Jason Blum joins The Ben Shapiro Show to dissect his low-budget, high-concept strategy behind hits like Paranormal Activity and Get Out, while addressing the controversy surrounding his film The Hunt. Blum defends the movie as a satire of political extremes despite conservative backlash from President Trump and explains its delayed release following Ohio and Texas mass shootings. The discussion covers Hollywood's alleged bias against conservatives, the pandemic's shift toward streaming versus the enduring value of theatrical horror experiences, Blum's transparent profit-sharing model, his past association with Harvey Weinstein, and how media blurring lines fuels American polarization. Ultimately, the episode highlights the tension between artistic expression and political identity in modern cinema. [Automatically generated summary]
One 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.
A couple sets up a camera in their home to capture a supernatural presence haunting them.
A family fights to survive the night when the U.S.
government makes all crime legal for 12 hours.
A black man goes to his white girlfriend's house and discovers their sinister plans for black people.
These are just a few of the high-concept films produced by Blumhouse Productions, founded by Jason Blum.
At 35, Jason Blum moved to Los Angeles and found himself producing a micro-budget horror film called Paranormal Activity.
The 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.
Fast 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.
Jason credits his success and his ability to take risks with his business model of low-budget, high-concept films, generally of the horror variety.
He likes to stay relevant and stay political.
His latest film, The Hunt, focuses on a group of wealthy elites hunting deplorables for sport.
The original marketing of the film received a ton of backlash, even garnering flack from President Trump himself.
Following the awful news of mass shootings in Ohio and Texas last August, Jason pulled the film from its original release date.
But 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.
Today 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.
And I had, you know, I did a lot of research on you before I came in here because I was told that.
And I looked at what you've said and done.
And all you've expressed is a conservative point of view.
I believe a lot of things that are different than you.
Probably we have many more things that are in common and share many more beliefs than our political beliefs.
And the idea that we can't talk to each other or I can't go on your show makes me furious.
So I want... I've been looking forward to it.
I'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...
Come together and talk to each other, even if we disagree about things.
Well, I mean, I really appreciate that, because obviously that is something that I believe, too.
It's one of the reasons we do the show, and it's one of the things that was so amazing when you first released the trailer for The Hunt.
It was perfectly obvious.
I mean, really, just from the trailer.
This was not meant to be what a lot of people on the right, including President Trump, immediately took it to be.
So for those who don't remember, the trailer for The Hunt comes out.
It 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.
And it's not supposed to be a wish fulfillment of the left.
It is, I mean, obvious from the trailer.
And the right immediately takes that as, no, no, no, this is just typical Hollywood wish fulfillment.
It's a bunch of people rooting for Hillary Swank playing the Upper West Side liberal, shooting down these good, noble Americans from the heartland.
And it was clear that wasn't what it was from the first place.
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Alrighty, so let's talk about the hunt itself.
So, again, I hadn't seen the movie.
It 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.
The way I've described it to people is it's basically a Mel Brooks film with extraordinary levels of violence.
That's right.
And 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.
This 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.
That 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.
I think that's a fair way of characterizing the film.
One 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.
And that bothers me, too.
And that's another reason I love this movie, because it felt like every so often there's a movie that's like a red state movie.
This is not that.
And they're movies like Clint Eastwood, for instance.
And there shouldn't be red state, blue state movies.
That 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.
So I wrote an entire book a while back about bias in Hollywood, particularly in TV industry.
There 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.
The 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.
What do you make of that critique of Hollywood in terms of its political insularity?
I 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.
I mean, if you said that about anything, anybody, any other kind of group of people, you would be arrested.
So I think that's very sad.
I think there is somewhat of a bias.
I think that that's true.
And I think that the bias doesn't take into account the audience.
And 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.
And 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.
I 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.
Also, so you have a unique film production strategies, which is you don't make these huge 50 to 100 million dollar blockbuster movies.
Your strategy is to pick good scripts that don't cost a fortune, then just make a fortune off of them.
So how exactly did you hit on the strategy?
I mean, because you have the money, obviously, the cash flow.
How 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?
Yeah, 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.
And really what you're talking about is the difference between independent and studio movies in terms of budgets.
Average independent movies, 4 or 5 million dollars.
Average studio movies, 75 million dollars.
And I never was comfortable in either space.
And I was really frustrated by the way studio films are produced, but I loved the way studio films were distributed.
I made a crazy, I'm not crazy, I made an unusual movie for me called The Tooth Fairy, starring The Rock, right?
That's the only studio film I ever made.
And I had this very frustrating experience making the movie, but I saw how a studio distributed a movie.
I thought that was amazing.
Because my only experience in distribution had been independent distribution.
Independent distribution is broken.
It'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.
And 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.
And 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.
And 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.
That's what every agent tells their director.
You directed a $20 million movie, now you're ready for an $80 million movie hit.
And I think that's garbage.
I 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.
Three successful movies have to feel like that in the last five years.
When you make low-budget movies, it's the opposite.
You can totally take risks.
You can hire directors who aren't hot.
You can hire actors who aren't famous.
