“Absolute cowboys, in the truest sense of it,” Justine Bateman declares, in praise of the frontier directors and producers who have come to embody the mythology of old Hollywood. She sometimes likes to leaf through the interviews that Peter Bogdanovich conducted with 16 auteur directors- Hitchcock, George Cukor, Fritz Lang – for a book called Who the Devil Made It.
“None of that work would have been made if they did not have that fearless attitude and just f**king do it. And that was the heart of that 100-year-old business.”
As far as Bateman is concerned, that industry – “that 100-year tree” – is no longer fully alive or relevant. The antic energy and fearlessness that drove the film and television industries in the Los Angeles of her childhood has been replaced now by an invidious caution, which has led to alarmed warnings and critiques about the decline of the industry in Lotus Land. Bateman has herself written a piece with the headline: Hollywood is dead.
“Greed, in short,” she replies when asked about the cause of its demise.
“The film had three components that made it untouchable. Your true north was excellent work. The second thing was a financial ecosystem that worked for everyone. And we also had a great creative ecosystem. What happened was the studios going for only big-budget stuff that makes a lot of money. Then the tech companies decide they are going to use our work as material on their websites. Which they call ‘content.’
“So now you have a content conveyor belt and giant-budget films and that is the focus. So that Hollywood business that we had is dead. The true north became the stock price and the studio executives chasing after the tech company model. And also, hardly anything is in person.”
When we speak, over Zoom, Bateman is in 11th-hour preparation for the Credo 23 film festival she founded and organised along with like-minded souls – Juliette Lewis, Matthew Weiner of Mad Men and Reed Morano, the director during the first season of The Handmaid’s Tale. The boutique festival has two abiding rules: that none of the entries have any Artificial Intelligence elements whatsoever and that they meet a certain quality threshold.
“The film-makers are so excited. There is one coming from England, another driving across the country to come. Social media has made people feel like they don’t matter because it quantifies people by likes and follows. It means you have a society that feels unloved and unvalued.
“All to say: I think when you have an event focused on the value of an inherent talent that they time to enrich and, in this case, to make a good film, that’s a spirit that people are responding to. It values humans. The criteria are simply: no AI and make a good film. Talent isn’t discriminating.”
Bateman, who is 59, has navigated a decidedly unusual industry life. Her breakout acting role in television was as Mallory Keaton, the wryly amused younger sister to Michael J Fox’s Reaganite conservative entrepreneur Alex and their hippy-era parents in Family Ties, the phenomenally successful sitcom that ran from 1982-1989. With that came an early taste of genuine fame.
She’s polite but clear in her lack of interest in rehashing war tales about that role and time in her life. Apart from anything else, she wrote a provocative, zesty book about it called Fame: The Hijacking of Reality. It is not a memoir (“I f**king hate memoirs” she clarifies in the opening sentence) but a bristling, stream-of-conscious polemic about the disconcerting attractions and vapidity of that late 20th-century iteration of fame. In the 1990s, her personal fame dimmed without ever disappearing and she has spent three full decades on subsequent acting, writing and directing projects.
Researching the book, she came across a comment online critiquing her appearance. It was a stranger remarking that she looked old. And it troubled her “for longer than I thought it would”, she told the actress and talkshow host Drew Barrymore after completing a second book.
Face: One Square Foot of Skin, published in 2022, is 47 short stories based on people – mostly women – with whom she spoke about the subject of ageing and the beauty industry. She compares plastic surgery to a Ponzi scheme people invest in believing it will help them acquire a partner or obtain a promotion or, in the surface world of the film and television industry, prolong a career. Bateman herself had decided to allow her face to age as it will. The response to the book took her by surprise.
“I knew it would strike a chord with some people. But it was immediate and huge. I got over a thousand DMs from women – and some men – and the feeling was: relief. Under this accusation that their faces were broken and had to be fixed for so long, and you don’t realise how much you were holding it in your body.
“The conversation had moved to: which procedures should you get? You know? It was a fait accompli. And I felt it was insane. So, people are saying perhaps that book was a tipping point – just like this election was a tipping point for the woke mob mentality momentum. Perhaps my book changed that ‘your face is broken’ momentum.”
In addition to all of that, over the past five years Bateman has emerged as a provocative if unlikely crusader against the woke culture which, she argues, had made life in California suffocating and humourless. It’s something she touches on as she explains the subtle but crushing shifts in the way the film and television business is conducted now, as opposed to a decade ago.
“Los Angeles was different too. Up until eight years ago, it had that: ‘hey man, you do you’ attitude. It can be annoying but that was LA. And then we had the invasion of the hall monitors and the party-poopers and the finger pointing and people telling you what to do. That really jacked out the spirit of this place, At the same time, you had virtually all of the film business being conducted online. Zoom links,” she says, throwing her hands up in exasperation.
