A love that should have lasted years — but Hollywood had to wear out its welcome.
It is painful to watch an art form die, especially the most popular one in history. Cinema has enthralled more people, across every stratum of society, than all others combined. In just over one hundred years, works by past masters — Hitchcock, Ford, Hawks, Wilder, Welles — and living ones — Spielberg, Lucas, Coppola, Lynch — continue to attract billions, including folks who can’t tell a da Vinci from a van Gogh. With an appreciative audience still awaiting, Hollywood might have outlasted the Roman Empire. But like Rome, it is rotting from the inside, sacked by leftist hacks who could never have built it. And like a modern Gibbon, media critic Christian Toto picks apart the spoils and spoilers of moviedom in his incisive, indispensable, yet breezy new book, Virtue Bombs: How Hollywood Got Woke and Lost Its Soul.
