Most of the people involved in this story are dead—except me, as of this writing—so I guess I can tell it without sustaining too much career damage.

In what seems like several million years ago, then-president George H.W. Bush was running for his second term. During the campaign, Vice President Dan Quayle gave a speech in which he drew the connection between the breakdown of American families—then, as now, a major reason so many families remain poor—and the prevailing attitudes in popular Hollywood entertainment.

After connecting the statistical dots between fatherless households, poverty, and crime, the vice president referred to a storyline in a popular television sitcom, Murphy Brown, in which the lead character has a child out of wedlock. “It doesn’t help matters,” the vice president said, “when primetime TV has Murphy Brown—a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid, professional woman—mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another ‘lifestyle choice.’” Hollywood and the liberal media went bananas. Dan Quayle—despite being factually correct in his analysis and moderate in his language—was portrayed as a dangerously unhinged lunatic. We’ve come a long way since then.

Everyone knew that the writers of Murphy Brown were going to respond to the speech, and everyone knew that their response would get huge ratings. And, possibly, affect the outcome of the election. It was weird, obviously: The vice president was a real-life person and Murphy Brown was a fictional character, but back then—before X and Fox News and the kaleidoscopic fragmentation of television channels and choices—a big network television show was a serious piece of political artillery.

Here’s where I come in: I was working in television at the time and somehow came across a copy of the top-secret script of the Murphy Brown season premiere. The teleplay and production of the Murphy Brown response to Dan Quayle’s speech were a total lockdown affair. The scripts were numbered and collected at the end of each day’s rehearsal, and even the network wasn’t allowed to keep copies. But Hollywood is the worst place to try to keep a secret, and somehow a copy found its way to me, a young and mildly Republican comedy writer.

I had in my hands a pretty powerful object, something that I knew my political allies would want to see and prepare a response for. But I was also—and defiantly remain—an absolute coward who didn’t want his fingerprints on any professionally compromising transaction. So what I did was this: I made two copies of the script on my lunch hour, at a copy shop on Gower Avenue, and I FedExed one to my friends in the Bush campaign and one to Rush Limbaugh, just for kicks.

In the end, of course, it didn’t matter. George H.W. Bush lost the race owing to a combination of a youthful governor of Arkansas and a vaguely imbalanced upstart third-party candidate from Dallas.

It’s impossible to measure the effect of the Murphy Brown call-and-response (or my brief and insignificant role as a shadowy political operative) on the outcome of that election, but what’s undeniable is this: Everyone assumed that it mattered. Everyone—the media, the political operations, and especially Hollywood—took it for granted that what people in show business say and think about politics makes a difference. The three decades that followed Quayle v. Brown have seen a parade of movie stars and Hollywood grandees swanning their way into the White House (when there’s a Democrat in residence) or shouting insults outside the gates (when there isn’t). But one thing everyone has agreed on is this: Show business and the people who work in it are powerful political machers.

“I love Joe Biden,” powerful Hollywood macher George Clooney wrote in the New York Times on July 10, 2024, “but we need a new nominee.”

It was, some have suggested, a dam-breaking moment. Clooney opened the piece with some throat-clearing praise—“I love Joe Biden…and I believe in him. Believe in his character. Believe in his morals. In the last four years, he’s won many of the battles he’s faced”—and then pivoted to what every Democrat knew deep down: Joe Biden is too old and too frail to run for president and worse, “We are not going to win in November with this president. On top of that, we won’t win the House, and we’re going to lose the Senate.”

Boom. Ten days later, after an agonizing and public tug-of-war between Democratic operatives, Biden loyalists, and the George Clooneyists, Biden dropped out. It was, some said, the direct result of an op-ed in the New York Times penned by a powerful and influential movie star.

Which, you know, could be true. Hard to say. But before we can anoint Clooney as a movie-star power broker and president toppler, I think it’s fair to ask this question: What, exactly, is a movie star, in 2024?

Clooney, for instance, hasn’t had a hit picture in years. He’s an enormously gifted actor and director—and by all accounts a genuinely wonderful guy—but his recent work hasn’t had the big-screen glamor of his first decade in the movies. He’s done some documentaries, a couple of projects for streamer…in other words, as show business has broken into a zillion little pieces on a zillion different channels, so has the idea of the Big Movie Star.

And that, in many ways, makes George Clooney emblematic of show business in general. He’s handsome and witty and talented and impossibly dashing, but show business isn’t like it was in 1994 when he burst onto the scene as the passionate Dr. Doug Ross on NBC’s blockbuster drama ER and around 30 million people tuned in each week to see him. Or, for that matter, like it was in 1992 when I furtively and fearfully sent two anonymous FedEx envelopes to the White House and El Rushbo. The Murphy Brown response episode, by the way, was watched by nearly 70 million people. Those numbers just aren’t possible now. A huge hit network sitcom literally gets a tenth of that audience. Everything is smaller, the screens and the stars.

The smallest screens around, for instance, are on Zoom meetings. So it’s no surprise that the Kamala Harris campaign is deploying its movie-star supporters on Zoom events. Part fundraiser, part campaign rally, these events—“White Dudes for Harris” and “Comics for Kamala” were two of the most popular—have the low-rent, grubby realism that perfectly captures the state of the entertainment industry. Stars like Jeff Bridges and Mark Hamill appear in tiny little boxes—just as we all do on Zoom meetings at work—and struggle with the mute button and the background effects. Actors like Jason Bateman and Ben Stiller suffer through the same bad audio as everyone else. The Zoom meetings have a homemade, small-d democratic feel—the opposite of George Clooney–silver-screen-pixie-dust pizazz. When you see big stars in those familiar little boxes, you naturally say to yourself, Hey! I’m on Zoom. I guess I’m a star, too! And when everyone is a star, nobody is a star.

In the end, George Clooney’s op-ed had about as much influence on the outcome of this election—whatever it turns out to be—as I did, back in 1992, when I conducted Operation: Sitcom Script. Biden dropped out because of a constellation of distinctly non-glamorous reasons: Money was drying up, the polls were looking bad, and Nancy Pelosi was telling him to pull the plug. Hollywood just doesn’t have the pull it used to. The machers, if they ever truly existed, are in a different, smaller business. In real life—and in the movie version of the events—it’ll be Nancy Pelosi who is the star. Maybe George Clooney will direct that project for Amazon Prime.

Photo: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP

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