Hollywood’s greatest trick used to be adapting beloved books into movies that were better than the books. Gone with the Wind. Jurassic Park. The Godfather.

What happened?

Book adaptations are still the hottest thing in Hollywood, but alas, good book adaptations are in short supply. The days of bestselling novels leading directly to blockbuster movies are long gone, with a few exceptions.

In just the last year or so, these movies and TV shows have premiered or been announced: Wuthering Heights, The Odyssey, Harry Potter (a new HBO series), Project Hail Mary, a new Narnia movie, a new Animal Farm movie, and even a Lord of the Flies series.

The job of great fiction is to reveal truth. It shows us ourselves, and invites us to learn how human beings respond to life experiences. When a work of fiction is warped from this singular mission with the distortions of politics, or ideologies, or “messages” of any kind, that essential truth revealing magic is wiped away.

All that’s left is a bunch of characters that ring false in situations no one believes.

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I hope you had a good Memorial Day.

It’s nice to have a Monday when nobody has to go to work but it’s also incredibly poignant to remember all the men in their graves who died for this country.

The quality that made these men and women so special is the same quality that allowed Americans to found this crazy country in the first place.

So what is it? What’s the singular quality that defines traditionally American mores and patriotic Americans themselves?

It’s this: an idealistic optimism so expansive and unwavering that to those riddled with the rot of cynicism it looks like hopeless naivete. “Those idiot Americans,” the stereotypical Europeans sneer. “Don’t they know that will never work? Don’t they know they are silly grinning fools? They should have quit while they were ahead, they can’t possibly keep their childish little country going.”

But it did work.

And it kept working. And the stubborn upstart, wet behind the ears, like an overgrown puppy bounding into grass too high to see over, charged headlong into settling it. It laid claim first to the manifest destiny in its backyard, and swiftly ascended until it ruled the world as its supreme power.

The purehearted, eternally generous people who rode to the rescue for those superior Europeans many times, and also happened to bestow on the rest of the world’s teeming masses wonders like electricity, telephones, the car, the plane, the Internet, and constitutional democracy.

You’re welcome.

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Can Spencer Pratt Break L.A.’s Stockholm Syndrome?

I’ve never met Spencer Pratt, although he went to the same private, elite high school (Crossroads) that many of my friends and relatives attended. His father was my husband’s dentist at one point. He’s a friend of a friend, you could say. I never watched a second of the reality show he starred on and I couldn’t even tell you what it was called.

But he is going to save Los Angeles.

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In the wake of Pope Leo coming out as a “global south” immigration maxxer, the argument that presents mass third-world immigration as a moral imperative for the first world is one worth confronting.

In other words, is it really the moral duty of every devout American Christian to surrender to the desire of anyone in the world who wishes to come here, and, in most cases, ask that we financially support them and their children? If you say no to a person like this, are you going against the express wishes of Jesus?

Would Jesus really want Americans to replace themselves with the world’s poor? Does being pro-deportation make you a bad Catholic?

Ever since Donald Trump bravely broke with decades of normie Republicans to declare mass immigration as the number one threat to the Republic, people on the left and the right have been trying to come up with ways to persuade you that he was wrong and that mass immigration is good.

Many people are still trying to accuse devout Christians and Catholics of doing things Jesus would disapprove of: namely, supporting mass deportations of illegal entrants to their country. Opposing 100 million new arrivals from the third world who are on welfare and food stamps is, according to these people, anti-Christian.

Preferring that your life savings be used to support and defend your own families and fellow citizens and not be sent to the “global south” is, according to them, a moral failing and against Jesus’s teachings.

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Is MAGA going straight to hell now? Or are we already there?

Populist Right vs Pope-ulist Left

As some of you know, I am a happy and grateful convert to Catholicism from secularism nothingness. I would be Catholic no matter who the Pope or the Cardinals were. I love traditional mass, including the Latin mass. I am totally allergic to liberal masses that feature modern rock music, guitars, and interpretive dancers. Mass should be about one thing: getting you to heaven.

That’s a lot easier when it’s not making you sick with postmodern art, terrible modern architecture, and homilies about how racist white Catholics need to be more accep…

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What a month. A lot of people who started out 2026 in good shape will not be leaving 2026 in good shape. Some of you failed basic tests. Others simply saw their luck run out. But in this season of a thousand fools, there were also some standout winners. Let’s review!

First, the Fools

Bimbo-fied Husbands

There’s a new ICE Barbie in town, folks.

