Hollywood Week: Hollywood's Big Failed Political Gamble, Quincy Jones Dies
- Details
- Category: Entertainment News
- Published on Saturday, 09 November 2024 09:52
- Written by Janet Walker
To say Hollywood gambled big is an understatement. The reverberation of Tuesday's 2024 presidential election is like a nuclear blast wave, the reach of the loss is felt far and wide as the failed political gamble backfired, big time.
Hollywood Big Gamble
After the push back against President Biden leading the ticket, which began by the media within hours after the June 27 debate, and in earnest, six days later with Netflix Chairman of the Board Reed Hastings penning an Opinion piece for The New York Times, on July 3, 2024, calling on Biden to stand down, many mega donors invested heavily in the hope for change.
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"Mr. Hastings became one of the first to say publicly what many Democratic megadonors are saying privately. "Biden needs to step aside to allow a vigorous Democratic leader to beat Trump and keep us safe and prosperous," he said in an email with The Times," reported The New York Times.
Once Mr. Hastings voiced his opinion everyone wanted to be on his side, and it became an onslaught of coattail seekers, and with Netflix consider the King of streaming, everyone wanted to be considered of the same opinion as the chairman of the board. The idea that we are of a like mind, celebrate the victory together, we knew it, only the voting patterns were not present to back up the belief and support the theory.
Hide sight, of course, is 20-20, and if we have learned anything it should be to look at the patterns. The 2016 election, which ushered in the first Trump presidency, resulted in 232 electoral votes and Hillary Clinton secured the popular vote. In 2024, Harris secured 226 electoral votes, the same states, expect Nevada, and did not capture the popular vote.
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In Biden's first 2020 debate, he poorly performed, he was a mirror to his 2024 June debate, he stumbled, and as Trump is verbally agile, he has stingers at the ready to interject doubt at any given moment, any time his mic is on, which every debate confirms. The patterns are presents. Biden second performance, in 2020, secured the election, he was agile and changed up his strategy. At the Democratic National Convention, Biden was back in good form, which would have mirrored the second 2024 debate.
And by the time, Actor George Clooney penned his opinion piece and joined the band, it was "We love you, Joe, but you gotta go." His words were stinging and harsh. "But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time. None of us can. It's devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe "big F-ing deal" Biden of 2010. He wasn't even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate," reported The New York Times. The Clooney letter, which was uniformly dismissed as personal, biting, attacks, was based on the White House policy regarding the Israeli-Palestine war and the work his Human Rights attorney wife had completed which resulted in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu facing a war crimes indictment.
However as talent fell into line, party over politics, the buoyance of breaking the glass ceiling resonated with demographics, and although Harris' previous attempts during primaries in the past ended with limited success, Biden stood down, and expected everyone to do their part since the band wagon for his dismissal, resonated with big donors, talent, leaders, movers, shakers, and honestly the majorities from the nation's most educated states.
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Unfortunately, the effort to change the opinion of the populous was akin to buying the vote and the power of the PR campaign initiated by Trump in 2020 which gelled for four years was too great to overcome. Some folks just refused to be bought. Calling on Biden to stand down said to the American people, there is no place for people of age, we don't need the wisdom of age, which alienated a demographic and the desire to payback, for every reason and any reason, spelled success and disaster.
Politics or Payback
From the moment former President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election his spin doctors were at work devising a scheme to override the loser status that goes along with losing a campaign, which is how they devised the notion of a stolen election. Stop the Steal became the rallying cry to incite the disgruntled, who invested their vote, and came up, like in the Superbowl or any other high stakes event, on the losing side. This slogan, generated by a marketing and PR team, provided the former president with the power to create outrage and discontent. The events of January 6, 2021, punctuated the power of the PR campaign. This rhetoric has continued to add fuel, to energize the disgruntled who are hoping for payback. Even as the political process should not be about payback, it always is. Americans are vengeful, if they believe they have been stolen from they will never cease the effort to regain what they believe was taken from them.
As there is nothing we can do about the outcome, in the words of legendary Los Angeles Lakers coach Pat Reilly, "Function forward, control what you can."
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Quincy Jones Dies at 91
Quincy Jones, a musical hitmaker, EGOT winner, and one of the most respected musicians and producers in Hollywood, died this week. He was 91.
"Tonight, with full but broken hearts, we must share the news of our father and brother Quincy Jones' passing," his family said in a statement. "And although this is an incredible loss for our family, we celebrate the great life that he lived and know there will never be another like him," reported The Hollywood Reporter.
Jones' musical genius was behind many of the greatest moment in musical history over the last sixty years, from working with Frank Sinatra and producing what many believe is Sinatra's greatest album, Sinatra at the Sands, in 1966, to producing Michael Jackson's Thriller, the best-selling album of all time, Off the Wall, and Bad. Over the course of his lifetime he received 80 Grammy nominations, securing 28 wins, and Jones is one of 27 elite talents to secure EGOT status, winners of the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony.
Jones created the scores for many Hollywood soundtracks and driven by an insatiable desire to create continued to adapt to the changes in the musical history and even with his 1989 "Back on the Block" which won six Grammys, including Album of the Year, and the 1995 "Q's Jook Joint" releases he returned pairing talent with hits from the Big Band era.
Jones died Sunday, November 3, 2024, at his home in Bel-Air. "According to his publicist, Mr. Jones is survived by a brother, Richard; two sisters, Margie Jay and Theresa Frank; and seven children: Jolie, Kidada, Kenya, Martina, Rachel, Rashida and Quincy III," reported The New York Times.
Janet Walker is the publisher, founder, and sole owner of Haute-Lifestyle.com. A graduate of New York University, she has been covering international news through the Beltway Insider, a weekly review of the nation's top stories, for more than a decade. A general beat writer/reporter and entertainment/film critic, she is also an accomplished news/investigative news/crime reporter and submitted for Pulitzer Prize consideration "Cops Conspire to Deep Six Sex Assaults" in the Breaking News Category. Ms. Walker has completed five screenplays, "The Six Sides of Truth," "The Assassins of Fifth Avenue," "The Wednesday Killer," "The Manhattan Project," and the sci-fi thriller "Project 13: The Last Day." She is a member of the Los Angeles Press Club, the National Writers Union, and the International Federation of Journalists.
