The economic purge of the young white male |
I can remember when I first realised 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, CVs were binned, hopeful meetings were suddenly cancelled. And white men in Hollywood in their twenties or thirties, who had assumed they were on the upwards curve of a career, discovered that the optimistic curve had ended. It was more like a ski jump. They were plunging into the drifts of debt, failure and bankruptcy.
Since then I’ve often wondered where many of those guys went. And now I have more than an answer, thanks to a simmering, eloquent essay in Compact magazine which has gone extremely viral, with Vice-President J.D. Vance wading in alongside many other powerful voices. The essay is entitled ‘The lost generation’, it begins in Hollywood but ranges way beyond, and it is by a youngish white American ‘writer’ called Jacob Savage.
I put the word writer in inverted commas not to impugn Mr Savage – on the basis of this essay he is highly talented – but because he is, by his own admission, a failed writer. He is one of the writerly men who floated around Hollywood in the 2010s, only to find themselves rebuffed on all fronts, their scripts unread, their skills unwanted.
Why did........