Killing The Gram
max takes meta's crown jewel by storm... plus: red scare = manson fam??
That’s a guy named BHEEEEEEEM!!!!
Heat Advisory Watchers,
How we doing?? It's been too long.
Since I last wrote you, the business model for streaming collapsed. No surprise. This Wall Street dude spelled it out real clearly back in 2020.
But wayyyyyy more importantly? Max is on the gram, sharing headlines from the trades that may merit a second look. The gram experiment is, like all these posts, just fodder for us to dish. So check that shit out & DM your guy…
BUT: "your guy" is also your girl, because the gram is actually a fire collab between Max & a major new character in the HFSU (Hollywood Forever Social Universe), henceforth known as Sloane Peterson. She has scaled the town’s Mount Rushmore but still likes to keep it grimy with the boys on the 'stack. And without further ado —
~~Here’s the Premium Content we’re spotlighting on social~~
get in on this shit????
LA Theater Report
The Laemmle Pasadena -- which had been my mainstay in quar till it closed -- will re-open as a Landmark theater. And thank God. My misgivings about the antiseptic Landmark chain aside, it's way better to have a theater there than not. I hope the new owners don't chop up the place into like 8 little screening rooms, or put the seats higher up than the fucking screen, which drives me nuts at their location on the west side.
Meanwhile, the Laemmle NoHo keeps on trucking. They played Bollywood bonanza RRR long enough for me to plan on going, get corona, convalesce, and still see that shit on the other side on a Wednesday. And I'm so glad. I had never watched a whole Bollywood movie -- and certainly not in a theater. I mean, I had seen clips and had some sense of the dancing & general maximalism, but what I didn't know was that the narrative structure would be of epic scale too. Unscientifically, it has wayyy more turns than an American popcorn flick. And each turn actually means something. It's nice to know movies can be like that too. BHEEEM!
Red Scare, Actually Scary? // Dasha Manson
Some months ago, I wrote you after having seen The Scary of 61st Street, a micro-budget horror flick about Jeff Epstein made by podcaster Dasha Nekrasova. I didn't hate it! I like a rough little movie with a pulse.
But last week, a friend alerted me that Dasha's already-controversial shtick had gotten weirder. Dasha, who first went viral as "Sailor Socialist," has been hanging with Alex Jones and embracing Catholicism (albeit a variety that seems v specific to the internet). And elsewhere in the Dimes Square scene with which she's associated, I was tipped off to another controversy I can't quite parse. There was a screening of a movie in which somebody succeeds in entertainment by pretending to be trans (??????). The filmmakers/stars (who are siblings) had coached the audience to confront a guy who had written a bad review (and brought their parents on stage to participate). And look... I think it's cool when people explode pieties & remain grubby & live for their art, especially IRL & in a city where such things were largely priced out long ago. (And I always want to know what everybody's parents look like.) But between a premise that feels less ~~provocative~~ than ~~fucking braindead~~ & a hostility to criticism, reading about this film & screening made me wanna hurl.
So… what's happening in Dimes Square doesn’t seem especially generative to me. In fact, it feels like the opposite: it's the end of something. In the way that the Manson Family demonstrated that the sixties had exhausted itself, the podcasts from Dimes Square are the anticlimactic death rattle of the hipster. The Dimes Square set aren’t the first hipster spawn to get cozy with fascism (here’s looking at you, Gavin McInnes), but their descent is palpable.
Surveying their output for this email, I’ve been plunged into a druggy hothouse cultishness, internecine feuding, ideological incoherence, and a depressing lack of art making that calls to mind strung out hippies, who railed against Man before becoming petit tyrants themselves on communes across the land. Now those communes have modern analogues: the fiefdoms of niche, newly-regressive podcasters. And from their origins in a gentler costume (liberal-leaning wry hipster), their zeal for fame & aura of madness, they remind me of Manson himself, who, as a guitar player donning the garb of the flower children, swung wildly between theories, before, of course, landing on Hitler's. These kids may find themselves there too: Who’ll go on Tucker first, Dasha or Anna?
I’m not being facetious. The Dimes Square micro-celebs, like Manson before them, pine for the mainstream, in any form. But among all the people associated with this world, the thirst isn’t always coupled with feral regressiveness. The hosts of The Ion Pack are so open about their wish to actually make movies. Honestly I don't totally get where they're coming from otherwise, but the love & hunger is there, and their intro song is funny. I just hope they aren't pressing their celebrity guest Jonah Hill too hard for the hook up: Manson, before turning murderous, sent his girls to execs’ houses as a kind of threatening“just following up” note IRL, because he confused Hollywood compliments with promises.
For a guide to the insanity of that time, I strongggly recommend Rick Perlstein’s sprawling book Nixonland. Its vision of the late sixties has a wide-ranging, if imperfect relevance to today. Here goes…
2010s : 1960s
Hipster : Hippie
Obama : JFK
Bernie : RFK
Trump : Nixon
Climate : Vietnam
BLM : Civil Rights
January 6th : Watergate
Red Scare : Manson Fam
... which scans like a dumb tweet, I know. But this is coming from a real place for me. Because when I was reading about the death of Trevor Bazile, an artist who had just thrown a party that was paid for by Peter Thiel, I couldn't help but think of Joan Didion's essay in Slouching Towards Bethlehem about the Haight in the Summer of Love. That essay ends with a five year old at a house party, wandering around on acid.
Maybe these podcasters were once kids left unattended on the internet.
Hollywood Forever Y'all,
Max