Jan Jekielek is a senior editor with The Epoch Times, host of the show “American Thought Leaders” and co-host of “FALLOUT” with Dr. Robert Malone and “Kash’s Corner” with Kash Patel. Jan’s career has spanned academia, international human rights work, and now for almost two decades, media. He has interviewed nearly a thousand thought leaders on camera, and specializes in long-form discussions challenging the grand narratives of our time. He’s also an award-winning documentary filmmaker, producing “The Unseen Crisis: Vaccine Stories You Were Never Told,” “DeSantis: Florida vs. Lockdowns,” and “Finding Manny.”

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[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] How has Hollywood changed in the last several decades, and why are film productions leaving Los Angeles and increasingly going abroad? Where is the industry headed, and what role should Trump’s “special ambassadors” to Hollywood play?

“Hollywood spent probably the last 15 or 20 years basically telling half of its audience that they don’t want them to watch, that they hate them, that they’re deplorables,” says actor and filmmaker Nick Searcy. “They’ve driven half the audience away.”

Searcy played James Baker in the Reagan biopic last year and is perhaps best known for his role as Art Mullen in the crime drama “Justified.” He’s also the director of “Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer,” a film about an abortion doctor who was convicted for the murder of three babies.

A few months ago, Searcy released his memoir, “Justify This: A Career Without Compromise.”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of NTD.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:

Nick Searcy, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Thanks, nice to be here.

Recently, President Trump announced a 100 percent tariff on films made outside of the United States. What do you make of this?

I think it’s kind of about time. I mean, it’s funny, I’ve been trying to get this movie made that I wrote with a friend of mine about the Texas border that we’ve been trying to get done for probably six years now. Finally found a company that wanted to make it. And they said, yes, we’d like to make it, but we want to shoot it in Thailand.

I’m like, you want to shoot Thailand for Texas? And they go, look, 50 percent cheaper there. You can make the movie for literally half the budget. So every job I’ve done in the last few years has been Canada, it’s been the Dominican Republic, it’s been overseas, England, so it’s something’s got to be done. We got to get American productions shooting back in America.

But isn’t it because American productions are overpriced?

Absolutely, yes. Some of it’s labor costs, it’s the union. They don’t want to shoot a movie set in Texas because of union rules. They say they can go to Thailand and pay everybody, I don’t know, 50 cents a day or whatever they pay people over there. So it’s definitely America that has to find a way to compete in order to bring production back.

To be fair, there’s also significant tax credits and subsidies for films made in Canada. I don’t know how it works in the U.S.

You see, the industry has left California and it sort of moves around to whichever state has the best incentive. So it was Georgia for a while, then for a little while, it was Kentucky, Oklahoma, Texas now just passed a big tax incentive, Louisiana for a while, North Carolina. When I first started, they had a big tax incentive; everything shot there. So California has basically given the business away. Nothing shoots there anymore, except for maybe the occasional sitcom. Talking about films, Trump imposed a tariff on foreign-made films, that’s because of the runaway production.

I did a miniseries called The Perfect Couple shot by Netflix. We shot on Cape Cod for three-and-a-half to four months in 2023, and the writer’s strike put a pause in it. We had about two weeks left of shooting, and the writer’s strike happened, and they had to suspend the production for two months. And I got a call that said, you know, we’re going to shoot the last two weeks in England. I said, in England? He said, yes, it’s cheaper. I go, I literally have one line left. I stick my head in the door and I say, hey, we caught the guy. That’s all I have left to do. They’re going to fly me to England for that? And they did.

They flew everybody to England for two weeks to shoot at Shepperton Studios in London because it was cheaper to finish the film over there than it was to bring everybody back to Cape Cod. That’s the kind of thing that we’re combating. And the people that suffer in that instance are not necessarily the producers of that show. It’s the crew. It’s the people who were working on that film in Massachusetts. They didn’t travel the crew over there. It’s a totally new crew. Maybe they took the Director of Photography and a couple of other people, but that’s it.

