The economic purge of the young white male
I can remember when I first realized that something strange was happening to white men in Hollywood. It was around 2014, and my younger colleagues in LA – often British writers, directors and actors who had moved to California to “make it” – began reporting, anecdotally, that their work was disappearing. By that I don’t mean the normal vicissitudes of a volatile creative industry. I don’t mean actors “resting” or scripts getting stuck in “development hell.” I mean that all jobs, and job opportunities, were abruptly vanishing. Applications went nowhere, résumés were binned, hopeful meetings were suddenly canceled. And white men in Hollywood in their twenties or thirties, who had assumed they
