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When Donald Trump named Jon Voight, Mel Gibson, and Sylvester Stallone as his “special ambassadors to Hollywood” back in January, no one was quite sure what to make of it. But if we've learned anything from what's happened since Trump let Elon Musk fire up the chainsaw as head of an initiative named after a Shiba Inu meme, it's that these things are never just fodder for easy jokes.
Voight and his manager reportedly met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago over the weekend to discuss what Deadline termed “a plan to save Hollywood.” And on Sunday night, Trump announced, via his Truth Social account, that he was ordering the Department of Commerce to place a “100% Tariff on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.” [sic]
“The Movie Industry in America is DYING a very fast death,” Trump wrote. “Other Countries are offering all sorts of incentives to draw our filmmakers and studios away from the United States. Hollywood, and many other areas within the U.S.A., are being devastated. This is a concerted effort by other Nations and, therefore, a National Security threat. It is, in addition to everything else, messaging and propaganda!”
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick responded “We’re on it,” to Trump’s post on Twitter, feeding the sense that something might actually come of this besides talk.
Trump’s concern about so-called “runaway production” wasn’t pulled entirely out of thin air. The issue of productions moving out of Los Angeles—and often abroad—in search of more favorable tax incentives has been a hot topic in the entertainment industry for at least a decade, and the situation has only intensified in recent years. The Vice President of IATSE (the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, which represents 168,000 crew and craftspeople) told the New York Times last month that California had lost 18,000 production jobs in the last three years alone. “We are allowing California to become to the entertainment industry what Detroit has become to the auto industry,” IATSE’s Michael F. Miller Jr. said then.
California governor Gavin Newsom had proposed doubling California’s tax incentive program back in October. Other California lawmakers have put forth even more generous bills. Trump himself referenced the kinds of incentives drawing productions abroad in his own post, and trying to lure productions back to the US with incentives of our own seemed like the logical reaction. Indeed, an incentive program was largely what Voight had been expected to broach with Trump.
Instead, Trump announced his plan for “a 100% tariff,” with scant details on what that would actually apply to or mean. It’s not as container ships are arriving at our docks packed with film reels. All of which raises the obvious question: why did Trump respond to the groundswell of support for production tax credits by announcing a tariff?
To some extent, the obvious answer is probably the correct one: Trump has become obsessed with tariffs as his economic cure-all in his second term, an infatuation possibly even stronger than the one he had with building a wall in the lead up to his first. It’s like he has one giant button on his desk, and whenever a problem arises, he tries pressing it again. Other countries, like migrants before them, simply aren’t paying their fair share, in his mind.
Certainly that’s mostly the explanation, but couldn’t there be something else? One of those half-forgotten grievances that lodges itself in the recesses of Trump’s brain and eventually becomes a worldview? Why might the man, seemingly against the advice of all counsel, prefer a policy that punishes foreign productions rather than one that boosts domestic ones?
In retrospect, perhaps a seminal event in the annals of Trumpology was Korean director Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite winning the 2020 Academy Award for Best Picture.
“How bad were the Academy Awards this year, did you see? ‘And the winner is … a movie from South Korea,’ ” Trump said at a February 2020 rally in Colorado.
Although Parasite is by Trumpian standards an unconscionably woke film about income inequality and violent class vengeance, his objection seemed to be less about the content of the movie itself—which it's hard to imagine Trump has actually seen—and more about Bong Joon-Ho's decision to film it in Korean rather than English (its subtitles being perhaps an additional hurdle to a president many have intimated may be dyslexic).
“What the hell was that all about? We’ve got enough problems with South Korea with trade, on top of it they give them the best movie of the year?” Trump continued.
True, “we’ve got enough problems with South Korea on trade” does point to this being part of Trump's longstanding obsession with trade deficits—but that’s not reason enough to discount Parasite as an inciting factor.
“I’m looking for like, let’s get Gone with the Wind—can we get like Gone with the Wind back, please? Sunset Boulevard, so many great movies,” Trump riffed, citing two films that were not eligible for the Oscar in 2020 by virtue of being, respectively, a Best Picture winner from 1939 and a 1951 nominee that lost to All About Eve.
If the reference to Gone With the Wind, a movie that venerates the Old South and perpetuates the Lost Cause mythos, can be understood as a red-meat pick for the base, Sunset Boulevard seems the more telling choice. Gloria Swanson’s performance as Norma Desmond, the glamorous, imperious, deluded fading star of the silent film era, living inside a museum to her own greatness is both much more true to Trump’s personal tastes, and the better fodder for a Freudian close read. Is there any famous film character more likely to have a solid gold toilet?
It’s hard to imagine that the struggles of below-the-line union members in the greater LA area are any closer to Trump’s heart than the pain caused by the high price of groceries (“It’s such an old-fashioned term but a beautiful term: ‘groceries,’" Trump mused last month. "It sort of says ‘a bag with different things in it.’")
Sunset Boulevard—this is the kind of movie Trump imagines is Oscar-worthy. Not some goofy South Korean class parable with subtitles. Better tax incentives wouldn’t keep movies like that from winning Best Picture. But tariffs that kept Academy members from seeing it might.
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