of these units, the WGA says, means that writers are basically working for their agents, a situation rife with potential conflicts

the writers say agencies are sharing revenue in a highly inequitable way, leaving many creative people to fight for scraps

Goodman said packaging fees were directly responsible for the stagnation, in part because agents collect 10 percent from the studio, reducing the pool writers draw from, in part because those fees discourage agents from fighting for higher client payments because they’re already collecting such a large slice.

“The system works against mid-level and lower-level writers,” he said. Goodman also noted a creatively limited consequence of high packaging fees: Agents are reluctant to find clients from another agency to work on a writer’s project because it would mean splitting the packaging fees.

The WGA could rely on an archaic clause in California labor code that does not allow agencies to refer people with whom the agent has a “direct or indirect financial interest.” It has also leaned on agencies’ status as fiduciaries, which require them to act loyally to a client. But a judge has yet to weigh in on whether a production arm violates that duty.

One historical precedent, at least, does favor the writers. In the early 1960s, the courts forced MCA, a growing music-and-representation company, to sell its agency business after buying a movie studio, Universal Pictures.

Our love of Hollywood-style glamour helped elect two presidents: JFK and Reagan, who fulfilled the prophecy that a country so enamored of actors would eventually make one their president. “All in the Family” chronicled the racial and cultural upheavals of the Nixon era. Bill Clinton captured the zeitgeist of young voters in the early 1990s by playing his saxophone on the “Arsenio Hall” show

Obama, though, has taken celebrity association to another level. He has been a darling of Hollywood, the music industry and popular culture from the time he declared for president in 2007

onservatives rail at Hollywood movies that make them feel alienated by presenting capitalists, corporations and moral traditionalists as the villains, and sexual libertines, iconoclasts and the godless (or godlike, in the form of superheroes, witches and warlocks) as the heroes.

the 80 percent of white self-professed evangelicals who voted for Trump purportedly did so to lay claim to the courts, where they believe they can yet win out on banning abortion and birth control, forcing women back into traditional roles, and undoing gay marriage

owes his election in large part to the sense of familiarity that being a reality TV star afforded him. That status allowed many of his voters to put aside his misogyny and vulgarity

which dined out on vows to discriminate against Mexicans and Muslims while unleashing a resurgence of racist hate groups and just plain haters is reaping the cultural opprobrium it sowed. And it’s making The Donald miserable.

“Before Uber was a thing, I would rarely go to Hollywood,” said Drew Heitzler, an artist who lives in Venice, a potentially treacherous drive away. “The prospect of going to Hollywood on a weekend night, if I was invited to a party or an art event, it just wouldn’t happen. I would just stay home.”

Taxis here were often unreliable, he added, but ride shares are always just a swipe away.

“There’s a lot of New Yorkers here, and they’re saying it’s almost like New York.”

Once, only the privileged few, the studio bosses and pampered starlets, could afford to have a chauffeur and a waiting car to transport them around sprawling Los Angeles. Now anyone with a credit card can enjoy that freedom.

“Uber and Lyft have made it much more affordable, and encouraged people to venture out of their neighborhoods, and to explore.”

That is especially true of downtown Los Angeles, which is enjoying the double whammy of a recent cultural resurgence — partly bolstered by the Ace, which opened its hotel and performance space in a historic 1920s movie palace in January — and the car services that deliver once-reluctant visitors. Along with Santa Monica and West Hollywood, it is the area with the highest ridership, according to an Uber representative, though the company refused to release specific figures.

A night out in Los Angeles used to involve negotiating parking, beating traffic and picking a designated driver. Excursions from one end to the other — say, from the oceanfront city of Santa Monica to the trendy Silver Lake neighborhood on the eastern side — had to be planned and timed with military precision, lest they spiral into a three-hour commute. More often than not, they were simply avoided.

Grand Central Market, a food hall from 1917, has lately turned Smorgasburg-y; on weekends, preppily dressed crowds wait patiently for sandwiches from Eggslut. Outside, the street is blocked off for pedestrians, with cafe tables and umbrellas, and nearby is a linger-worthy bookstore and a retro barbershop with shuffleboard. Along Broadway, between discount stores and pupusa stands, are boutiques like OAK NYC and Acne Studios, the Swedish fashion label that opened a giant store there this fall.

