How JD Vance’s Life Story Convinced Me To Leave Hollywood

I never intended to move to LaLaLand, much less to work in Hollywood.

I’d been living in Manhattan and working in book publishing for long enough to let the bloom fall from the rose. Simultaneously in love with New York and absolutely over it, I’d contracted a serious case of Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That.” So, when Tinseltown came calling with a job offer for a Creative Executive role, I bid the East Coast farewell and headed for The Hills.

It was 2015, and the entertainment industry had worked up an appetite for adapting books into box office success. Fortunately, almost nobody in the vicinity of a studio lot actually read them, so it was a plum gig. Admittedly, the hours were endless and expectations were high, but I wasn’t exactly shoveling rocks for a living.

While Hollywood remains famous for attracting purveyors of “indelicate” behaviors, such as throwing staplers and sexual assault, the only unsavoriness I witnessed first hand could easily be attributed to aspiring mean girls: lying, gossiping, and so much side-eye. In the entertainment industry, though, this juvenile social warfare was waged by middle-aged adults with new money and questionable taste in art.

Cattiness and vanity aside, working in Hollywood was also really, really fun. Los Angeles sparked with a kind of “Things Happen Here” energy that felt like the bottled-blonde, spray-tanned cousin to New York’s effortless sophistication. Meetings were often on bustling studio lots and it was not unusual for a single week to include more than one expensed sushi meal and a film screening, typically during the workday.

The superficial perks were disgustingly cush. I’m certain they would have turned me into an insufferable bore, had I not been blessed with pockets too shallow to afford a SoHo House membership. The absence of social prestige left room for an intangible gift: awareness of the rare opportunity before me. Having long been enamored with story, not just for the imagination and escape of it, but for the power it held — to touch hearts, change minds, and shape culture – I was motivated by the ambition of shedding some light in a dark place.

A practicing Catholic — the Church of Tolkien, O’Connor, Chesterton, and Christ Himself — I understood how story, when directed toward the Divine, could illuminate the innate human longing for reunion with God. Overtly faith-based films had their audiences but I had no interest in making them. Like other Christians who had entered into that shadowed wood, I wanted to apply my efforts toward infusing Truth into mainstream entertainment: comedies and romances and adventures that acted as Trojan Horses for hope.

I wasn’t afraid of tales that were dark or gritty, so long as they said something authentic about the human spirit, which I believed was anchored to an intrinsic recognition of what is Good.

Which is to say, what is Beautiful.

Which is to say, what is True.

Fable or folklore, blockbuster or indie darling, I believed — and still do — that art could enlighten the soul. No matter how rarified the world, a story told with excellence of craft and honesty of word could speak to something universal within all of us.

Then, Hollywood stopped telling stories that were true.

Like most cataclysmic changes, the shift happened slowly. Then, all at once.

My job required that I be aware of trends in the marketplace of ideas, but I had almost full autonomy over which ones to pursue. For example, when the manuscript for a road-trip comedy about a pair of teenaged girls traveling cross-country to get an abortion landed on my desk, I recommended that my company pass on it without a moment’s hesitation. HBO made the movie (again: a comedy about a teenager getting an abortion) and critics raved to the tune of a 92% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Likewise, a young adult novel proclaiming “body positivity” in the form of an overweight girl starting an underground burlesque club at her high school received a rapid pass as well.

The tide was still gaining momentum, and while it shames me to say it now, I continued to stand silently on the shoreline, watching it come in. Not deep enough to risk losing myself in the potential undertow, but not yet strong enough to fight against the impending wave.

Then, the pandemic hit. Like many industries, Hollywood went remote and dove headfirst into the DEI deep-end. I spent much of that time with family outside of California, attending meetings and diversity trainings via Zoom. While storm clouds over the entertainment industry continued to darken, I felt a growing sense of detachment from the life I had known in Los Angeles as Tinseltown’s glittering scales fell from my eyes.

In one pandemic-era meeting, an executive announced that a particular screenwriter was on the lookout for projects that could skewer the so-called oppressive patriarchy of the Catholic Church. In the same meeting, another person highlighted a New York Times article about divinity school students who were lifting religious traditions to bring spiritual depth to office environments. The irony was not lost on me. How many other people across the country were holding similarly confused discussions about destroying the richness of history and replacing it with sterilized corporate groupthink?

Around this same time, a biopic was being developed about Fallon Fox, a biological male and the first openly transgender MMA fighter, who was regaled as heroic for beating the lights out of women. As the trans movement gained momentum, I marveled as the Time’sUp and MeToo supporters around me switched teams. Who could continue proclaiming to champion the rights of women when they couldn’t even define the word?

