In its early, scrappy days, Twitter captured the hearts of Americans with a seductive promise: famous celebrities tweet, you can tweet back at them, and if you’re lucky, they might read your tweet. Such interactions seemed to offer a peek behind the curtain into the world of Hollywood spangle. We thought it’d be fun.

It turns out, alas, that celebrities use Twitter to do the same things the rest of us humdrum U.S folks do: engaging in dumb fights over dumb politics through egregiously humorless burns. But Hollywood types have one weapon in their Twitter arsenals the rest of us lack: the ability to press-gang their beloved intellectual properties into service.