“I find myself going down there a lot and taking friends that are coming to visit, because there’s so much cool stuff to do,” s

Ride sharing, some analysts say, has become a viable alternative to owning a car: between the cost of gas, insurance, garages and valet tips, it’s often more economical to get a lift in a professional’s Toyota than to drive solo in your own, and that’s without factoring in the mental cost of sitting in gridlock on Interstate 405.

A short ride through downtown in UberX, the company’s lower-priced service, introduced here last spring, can cost as little as $4, while parking lots charge $5 for 15 minutes.

In a nod to the city’s continued obsession with the status ride, the company recently implemented, in Los Angeles and Orange County only, UberPlus, with a fleet of BMWs and other luxury vehicles. Even with ride shares, what you pull up in matters.

He reciprocated in kind. “How do you describe coming into a warm room from out of the cold?” he once said. “Never waking up bored? The only thing wrong is, she’s made a coward out of me. Whenever she’s out of sight, I’m a worrier about her.”

But this was a convention in a day when women were not encouraged to have careers outside the home. In his book “Reagan’s America: Innocents At Home,” Garry Wills disputed the prevalent view that Miss Davis had just been marking time in Hollywood while waiting for a man. She was “the steady woman,” he wrote, who in most of her 11 films had held her own with accomplished actors.

In the late 1940s, Hollywood was in the grip of a “Red Scare,” prompted by government investigations into accusations of Communist influence in the film industry. In October 1949, the name “Nancy Davis” appeared in a Hollywood newspaper on a list of signers of a supporting brief urging the Supreme Court to overturn the convictions of two screenwriters who had been blacklisted after being found guilty of contempt for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee.Such newspaper mentions could mean the end of a career, and Nancy Davis sought help from her friend Mervyn LeRoy, who had directed her in “East Side, West Side.” LeRoy found it was a case of mistaken identity: another Nancy Davis had worked in what he called “leftist theater.” He offered to call Ronald Reagan, president of the Screen Actors Guild, to make sure there would be no problems in the future. Instead, Miss Davis insisted that LeRoy set up a meeting with Mr. Reagan.

From the first, Mrs. Reagan was part of the campaign planning. “They were a team,” said Stuart Spencer, who with Bill Roberts managed the Reagan campaign. New to politics, she said little at first. But Mr. Spencer found her “a quick learner, always absorbing.” Before long she was peppering Mr. Roberts and Mr. Spencer about their strategy and tactics.

The mansion episode, and Mrs. Reagan’s unalloyed preference for Southern California, aroused parochial resentment in Sacramento. She in turn disliked the city’s locker-room political culture, which required her to socialize with the wives of legislators who had insulted her husband. She bristled at press scrutiny, which became more intense after Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, wrote an unflattering article, “Pretty Nancy,” in The Saturday Evening Post in 1968. The article described Mrs. Reagan’s famous smile as a study in frozen insecurity.

Mr. Reagan decided to debate and did so well that he surged ahead in the polls and won convincingly a week later.

After the assassination attempt, Mrs. Reagan turned to Joan Quigley, a San Francisco astrologer, who claimed to have predicted that March 30 would be a “bad day” for the president. Her relationship with Ms. Quigley “began as a crutch,” Mrs. Reagan wrote, “one of several ways I tried to alleviate my anxiety about Ronnie.” Within a year, it was a habit. Mrs. Reagan conversed with Ms. Quigley by telephone and passed on the information she received about favorable and unfavorable days to Mr. Deaver, the presidential assistant, and later to the White House chief of staff, Donald Regan, for use in scheduling.

Mr. Regan disclosed Mrs. Reagan’s astrological bent in his 1988 book, “For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington,” asserting that the Quigley information created a chaotic situation for White House schedulers. Mrs. Reagan said that no political decisions had been made based on the astrologist’s advice, nor did Mr. Regan allege that any had been.But the disc

losure was nonetheless embarrassing to Mrs. Reagan; she and many commentators saw it as an act of revenge for the role she had played in forcing Mr. Regan out after the Iran-contra disclosures. Mrs. Reagan’s low opinion of Mr. Regan was well known; she had said tartly that he “liked the sound of chief but not of staff.”

After reading Seven Days in May, Kennedy remarked ‘it could happen’ and some generals ‘might hanker to duplicate fiction’

The possibility of a coup – and the threat of his own assassination – was a leitmotiv in Kennedy’s conversations with friends. The president had a dark sense of humour and often joked about it. On one occasion, he called Chuck Spalding to announce he was writing a novel about a coup led by Vice President Lyndon Johnson. Kennedy would sporadically update Spalding: ‘I’ve just got the second chapter’, he once quipped, ‘Lyndon has me captured just as I hit the pool!’