One of the most jarring realizations was also the most seemingly innocuous. It occurred during a phone call with an executive whose artistic taste and empathetic intentions I’d come to appreciate. While discussing a list of potential directors for a project, I asked if she’d seen Ron Howard’s most recent film at the time, “Hillbilly Elegy.” At this point, JD Vance — the author of the film’s titular book and Trump’s current running mate — was merely a politically adjacent businessperson who had fallen out of favor with Hollywood for his connections to conservatism. In my mind, the film in question still held its original merit as an emotional portrayal of poverty in the American Rust Belt, one that offered an honest depiction of a person who had escaped family addiction, abuse, and socioeconomic decline to create a life of purpose. The story was as American as it gets, but I quickly learned that, to this executive, it had morphed into something else entirely. She responded to my question with a mutter of disgust. “No,” she said plainly. “Every time I see Amy [Adams] and Glenn [Close] looking so middle America I want to throw up.”

I was stunned into silence. Did the sight of poor people make her physically sick, or was she induced to illness at the thought of two women who belonged squarely in her elite bracket masquerading as lower class? The real answer, I think, is that she — like so many others — had become blinded by anything that held a whisper of the reasons why Trump had won the presidency in the first place.

My mistake was thinking that these occurrences were anomalies, like a stranger’s leftover smudge of thoughtless chocolate on the pages of a borrowed book; a reminder that not everyone treats stories with reverence or care. Instead, they were symptoms of a moldy sickness that had been festering within the entire library, long before I’d arrived. I once believed that I could light a burning candle in these darkened halls of stories, but the wick was waning and I was nearly out of matches.

It became increasingly evident that according to modern Hollywood: 

Abortions were funny.

Promiscuity was empowering. 

Poor white people were idiots.

All people of color were victims.

Masculinity was toxic.

The future was female.

Gender was a construct.

Meritocracy was racist.

Religion was oppressive.

Families were burdens.

Bad was good, good was bad, and truth itself was relative.

I had finally begun to see the industry as a whole more clearly, and it was one that I knew I had to leave. This was a bittersweet conclusion, as I’d come to genuinely like most of the people I worked with. Like many institutions that idolize earthly kings, Hollywood has normalized depravity to the point of appearing almost banal. But, despite the oft-touted belief in conservative circles that the entertainment industry is populated entirely by dealers of malicious evil, after multiple years in the belly of the beast, I can confidently say that most of the people I was surrounded by had no real awareness of ill intent. They were merely acting on an instinct that had been shaped by the culture they’d helped to create, and I could no longer justify my participation in a game whose rules had changed since I took a seat at the table. Though this realization came as a surprise, in retrospect, our culture had been on a steady decline into moral confusion for long before the between-the-lines insidiousness came out of hiding.

Now, the woke wave has crashed and claimed its victims: those who have sacrificed truth for allegiance to the governing social authority. Some dove headfirst into the rough waters and fought to survive. Others, myself included, ran from that tidal wave just in time to escape unscathed, breathless and gratefully gasping for clean air.

Yes, this dampened sand is still littered with detritus, and work will be required to clean it anew. But let’s not allow misanthropes to mistake any lingering cultural malaise for abject degradation. For, the anchor within the human spirit is weighted by eternity, and that’s far more powerful than this creatively bankrupt blip on the radar of history.

As with all things that are actually worth doing, reviving and defending a culture steeped in beauty will require work and it will entail suffering. It begins at home: by cultivating a life that is rooted in the virtues we hope for our artistic creation to illuminate. Minute to minute, and day after day. Even if we’re living with the mystery of hope in mind – whether that’s the eternity of Heaven, or the future we’re building for generations yet unborn – today, we live here.

Thankfully, in this Here and Now, there is growing tangible evidence of a new era of artistic creation on the horizon. One that bucks the mainstream and makes renegades of those rebellious enough to take up their crosses in one hand and their pens in another.

When the psychotic school marm of bureaucracy has emptied our streets in the name of safety and stripped the curving slopes of our cities into wastelands of sharpened edges, the mouth of the rebel spits on this soulless concrete and quenches his thirst with Beauty.

When hedonism has made gluttons of fools and demonism has demanded worship from the weakened masses, the rebel grips his sheathed sword and prepares himself to defend unto death what is Good.

When idols have been toppled and history rewritten, the rebel creates art that poses a question whose answer can only be Truth.

Sure, a morally confused cadre holds the reins of the cultural chariot, but their wheels are rusted and their horses are tired. Artistic avenues have broadened and a new era has emerged. The arena is once again wide and lit up for adventure: will you dare greatly?

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Kathleen Breaux is a former creative executive from the film and television industry.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.