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Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
[Listen] The New York Times Profiles Me
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- [00:00]
Sasha Stone
Hi, this is Free Thinking through the Fourth Turning. My name is Sacha Stone. This is a little bit different from my usual podcasts. I was profiled in the New York Times and I thought I would read the story to you. The reason that I'm not posting it is I think that infringes on copyright. I don't think it's right. And I know a lot of people don't have subscriptions to the New York Times, don't want subscriptions to the New York Times, but would be interested. A couple people have written me and said they were interested in the story. So the first thing I'd like to say about it is that I will be writing another piece about the photos in the story called A Picture is Worth a Thousand Curse Words. And it will be about my experience having these photos taken and then being printed. And also Trump's portrait in that was hanging in the Colorado State House and was then taken down. And the JD Vance memes and how we dehumanize people by how we depict them. But I was complaining about the photos because now I want to be really clear. I don't blame the New York Times or the writer or anybody. I'm just assuming the editor selected the photos. But I will say that I like the story. I think it's very good by Mark Tracy. I think he did a really good job writing it. He's fair. He doesn't depict me as a victim or call me self pitying. I think he just tells the story in an interesting way. And I think given the situation I'm in, I come off, you know, about as well as you could hope. Pictures, on the other hand, I wasn't gonna look at them because I have a lifelong, you know, hatred of looking at myself on camera or anything. You know, you can call it body dysmorphia, whatever you want, but my mother was a beauty queen growing up. She was, you know, she dropped out of her pageants to have my brother when she was a teenager, but she was always just a stunningly beautiful woman. And so I think if you grow up that way, you get a thing, you know, you get a little bit of a thing. And women are vain anyway. I wish that I wasn't, but we are. And you'd think given the fact that I was vain, I would hit the gym more often, get some Botox, maybe get myself a decent haircut. But, you know, I'm. In some ways I'm still the same basement dweller I was when I got online in 1994. You know, I work, I walk my dogs. That's pretty much it. So, you know, let's hope for aspirational change in that regard. You know, a little self care, as they say on the left. Having said all that, I wasn't going to look at the photos until some people started writing to me about them. They seem to fall into two categories. People who know me in real life say they were terrible. People who don't know me think they're fine. It was the people that I know from real life, some intimately, who wrote to tell me that they thought that the New York Times had done me not just a disservice, but had been cruel in how they depicted me in those photos. They made me look mean. And the lighting in one of the pictures is really bad because I have beautiful lighting in my office. But for some reason the photographer used a flash and so it blasts me out. But that photo is nothing compared to the other photo. I mean, she took hundreds of pictures of me in my hat and my glasses, you know, standing, smiling, you know, well, maybe not hundreds, maybe a hundred. You know, I don't think she was deliberately trying to take a bad picture of me, but I do think that there's maybe a bias that comes into it when you think you're trying to select a photo of what you believe to be a Trump supporter. Right. I think that when I saw the picture, since I'm not used to seeing, not only am I not used to seeing myself in photos, I'm not used to having having my photos taken, especially by a high resolution camera like that with no filters and no ability to judge. You know, a friend of mine had been calling me and haranguing me before the photo shoot, saying you have to tell them to watch the movie Reds and make sure they photograph you that way. And he was very urgent. And I said, you can't tell photographers what to do. And he said, you know, bullshit. You tell them what to do or you tell them to go home. And I said, it doesn't work that way. This isn't a publicity shoot. It's not glamour. It's supposed to be, you know, as they are. But I don't know that I think that those photos do represent me as I am. I think they represent me as people on the left might want to see someone who switched and became a Trump supporter. I think I look like a sort of a bitter, mean old hag, frankly. And I think that makes them feel happy. Look at what happened to her, you know, don't do this or that'll. Happen to you, too. You'll look like her. I know I'm exaggerating, and I'm being melodramatic, and