Let’s say that the Academy Awards had been the target of a terrorist attack. Terrorists piped nerve gas into the theater’s HVAC system, and everyone who’s anyone in Hollywood is now either dead or in major medical trouble.
What would the effect of such an incident be? Would the stars and producers and whatnot be replaced with little trouble, or would this mark a major shift in the way America gets entertainment? What do you think the lasting effects would be?
Bollywood would get its big break!
In reality, the vast majority of actors, directors, producers, etc. aren’t anywhere near the Academy Theater on the night of the Oscars, so things wouldn’t change very much. Some new faces get their chance is all.
Well, we would lose our Queen and have to put up with Jug Ears on the throne. 
Wait a minute …
:smack:
well, let’s see. The OP just suggested a major terrorist attack with chemical Weapons of Mass Destruction on US soil. That may get some war drums beating…
But if we just want to have a fun thread, and restrict it to the effects on Hollywood—then I don’t think it would be too disasterous.
Big business would flood money into Hollywood, each studio trying to jump-start a new wave of actors to win fame and glory. After such a disaster, the first major film to be released would be anticipated like the re-opening of the Stock Exchange three days after 9/11. Way too much attention, all of it positive and patriotic, and whoever appears in it would become an overnight sensation (= big bucks).
And after that, it’s business as usual , just with different faces.
I think they have Bruce Willis and Steve Buscemi on call for such an eventuality, so I doubt it could actually happen.
I would feel sorry for the sound guy who has been nominated 19 times.
Assuming everyone at the Oscars suddenly retired (I don’t like violence), I think the acting profession is so popular that they would all be replaced swiftly.
Yeah, but everybody killed in the attack would be liberals!
So I’m thinking the White House issues a national day of rejoicing. 
If The Keifer is present, this whole exercise is moot.
I think we can safely assume they’d come out with a movie about it within a few years.
Would it be too snarky to suggest that such a “disaster” would cause an immediate and lasting improvement of American culture? What does “snarky” mean, anyway? Is it one of those words that is what it sounds like? What was the original question?
Let’s not forget there would be quite a bit of prime real estate up for sale in the not too distant future.
Snarky roughly means snide and smartassed.
Back to Hollywood, plenty of “Stars” are not there and plenty of directors, writers and etc. There would be large ranks of TV and Broadway performers and new faces to flood in and fill the gap. I almost think the loss of the top directors would be the only really big hit. The actors are much more interchangeable.
Jim
No long term effect. The talent would actually be the least effected; actors, actresses, directors, writers, and producers are the most decentralized group in the movie business so they’d have the fewest casualties and these would be replaced by foreign and regional talent. The actual impact would be felt most in the loss of the support staff - all of the cameramen, sound men, second unit directors, production assistants, grips, gaffers, best boys, costumers, make-up artists, stunt people, CGI technicians, etc - these are the invisible people that actually get movies made and most of them have years of experience that can’t be quickly replaced. But while many of these people are located in Hollywood, they are big regional filmaking locations like New York, Toronto, Vancouver, and other cities as well as large pools of experience in Europe and Asia.
It would be nice to think that in a world without Hollywood celebrities, we wouldn’t have to put up with so much bullshit celebrity news. (see: CNN and Anna Nicole Smith woo woo!)
But in reality, if Hollywood went down in this fashion, it would mean DECADES of remembrance for all of these yahoos. I think it would suck even more than it does now.
Celebrities aren’t the problem. Apart from being overpaid gossip fodder, they don’t bother me.
What I want to see is the no-talent Executives that make the boneheaded decisions to be eliminated. Then you’ve got a clean slate to get some really good stuff done for considerably less expense.
That’s actually part of the “mythology” around the upcoming Nine Inch Nails album (read the hubbub here). It describes a dirty bomb being detonated at the 81st Academy Awards (two years from now) followed by several other bombs detonated in the Los Angeles area. The website set up to describe it is called Hollywood in Memorium.
If it’s full of radioactivity from the dirty bomb, it might not be so prime anymore.
Well said. I think a Hollywood disaster (I’ve always thought “The Big Quake”) which wiped out most of the clueless bigwigs would get a lot of independent films on the big screen. There would be a lot of really bad films that hit the market, but there would also be some really outstanding ones. In other words, we’d see variety, and our dream to see a widely-distributed great movie would finally come to fruition.
There would be a lot of “remember the lost celebrities” causes, though. And, many films about “The Day the Movies Died.”
I’d speculate it would be the opposite. The heads of the movie corporations aren’t living in Hollywood - they live in Manhattan, Tokyo, Atlanta, London, and Philadelphia (the exception being Disney which is headquartered in Burbank, California). So the bigwigs would survive.
It would mean an extra long Dead People Montage at next year’s Oscars.