Is it just that it’s so inflated here or that they make it so unreasonably cheap over there? I mean, or is it the combination of both?

I think it’s both. I mean, I think that, you know, transportation costs, gas fuel costs, and union labor costs are probably the main drivers of it. It’s just cheaper to pay a crew there. It’s cheaper to travel all the actors to a foreign country and pay the crew what the crew gets there than it is to shoot in America and pay the American wages. I think that’s most of it. And then also there are tax incentives. Definitely in Canada, the tax incentives are probably a bigger part of why you shoot in Canada than the labor costs. Because labor is probably not that much different in Canada, but the taxes are.

I was looking at a talk you gave about five years ago, and you basically said that we, meaning let’s say more conservative-leaning actors, entertainment industry people, need to really get into the game of entertainment. We’ve got to build a new Hollywood. You were saying that we have an opening right now to do so. What does Hollywood need right now?

Hollywood spent probably the last 15 or 20 years basically telling half of its audience that they don’t want them to watch, that they hate them, that they’re deplorables. If you don’t support Obama, if you’re not for these rights, transgender rights, these different rights groups, if you’re not part of that, then we’re going to demonize you and we’re going to make programming that makes fun of you, that ridicules you.

And so that’s what’s been happening. They’ve driven half the audience away. And so when you have a film that does appeal to that audience, people turn out, people go to the theater. Or when you have a film that just doesn’t attack that audience, like Top Gun: Maverick, something like that, they turn out.

It’s interesting that you mentioned that film because it was very stark. When I watched that film, I thought to myself, that film would work for just about everyone. That’s unusual.

I think that Tom Cruise is smart in that way, and you know, people have been calling him the last great movie star. I think that’s why he stays away from politics, although he’s not afraid to make a movie that’s blatantly patriotic. He’s just not going to say that, he’s just going to show it to you. Or a movie that’s just based on action, like his Mission: Impossible movies. As long as you keep that stuff out of it, either way, people just go to the movies to be entertained.

They don’t go to be lectured about how terrible they are because of who they support politically. And so that’s what Hollywood’s been doing for 25, 30 years, and people are sick of it, and half the country’s just turned them off. And so that’s what I mean by there’s an opportunity there for people to make movies that are not necessarily conservative movies but movies that just aren’t ramming a woke philosophy down your throat.

How did you survive Hollywood? You’ve played all sorts of different roles. You’ve been a director, you’ve been a producer, actor, you know, sitcoms, movies. What was your evolution and thinking?

I don’t know that I did evolve that much. You know, I was in New York for seven years in my 20s, doing stage and not really getting anywhere in the film business. I didn’t really get started until I was in my 30s. We had moved back to North Carolina, my wife and I, to have our baby. We didn’t want to have the baby in New York City. And the movie business was down in North Carolina, and I started doing smaller parts. I built my career up in North Carolina, acting in Georgia and things.

And Fried Green Tomatoes was the movie that kind of put me on the map enough that I could move to L.A. So by the time I moved to Los Angeles, I was already in my 30s. I had a child. I was kind of a grown-up, and my belief system was already pretty set. It didn’t change me much. I just, when I first went to Hollywood, I didn’t know I was supposed to keep my mouth shut about what I thought. By the time I realized that it was too late, I figured, well, everybody knows by now. I’m just going to have to go with it.

But you were successful by any standard.

Yes,I’ve been very fortunate. Everything I got, I kind of scratched and clawed and auditioned for and won, because I didn’t know anybody. I was just a kid from North Carolina. I didn’t even know any professional actors. I’ve been fortunate to be part of some really great movies. And the joke I tell is that, you know, people with good taste obviously think I’m good. That’s why I don’t do very many bad movies.

What is the memorable one? Did you have a favorite role?

Fried Green Tomatoes is memorable because it was the first movie role I had where I had more than one scene. It was actually a fairly substantial part. But I’ve been very blessed. In the HBO miniseries, From the Earth to the Moon, about the astronauts, I got to work with so many great people. I was in all the episodes. Tom Hanks produced it. Cast Away with Tom Hanks was big for me. Nell, the movie, with Jodie Foster and Liam Neeson.  And then, Justified was like a nice capper, a nice little six-year series to hang my hat on towards the end of the career.