“Aren’t there offices in Burbank? It is like a 20-minute drive. Okay, let us look into the availability. The parties that used to take place weren’t just for fun. You could talk about films and you were in this pot of truly gifted artists. And studio executives. And producers. And marketing gurus. Now, that has completely shrunken down to some private clubs.”
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Even through a screen and from a distance of 3,000 miles, Bateman is animated and bright. She believes a Kamala Harris presidency would have been a disaster for the US. Her thesis is that liberal left wing orthodoxies had taken command of the cultural conversation and enforced on it a series of rules that she found to be increasingly shrill and absurd. During the Covid lockdown and afterwards, that shrillness intensified, particularly, she says, in her city.
“Los Angeles is not a place where people move to start a family or contribute to the success of the city. New York has that. People go there to try and prove themselves. But here it is more: hey, LA, what have you got for me? I’ve been told in my little town in Minnesota I’m the prettiest girl in town and I should go to LA. The truth is you get here and it’s like: get in line. There are never going to be enough roles or films to employ anybody. And also: you may or may not be talented as an actor.
“So, there are a lot of disappointed people that it never happened for. And the last thing they want to do is go home and admit defeat. So, they stay out here. And they can turn bitter and angry. And 2020 was perfect for them because they got to become these hall monitors. And they got to keep this going for two years. So how did it feel? It felt ridiculous. You kept your thoughts to yourself. Cancellation culture. Arbitrary rules. You say this doesn’t make sense: then you’re a Nazi! It was all just screaming, in your face. I found it unbearable. And I found it incredibly un-American.”
Her glee at the November election originated, she says, in an outpouring of relief that she could breathe again rather than a pronounced political affiliation. Because of her views, she has been invited on to Fox News talkshows to discuss the disintegration of the Democratic leadership and belief system. But she makes it clear she is sceptical about politicians as a rule – and took exception to the Hollywood Reporter, the long-established trade paper, depicting her as a Trump supporter.
“I don’t like politics or politicians, generally speaking. I was so glad that enough people were like: we are done with this. It got really insane and I kept thinking a senator or world leader or someone will say: enough. To me, the American spirit is: come over here and live your life however you like as long as that doesn’t impinge on my right to do the same. Don’t get in my face and start telling me how I am supposed to behave or relate to other people.”
It is, of course, difficult for some among the generation of Americans who grew up with Family Ties and retain the archetypes of those characters to reconcile themselves with the contemporary reality of Justine Bateman. Her views are both lauded and vilified, according to political perspective and mirroring the prevailing mood in the country. When the conversation does turn to that show, she will allow that it was part of an irrecoverable period of utter domination for the television networks. The situation comedy had extraordinary, never-to-be-repeated, reach.
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“I was 16 and it never even crossed my mind to act for a living,” she says. “I fell into my vocation at the time. There were a handful of television stars that crossed into movies- John Travolta, Mike Fox, and Christopher Lloyd. It wasn’t done back then.
“And this is part of the 100-year-old business. Cultivating these extraordinary plants that were movie stars. There has to be context for that to happen. You can’t just take all the best paintings in the world and throw them in a parking lot. So, when you throw 10,000 films online on a streaming website, you are telling people how to treat the work.”
At its peak, Family Ties was drawing in around 30 million viewers a week. Season finales could attract 50 million. All watching the same show, at the same time. Millions more watched around the world. Bateman agrees that the show subliminally communicated endless messages to its global audience about America, from its interior decor to the inherent values contained within the storylines.
“Yeah, such as: the showing up for friends. The good guys – bad guys. It was very clear when someone was stealing or lying. And also: just that cowboy fearlessness and don’t sweat the small s**t, and just go for it. And pick yourself up and go again. It is not fair for me to qualify that as uniquely American, but it is woven into the American spirit.”
Her contention is that the old model – dominant studios and the careful curation of actors who became – in the Hollywood walk of fame sense – movie stars – is done. The idea of the film star, born for the big screen, is still alive in the imagination of film fans, she believes. But in the torrent of content and streaming services and social media, the film industry has simply forgotten how to create them.
“You have to have someone who is magnetic, personable, a good-to-great actor,” she says cheerfully. “And then you have to cultivate that. And then, you have to frame it and put it in context. Brad Pitt was in specific films that were released in ways that films aren’t released now.
“Do people still believe in movie stardom? Sure. Are there any new ones coming through? Hardly. Tom Cruise – he has a social media account but he isn’t posting pictures of himself in his kitchen or whatever. Neither is Brad Pitt. Part of it is allowing yourself that under exposure. But ... that 100-year-old tree died.
“I say all this, and there is a new tree emerging. And the new film business is going to be filled with those same kind of people as before. It’s going to be built on the same fearlessness. By people who aren’t answering to anybody.”