I really should just get over it. And the fact that I'm even talking about it means you're gonna rush out and try to find those photos, whereas I could have just downplayed it. But I bring it up because I think that the photos and the story say two different things. And I think that the story is very good. I think he did. You know, I think his. His depiction of me is much kinder and humane than it needed to be. But I think that the editor. Perhaps I could be wrong. My guess, the editor felt that they needed to compensate for that kindness by posting photos where I really look like, you know, death warmed. I mean, yeah, they're terrible. I mean, women listening to this. You know what I'm talking about. You know that photo that you make your friends delete off of Facebook? You know, that photo that would go in the reject pile? You know that photo that would make you groan and scream, now imagine that in the New York Times for all to see. Now, it is my fault, right? Because I agreed to the photo shoot. There was a part of me that was just saying, you know, I'm. I'm so old now. I'm kind of sick of hiding. I just want to be myself now in the last part of my life. Is that okay? Can I just be myself? And I had one photographer at first, and he was assigned, and I looked at his photos, and I oh, wow, those are great. But then the power went out in my place all day, so they assigned me a new photographer, and I looked at hers, and hers were good and bright and pretty. But she had pronouns in her bio, and most of the photos were of, you know, intersectional people, and they were very flattering. And, you know, I could make a joke about it. I could write a short fiction piece about it, which I might do, but she was actually a really nice person. I don't think she was deliberately trying to take a bad photo of me, although maybe she was, and she was just trying to make me comfortable. I have no idea what people on the other side would think about, you know, going into a Trump supporter's house. Like, and to make matters worse, I was being. Trying to, you know, my usual motherly self. I was like, can I get you some tea? Can I get you some coffee? I have candy. And I heard her say candy. Like, you know, and then I had a bag of, like, screeners of movies. That I don't watch. I'm like, hey, you want to take these? Because I don't. And she's like, no, no, that's okay. Just, just shut the door. And I thought, she thinks I'm trying to bribe her. She thinks I'm like the old lady in the cottage in the forest, you know, come on in, little girl. And you know, I'll turn you into a meat pie or something. I mean, ah, So I did have a little bit of a bad feeling after she left. But, you know, you have to just let it go. You have to let it go. There are more important things in life. I'm never going to be my young self. And this is already too much for you, all of you listeners who are so nice and kind to me. I'm sure this is, you didn't need to hear any of this baggage. But it was important to me to say I will be probably writing a piece about those portraits about image, about how we see Trump supporters, you know, how we dehumanize people through photos. And it's not just on the left, they do it on the right, too. I'm not saying it's one sided, that's for sure. And, you know, I said to my daughter, I said, you know, this is terrible. And she said, you know, that's what they do to Trump. And she was right. They do. She's brilliant, my daughter. But she said they also do it to, you know, very young, very pretty women if they want to. You can make anybody look ugly. So there you go. That's the ugly part of the story. Right? That's why I haven't been sharing this story far and wide, because I just the other part of it, the photo part of it is just heavy for me. But the story I like. And so I'd like to read it to you now if you would like to listen to it. So here we go. This is by Mark Tracy for the New York Times. The original Oscars blogger takes on Hollywood as a MAGA pundit. As I read this, I will cut in and make some notes, but I will always use quote, unquote, so you know when it's me and when it's the writer. All right, quote, earlier this month, Sasha Stone watched the Oscars alone at her home in a town outside Los Angeles. For someone who has spent more than two decades as one of the premier chroniclers of awards season, it was a notably unglamorous way to take in the ceremony. But she was thrilled that Honora, the frantic story of a New York stripper's romance with a young Russian man took top honors as part of a historic haul. I watched the Oscars alone because the Academy rescinded their invitation to me for the first time in about 10 years or more because of what happened. I was no longer welcome at the ceremony. I wouldn't have really wanted to go anyway, but it was part of some of the things that happened to me after the story was posted in the Hollywood Reporter quote Stone believed the film had the virtue