You can tell stories where the lead character gets shot 30 minutes into the movie.
Well, I think it's a complicated, a little more complicated than this, but a big part of it is ego.
And this idea of success means expensive.
Like, if you're a big hot shop producer, you should be producing $150 million movies.
And as silly as that sounds, that's a big part of it.
Now, 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.
How do you make choices about which sort of movies you want to do?
So 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.
And 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?
It'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.
So we'll throw in this little hint of a gay character right here, just enough so that GLAAD won't be on our ass.
And then not enough that it actually pisses off the 13-year-olds who are coming to the movie, or their parents, more importantly.
So how do you decide how to make, because you're making controversial films.
I mean, films that have something to say about our politics.
I would say The Hunt is pleasing to people on the right, but obviously the politics of Get Out.
I mean, I did a review of Get Out on my show.
I said it's a beautifully made film.
I mean, the politics enraged me.
I 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.
I mean, I thought that the racial themes of it were deeply off-putting to me.
But you're taking those kinds of risks, so how do you decide which scripts you're interested in doing?
Well, 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?
So, 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.
Someone has to love it, I have to love it, or someone at the company has to love it.
We have to think it's scary or unnerving in some way, because that's kind of what Blumhouse means to us or to me.
But 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.
And 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.
I'd say for a hundred million dollars over my dead body.
Right.
So I'm not, it's the only way it's not the studio system.
It'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.
So right now, obviously, we're watching as coronavirus unfolds.
Theaters in China are largely shut down.
That obviously provides an enormous amount of money to Hollywood.
You have theaters in the United States likely are going to shut down.
If not en masse, then people are just not going because big crowds are bad right now.
So, how does this change the model of Hollywood?
Hollywood is already suffering with the movement from theater screenings to streaming.
Streaming is an absolute threat to theaters, obviously.
The revenue is moving in that direction.
It'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.
Where do you see the future of Hollywood going?
You see it fragmenting into a bunch of streaming services.
Do you think that theatrical film is basically going to die?
I think it's not realistic to think all the studios are going to wait four months before they put a movie at home.
They just can't compete with, they're going to have to compete with Amazon and Netflix and Apple in a different way.
So I think that's changing.
I 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.
But 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.
There are going to be shifts.
There are going to be shifts.
The consumer is going to be more used to staying at home.
Something is going to give.
There has to be something that's going to happen post-corona.
I don't know what it is.
We're one day, two days into it.
But I definitely agree with you that the movie business will look different after the coronavirus.
With all that said, how does that impact genres like horror?
So 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.
The horror movie experience does require somebody in the back of the theater shouting, don't go into that, don't open that door.
So how does that change the movie making from your perspective?
Well, I don't think theaters are ever going to go away.
I 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.
I 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.
I think there'll be less movies in theaters.
There'll be maybe less of a selection.
Or I should say, there'll be many, many fewer movies in theaters with a window.
And I think there may be many more movies in theaters, but they only last for a week or two.
And I think horror, it was going to continue to work.
I think I'm safe anyway.
For better or for worse, kids are going to want to go collectively to a movie theater to be scared at a horror movie.
And 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.
Less 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.
But the way, you might, maybe on comedy with a joke, but maybe I think even horror is more.
The way a scare, a good scare, the way James Wan or Lee Wannell does a scare, it's super choreographed.
You have to be paying attention all the way up to the scare for the scare to work.
And if you look away for 10 seconds, a minute before the scare happens, the scare won't be scary.
So in that way, you know, you're really right.
Like 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.
Yeah, because everybody's going to be spending tons of time at home and they're going to be streaming everything.
But 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?
Like there are only a certain number of people on planet Earth who are going to be paying into that service.
And they are expending such enormous amounts of money to bring new content all the time.
And also because of the binging effect, you have to generate so much content.
Because 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?
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Something has to give here. - I don't know on Netflix.
I 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.
Oh, there you go.
So I think they're going to start seeing that, too.
And we don't know how that data is reported when they say X amount of subscribers.
Does that mean they're subscribing all the time or part of the time?
- 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.
If 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.
My executives aren't sitting with filmmakers saying, like, what issue do you want?
Issue-oriented movie do you want to do?
There are companies that do that.
We do not.
I would even go so far as to say if I'm sitting with a director and they say, like, you know, you made Get Out.
You made The Purge.
You made The Hunt.
Like, I want to do a political movie.
I want to do it about X.
Topic I want to do about global warming.
I 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.
What what's in your heart?
That'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.
Obviously.
Obviously.
But I don't think... It has to be organic to the artist.
It can't be like...
Just like I said, I want to make a story about global warming.
I'm going to make a scary story about it.
I'll tell you a funny story.
Where 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.
And his agent said, you know, you should make a documentary.
You should make a horror movie about the Chesapeake Bay, and many more people will see it.
It's funny you should say this, because this has been my lead advice to conservatives who say they want to get into film.
So 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?
And 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.
And 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.
And 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.
Because there are films that have fairly conservative themes.
I 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.
