When the dust settles, a Hollywood political reboot?

Robert De Niro declaimed. Bette Midler screamed on “autocracy.” Lea DeLaria war declared. But Donald Trump, though convicted in New York and shot in Pennsylvania, continues to march toward Milwaukee, where the Republican National Convention begins tomorrow.

Meanwhile, George Clooney has called for a new Democratic nominee. Rob Reiner has seconded the motion. Damon Lindelof has pulled out all the stops, calling for a donor strike. But their shirked champion, Joe Biden, is still dragging his feet toward Chicago, determined to secure his party’s nomination at next month’s Democratic convention.

When this mess is resolved – as it must sooner or later – Hollywood might want to rethink its political ways. Because the current approach is clearly not working.

Hysterical displays on social media or on the red carpet don’t win votes. Instead, they become clickbait for right-wing sites like Breitbart.com, which has made a cottage industry out of recording and highlighting celebrity political crises.

Getting De Niro, Midler, DeLaria and their friends to shut the situation down would be a start for Hollywood Democrats who want to be taken seriously by their party of choice.

But that might be the easy part.

It would be much more difficult, but more interesting, if major donors would try to put aside the simple, instinctive tribal behavior that has led to the current embarrassment.

And make no mistake, it is deeply embarrassing that people as sophisticated as Clooney, Reiner, Lindelof and many others were publicly endorsing and fundraising for Biden just days before his June 27 debate performance made clear what less astute observers had known for a year: that Biden was in the throes of age-related decline.

The details are not particularly important. What matters is that the big players in Hollywood, who are supposed to be in control, called on the rest of us to support a candidate they abandoned two weeks later.

This about-face has ended their credibility, and late calls for a more viable candidate won't bring it back. What's needed, once this situation is over, is a reboot, a new way of looking at the relationship between Hollywood and Washington.

As Peter Bart pointed out last week, that relationship has changed a lot over time, including a generational shift from the days when some studio executives thought Jane Fonda was too left-wing to be safely cast. Fun with Dick and Jane.

In the 1940s, Hollywood entered the war on Roosevelt's side. Later, it was divided over the blacklist. For John Kennedy, cinema was a playground. With Reagan, he even gave it a president.

In the 1970s, the contemporary, progressive nexus took root in what were called, in the days of Warren Beatty and Gary Hart, the “Hollytics.” Political speeches and personalities circulated in an informal cocktail party circuit in which Hollywood’s open checkbook played an increasing role. By the early 1990s, when journalist Ron Brownstein mapped the interface in a book, Power and GlitterThe prevailing attitude – not to mention those conservative opponents at the Wednesday Morning Club – was summed up in a familiar invitation to conversational trust: “We are all democrats here.”

Conformity was taken for granted. When I was a Sony executive, no one seemed to hesitate to tell me that my contract would be renewed, but that it would cost me $200 for the Clinton campaign. I paid, even though I was planning to vote for Jerry Brown at the time. Then a senior executive at the company asked me to attend a political caucus of sorts, to support his wife's bid to be a delegate to the Democratic convention. I did, but I ended up re-registering as an independent “refusing to vote in any state.”

Under Bush, things got more heated. Invited to a small meeting in Hollywood with Howard Dean, I had to sneak in through a side door. The growing vehemence was too much for me.

Eventually Trump came along, and then the Covid-19 lockdown gave rise to the sameness, fueled by anger, social media and money, that passes for political culture in the entertainment world today. The reflexive need to crush Trump inevitably led to self-deception or the deliberate concealment of Biden’s weakness. The game of compromise of an earlier era, when Lew Wasserman and his Universal team, for example, played both sides, gave way to a doctrinaire intensity.

For the sake of Hollywood and all of us, this monoculture has to end. That doesn’t mean Democrats should support Republicans. That’s never going to happen. But Ari Emanuel, a real political pundit, was clearly right when he noted in Aspen that donors were suddenly shifting from the presidency to the House and Senate races.

This is a step in the right direction, a return to somewhat softer, ideas- and policy-driven methods from a dimly remembered past. Think twice, look more closely, think a little before you sign the check.

The next step might be as simple as talking to someone on the other side, instead of these diatribes about X. You don’t have to agree. But it can’t hurt to know what they think. They might know something. They might even save you from embarrassing falls, tumbles, and reversals in the opinion pages of The New York Times.