After the shootings of Renee Good and the other communist in Minnesota, ICE was forced to pull back and lay low. But instead of roaring back and carting truckloads of skinnies to the airport for one-way flights back to Shitholistan, a brand-new DHS scandal heaved and swelled, ballooning to comically huge proportions. Immediately after getting fired as head of DHS, Kristi Noem’s estranged husband Bryon was outed as a man addicted to wearing triple-Z latex prosthetic breasts on video calls to porn stars.

Is everyone a freak these days? People, cool it on the niche fetishes. Any sexual desires that involve purchasing rubber props on Amazon, X-rated calls to strangers online, and dressing up in humiliation ritual outfits is not sex: it’s a dangerous addiction that will ruin your life.

Black Snape and the (British female) Harry Potter Casting Director

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It’s been a tough few weeks, so here’s some good news: I am delighted to announce that my new book, SUPERVILLAINS, is now officially open for pre-orders at the Passage Press website.

Thesis of the book: America can only be destroyed from within, and a shocking large number of people are hard at work on this not-so-secret project.

Someone had to categorize them. So I did.

Pre-order here before you read the rest of this post + save 10% with promo code PEACHY!

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Pretty Woman came out 36 years ago this weekend—March 23, 1990. I’m pretty sure I saw it opening day. That week, the entire universe fell in love and stayed in love with Julia Roberts, who became the undisputed queen of all popcorn movie stars. The female Tom Cruise, with that big toothy grin American audiences can’t get enough of.

(It also didn’t occur to me until this watching that casting Richard Gere as the john is a bit of funny casting, since he first became famous as a leading man by playing a Beverly Hills prostitute himself in American Gigolo ten years earlier.)

It’s a great comedy, and a highly entertaining modern-day fairy tale starring two of the best looking movie stars of the 20th century. As I rewatched it last week, I realized it is also a wonderful primer to American values of the late 20th century; a paean to our long-lost ideals.

You all know the Pretty Woman plot: it’s a 1990s Cinderella, only she’s a Hollywood street walker and he’s some sort of Wall Street tycoon with terrible taste in ties. Disney famously toned down the original script and its drug-addled hooker leading lady. The original title was $3000, after the amount of money Edward offers Vivian for the week-long job.

No romantic comedy since has ever been able to top it. In the end, it’s about an uncouth but great-looking American defeating the hidebound, snobbish cultural elites and coming out on top—based on old-fashioned American qualities like charm, sex appeal, honesty, generosity, common sense, and bootstrapped opportunism.

In the wholesome, PG-rated version that got made, Roberts plays a hooker, yes, but she’s never taken drugs, has no personal vices, and is clean, gorgeous, and has a child-like fascination with the world. Watching it now you are struck by how the filmmakers get the audience to forget what she does for a living. Americans are a forgiving and benevolent people, and want to absolve her of her sins immediately—especially when she lays out her sob story. Vivian opens up about her career only once, when she tells Richard Gere how she fell into her line of work. “I had to pay the rent, so I tried it. The first time I did it, I cried the whole time. But then I got some regulars, and it’s not so bad.” The poor dear! All judgement of her lifestyle is forgiven, and the audience can root for her redemption.

We learn that she followed a boyfriend to L.A., they broke up, so it was either prostitution or homelessness. (No one told her to try modeling or acting?) She later reveals that she dropped out of high school in 10th grade, and is planning to go back to get her degree—she’s smart, you see. “I got pretty good grades, actually.”

In the end, she manages to win over the prince despite her lack of good breeding thanks to her homespun charm, soulful earnestness, and that iconic all-American beauty.

The movie, it turns out, is an incredible time capsule of how Hollywood used to think about Americans—and what we used to value ourselves.

Lesson 1: Class Doesn’t Matter When You’re Pure of Heart

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This is going to be a quick geopolitical post before I finish my main post this week (on a subject I am actually qualified to discuss: the movie Pretty Woman).

But I just wanted to broach something I’ve been thinking about since the Iran campaign started.

So far, I have heard about a thousand justifications and reasons for why Trump decided to finally pull the trigger on Iran. Political reasons, military reasons, Israel reasons, etc.

But I have my own private theory as to why Donald Trump was the guy who finally said “F it” and went medieval on the mullahs.

I have been a Trump watcher my whole life. I first learned about him as an L.A. middle school kid when my issue of SPY Magazine arrived in the mail and he was on the cover. SPY editor Graydon Carter referred to him as a “short-fingered vulgarian.” Who was this guy? He seemed like a character out of a Tom Wolfe novel, an old New York character from the Gilded Age. Was he real?

