It feels like everything now is done with who follows who on Social Media. I've experienced this a lot in my small career, so it's nice and also entertaining to hear that even famous people have to deal with this stuff.
Take Maya Hawke, daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman and star of StrangeR things among a diverse array of movies and TV shows.
Hawke's star should be on the rise in Hollywood, but she says she still has to deal with social media and casting directors counting her followers.
Recently on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, Hawke explained, saying, “The industry keeps changing, and you have to change with it and understand that all of these things are getting blurred and there are wonderful, incredible actors I admire whose personalities we all know very well,” she continued, “Just figuring out the footing in these changing times of social media and public personality and also how difficult it is to get things made, where it’s like, ‘I don’t care about Instagram, Instagram sucks.’ ‘Right, but just so you know, if you have over this many followers, you can get the money movie funded.’ Well, I want to make the movie, so it’s a really confusing line to walk,” she said.
That's a really hard gut check, and it covers all financial levels of filmmaking. When you're trying to convince people to give you money, they want to know the film will be seen by a lot of people. And studios and financiers are inflating the importance of social media in that part of the equation.
Hawke said she's spoken to a lot of smart directors about the idea of her deleting social media, and they keep warning her against it.
She elaborated. “They’re like, ‘Just so you know, when I’m casting a movie with some producers, they hand me a sheet with the amount of collective followers I have to get of the cast that I cast so if you delete your Instagram, and I lose those followers, understand that these are the kinds of people that I need to cast around you.’”
Right now, Hawke has 8.9 million Instagram followers. But even with that, people want to see that number grow. And when you want to be an artist and to be private, giving the public total access to your life is hard.
And when it becomes your bread and butter to get cast, it can feel like you never have a moment to yourself.
I think this speaks to how we have no movie stars anymore. Everyone has access to everyone else. There's no mythos behind the people we see on screen, It would be nice to get back to that and build box office draws not by who follows who on social, but by who is good and picks good movies.
I've never seen any study that proves people with a huge following open movies or TV shows. And in my experience working that way, it does not correlate.
Let me know what you think in the comments.
