Thursday

March 28th, 2024

Insight

What a Donald Trump presidency would mean for Hollywood

Alyssa Rosenberg

By Alyssa Rosenberg The Washington Post

Published March 31, 2016

What a Donald Trump presidency would mean for Hollywood

When Donald Trump got himself out of the entertainment business to run for president last year, the transition had a few bumpy moments.

NBC declared that his series "The Celebrity Apprentice" wouldn't be back with Trump as the host, though someone else might get to tell contestants that they were fired. The network insisted that it had shown Trump the door, but Trump said he was the one who had quit. And when Univision decided to stop airing the Spanish-language broadcasts of the Miss USA and Miss Universe contests, the result was a lawsuit that was finally settled in February.

But if Trump ended some of his industry relationships on bad terms, his responses to a questionnaire I sent to the candidates about arts and cultural policy suggest that he and Hollywood share at least one significant priority.

Access to overseas markets has long been a priority for industry groups such as the Motion Picture Association of America. China has been a particular concern: A 2012 trade agreement raised the number of American movies that could be screened in China each year from 20 to 34, though the 14 additional movies had to be available in special formats, meaning that action spectacles were more likely to reach Chinese audiences than any sort of lower-budget (and potentially politically sensitive) films.

"While MPAA recognizes the right of countries to regulate to protect their citizens, the censorship regimes of some Asia-Pacific economies, such as Vietnam and China, are opaque, unpredictable and slow and can often result in de facto discrimination against foreign content," the MPAA wrote in a 2015 report to the U.S. Trade Representative, cautioning against cultural promotion programs that are really a way to lock out American entertainment industry exports.

Trump has made criticism of trade deals a hallmark of his campaign for the presidency, and he emphasized this theme again in his response to my questions.

"In the context of my campaign, I have also said on countless occasions that we should make sure that our free trade is also fair," he wrote in the responses his campaign sent me. "If Chinese entertainment markets are closed because of unfair practices, then we have an obligation to make sure that our companies and enterprises are not being taken advantage of."

But on net neutrality, an issue on which cable companies and content companies such as Netflix are split, Trump, like many of the other former Republican hopefuls, sides with the cable providers.

Net neutrality is the idea that Internet service providers should have to treat all the content traveling over their networks the same, rather than charging content providers for faster delivery; the Federal Communications Commission released new net neutrality regulations last year. It's a significant priority for companies like Netflix, which worry about the prospect of having to pay up to keep subscribers' videos streaming smoothly, and a challenge for Internet service providers, which want to make the companies that place the heaviest strain on their networks pay up.

Trump's position on net neutrality? "If one believes in the free market system, then it is hard to imagine how the FCC is helping things with rules associated with net neutrality."



On the question of whether Congress ought to extend the length of copyright terms as major works begin to enter the public domain in 2019, Trump said he would defer to Congress, which "will make this determination as is their Constitutional obligation."

And his response on whether existing voluntary entertainment ratings systems give parents enough information might give pause to groups such as the Entertainment Software Ratings Board and the Classification and Rating Administration.

"Parents should make the determination about what their children should watch or not watch," Trump wrote. "If they do not have enough information upon which to base those decisions, they should insist that their elected representatives act on those needs."

In other words, Trump's relationship to the entertainment industry as president might be similar to the one he had to the business as a TV star and producer: intermittently mutually beneficial and complicated.

Previously:
03/14/16: It's time for J.K. Rowling to let other people write Harry Potter books
11/23/15: Restoring religion to the 'Star Wars' movies

Columnists

Toons