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Confession: In the last few months, I began to indulge in the venial sin: despair. The Golden Age is upon us, the last few years of the best American president of my lifetime, a top three all timer, but when you live in California, in Los Angeles, that glory is drowned out by the crushing weight of living under an idiocracy.

We would never, it seems, clear out the miscreants and parasites siphoning off our precious dollars into their fraudulent scam businesses. We would never deport more than a handful of illegal aliens and visa overstayers.

We would never clear our streets of homeless junkies and the attendant misery. We will never boost the plummeting birth rate.

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Women everywhere are positively wuthering in their pants in anticipation of this Valentine’s Day’s “Wuthering Heights” premiere. Logline: Barbie finally gets a vagina and learns how to use it. The movie is going be an absolute blockbuster. “Barbenheimer” was a fun phenomenon, but “Heights” will reach the iconic status.

Wuthering Heights, of course, is famous not as a romance, but as a ghost story—after getting ghosted by Heathcliff, Cathy becomes a literal ghost who haunts him forever.

The debate around the movie is swirling: Is it girl “goon fuel”? Is it old-fashioned, standard-issue, bodice-ripping romance? Is it 50 Shades of Heathcliff? Is it feminist? Is it empowering? Isn’t Heathcliff supposed to be “dark”? Is it a symbol of the dumbing down and cheapening of great works of English literature? Does it desecrate Emily Brontë’s moody (and sex-free!) Gothic masterpiece?

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Or is it a good sign that women of all stripes are once again allowed to embrace their innate love of swoony male-female normie romance?

We will examine this momentarily, but first, a look at the wuthering lows of the last few years:

Girls Gone Wild

The most recent mainstream bodice-ripping period romance that gained a huge audience was, of course, Bridgerton. It became famous for its diversity race-swap casting (black Queen Charlotte, etc.) and zesty soft-core sex. Every time I watched a clip or two to see what the fuss was about, I wanted to vomit from the bad acting and charisma-free leading men.

Half the characters were gay or bi or “fluid” or had weight issues — where was the romance? Then I realized, ah — women really just want to watch porn and this was a socially acceptable one with high production values and nice frilly costumes. This show has come and gone with zero breakout cast members. Is it still on? No one knows or cares.

Last month, of course, everyone (outside of trad mom circles) was “obsessed” with the near X-rated gay hockey show, Heated Rivalry. Teenage girls are especially smitten, and I think this is because no male leading man has so closely matched the archetypal teenage girl romantic hero until Connor Storrie came along.

Athletic, slim but muscular, hairless face and chest, blond curls, bright blue eyes and a devilish grin—he looks like the All-American bad boy who Taylor Swift’s been singing about all these long years. Of course girls love him. The fact that he plays a gay man, has gay sex on screen, and presents as a gay man in interviews—well, nobody’s perfect.

I wrote about the phenomenon of this show in my last post.

It’s good that girls are swooning over handsome men again, and not getting guilted into becoming lesbians or trans men. Whatever helps them stay off the testosterone and keep their breasts intact.

But does fantasizing about gay dudes in love with each other—and not with them—hurt their future relationships with real, actual men? How do you keep ‘em down on the farm once they’ve seen Karl Hungus, er, I mean, Connor Storrie? Are girls going mad for this show because they are over straight guys, who give them the ick now? I

n general, it’s probably not great in the long run for young straight women to go ga-ga for two gay guys going at it. Is that homophobic? Seems like girls who want to watch two guys do it is not “romance”—it’s a fetish.

And that brings us to…

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For years I have been observing my fellow female book readers becoming weirder and weirder. Book club women (and frankly, any women who spend a lot of time in women-only clubs) can be a little coven-ish, and my brief attempts at going to book club meetings were mostly unbearable.

Conversations about plot would devolve into therapy sessions where other L.A. preschool moms overshared about their husbands, their infidelities, and their sex lives. I decided to close the book on group activities with book women.

When the back-to-back sensations of Twilight and then 50 Shades of Gray hit this population of women (roughly ages 18 to 40), things got even weirder. A multitude of fanfic sites blossomed. This is of course where 50 Shades came from: it started life as X-rated fanfic with the lead characters from Twilight.

But at least these books had recognizably aspirational normie romantic characters: a handsome, brooding, strong male who falls desperately in love with the heroine for life. Infidelity? He’d rather die. She threatens to leave him? It’s the end of his entire world.

No wonder women swooned at Edward and Christian Gray—these two characters stood in for the timeless male hero that young ladies swooned for, even if they weren’t allowed to admit it to each other. Yes, in fact, ladies, you do want to be swept off your feet by a heterosexual man who thinks you are the most alluring creature ever born.

