Because when Hollywood people make movies, they’re thinking about the audience. They know that if they want to keep making movies, they have to get butts in seats and eyeballs on screens. Every choice they make is disciplined by a single question: “Is the audience going to be moved by this?” And they use their domain knowledge to answer that question. They don’t always get it right, but they do a lot better than a random person off the street would.
When they start talking about politics, however, they’re not thinking about the audience; they’re thinking about themselves. They’re exactly as effective at reaching an audience as your average Washington staffer is with those screenplays he scratches out in his spare time.
This painful contrast between how entertainers approach their art and how they approach their political statements, is nowhere more evident than the cast of Hamilton delivering its message to Mike Pence. The right question was not, “Did they have a right to do that?” (It’s a free country, and they had purchased the right to appear on that stage.) The correct question was, “Did they move even an iota closer to their stated goal?” And the answer was, “Obviously not.”
If you didn’t already agree with them, it came off as the kind of thing that clever middle-schoolers do, technically staying within the rules while flouting basic norms of politeness.
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