Why JD Vance Turned Against Hollywood After 'Hillbilly Elegy'

There's still a lot we don't know about JD Vance's personal politics, but one thing seems certain: The scathing response to his 2020 life story film, Hillbilly Elegy, has turned the Republican vice presidential nominee against Hollywood, and turned him even more against the mainstream media.

When the film directed by Ron Howard and produced by Brian Grazer was released in November 2020, a few days after the presidential election won by Joe Biden and contested by Donald Trump, the critics were merciless, and fairly unanimous.

The film depicts Vance’s family background in Appalachia, torn apart by drug addiction, poverty and the breakdown of the family unit. It conveys a message of personal responsibility by chronicling Vance’s rise above disadvantaged circumstances. Democrats including Hillary Clinton had already hailed the book as a window into the discontent in rural, white America that led to Trump’s election in 2016.

But critics and others have said the film panders to stereotypes and parodies the very real suffering of people in the area. They also point out that Vance is from Middleton, Ohio, not Kentucky, where his grandparents lived.

Two sources close to the film told TheWrap that Vance was personally hurt. He had worked closely with the film’s producers, visiting the set and telling them that Glenn Close had faithfully captured his beloved Mamaw, Bonnie Vance.

“I'm done with Hollywood,” Vance said after a barrage of scathing and personally embarrassing criticism, according to the two people familiar with the film.

He put himself forward, one insider said. He felt he had worked hard. A second insider said he was bothered by the harsh criticism of his personal story.

The criticism was particularly scathing and personal.

David Sims of The Atlantic called it one of the worst films of the year. Forbes' review headlined it as “Pandering Poverty Porn,” as did Katie Rife of The AV Clubs, who called it “self-promoting poverty porn” that reinforces the stereotypes it claims to illuminate.

Pulitzer Prize-winning LA Times critic Justin Chang called the film woefully misguided. He wrote, “Directed by Ron Howard and stripped of any meaningful political dimension, Hillbilly Elegy is an Oscar-worthy extended montage in search of a larger purpose, a bucket of theatrical scenes in which doors are smashed, children are slapped and husbands are immolated.”

Vox's Alissa Wilkinson wrote: “It's a kind of distracting Hollywoodization of a rich person's idea of ​​poverty, a tone-deaf attempt to assuage a very particular kind of liberal guilt by reifying the very thing that caused that guilt in the first place. And, perhaps worst of all, it's a very boring movie.”

Echoing others, TheWrap wrote: He's not interested in the systems that create poverty, addiction, and ignorance; he just wants to pretend that a straight white guy's ability to rise above his environment means there's no excuse for others not to have done so, too.

The film earned a dismal 25% on Rotten Tomatoes, a composite of dozens of critics. Close earned an Oscar and Razzie Award nomination for her portrayal of Mamaw.

It was a spectacular fall for a film based on a New York Times bestseller published in 2016, when the media and other elites, as Vance likes to say, were struggling to understand Donald Trump's appeal to the white working class.

After a bidding war, Netflix blew away the offers of its competitors by offering nearly double the price of the next bidder, with a deal that allowed beloved director Ron Howard to helm the project with his producing partner Grazer. They spent $45 million on the budget.

Vances' political turning point

Oddly enough, the release of Hillbilly Elegy coincided with Vance's political turn toward Trump. The Republican vice presidential nominee had been an inveterate critic, speculate in a text addressed to a former roommate Trump could be America's Hitler. In 2016, he voted for independent candidate Evan McMullin, according to Time Magazine who interviewed Vance in 2021.

Sometime after the 2020 election, Vance changed course. In March 2021, he and Trump met for an hour at a meeting hosted by Vance’s friend and former boss Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley businessman and political libertarian who gave $10 million to a super PAC in Vance’s name.

Vance understood that he had to reverse his opposition to Trump. Trump is the leader of this movement, Vance told Time in July 2021, and if I really care about these people and the things that I say I care about, I just have to go out there and support him.

Asked whether the 2020 election was stolen, he simply said in this interview that it was unfair.

By the time Vance began his Senate campaign that summer, the candidate had become more definitive, openly seeking Trump's endorsement as he ran against Josh Mandel, the Ohio state treasurer who was also a Trump hardliner.

We have a fake country right now, Vance. told a reporter from The Vindicatora Mahoning County, Ohio, newspaper in October 2021. There were certainly people voting illegally on a large scale.

Certainly, Vance had long spoken out against the media. an appearance in 2017 at the University of Chicago, he said: “In some sense, the fact that people don't trust the mainstream media is a symptom of some of these much larger cultural problems that we have, and the fact that they just feel disconnected from this whole group.”

It is hardly innovative for a politician to criticize the mainstream media; Trump has made it his full-time occupation, even though he has been known to personally leak information to journalists for decades.

But Vance's turn away from Hollywood coincided not only with the film's rejection by critics and audiences, but also with his need to cozy up to Trump in order to get elected.

According to one of the insiders who spoke to TheWrap, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos tried to comfort Vance, telling him he personally loved the film but noting, “It’s unfortunate that the media did what they did.” A spokesperson for Sarandos said, “It was made up and it never happened.”

Vance himself blamed the film's poor reception on its political turn. He felt bad enough to apologize to Howard and Grazer, according to a source familiar with the matter. “I'm sorry you worked so hard,” he said. “I'm done with Hollywood.”

Through a spokesperson, Vance's campaign declined to comment on the matter. Grazer and Howard also declined to comment.

Tess Patton contributed to this article.