But this traditional female fantasy has been replaced. Gen Z is not interested in these idealized male-female romances.

Because they’re interested in male-male romances.

Somewhere along the way, young women stopped craving self-inserting themselves into romantic storylines, and instead started preferring to watch two men self-insert themselves into, er, each other.

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2025 started in a state of absolute exhilaration. The crackling thrill of victory was upon us. Eight years of “Get Trump” lawfare had failed. He’d survived bullets, bimbos, and brutal persecution. Our worries were over, Dude. Valhalla had arrived. The only question was: how long would it take to deport 20 million people so our golden age could begin?

Despite the joyful atmosphere, I was in a bit of personal turmoil at the end of last year: I was late delivering a manuscript. (Spoiler alert: I finally turned it in. SUPERVILLAINS comes out summer 2026 from Passage Press).

But the world outside was shining bright with hope. A new pope. A new president. A world remade! The blasted manuscript could wait!

I spent New Year’s Eve sleeping so I could get up at 4 am, bundle the kids up, and head to the Rose Bowl parade. We’d won tickets from a local politician for excellent seats in the grandstands in Pasadena, CA.

A week later, not only did my entire hometown of Pac…

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Culture-watchers still look to the House of Mouse for signs on which way the culture is moving. For decades, Disney stood as a stalwart pillar against tides of political ideology that broke lesser studios. At Disney, little boys played with trucks and cars and space rangers, and little girls liked princesses in sparkly crowns and pink gowns.

Disney did resist going full woke a little longer than the others did, but when they finally broke circa 2016 they entered a ten-year box office plummet the likes of which no Hollywood studio has ever seen.

Frozen 2 was a blockbuster, but everyone young and old agreed: it stank. The magic had melted into heavy slush.

Woke, but Slightly Less Obvious About It

After that response, and massive recent flops like girlboss Snow White, Wish, and the Pixar disaster Elio (about an autistic queer nonbinary kid) you’d think Disney would regroup. Moana 2 made a lot of money but creatively it was a complete dud and killed that budding franchise. (The upcoming live action Moana looks awful.)

They did—sorta. They shifted their former Chief Creative Officer, the writer and director of the Frozen mega-franchise Jennifer Lee out of her role in favor of Jared Bush. She wasn’t fired, she was merely put on full-time Frozen 3 duty, which tells you all you need to know about how well that one is going.

A little-seen article in the Business section of the New York Times is filled with juicy tidbits that offer us a rare glimpse inside the Disney juggernaut’s political realignment.

Last year, Disney turned to Mr. Bush to solve a problem at its 102-year-old animation studio. After more than a decade of uninterrupted success, Disney Animation had thrown a gear, serving up two humiliating clunkers in a row. “Strange World,” an adventure about a gay teenage boy and his three-legged dog, cost at least $220 million to make and market and took in $74 million worldwide. The poorly reviewed “Wish,” featuring a protagonist voiced by the actress Ariana DeBose, cost an estimated $300 million and collected $255 million. (Disney splits ticket sales with theaters.)

So Disney took action, removing Jennifer Lee as the division’s chief creative officer and replacing her with Mr. Bush, whose Disney Animation credits include writing or co-writing “Moana” (2016), “Zootopia” (2016) and “Encanto” (2021). “Zootopia” and “Encanto” won Oscars.

Jared Bush wrote and directed Zootopia and wrote their latest animated movie, Zootopia 2. I found the first Zootopia to be boring and the implied politics annoying. Incredibly, the entire movie is an extended metaphor on why racial profiling of criminals is bad.

The predators “go savage” and kill a bunch of prey animals. It turns out it was a plot by the Mayor, a sheep, to drug the “savage predators” so they unleash their violent instincts, and are shunned from the “utopian” city. The hero must end the prejudice against the predators by proving it was the drug (a plant) that made them violent. She defeats “prejudice,” the predators calm down, and order is restored to the animal utopia.

It will not surprise you to learn that Jared Bush is a white liberal obsessed with “racial justice”:

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I used to read this oversized, floppy ‘zine cover to cover, but because it was launched at the tail end of the Great Magazine Era, and it didn’t leave much of an imprint on me (except on my fingers). It launched in 2004, when I still lived in New York City and we would get the Sunday print edition every single weekend, like all New Yorkers were still required to do back then.

10 years earlier, in 1994, I was slaving away at my first-ever real job in the Great Magazine era, as a college summer editorial assistant (unpaid) at another oversized, floppy publication: Interview Magazine. Its offices were on lower Broadway in Soho at the time and why yes, did I feel cool working there.

