Does it boil down to if you’re an ass in the movie making world it produces results of success. You take someone like Nate who is an absolute mental giant vs an asshole..well again that is my question. Does being a dick pay off in movie making? Apparently it does.
No other evidence is needed lol
Believe it or not, this is a more interesting question than everyone is giving it credit for.
I'll rephrase it in a way that makes sense to me, and see if that helps the discussion.
"Is sociopathy an advantage in social heirarchies?"
The reason this is interesting is that numerous studies point to a high concentration of people with psychopathic traits at the very top of power structures. So the answer is at least partially yes.
I'll give a practical example of how this works, specifically in the film industry, but basically in all industries.
You are working at a company, and people there get promoted mostly on the basis of their impact on the bottom line. One day, you are faced with a decision, and that decision is whether to pay your workers a living wage, or give them the minimum allowed by law. Throwing everyone except yourself under the bus will increase the company's profits by 12%, and adjusting their current wage for inflation would decrease the company's profits by 3%. A bad person will immediately harm the entire group without a thought to get that 12%, and at the end of the year, they will be celebrated by the only people who's votes count, senior member of the corporation who were affected positively by the change. 20,000 people suffered, but 15 people won big. The thing is, you don't get promoted by the people under you, you get promoted from further up the chain, where the suffering you caused pays out huge dividends. In short, profitability produces promotions, and being evil is more profitable than being ethical.
I'll give another example. Lets say there's a popular new cult next year, that takes over for a while like all the others did. This time, it's considered bigoted if you don't shave your head to commiserate with cancer survivors. Anyone who doesn't shave their head is said to "Hate" cancer survivors. But you don't believe that's true, and you consider it just more made up nonsense, like when people used to look down on anyone who couldn't do "the hammer dance". But you can see that everyone around you is shaving their heads, and wearing, "cancer is a state of mind" T shirts, and though you think it's silly, you understand there is a choice to be made here. You can lie to everyone around you, and say you completely agree with popular thing x. That's more likely to lead to a promotion. Or, you can tell everyone the truth, and say that you don't think shaving your head will cure anyone's cancer, and that the whole idea is kind of stupid, and what might really help is if the company donated some small portion of it's unfathomable net profits to actual cancer research.
By being a good and honest person, and suggesting things that would actually help someone, you have made multiple errors in terms of setting yourself up for promotion. First, you disagreed with a popular idea. You may be smarter than they are, but they won't see it that way. Being seen as intelligent by others boils down to matching their understanding of the world. If you tell a flat earther that you think the earth is flat, you are earning respect points from them. Second, you would quickly be asked to explain your deviance from this months "philosophy of the month" at which point, you would continue to be honest, which would have the net result of calling everyone an idiot. They won't like that. Lastly, you put the company in a bad position, suggesting that they loose money or admit that they don't actually care about people with cancer, and this is all a show. They're not going to like that. So you're not getting a promotion.
A person that just says whatever people want to hear, as long as it helps them get what they want, is morally inferior, but will be promoted faster.
So ultimately the terrible true answer to your question is. yeah, in the free market, you are really encouraged and rewarded for being an asshole.