You were saying that it’s hard for you to go anywhere in Kentucky.

I’m very famous in Kentucky. Everywhere I go, they ask, are you Art Mullen? It’s kind of fun.

What you said about clawing your way, I think most actors or actresses would say that’s just the business. What’s your likelihood of being successful in Hollywood compared to how many people show up? It’s very low.

Very low, yes.

But somehow, and you said your belief system was set, but what I’m saying is this feels to me like it goes against kind of your thesis here, right? That you can’t make it as someone who has a more conservative viewpoint.

I do think Hollywood’s changed, though. I was there for 30 years. So when I went there, it was what, Clinton was president? It wasn’t so divided. It wasn’t so galvanized. And so you could have discussions with people back then. I remember having fairly civil discussions with Democrats on set, making some jokes about Clinton or whatever, and it was fairly good-natured.

But after Bush, when Bush got in and the Iraq war and then Obama right after, that’s when it really got to be like, okay, if you’re not one of us, you’re a bigot, you’re a racist, you’re a terrible human being and that sort of thing. So it kind of evolved to the point where, you know, I think it was more dangerous to come out as a conservative. If I’d come out as a conservative while Bush was president, then it probably would have been more difficult. But my trajectory was already set in terms of my acting career, you know, before it really got so polarized.

I see. And then you already had enough people who knew what you could do, who kind of maybe liked you.

Yes, and knew me personally. At that point, Hollywood was really run by, you know, profit. And so agents and managers wanted to work with me, you know, that kind of thing. But now it’s not run by that anymore. It’s run by hate. So if they hate you, you’re not going to work.

This is something that’s very, very interesting. There are these, you know, huge awards ceremonies, a variety of the Oscars being kind of, I suppose, supposed to be the pinnacle. But when you see the Oscars, you don’t necessarily know a lot of the films. I mean, I definitely wasn’t like that when I was younger. These were, you know, blockbusters and there’s something that’s shifted, like you’re saying, that’s for sure.

Yes, when we were growing up in the 70s, everybody knew every movie. Everybody watched the Oscars like it was the Super Bowl. And you’re going, oh, wow, is Five Easy Pieces going to win? Is The Godfather, or The Apartment, all these movies that everybody knows? The French Connection. And now they nominate 10 films. They’re barely in theaters. They’re in theaters for a week to qualify, and then they’re on Netflix or something.

So it’s just a totally different way of doing the award ceremonies that has nothing to do with quality or the popularity of the film or how well the film is received. It has more to do with, you know, does the content fit our political ideology? And do we want to reward a film that doesn’t fit our political ideology?

How is it possible to make films that aren’t popular? Isn’t that how it works? I mean, isn’t that where the money comes from?

Yes, you would think. But I think Hollywood has some deep pockets and the way films get made now, it’s not so much dependent on the box office now as it used to be because now they’re made by streaming services. So everything’s kind of spread out. You’re paying your $15 a month to a streaming service so they can make a bunch of things that you don’t want to see, but they’ll make that one thing that you do. That’s what I think has happened is that, you know, films are just not so dependent on straight people buying tickets.

I remember it was Netflix or HBO would go out and just buy and produce a massive miniseries or series or movie and they’d pick the actors presumably from their data. These are the actors that people like, these are the themes that people like, and they would construct film around that. But I suppose that could be leveraged in a different way, that same approach, right? Instead of going for the gold, you could be going for some sort of ideology.

And now they literally, you know, they have quotas in terms of, you know, the racial makeup of a movie. I think I heard that Reagan was not eligible to be considered for the Oscars because the cast was too white. Well, it’s a historical piece. I mean, you know, what are you gonna do, non-traditional casting about a slice of history? It doesn’t make any sense.

