Screenwriter Dan Gilroy has a piece in Deadline ringing alarm bells at—and on behalf of—Hollywood. Gilroy just received an Emmy for one of his episodes in season 2 of Andor. Notably, the award-winning episode he wrote included Senator Mon Mothma’s grand anti-fascism speech denouncing the genocide on Gorman.
This is the portion that jumped out:
Trump’s aim is to control what we make and say…this isn’t a skirmish. It’s a siege.
Whether you’re reading this on line at Blue Bottle or killing time before your 3 o’clock Zoom or staring at a glowing screen unable to sleep, we have all become characters in a story where our actions carry actual weight and consequence. Our industry faces the most sophisticated, venomous, creeping evil in America’s history. There’s no standing above this conflict. No impartial observers. If you’re on the sidelines you’ve made a choice and must live with it.
Their goal is to instill fear, to make you feel helpless, hopeless, to break you down. Don’t let them. Educate yourself. Organize. Speak truth to authority. Because the story’s not written — the pen is in your hand.
Even just within Hollywood, Gilroy’s alarm bells are more than interpretive vibes about silencing Jimmy Kimmel. The Ellison family—whose patriarch is a MAGA-backing Israel supporter and one of Trump’s favorite oligarchs—is about to own CNN, HBO, CBS News, Comedy Central, and TikTok in the US. The problem isn’t just the FCC doing a fascist’s bidding, then; it’s 360-degree control of media (MAGA-supporting monarchist Marc Andreessen is a major investor in Substack, btw).
I mention this only because it offers receipts on behalf of Gilroy’s alarmism. And Andor, in its own way, was sending up a signal flare warning about where we find ourselves. My co-host Lyle Rubin and I found Andor so compelling as a political object, not just entertainment, that we recorded eight episodes of our show covering both seasons of it. Like so much great art, Andor holds up a mirror to society for anyone willing to see.
I can forgive that Gilroy thinks “artists are censored first because they fear us most”— immigrants and peace activists have been censored (and worse) ever since October 7, 2023. It says something about a person’s worldview when you can only see authoritarianism on the issues that you care about. But I no longer get mad when this kind of omission happens; it’s hard to get people to join a potentially life-altering fight until the jack-boot comes for them. I don’t know how much of Hollywood Gilroy speaks for, but I hope a lot, because he’s in the fight now.