of not pushing a partisan agenda, which has become some of the top criteria for her when judging a movie. When she made her name as an Oscar blogger, Stone believes she fit neatly into the Hollywood status quo and the brand of liberalism it represented. Often on screen, she says now she sees the error of her old ways, even if she continues to understand the old ways better than conservatives who were never part of that world. Here is where I run into problems with the right, stone said in an interview the day after the ceremony. They're never going to give any credit to the Oscars or Hollywood. I knew the script was going to be the Oscars suck and I was going to have to stand apart from that. Stone's advice to the right Take the win. And after some Monday morning carping, it collectively did. The ceremony drew praise from conservatives for its largely apolitical content. Just one brief comment about President Trump by the host Conan O'Brien, and for Kieran Culkin's acceptance speech in which he publicly asked his wife for more kids relatable to any middle American, said a Daily Caller writer. Side note a couple of things. It's true that the Academy in Hollywood were always liberal, that they shut out half the country. They didn't used to do that. And you can tell that the Oscar ratings began to slide the year Trump won. So part of my situation is also that I object to how they're treating the other half of the country, and I think it's frankly killed their brand and that's why their ratings didn't improve and probably won't improve. See, this is good because I'm commenting on the story which makes it Fair use Stone, 60, is that increasingly familiar figure in conservative life, an apostate from the mainstream in recovery from her early liberalism. During the 2000 and tens, as popular culture appeared to be moving to the left, she'd been out in front celebrating pathbreaking Oscar winners like moonlight and Parasite. She also publicly supported Democrats, including Hillary Clinton and Joseph R. Biden. For Stone and many in her current cohort, 2020 was a pivotal year, she underwent a transformation, and ever since, she has leaned into that punditry of the make America great again variety. She voted for President Trump in November. And on social media and on her personal substack, she can be vitriolic, even incendiary. Ukraine and transing the kids, that's all the Democrats stand for now. When a recent non unrepresentative post on X provocations like that cost her money, one in particular did much of the damage After Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee for president last summer and drew support from white dudes for Harris and similar groups of white women, Stone quoted a social media post mocking those affinity groups with the phrase white power. She said it was a joke. Many movie studios either disagreed or didn't see the humor. The majority that advertised on her site pulled their ads. Side note, they actually didn't know about it. And they wouldn't have known about it if Rebecca Keegan hadn't written a story. It was the Hollywood Reporter story that shocked all of them. And the fact that she'd gone around town telling publicists and Oscar voters about my tweet, they would have had no idea. Nobody follows me on Twitter, right? Like that's. So it was the story and the public embarrassment from that that. That lost me my income. But, you know, fine, it's easier to say it this way, I think, because it ultimately it is the truth. It's the thing that happened that changed my income status, you know, and however it got there, you know, he's not going to blame another journalist. That's not what they do. Quote, Stone has interpreted the blowback as an overreaction from Hollywood. The same people, she says, are responsible for diminishing the movies by forcing them to serve liberal politics. In her telling, it was the movies shifting so far to the left that prompted her to move to the right. Or as Stone, who peppers her prose with analogies to her beloved American cinema of the 1970s, might put it, like Han Solo, the industry shot first. Some days I forget what the left is now, she wrote on her personal substack last summer. And I assume that we still live in a country with a culture that supports free expression, but we do not live in such a country, not with the left dominating culture. Everyone is potentially a thought criminal or some baddie. Clarence Moy, a former writer for Stone's Oscar site, said he felt that the responses that Stone's new views provoked, which included not just the nixed advertising but also a Hollywood Reporter article on her turn, contributed to her shift. The harder they pushed on her, the harder she pushed back, and the farther she got away, the farther right she went, he said. Stone's bottom line might have taken a hit, but she has become a part of a different branch of media, where she has written an op ed for the New York Post and appeared on Megyn Kelly's