Kennedy thought Seven Days in May should become a movie. Arthur Schlesinger, a presidential adviser, said Kennedy wanted the film ‘made as a warning to the generals’. The president reached out to Hollywood contacts

Pierre Salinger, the president’s press secretary, gave the director a tour of the White House for research purposes. He also explained that, for Kennedy, the film represented ‘a warning to the republic’. It was certainly a way of alerting public opinion and, as Schlesinger put it, ‘raise consciousness about the problems involved if the generals got out of control’.

In July 1963 JFK announced that, like the fictional president in Seven Days in May, he had struck a nuclear deal with the Soviet Union. The Test Ban Treaty – the first arms control agreement of the Cold War era – outlawed most nuclear testing

Although it was ratified by the US Senate in September 1963, Kennedy’s treaty was initially opposed by most of the military.

It is unashamedly religious pronouncements such as this from Caviezel that have attracted widespread support from conservatives and right-wing influencers who have helped fuel Sound of Freedom’s surprise success.

Caviezel mentioned “the adrenochroming of children”, referring to a macabre blood-harvesting conspiracy theory circulating among some online communities. His controversial claims do not appear to have harmed Sound of Freedom’s prospects at the box office

The film, which has a reported budget of $14.5 million, was completed in 2018 and spent years bouncing around Hollywood after being rejected by major studios, including Disney.

The studio raised the cost of releasing Sound of Freedom through courting investments from the public, with about 7,000 people chipping in between $10 and $25,000 each.

Michael Grace, a Hollywood writer and producer, said the success of Sound of Freedom may convince studios to diversify from “woke” content.

“And it’s like they’re not realising it’s a business and they’re not asking ‘Are we going to make any money on this?’ They may look at this movie and realise it’s doing as well as Harrison Ford.”

(An early conclusion: while we were late to understand how angry white voters were, a perhaps even more serious lapse was in failing to recognize how many disaffected Democrats there were who would stay home rather than support their party’s flawed candidate.)

Stories that would have killed any other politician—truly worrisome revelations about everything from the federal taxes Trump dodged to the charitable donations he lied about, the women he insulted and allegedly assaulted, and the mob ties that have long dogged him—did not stop Trump from thriving in this election year

the Oxford Dictionaries announced that “post-truth” had been chosen as the 2016 word of the year, defining it as a condition “in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

Meantime, Trump personally blacklisted news organizations like Politico and The Washington Post when they published articles he didn’t like during the campaign, has openly mused about rolling back press freedoms enshrined by the U.S. Supreme Court, and has now named Stephen Bannon, until recently the executive chairman of Breitbart—a right-wing fringe website with a penchant for conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic tropes—to serve as one of his top White House advisers.

none of this has any modern precedent. And what makes it unique has nothing to do with the outcome of the election. This time, the victor was a right-wing demagogue; next time, it may be a left-wing populist who learns the lessons of Trump’s win.

This is no mere academic argument. The election of 2016 showed us that Americans are increasingly choosing to live in a cloud of like-minded spin, surrounded by the partisan political hackery and fake news that poisons their Facebook feeds.

To help us understand it all, there were choices, but not that many: three TV networks that mattered, ABC, CBS, and NBC; two papers for serious journalism, The New York Times and The Washington Post; and two giant-circulation weekly newsmagazines, Time and Newsweek. That, plus whatever was your local daily newspaper, pretty much constituted the news.

Whether it was Walter Cronkite or The New York Times, they preached journalistic “objectivity” and spoke with authority when they pronounced on the day’s developments—but not always with the depth and expertise that real competition or deep specialization might have provided. They were great—but they were generalists.

Eventually, I came to think of the major media outlets of that era as something very similar to the big suburban shopping malls we flocked to in the age of shoulder pads and supply-side economics: We could choose among Kmart and Macy’s and Saks Fifth Avenue as our budgets and tastes allowed, but in the end the media were all essentially department stores, selling us sports and stock tables and foreign news alongside our politics, whether we wanted them or not. It may not have been a monopoly, but it was something pretty close.

This was still journalism in the scarcity era, and it affected everything from what stories we wrote to how fast we could produce them. Presidents could launch global thermonuclear war with the Russians in a matter of minutes, but news from the American hinterlands often took weeks to reach their sleepy capital. Even information within that capital was virtually unobtainable without a major investment of time and effort. Want to know how much a campaign was raising and spending from the new special-interest PACs that had proliferated? Prepare to spend a day holed up at the Federal Election Commission’s headquarters down on E Street across from the hulking concrete FBI building, and be sure to bring a bunch of quarters for the copy machine.

