#nepobabies

y'know sometimes I think about that scene in First Wives Club where Hawn as an experienced actress is debasing herself to play the mother of her husband's new shiny bouncy woman.

She sits down with her talking about character, and Elizabeth Berkley playing her vapid replacement says, "I'm thinking, streaks."

Hawn is silent for a moment, and you can see she was trying to think in terms of story and narrative. Then Berkley cuts in with a brilliantly performed, "Just around my face."

That moment crystalizes how I feel about this fanfic nonsense Fennel has produced and hung the Wuthering name on. It feels like someone made Wuth3ring H3ights using refrigerator magnets and they're looking at me like they want me to confirm it is high art.

If you don't want to adapt a story, write your own. But writing your own and then claiming Bronte's name on top of it? That's gross and plagiaristic in its own way. You're backwriting over a classic and calling it any kind of adaptation is just historical revisionism, not to mention the stark whitewashing of a lead character.

Write something of your own. Tell stories we'd get excited about. Now you've made the worst of both worlds - fans of Wuthering Heights are pissed and rejecting it, and the other percentage of people who would rather light themselves on fire than sit down to read it won't go because they never had an interest in the first place. What was the point?

The fact that everyone doesn’t already assume that most famous people are them.

Because y’all. We should be assuming it’s the default in Hollywood. Because it is.

After 20 years in the extremely indie micro budget filmmaking community in both Indiana and Texas, I can tell ya, all over the country there are extremely talented folks creating, writing, acting, etc. who should be recognized but they’re not. Whose work should get more eyes but it doesn’t. And it’s pretty much exclusively because they don’t know the right people to open the right doors and they don’t have the ability (for a variety of very different reasons) to leave their entire lives and communities behind to move to LA and spending years taking abuse at low wage PA gigs, working 3-4 jobs to make rent, pounding the pavement with endless auditions, withstanding constant rejection, etc. waiting to see if they “make it big.”

Power perpetuates power. Hollywood insiders will always give advantages to their kids in ways big and small. Even if someone’s famous parents don’t ask for favors or overtly hire them, those kids’ social lives and networks are linked with the right people to open the right doors. Plus getting the education a mega celebrity can afford for their kids? The private lessons? The exposure to the industry from day one? Knowing the right way to socially comport yourself in Hollywood spaces from day one?

Advantage on advantage on advantage.

I’m not saying that there aren’t very massively talented nepo babies in their own right. But I am saying that for a nepo baby we can never REALLY know if they would have made it on their own. We simply can’t know if they grew up in a trailer park in Kansas if we’d ever know their names.

WYBORG

Weisswoman

Or Watman