I picked up T because of this cover, which is absolutely irresistible bait for anyone my age:

Ferris, Fight Club, Winona, Keanu, great. But why use Keanu in his millennial era and not in his peak Gen X Point Break era?

They also printed an alternate cover:

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Just look at that graph. This is based on new Pew Research that just came out on What Women Want—and there’s no surprise here. Surprise: feminism works!

Yes, we know: 12th grade girls are a lot less interested than boys in getting married, which means feminism is working exactly as intended.

Population control brainwashing is easy: all you do is take over the education system and then wait 50 years.

But something ELSE is happening here. These girls are not just brainwashed NPCs getting their IUDs implanted just because.

This is more than the fumes of second-wave feminism—these girls aren’t studying Simone de Beauvoir or reading Betty Friedan. They are the third Sex and the City generation in a row, and there has been no major update to this American Female operating system in decades.

In fact, Sex and the City is having a renaissance right now among high school girls. Their grandmothers watched it, their mothers watched it, and now they are fans. It’s a great show, very entertaining! But life lessons it has not. The characters on SATC are in fact great examples of how not to be, choices not to make.

Rejecting a perfect mate in favor of a toxic and unavailable one, not having children in time, substituting relationship intimacy with shopping and brunch, and engaging in repeated infidelity with married men—this a classic female recipe for disaster.

But for the women in question, a chart like the one below is progress, not catastrophe. This means women—at least the ones liberated from the patriarchy—are living their best lives, finally!

Ladies: Carrie Bradshaw was a cautionary tale, not a fairy tale.

And yet.

What if . . . .

What if these young women are the canaries in the coal mine, desperately trying to tell us something urgent?

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Yes, I’m mid-way through writing my first novel, and finalizing the manuscript for my next nonfiction book, but I plan to post through all this.

Send prayers.

If you’ve been waiting to buy a subscription, this is the time to do it. All paid subscribers will get special access to book events and sneak peaks.

Some exciting announcements on the Lost Riviera front to—yes, we are working on a few TV/video projects for 2026.

Stay tuned for more! Thank you all so much for your support, it keeps this bedraggled housewife at her keyboard through the good days and the bad.

Much love,

—Peachy

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For the last 20 years there has been an Internet event for wanna-be novelists called “NaNoWriMo,” where lots of people would start writing a novel November 1st and finish the first draft by the end of November.

I think it’s inane name stood for “National Novel Writing Month.” But I always found it charming: that earnest enthusiasm! That utterly naive optimism that one could somehow commit 50,000 words to the page in 30 days!

Despite the odds, 600 novels that started during NaNoWriMo actually got published.

Did any successful novels get published thanks to NaNoWriMo?

That’s a trick question, of course: there are no successful novels. At least, novels that don’t feature women having pornographic sex with minotaurs or werewolves. As Rob Long’s agent told him when he declared his wish to write a novel, “if you need $800, I’ll give you $800.

Nonetheless, millions of aspiring novelists participated.

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Tuesday, Election Night, was a bad night. But was it a bellwether of electoral catastrophes to come? Or just a blip, just typical blue-state candidates winning typical blue-state voters?

To answer that, we may have to wait until next November. But it’s not looking too good. What’s most striking to me is that for all the talk about multi-racialism and diversity, the new female governors of New Jersey and Virginia are both cut from the same Hillary Clinton pant-suit cloth.

Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger are polished blondes, outspoken feminists and pro-choice Democrats with elite government backgrounds. Both women have long resumes of government and military service, law, and business. There is nothing “diverse” about them: they are about as white and blonde as white women get.

But when you’re CIA (like Spanberger) or a groundbreaking Navy pilot (like Sherrill), they let you do it.

The “Eat Pray Love” Ladies and the “Eat With Your Hands, Pray, Submit” Coalition

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A while ago we started to wonder why there were no rightwing news sites about California. There’s lots of news to cover—endless insanity—but no curated site where you could see all the good stuff (and by good, we mean bad), in one place.

As lifelong Californians, a few of us decided to do something about it.

Introducing: THE MAGPIE FLYER.

Why did we call it that? Reasons.

We are collecting stories from other sources and will be publishing our own original reporting.

Note: if you have tips or leads on amazing (read: insane) stories that you think our readers would enjoy, please send your tips to Editor@magpieflyer.com.

This site is not sponsored or supported by anyone, and we are doing this for free. If you’d like to support our work, please SHARE THE SITE with anyone who enjoys disaster coverage.

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Thank you!

—Peachy

Co-editor, The Magpie Flyer

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