I am writing this in the immediate, shocking aftermath of a 2016 presidential election in which the Pew Research Center found that a higher percentage of Americans got their information about the campaign from late-night TV comedy shows than from a national newspaper. Don Graham sold the Post three years ago and though its online audience has been skyrocketing with new investments from Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, it will never be what it was in the ‘80s. That same Pew survey reported that a mere 2 percent of Americans today turned to such newspapers as the “most helpful” guides to the presidential campaign.

In 2013, Mark Leibovich wrote a bestselling book called This Town about the party-hopping, lobbyist-enabling nexus between Washington journalists and the political world they cover. A key character was Politico’s Mike Allen, whose morning email newsletter “Playbook” had become a Washington ritual, offering all the news and tidbits a power player might want to read before breakfast—and Politico’s most successful ad franchise to boot. In many ways, even that world of just a few years ago now seems quaint: the notion that anyone could be a single, once-a-day town crier in This Town (or any other) has been utterly exploded by the move to Twitter, Facebook, and all the rest. We are living, as Mark put it to me recently, “in a 24-hour scrolling version of what ‘Playbook’ was.”

These days, Politico has a newsroom of 200-odd journalists, a glossy award-winning magazine, dozens of daily email newsletters, and 16 subscription policy verticals. It’s a major player in coverage not only of Capitol Hill but many other key parts of the capital, and some months during this election year we had well over 30 million unique visitors to our website, a far cry from the controlled congressional circulation of 35,000 that I remember Roll Call touting in our long-ago sales materials.

I remained convinced that reporting would hold its value, especially as our other advantages—like access to information and the expensive means to distribute it—dwindled. It was all well and good to root for your political team, but when it mattered to your business (or the country, for that matter), I reasoned, you wouldn’t want cheerleading but real reporting about real facts. Besides, the new tools might be coming at us with dizzying speed—remember when that radical new video app Meerkat was going to change absolutely everything about how we cover elections?—but we would still need reporters to find a way inside Washington’s closed doors and back rooms, to figure out what was happening when the cameras weren’t rolling.

And if the world was suffering from information overload—well, so much the better for us editors; we would be all the more needed to figure out what to listen to amid the noise.

Trump turned out to be more correct than we editors were: the more relevant point of the Access Hollywood tape was not about the censure Trump would now face but the political reality that he, like Bill Clinton, could survive this—or perhaps any scandal. Yes, we were wrong about the Access Hollywood tape, and so much else.

Fake news is thriving In the final three months of the presidential campaign, the 20 top-performing fake election news stories generated more engagement on Facebook than the top stories from major news outlets such as The New York Times.

, we journalists were still able to cover the public theater of politics while spending more of our time, resources, and mental energy on really original reporting, on digging up stories you couldn’t read anywhere else. Between Trump’s long and checkered business past, his habit of serial lying, his voluminous and contradictory tweets, and his revision of even his own biography, there was lots to work with. No one can say that Trump was elected without the press telling us all about his checkered past.

politics was NEVER more choose-your-own-adventure than in 2016, when entire news ecosystems for partisans existed wholly outside the reach of those who at least aim for truth

Pew found that nearly 50 percent of self-described conservatives now rely on a single news source, Fox, for political information they trust.

As for the liberals, they trust only that they should never watch Fox, and have MSNBC and Media Matters and the remnants of the big boys to confirm their biases.

And then there are the conspiracy-peddling Breitbarts and the overtly fake-news outlets of this overwhelming new world; untethered from even the pretense of fact-based reporting, their version of the campaign got more traffic on Facebook in the race’s final weeks than all the traditional news outlets combined.

When we assigned a team of reporters at Politico during the primary season to listen to every single word of Trump’s speeches, we found that he offered a lie, half-truth, or outright exaggeration approximately once every five minutes—for an entire week. And it didn’t hinder him in the least from winning the Republican presidential nomination.

when we repeated the exercise this fall, in the midst of the general election campaign, Trump had progressed to fibs of various magnitudes just about once every three minutes!