But conservatives, Who are interested in film tend to think of the thematic first, because they're thinking through that prism.
He and I were roommates in college, and we were roommates in Chicago.
We lived in Chicago.
I sold cable TV door-to-door to support myself, which was amazing.
Commission only, I would say.
I learned more about producing from doing that than anything else.
And 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.
It was clearly about all of us.
And I got that movie made through various hustling.
I got the movie made.
And that kind of started, it came out, it was called Kicking and Screaming.
We changed the title.
And I'm an associate producer.
And it got me a job at a little company called Arrow.
I produced a bunch of independent movies, most of which were really, really not good.
And then this connects to where we started, which is I got to being 35.
I got lucky enough to get involved with paranormal activity and kind of forced the tooth fairy to happen.
And that was the genesis of Blumhouse.
When those two movies came out, I stepped back.
I 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.
And I always say that we kind of sneak these Sundance dramas almost into the skin of a genre movie to get them distributed.
And that's that's what we do.
We do 50 percent of our business now is movies and 50 percent is television.
But our television company really only started about three or four years ago.
So that's relatively new.
But now I spend about half in TV and half in movies.
So we have to talk about your politics, since obviously we're talking about the politics of the hunt.
So 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.
It's a contention that I think is largely true.
I 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.
I think the government should provide a safety net, which I know is different than what Republicans think.
I 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.
But everyone in this super rich country should at least have a room to live in and a hot meal or whatever.
And I would be more than happy if me and all my rich friends paid more taxes to help that happen.
I 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.
And 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.
Hollywood is famous for pretending to share and not sharing.
We give net profits and you never get paid.
I was on the receiving end of that.
I have net profits of 10 movies.
I never got a single penny.
So I always said, if I have my own company, I'm never going to do net profits.
I'm going to say, In Variety.
You used to open it, but now you get it on your phone.
When you're looking at Variety and the movie's done $30 million, I'm going to give you $100,000.
It's done $40, I'm going to give you another $100,000.
So I actually deliver the checks myself to FedEx.
I've done it for years.
So when our movies hit certain thresholds, we pay immediately and I film it and I send it to the recipient of the check.
We've done that for a long, long time.
And 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.
So 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.
- I know, and then you basically obligated me to ask you more questions on this specific topic.
- I know, I know.
- So President Trump, there are a few, Hollywood obviously despises President Trump.
One of the things that is very weird about that is just that Trump is a Hollywood creation in the first place.
- 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.
It turns out that he actually, it's actually one of the things he's worst at as president.
He'll find ten different ways to get people to try and fire themselves.
He'll fire people while they're on the toilet.
He'll fire people in ways that put him in impeachable territory.
Hollywood 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.
So, what words do you have for Hollywood for having brought President Trump to the world?
And 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.
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I think that part is... The building up of his image.
But 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.
is that in D.C., People from Hollywood are the celebrities.
In Hollywood, people from DC are the celebrities.
And 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.
I mean, Fox News really started to blur the line between information and news and entertainment.
Now CNBC, now they all do it, by the way.
I'm not suggesting that Fox News is the only company that does it now.
Now 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.
And that, for sure, is something that Hollywood did.
What do you think Hollywood's attitude toward intervention in politics should be?
So 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.
You know, you're going and doing business with China.
Tim Cook from Apple, while you're sitting here bitching about President Trump and his policies toward China.
Everybody in this audience is very rich and has spent five minutes reading a book, and now they're talking politics.
I think there's a lot of Americans who watch that and agree with Ricky Gervais.
What do you think that Hollywood's attitude should be toward political involvement?
And not even just being involved politically on a personal level, but in terms of sort of promulgating political messages more broadly?
So 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.
I mean, if I were you, I'd be more proud of this than any movie I'd produce.
So I want to ask you sort of what you think are the misperceptions that conservatives have about Hollywood generally.
So, 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.
But 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?
Well, 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.
You know, we're different.
I 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.
So I think that's probably the most important thing.
One 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.
So do you have hopes that with movies like The Hunt that people will actually learn to laugh again?
Because 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.
There'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.
Do you think that there is going to be a reawakening of that mentality?
People are so afraid of being taken down by the right or being taken down by the left.
Both sides are equally vicious.
That they're curbing what they do.
And I would say we, you know, and I really push hard not to do that.
I say, you know, if you do this, this is going to happen.
I say, if I do your show, X, Y and Z is going to happen.
I say, screw it.
I'm going to do the show.
Same thing.
If you make this movie, if you make this, if you do this, do you really want to deal with the controversy?
I 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.
Yeah, 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.
I don't think that means that they should be deplatformed or that they shouldn't be able to say what they want to say.
They should be able to and then we should be able to talk about how dumb they are.
But there are people who are clearly not within sort of the mainstream of public rhetoric.
The 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.
I mean, and that's been one of the problems for the right.
I think that there's still litmus tests in Hollywood.
My point in saying that is that the Overton window in Hollywood is obviously still incredibly operational.
If you were to lead, I get a lot of questions from people in my audience who say, I really want to work in Hollywood.
I love storytelling.
I'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.