>>21310323

2/2

Universal’s approach to “Twisters” involved positioning the movie as escapist fun and studiously avoiding sociopolitical issues.The last thing Universal wanted was a film that doubled as a climate change scolding, which would likely repel conservative ticket buyers. “We couldn’t afford to overlook any audience,” said Michael Moses, chief marketing officer at Universal. “With every decision, it was about how can we include and not exclude.”

“Twisters,” which cost $155 million to make, not including tens of millions in marketing costs, collected $82 million in ticket sales over its first three days in theaters in North America, roughly 65% more than box office analysts had expected,with red states providing most of the upside. Toplay up the movie’s countrified bona fides, Universal arranged for marketing tie-ins withRam trucks and Wrangler jeans; Moses dispatched the film’s stars to a Luke Combs concert, where they shotgunned Miller beer.

“This movie is killing it for us,”said Mike Barstow, executive vice president of Main Street Theaters, which operates 50 screens across Nebraska, Ohio, Wisconsin, Illinois and Iowa. “It’s a relatable story — our communities deal with tornadoes all the time —but it’s also just fun and doesn’t feel condescending to rural values.” (Instead, city dwellers are mocked. “Kate’s from New York,” one guy sneers in the film, which was written by Mark L. Smith. “You can’t trust a thing she says.”)

A lot of people in Hollywood only seem able to discuss the middle of the country while holding their nose. But entertainment is a reactive business: chase what worked over the weekend, drop what didn’t. And some moviegoers and theater owners in the vast center of the country have recoiled from films they see as too progressive.

“WARNING,” read a sign taped to the glass door of an Oklahoma movie theater in 2022.“The management of this theater discovered after booking ‘Lightyear’ that there is a same-sex kissing scene within the first 30 minutes of the Pixar movie. We will do all we can to fast-forwardthrough that scene, but it might not be exact.”

There was a line outside that same theater over the weekend to see “Twisters,” which played on two of its three screens.

“Go woke, go broke” jokes, in some ways, have calcified into conventional film industry wisdom. Disney’s storytelling shift came after an extended period in which the company was attacked by conservative pundits and politicians. Rival studios watched in terror, afraid they might be next.

More than ever, studios need every dollar they can find. Most are part of larger entertainment conglomerates that are under severe pressure to boost revenue, not to mention profit, as traditional cable channels wither and streaming services struggle with high programming costs.Last summer, ticket buyers in red states caught Hollywood’s attention when they turned “Sound of Freedom,” a thriller with QAnon overtones, into a runaway hit. “Sound of Freedom,” made independently for $15 million, collected $184 million in the United States, beating big-budget “Indiana Jones” and “Mission: Impossible” sequels.

Hollywood has not recovered from the pandemic (in part because pandemic closures were followed by two lengthy union strikes against studios). Ticket sales so far this year in North America total $4.3 billion, down roughly 35% from the same period in 2019, according to Comscore, which tracks box office data.

As studios try to climb back, the heartland represents a specific opportunity.Ticket buyers in red states were the fastest to return to theaters after the pandemic, while those in coastal cities were the slowest. Some large markets, including San Francisco, have not fully recovered, according to studio distribution executives.

As Sarah Unger, co-founder of Cultique, a firm in Los Angeles that advises companies on changing cultural norms, wrote in an entertainment industry newsletter Wednesday, “Hollywood is missing a massive audience in plain sight.”

(Hollywood if you are serious take out the subliminal programming and other psychological manipulation you’ve used for 70 years)

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/hollywood-message-red-states-movies-153634983.html?guccounter=1

>>21310507

2/4

But Nelson and Mr. Vance had a falling out in 2021, when Mr. Vance saidpublicly he supported an Arkansas ban on gender-affirming care for minors, leading to a bitter exchange that deeply hurt Nelson.

“He achieved great success and became very rich by being a Never Trumper who explained the white working class to the liberal elite,” Nelson said, referring to Mr. Vance’s successful 2016 book. “Now he’s amassing even more power by expressing the exact opposite.”Now, Nelson, who opposes the Trump/Vance ticket, hopes the emails inform the opinion of voters about Mr. Vance.

Responding to a request for comment on the emails, Luke Schroeder, a spokesman for the Vance campaign, issued a statement:

“It’s unfortunate this individual chose to leak decade-old private conversations between friends to The New York Times. Senator Vance values his friendships with individuals across the political spectrum.He has been open about the fact that some of his views from a decade ago began to change after becoming a dad and starting a family, and he has thoroughly explained why he changed his mind on President Trump. Despite their disagreements, Senator Vance cares for Sofia and wishes Sofia the very best.”

Charting His Own Path

In 2014, they were both near the beginning of their careers, about a year out of law school.

Mr. Vance shared that he was planning to buy a house in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Usha, whom he also met at Yale.

The Vances could afford a house in Washington’s highly priced market partly because Mr. Vance was starting a job in Big Law. “Blech,” he wrote then, indicating his distaste for a career he had already decided against. He would remain with the white-shoe firm Sidley Austin for less than two years.

In the same exchange, Mr. Vance also wrote about his wife’s interviews with justices of the Supreme Court, where she was seeking a clerkship. Mr. Vance worried that her seeming politically neutral, or lack of “ideological chops,” could harm her chances.

“Scalia and Kagan moved very quickly,” Mr. Vance wrote, referring to Antonin Scalia, the conservative justice who died in 2016, and Elena Kagan, one of the court’s current three liberal justices, “but she was just not going to work out for Scalia.”

Nelson wrote back, “His homophobic screeds are hard to believe in 2014.”

=“He’s become a very shrill old man,” Mr. Vance responded. “I used to really like him, and I used to believe all of his stuff about judicial minimalism was sincere. Now I see it as a political charade.”

Mrs. Vance would end up clerking for Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.

On Cops, Body Cams and Pride Day

Like their conversations, Mr. Vance could be surprising.

In October 2014, in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old Black man, by a white police officer in Ferguson, Nelson raised the idea of requiring that police officers wear body cameras.

“I hate the police,” Mr. Vance said in his response. “Given the number of negative experiences I’ve had in the past few years, I can’t imagine what a Black guy goes through.”

A screenshot of an email from Mr. Vance to Nelson.

Around the same time, the written conversation turned to a much-discussed essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic making the case for reparations. Mr. Vance offered that whatever problems he had with reparations, generally, “I have at least been convinced of the virtue of compensating modern victims who’ve suffered redlining or denial of federal benefits.”

By next summer, after a shooting at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, the two were again discussing race. Mr. Vance said he didn’t understand why people “can’t see the connection between this person murdering innocent people and the fact that the Confederate flag — by democratic will — still flies” at the South Carolina Statehouse. “I’m not sure how to wrap my head around it.” (The flag was removed from the Statehouse in Columbia a month later.)

https://archive.is/rUPaU