By the time Trump in September issued his half-hearted disavowal of the Obama “birther” whopper he had done so much to create and perpetuate, one national survey found that only 1 in 4 Republicans was sure that Obama was born in the U.S., and various polls found that somewhere between a quarter and a half of Republicans believed he’s Muslim. So not only did Trump think he was entitled to his own facts, so did his supporters. It didn’t stop them at all from voting for him.

in part, it’s not just because they disagree with the facts as reporters have presented them but because there’s so damn many reporters, and from such a wide array of outlets, that it’s often impossible to evaluate their standards and practices, biases and preconceptions. Even we journalists are increasingly overwhelmed.

2016 suggests a different outcome: We’ve achieved a lot more transparency in today’s Washington—without the accountability that was supposed to come with it.

So much terrific reporting and writing and digging over the years and … Trump? What happened to consequences? Reporting that matters? Sunlight, they used to tell us, was the best disinfectant for what ails our politics.

Referencing Trump's travel ban and stance on immigration, Kimmel joked that in Hollywood, "we don't discriminate against people based on where they're from. We discriminate against them based on their age and weight."

“We keep coming up with new ways to exceed the expectation of our customers,” Mr. Katzenberg said, referring to the rise of cable, DVDs and streaming. “Except now, for the first time in history, we have a whole generation of customers that have a new consumption habit, with this thing called short-form content. And the professional enterprise of storytellers in Hollywood is nowhere near it.

A woman is never challenging only one in-group, either. She is challenging the culture of the whole country, where power feeds on power and once a man has won enough, it is unlikely anyone will let him lose.

Peele repeatedly explained how the notion of a post-racial America, which circulated around the 2008 election, struck him as part of a destructive national mind-set of denial. “The thing I didn’t feel we were talking about in any substantive manner was race. With this one, I asked myself, ‘What are we not ready to talk about now?’ And the answer for me was, ‘What is my part in this mess?’

“We’re living in a messy time,” he continues. “A dark time. And I think there’s plenty of blame to go around, but what I don’t see happening enough is people looking at their own part in this dark turn. It’s so much easier to blame the other. It connects to something in human nature, and to a duality in the history and present of this country as well: this fear of the outsider. This movie was a way to say, What if the intruder is us? Maybe the monster has our face, and we’re so obsessed with some unrecognizable monster that we’ve been blinded to the real one.”

By the time he dropped out of Sarah Lawrence he’d become hyperliterate in horror and, simultaneously, obsessed with improv comedy. In both idioms, he has addressed complex questions about race, such as what it means to be authentically black—a question with particular resonance to a kid whose own dad once asked him why he “talked white.”

in Us. Rather than another meditation on race, Peele says, he wanted to explore questions of economic privilege, training his lens on an upper-middle-class American family that happens to be black.

“There’s this idea that we deserve our privilege,” Peele says, “but when someone enjoys privilege, there almost has to be someone suffering so you can have that. Which means it’s not deserved. It’s violent. In this country we shield ourselves from the people who make our shoes. The people who have to work three jobs. The people we’ve murdered to build over. The wars that have happened so that we can have what we have. If we really acknowledge our place in the world, we have to acknowledge the atrocities, even if we’re not active members in them.”

I observe that Peele has just paraphrased Marx’s theories of alienation in describing a potential Hollywood blockbuster, and he doesn’t miss a beat: “The Tethered are wearing red.”

“I can watch Us, just like I watched Get Out, and learn what I’m trying to say to myself,” he says. “You never make a film and know what you were doing entirely.”

Peele says that, in Hollywood, “the presumption used to be that a successful story is about someone who looks and feels like the audience. With the majority population being white, why would you make a movie with a protagonist of a different race than where your money is? It was a failure of imagination. Black people always saw white movies—because we had to! But also because when a story works, you see yourself in it no matter who you are.”

somehow we’ve reached a point where any behavior short of violent predation – let’s call it the “not as bad as Weinstein” standard – is characterized as misunderstood seduction.

There’s a reason so many people are conflating bad and sometimes criminal behavior with romance: traditional ideas about seduction rely on tropes of women witholding sex and men working hard to get it. It’s a narrow notion of heterosexuality – one that does a good job excusing abusive behavior.

When will we have more concern for the women hurt by abuse than the men accused of it? One of Roy Moore’s accusers had her house burnt to the ground – arson is suspected. Harper’s magazine was on the brink of publishing the name of a woman who created the Shitty Media Men list before a feminist Twitter campaign stopped it. Some women won’t see justice for years, some ever. This moment isn’t about romance, it’s about abuse. Perhaps the fact that so many people can’t tell the difference is part of the problem.