question of the day: How big a problem is it that Hollywood no longer makes movies about blue-collar, working-class people?

“The studios feel that the only way to get people out of the house is to show them something that’s going to entertain them in a fantastic way,” [Joe Roth, a producer and former top executive at the 20th Century Fox and Walt Disney studios] added, “whether it’s 3-D, fantasy or crude humor.”

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It wasn’t always so. In another dark economic climate, the Great Depression, studios cranked out both penthouse- and tenement-set tales. “You certainly had a lot of escapist fare and musicals to lift people’s spirits, but you also had powerful films that went straight to the heart of what people were going through at that time,” said the documentary director Michael Moore, who admiringly name-checked “The Grapes of Wrath,” the comedies of Will Rogers and the directors Preston Sturges and Frank Capra.

Hey! Yeah! What the hell, man?

How big a problem is it that Hollywood no longer makes movies about blue-collar, working-class people?

Distraction is fine, but as I’ve said many times before, must everything we consume as entertainment be escapist and “aspirational,” a word another Hollywood insider quoted by Rozen uses? Isn’t there room, next to the fantasy, for movies that are about people who look like and live like the people who are seeing them? Isn’t ignoring poor and middle-class people just another way for the mainstream media to ignore us, and pretend our troubles don’t even exist?

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