Sirius XM show. Since the raft of summer ad cancellations on Awards Daily, Stone has replaced some of the lost income with proceeds from her political substack, to which one can subscribe. There's nothing exciting happening in Hollywood. It's boring, stone said in an interview in February. The movies are boring. Everything is boring. Politics isn't boring because politics is real life, she added. Look at what Trump is doing with his administration. He's casting it like a TV show and he's not paying attention to the rules. He's a guy who likes to entertain, and so he's entertaining people. They can't look away. Side note, I would have added here, you know, if we had paragraphs and paragraphs of space, that it isn't just politics. It's real life. Period. It's the independent lane, it's Megyn Kelly's show, it's Joe Rogan. It's anywhere where people feel like they're getting something authentic, something real, something honest, even if they don't agree with it. And I see this on TikTok all the time. I see real life dramas playing out and on YouTube, too. You know, modern audiences or generations are now highly attuned to phoniness, to fake, to the fake image that Hollywood sells. And they're just, they're not interested in it anymore. You know, they're interested in something raw and exposed and unpredictable, quite frankly. And most importantly, real life. What Hollywood has done to destroy its image is that they've mucked with the works. They've decided that they're going to tell the reality that they want to be true, much like the legacy press does with the Democrat. And just as the public has tuned out the media, they've also tuned out Hollywood for the same reasons. And the Oscars, they sense inherently an inauthenticity in what they're being presented, either because they've heard the actors, you know, trash Trump in interviews or whatever it is. It's hard for them to see them as celebrities. They just look like peers or, you know, people on the other side of the political aisle. But that's not the case on, you know, YouTube, for instance, and podcasts. That's what people like. They like a real experience and Hollywood is not in touch with reality anymore. They couldn't tell stories about everyday life in America if they tried. Look around. Look at all the amazing stories there are to tell that Hollywood won't touch. I just watched a live stream with with Jamie Reed, the whistleblower who who exposed the gender clinic at a town hall in New Hampshire where they were hassling a Rep, Jonah Wheeler, who had voted to protect women in locker rooms and in their private spaces. And he was getting hassled by all these Democrats, these looney tuned Democrats. And there was so much tension and drama in the room and I thought this is the story Hollywood should be telling. They should be telling the story of the fight to protect women's sports. But of course they can't because they have to take the other side and that's not going to be interesting to anyone. All right, Quote Stone's love of movies was forged one summer during her childhood. She and her sister, amid turmoil in their personal lives, found escapism and constancy by going to see the same movie over and over. The summer was 1975. The movie was Jaws. Side note, you can I think my little short film is still on Netflix. It's called the Summer of the Shark. They may have taken it down because I am Persona non grata, but it used to be there and that's my childhood. Seeing Jaws over and over again produced by David Fincher. Twenty some years later, she was on a Usenet forum trying to convince people that James Cameron's epic blockbuster Titanic would win the best picture Oscar over the gritty neo noir LA Confidential. Her opinion, believe it or not, put her in the minority. Then she was right, of course, and she was hooked. She started her site Oscar watch in 1999. She changed her blog's name after the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences sued. In his 2023 book Oscar Wars, Michael Shulman identifies Stone as one of the founders of awards blogging. In 2014, New York magazine labeled Tom O'Neill of the Psych Gold Derby and Stone the Adam and Eve of Oscar blogging. Side note, just this year, after a 25 year friendship, Tom O'Neill benched me from Gold Derby after that story came out in the Hollywood Reporter. Quote, Dave Karger, a Turner Classic Movie host who formerly wrote an Oscar column for Entertainment Weekly, praised Stone's coverage from when they were on the same beat. Sasha is one of the most enterprising and passionate Oscar writers, if you will, I've ever encountered, he said. Her sight started at the optimal moment right as the blogosphere flowered, and as Oscar campaigns became full fledged spectacles and Oscar's industrial complex emerged, involving the talent, the studios, the academy and the outlets and the journalists covering it all, it was never about the Oscars themselves, stone said. It was about the lead up, and