8:29:24

Sasha Stone interview on the death of Hollywood movies and unity culture, politics, leaving the Left, and William Strauss and Neil Howe’s book, The Fourth Turning:

“There is now an endless sea of content and almost none of it is good…When audiences mattered, which they don’t anymore, you had a bunch of people at the studio saying, ‘Does it have to be this long? Can you cut it here? This woman has to look hot. There has to be a hero.’ They had all these formulas, some bad of course, that they knew audiences would respond to. And because they had those requirements, and high standards in many cases; because they measured everything on whether or not it people came to see a movie—I mean, they dug their own hole when they made it about opening weekend, that helped kill it; when they made it about superhero movies that helped kill it, and people just went to the movies like they were going to an amusement park—but, I don’t think you can ever go wrong if you put your faith in the free market, and you go by what people want to pay to see…I grew up in movie theaters. Everything I know, I know from movies. It's been devastating to watch that go away…There used to be these movies where one line would open a whole universe of ideas. Those kinds of lines and movies, we don’t have them anymore.”

In 2021, Stone did a personal segment on Jaws for David Fincher’s Voir documentary series on Netflix, which I didn’t find particularly memorable at the time despite my love for Jaws. For years she ran a hugely popular film blogging site on Oscar predictions, which has since been cancelled, of course, now that she doesn’t tow the line, and now that she entertains other points of views and perspectives on politics, morality, and culture. I love when interviewer Alden Olmsted, after quoting Matthew 16:25 (“For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it”), says to Stone, “Even the movies, the character has to let go of everything they thought they were going to stand on—to storm the castle, to get into the finale, to get into Act 3, whatever—they usually have to let go of something. Something has to die. The old person has to go away, the old life has to go away, and the protagonist has to realize that the truth was in them all along.” The final10 minutes of the interview, where Stone talks about what the radical Left is doing to this country and its people, is particularly beautiful.