I was at an Oscar party thrown by one of the agencies last month, and I happened to notice a personality there. He’s someone in the business who would wear the moniker “bro” happily and proudly, and for whom there could be no more appropriate description. A big, loud, sports-obsessed, business-driven oaf whose lack of interest (or is it disdain?) in the creative part of the business he inhabits is projected from miles away. I caught sight of him at this party, and noticed that he was yelling happily at a group of about eight other white gentlemen, similarly dressed in expensive but bland suits, expensive but bland shirts and no ties. They were all yelling at each other in great delight, and then marching through the party together in phalanx, shoulder-to-shoulder, bro-to-bro. Then, as I looked further around the party, more bros: mini-mobs of bros, tromping through the event, yelling at each other, back slapping and shoving sliders into their flushed pink faces with evident glee. Suddenly, as I pondered the issues of the past decade and Hollywood’s shrugging reaction to them, it was like I had been handed the Rosetta Stone to unlock the riddles of our kingdom. I saw, for the first time, clearly how we’ve gotten to this point. Of course, diversity is backsliding; of course, creativity has been sent to its room to think about its choices; of course, the preservation of a 100-year-old creative community is deprioritized; of course, every genre of film has been pushed aside in favor of bro-y action-comedy tentpoles; TV is populated with Reacher and Reacher copycats; and I’ve stopped counting the series and movies featuring middle aged-to-even elderly men engaged in various states of internal sad dad struggle — or heroism. Of course, you only have to look at the gatekeepers atop our companies who manifest an ur-bro persona to connect the dots of how we got here: They have become more important than the product. “Character is destiny,” said the philosopher Heraclitus. I have augmented that wisdom with Ankler Rule No. 2: There is no factor more important in understanding a company’s decisions than what its leaders want to tell the people sitting next to them at dinner parties about what they are working on. The bros don’t want to tell their dinner companions, fellow bros-in-arms, that they are working on a really interesting project from an emerging filmmaker — something that’s a little hard to explain, but sit with it, and it will grow on you. They want to brag about their deals. Their giant package. Their EBITDA and their YoY growth charts! Honestly, what is sexier than that? And this isn’t just a matter of vibes. What these guys choose to brag about at dinner — the deal, the leverage, the win — is the same value system that also determines what gets dismissed. Not just challenging creative work, but entire groups of people. You don’t need access to private conversations to understand it (though the Epstein files do illuminate); the pattern shows up in who gets heard, who gets sidelined and who is treated as incidental to the story. When I’ve bounced this theory off some friends, the younger ones in particular have explained to me that Hollywood has always been a land of bros, and I have just been blind to it. And certainly, they are correct that it has been an unshakeable white male oligarchy since Hollywood’s founding. But within that demographic, there is a category, or maybe a stylistic distinction that I think many miss.
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