Nolte: AMC ‘Batgirls’ Two TV Shows — Scraps ’61st Street’ and ‘Invitation to a Bonfire’

AMC is doing to two separate TV shows what Warner Bros. Discovery did to Batgirl. Although already shot, both shows have been canceled.

Back in August, we learned that Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) had killed its $70 million Batgirl movie. This was after the movie had already been shot. When WBD went for the tax write-off, Batgirl was nearly through the post-production process. Basically, WBD believed the movie would flop and that spending another $50 million to promote it was a waste. So the multinational disappeared it to take advantage of the tax write-off, which was much more cost-effective.

To not break any tax laws, WBD cannot exhibit Batgirl in any way ever. So the public can never see it. WBD did the same to Scoob! Holiday Haunt, which was also near completion.

I find this behavior appalling, corporatism at its worst. It’s easy to laugh at how bad or woke or unwatchable a Batgirl movie might be, and it was probably all those things. But Batgirl is still art. It might be dreadful art, but writers, actors (Michael Keaton’s return as Batman), actresses, production designers, sound engineers, editors, composers, stunt people, and many others poured their efforts and talents into this art, and to disappear all that for a mercenary tax write off is un-American. Well, these days, it’s as American as it gets.

And now, here we go again…

The second season of legal drama “61st Street” had already been shot, but AMC no longer plans to air it. In addition, four of the six episodes of “Invitation to a Bonfire” had been shot before AMC decided to pull the plug.

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“61st Street” was originally picked up at AMC as a two-season event series in 2019. The first season aired in April 2022. It was created by Peter Moffat and boasted Michael B. Jordan among its executive producers. Courtney B. Vance starred in and executive produced the series, with the cast also including Tosin Cole and Aunjanue Ellis.

“Invitation to a Bonfire” was picked up to series in February 2022. It was to be based on the book of the same name by Adrienne Celt. The series was described as a “psychological thriller set in the 1930s at an all-girls boarding school in New Jersey.

You have serious artists involved like Courtney B. Vance and Michael B. Jordan, and you have the entire second season — the concluding season in the can — and you just kill it?

This is not okay.

As far as censorship and greed, Hollywood is at its all-time worst.

People complain and write books and produce documentaries about how cruel the old moguls — Zanuck, Mayer, Cohn, the Brothers Warner — were, but those guys look like hippies compared to today’s generation of mogu— I mean, anti-art multinationals. Conformity, censorship, and the total erasure of art to please the bottom line — that’s today’s Hollywood.

The old Production Code offered a hundred times more artistic freedom than today’s Woke Production Code. The old Production Code only told you what you couldn’t do, which allowed artists to find the subtext of workarounds. We didn’t have to see it, but we knew Rick and Elsa had sex up in his office. We knew Joe Gillis was banging Norma Desmond for those gold cigarette cases.

The Woke Production Code tells filmmakers what they must do, what they must say, what political and cultural lines they must color within. The result? Blah. The death of individual expression in movies and television. You still had cinematic debate when Zanuck, Mayer, Cohn, and the Brothers Warner ruled. You still had High Noon and Rio Bravo openly arguing over the decency of everyday Americans. You still had MGM’s American idealism vs. Warner Bros. cynicism. No more, boy. It’s all blah. It’s all one big, unhappy, boring, intimidated, tedious Borg Collective.

And for what?

To please who?

A bunch of faceless, anti-art human calculators who will take years of your artistic sweat and write it off sight unseen.

These past couple of weeks, I’ve been rewatching the films of John Cassavetes. There was an artist. He may not be your cup of tea (I think he’s a genius), but that man believed in individual expression like no other. For three decades, he put his money where his mouth was. His money, his time, his talent… He courted failure and bankruptcy when conformity would have made him rich and comfortable, and he was Easy Ridering and Raging Bulling a full decade before anyone else came along. You see, he had things to say about the human condition, often uncomfortable things, but always what he saw as the truth. He inspired countless filmmakers, and the result was the second golden age of the late ‘60s and ’70s.

I don’t blame anti-art human calculators for acting like anti-art human calculators. I do blame the artists for going along to get along, for selling out, for rolling over and taking it. They might do art, but they are nothing more than their own form of anti-art human calculators.

Thank heaven for home video. The thought of having access only to today’s anti-art conformist garbage is literally despairing.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.