Comic Basics has a list up of male actors who've spoken out against woke Hollywood, and I read it twice, once for the information and once for the nostalgia. It reads like a casting call for the last men in town with working spines.

I won't spoil the lineup, because half the pleasure of a list like this is checking it against your own guesses, and I matched most of mine. The names run toward the elder statesmen, men who came up when an actor's job was to disappear into a character rather than lecture you about the character's carbon footprint on the press tour. Go see for yourself how many you called before you clicked.

The names, anyway, interest me less than the price of admission. In this town, being known as the man who spoke up has generally cost something, and by several of these actors' own accounts it cost them plenty of work. I take them at their word. When a man tells you his phone stopped ringing after he said what he believed, and he says it while his phone is still silent, that's testimony rather than talking points. That used to be called character, back when Hollywood still knew the word.

I keep thinking about the Rex Theater in Muskogee, where I grew up. Nobody in that audience ever once asked what an actor believed before buying a ticket. They asked whether the picture was good. Warren Beatty could be as left as he liked and the house was still full for Bonnie and Clyde, because the movie was great and the movie was the point. That arrangement worked for seventy years. It got broken on purpose, by people who decided the audience was the problem, and now half the country's living room has a streaming service in it that nobody watches.

The big lecture-first pictures keep dying at the box office while the executives stare at the receipts like a man looking at a math problem that insulted him. Some franchise bets have paid anyway. Enough of them haven't that the pattern is getting hard to ignore. And the men on this list said the quiet part out loud while it was still expensive. I don't need all of them to be right about everything. I just need them to have meant it, and a list like this suggests most of them did.

Read the whole thing at Comic Basics and count the careers. Then count the disappointments on the other side of the ledger. I know which column I'd rather be in, and so do you.