it was about the why of it. Why do some films win? The answer, which intrigued Stone, was that awards were often doled out to films for reasons beyond just their intrinsic merits. It was a tradition stretching all the way back to the victory of How Green Was My valley at the 1942 ceremony over the scandalously fictionalized biopic of a famous media baron called Citizen Kane. Moy recalled Stone's steadfast advocacy years before Oscars, so white became a rallying cry. In the run up to the 2012 ceremony, for example, Stone was outspoken in support of Viola Davis, the help to win best Actress over Meryl Streep for the Iron Lady. Streep won for the third time. I was what you might call the first woke blogger, stone said. But after Trump's first victory in 2016, she sensed that something had changed. The entire industry, she now argues, had become captured by an ideology that prioritized a movie's perceived politics. As she wrote in a recent article in Tablet, La La Land was racist, so moonlight had to win. Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri was racist, so the Shape of Water had to win. By the time Green Book came along, everyone in Hollywood had lost their minds. A small but growing number of movies with expressly conservative messages have started to flourish. The 2023 surprise hit sound of Freedom, last year's Daily Wire produced documentary Am I Racist? And the recent biopic Reagan were all success stories from this new ecosystem. But Stone believes that the mainstream movie industry remains where the action is. There is no wiggle room from Hollywood to ease up on their one sided point of view, stone wrote in an email recently. And the conservatives haven't yet produced the thriving cinema they would need to mount a real challenge. Friends detect in Stone the manifestation of an innate contrarian. She has always admired Hollywood for the films of the 60s and 70s that broke the mold that were pushing back against authority and the man, said Moy, her former colleague. The way Hollywood seems more in the gear of you have to have a certain amount of representation within projects, he added. That is an anathema to her because she doesn't think that's where art comes from. And some feel a Hollywood vibe shift is afoot. Disney is moving away from hot button cultural issues. The Oscars recently announced that Conan O'Brien would return next year, a sign that the industry approved of his largely apolitical hosting. Side note, Disney shareholders recently doubled down on their support of DEI and esg, and they also support the policy of not advertising on non ideologically compliant sites. At least for now. The the Woke thing in Disney is still very much a thing. Quote it can seem at times that Stone is offended less on behalf of the country than on behalf of cinema. What the bizarre 2016-2020 era did for me, she said, was it made the Oscars a lot less interesting. During this year's lead up, Stone thought this would be the last year she dedicated to fully covering awards season, but she also said she may not be done with them after all. There are a lot of people who are waiting to see my site come to an end, she said in an email, and I don't want to give them that victory. Besides, she added, it has been her job for 25 years and either way, it is plain that she cannot give up completely on the movies. A win for Honora, Stone had written before the ceremony is an indication of a pendulum swing afoot in what could double as a personal manifesto. She added, no one looks at that movie for the message. It's just a good movie, end quote. I think it's a good story. I like it. I think he did a good job. He's a good writer, so I hope you enjoyed that. I hope I wasn't too much of a over talker and over sharer. And remember to thine own self be true.
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Unknown
Do you want to know know that it doesn't hurt me you want to hear about the deal that I'm making with me and if I only could I'd make a deal with God and I get him to swap out places Be running up that road be running up that hill be running up that building see if only co.
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Sasha Stone
You.
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Unknown
Don'T want to hurt me yeah yeah See how deep the wood lies unaware and tearing you asunder There is thunder in our heart is there too much hate for the ones we love? Well tell me we both matter don't we you it's you and me it's you and me you won't be unhappy and only God I'd make a deal with God and again just walk places be running up that road they're running up that hill be running up that building if only could come baby come darling let me steal this moment from you now call angel come on, come on darling let's exchange the experience if I only could make a deal with and I guess a small be running up that hill with no problem. They're running on that hill with no problem. With no problem.