Without an apology, the films should campaign for free speech – Deadline

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A wild thought for Hollywood: Just because Donald Trump is campaigning for free speech-last week, he announced a class-action lawsuit against censorship against Twitter, Facebook and Google-doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea.

Freely speaking, that is. I don’t know about the lawsuit, which would reconcile First Amendment tech rights and legal protections with a claim that they abused their immunity by acting as one-sided sensors.

More heat than light will dissipate as the suit works towards the courts and media mill. But never mind Trump. Freedom of expression is something the film business should start to worry about, sooner rather than later.

It’s no secret that movies – like the rest of pop culture – operate in a narrower field when it comes to what can be depicted on -screen, and to whom. Even to recognize the growing list of prohibitions will invite an attack.

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Suffice it to say that Sean Penn had a point when he suggested in a recent Conan O’Brien podcast that now, as a straight man, he probably can’t be thrown out as a gay activist Harvey Milk, a role that if where he won an Oscar in 2009. “You wonder at some point if only the princes of Denmark can play Hamlet,” he said.

On another front, Lin-Manuel Miranda apologized for his lack of racial sensitivity in In The Heights. Rita Moreno apologized for defending Miranda. Meanwhile, John Cena scrambled to save F9 by apologizing for an offense in China.

In fact, Hollywood could also operate under the Hays Code, which, in a version adopted on June 29, 1927, the law prohibited the description, “regardless of the manner in which they were treated,” of, among other objects, any “intentional offense against any nation, race or creed.”

Obviously, this can’t go on-not if an allegedly creative business has long boasted rule-breakers (Warren Beatty, Quentin Tarantino), counter-heroes (Super Fly, Thelma & Louise), and inevitable respect (from Charlie Chaplin, through Monty Python, to The Hangover and more), will breathe again.

This is not to say that the film industry, as a whole, has been particularly bold when it comes to free expression. The aforementioned Hays Code, since a century, has set a familiar pattern today. When under attack, the film business and those in it tend to prioritize censorship by censoring themselves. For a moment, it seemed to work. The Code, which has sterilized American film for decades, certainly put a cork on dozens of local censorship measures that could make national theater distribution impossible.

But the amazing thing about Hollywood is its buoyancy. If you think you are about to sink into excessive surrender to moralists acting on the finger protesting gangsters, or sex, or cigarettes, or whatever, the spirit of filmdom rebels is emerging, like a self-righting boat.

So, even before it was abandoned in the late 1960s, the Code was challenged by lively rule violations such as The Pawnbroker, Anatomy Of A Murder, and Some Like It Hot. (It helped that the U.S. Supreme Court, reversing its own former position, held in 1952 that films were actually a form of constitutional free speech.)

Similarly, the current system of film ratings – designed to bring censorship to the next wave with age restrictions on the theater door – stretched and bent until it finally allowed almost any of the photos of PG-13, and almost everything else is accessible-to-all-but-children R films.

Ultimately, even the anti-Communist blacklist is not dying of free expression. Kirk Douglas hired blacklisted Dalton Trumbo to write Spartacus, which has won four Oscars. Jay Roach recounted the back of Trumbo. The inevitable respect of the Coen Brothers is fun here at Hail, Caesar!

But back to the present.

Unchanged but very real restrictions on film – such as conflicting speeches on campus, on social media, in comedy shows – are piling up faster than offenders can apologize to Tweet. Yet major players and industry institutions have been slow to campaign for free expression (as Harvey Weinstein even once did, with his endless appeal to ratings). Sometimes, in fact, they really narrow the safe zone of the film, whether in the denials attached to classics like Gone With The Wind, or in the upcoming standards in the inclusion of Best Picture and representation that will ask if one will Oscar’s contender delivers a “main story (s), theme or narrative” that “is centered on a less representative group (s).”

This is another version of the old tactic, preemption. But that’s a high -risk strategy – playing, while waiting for the right boat – in an online world where cancellation is instantaneous, and almost total.

Something more emphasizing is in order. (More than the safe historical bravery of a Mank.)

Comedians like Ricky Gervais, Bill Maher and Jerry Seinfeld have already spoken. Journalists like Glenn Greenwald joined. Musician Winston Marshall, late of Mumford & Sons, just stood up.

It’s time for the people in the film to do a lot. It doesn’t matter what Trump says.

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