And so that’s why Hollywood is falling apart. And I mean, I know, I just left Hollywood four years ago. I left Burbank and I just know so many people there that are just like, there’s no work. Editors, you know, camera people, they’re all moving away because there’s nothing for them to do.

Tell me about making the movie, Reagan.

I knew the producers and they’d asked me to be part of it. And it took a long time because we shot it in the middle of COVID. And so there were all these crazy restrictions that they had to go by. SAG [Screen Actors Guild] had imposed all this stuff. And it was such a huge cast that it became almost comical. I mean, we weren’t allowed to ride in the van together to the set because we might kill each other with COVID or something.

So, we all had to have our own rental cars. We all had to drive ourselves. Each actor had his own golf cart. So, when there’s ten of us in a scene in a boardroom, you know, sitting around the table, well, there’s ten golf carts bringing us all. I mean, it was kind of silly. I guess the producers couldn’t help it. They had to do it to get the movie made. But there was, for example, there was one scene where we’re supposed to be at the 1976 Republican National Convention.

We’re all crammed into this little room. They’re shooting it tight. They want to make it look like we’re on the floor of the convention. And so they bring the actors that have lines. They bring us all to this set, and all the background actors have masks on. They’re in costume, but they have their masks on. And we’re principal actors who don’t have their masks on because I guess we’re superhuman beings and we are impervious to the disease or something.

So we get there and the assistant director says, okay, everybody, when you hear rolling, everybody take your mask off and put it in your pocket and make sure you tuck it in so that those little strings don’t hang out. And then we’ll play the scene. And then as soon as it’s over, just put your mask back on as quickly as you can. And I said, yes.

Because when cameras are rolling it’s 1976 and the virus didn’t exist back then so if you act really well you’ll survive but if you suck you might get COVID so everybody be on your best behavior. So it was a little silly, but it’s a great movie. I think it’s a great thing to be a part of. I got to play James Baker, which was fun. I had a nice wig. The joke was it was an honor to play James Baker. It’s the first time I’ve ever played a swamp creature.

What did it take to prepare for the role of James Baker?

I watched a lot of film clips of him. I read his book and tried to get a sense of the man, how he operated, how he was able to go from being a Gerald Ford supporter in 1976 to becoming somebody that Reagan trusted enough to make him Chief of Staff and then later on Secretary of State. I mean, he was obviously a political animal who could play the game. That’s how I tried to play him. I sort of tried to stick to this idea that he was a political animal who could navigate through whatever waters were put in front of him.

John Voight is in the film, one of the special ambassadors that President Trump has assigned to Hollywood. We haven’t heard much about them since they were assigned. It’s John Voight, Sylvester Stallone, and Mel Gibson. Do you know if they’re doing anything?

I think John Voight is the one who came up with the tariff on foreign films, tariff on films shot overseas. That’s what I heard. I don’t know if that’s true or not. It’s a funny thing about the conservative side of filmmaking, the conservative side of Hollywood. If you have people like John Voight, Sylvester Stallone, Mel Gibson, they are such big stars that it doesn’t matter. Their conservatism is not going to affect them. Maybe it’ll affect them with certain people, but they’re never going to be hurting for work. There’s always going to be people that want to have them in their movies just because they’re great actors and they bring a huge body of work to the table.

For some of the rest of us, like me and some of the lesser actors, what happens to us is that the Left side of Hollywood gets a whiff that we’re conservative and they go, well, we’re not going to work with those guys. We don’t want to put them in our movie. And what happens on the other side is the conservative filmmakers, when they get money to make a movie, they go, we’re not going to be like the other side. We’re not going to exclude people because of their ideology.

So we’re going to hire people from the Left side too, just to show how magnanimous we are. So the people that get screwed are the guys like me, the conservative actors that aren’t huge stars that have come out. We’re the ones who the Leftists won’t hire. And now the conservatives won’t hire us that often, because they want to appear magnanimous.

So the ambassadors to Hollywood, I think it’s a very interesting and kind of funny idea. But they’ve kind of made it. There’s not a big movement on the conservative side to help out conservatives that are lower down on the ladder. What could they do?

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