The Old Entertainment System Shows What It Is By Admitting What It Does

It’s often said in dissident circles that “A system is what it does.” On that basis, even a cursory glance at the legacy entertainment industry reveals that its purpose is to spread regime propaganda by purging normal people.

A recent Compact Magazine piece titled “The Lost Generation” provides a warehouse full of smoking guns. The author, Jacob Savage, recounts chasing a Hollywood writing career, getting tantalizingly close to breaking in, and then watching the opportunity slip through his fingers.

Here’s how it works: A showrunner submits your pilot to a room that says they want you, only for the executives to pull back. Meetings happen, words are exchanged, encouragement is offered. But nothing materializes. The doors stay closed.

On its face, the piece reads like a personal story of dashed hopes. Read it again, and it becomes unmistakable evidence of a deeper systemic problem: The legacy entertainment system has long since stopped valuing merit or skill; now it filters talent and audiences alike through ideological screens that have little to do with creative excellence.

Savage describes what was once aspirational. If you wrote relentlessly, built your portfolio, and caught an executive’s ear, you could climb the ladder.

That pathway existed because entertainment institutions once served as distributors of culture; gatekeepers, yes, but with reasons to care whether a creator’s vision intersected with audiences and commercial reality.

By the time Savage reached Los Angeles in 2011, the doors had already started closing. By 2016, when a potential break was poised to happen, the rules had changed. A room that might have welcomed fresh talent suddenly prioritized demographic optics above storytelling proficiency.

Nor were those accidental policy changes. They reflected ideological interventions that redistributed opportunity according to agendas that had nothing to do with whether a creator could actually tell compelling stories.

The casual reader might interpret Savage’s article as nostalgia for a vanished golden age. Or worse, a bitter complaint about unfairness. But anyone paying attention sees instead a decades-long structural capture of cultural production.

Savage’s experience mirrors what has happened in every corner of the legacy entertainment complex. The institutions that once measured creative potential by storytelling ability now measure it with group identity and ideological compliance.

The result? Individuals from the core audience demographics that historically supported these industries discover that their interests, their career paths, and even their aesthetic preferences are no longer factors in the equation.

This pivot transforms the industry from a network for creating opportunities into a maze of screens and hurdles. Talent is no longer weighed against other talent. Instead it gets filtered by committee mandates according to a version of progress that has calcified into rigid dictates.

The legacy industry’s embrace of political and ethnic checkboxing renders training, skill, and hard work irrelevant. And the audiences that once followed their favorite creators into theaters now watch from out in the cold as the factory resets what it believes stories should look like.

Look at the numbers from the article. They show a precipitous drop in the representation of one specific group that built and sustained American entertainment. Those who once formed the backbone of Hollywood’s creative engine now find themselves excluded; not due to lack of ability, but because of who and what they are.

These race and ideology-based proscriptions cut across hiring, production, and distribution channels. Legacy institutions now distribute cultural bandwidth the way a bureaucrat allocates permits, not like an editor signs talent. The calculus has become “Does this project check the approved boxes? Does the artist submit to elite doctrine?”

Savage’s account can’t be dismissed as sour grapes from a never-was. Ask around, and you’ll find no shortage of Millennial white men sentenced to exile for being the wrong sort. And if that’s not enough, the numbers bear it out. Whether we’re talking Hollywood studios, New York publishers, or Ivy League faculties, the cultural institutions have enacted a policy of ethnic cleansing against young white men.

So the lost generation Savage describes is less a cohort defined by confusion or aimlessness than a byproduct of structural gatekeeping. The crowning insult is that the gatekeepers decide who gets access based on boutique ideology rather than audience demand or artistic merit.

The result of the industry having spent decades spouting rhetoric about diversity and inclusion has been to alienate the core of its audience and talent pool. But even as theaters empty and franchise returns dwindle, executives refuse to reverse course.

The article’s tacit but unmistakable conclusion is that the talent didn’t just vanish. Instead, the system that once identified and elevated creators is out of touch with the audiences that made cultural institutions powerful. When an industry reconfigures power around arbitrary axes, it starts the long slide into irrelevance.

Let the old gatekeepers fall. We don’t need them. Independent creators have found the way to rebuild culture without institutional help: Neopatronage. Connecting with patrons directly is how creators build new support systems to sustain them outside the industries that have been weaponized against artists and audiences. And it reattaches creative effort to audience interest rather than institutional approval.

Legacy Hollywood exemplifies what happens when culture is managed by self-appointed curators instead of emerging from the interactions between creators and audiences. Neopatronage, by contrast, restores a direct relationship between the two. The aim isn’t to impose mandates from on high. The idea is to connect creators with the people who actually want their work.

Jacob Savage was close to breaking in. He had talent, momentum, and support from established figures. Yet the industry had already moved past evaluating stories on their own terms. The gatekeepers had changed, and their goals no longer included fostering the next generation of storytellers.

That transformation didn’t happen overnight. It unfolded over years as institutional priorities drifted away from creating and distributing compelling stories to pushing elite narratives.

Now those institutions are crumbling. Audiences are turning to creators who speak to them directly. Writers are finding patrons who don’t demand ideological purity. Digital platforms, independent funding models, and direct sales systems are championing what the old system cast aside.

Neopatronage isn’t what’s next; it’s now.

The story of Hollywood’s lost generation documents how the cultural manufacturing apparatus has been repurposed to exclude the people it relied on. And the answer is not pleading with the industry to revert to its past. The solution is building new support networks.

Neopatronage turns the old model on its head. It reorients cultural production toward those who value good stories well-told instead of corporate checklists.

The legacy industry chose its new priorities. In doing so, it opted to jettison the artists and audiences that once sustained it. And now the culture’s lost generation has a blueprint to rise outside its ruins.

Brian Niemeier is a best-selling novelist, editor, and Dragon Award winner with over a decade in newpub. For direct, in-person writing and editing insights, join his Patreon.

NEXT: Hollywood’s Ongoing Identity Crisis