The New Hollywood
by James HudnallThe world economy is a mess. Things are in flux. These are scary times. But part of that comes with change.
If you think things are scary now, imagine how people felt when World War I or World War II started. Both of those wars led to massive alterations in the world as we knew it up till then. WWI ended the age of the aristocracy. Dukes, earls, czars, even kings fell by the wayside and their fortunes and lives were ruined. WWII shifted world power structures, ending the European dominance over the developing world. Colonies were abandoned and left to find their independence. The US became a superpower after living in the shadow of Europe for so long.
But this site isn’t dedicated to geopolitics. It’s dedicated to the Big H. And that’s the subject of today’s discussion. The end of Hollywood as we know it. It’s already begun.
Entertainment is about to undergo a radical shift from old media to new media. And the rules of the game will be changed forever.
In the early days of Hollywood they had the studio system. If you worked there, you were beholden to whoever held your contract. They’d give you work, but you had to do what they said. They would hand you a project and you were forced to do it. Or you might lose your deal and you’d be lucky if anyone would hire you. The creative person in the old system may have worked more, but they had less freedom. Working for the old system was kind of like being a citizen of a Communist dictatorship. The studios controlled the press and the behavior of their stars as much as they could. They had a tight control over everything.
But that system couldn’t last. The costs of running a studio like a company town were too exorbitant. The public was also getting tired of the artifice of back lots and stages. They wanted more realism. So, with the price of land being so high, the studios sold off a lot of their lot space and compressed their operations. Actors and writers were let go of their contracts and were free to work wherever they could find it. That’s the system we have now. But even though artists are more free, there is still the game to be contended with. There is still a kind of invisible hand over it all that sometimes feels like Big Brother is watching. You dare not offend the powers that be.
In my last piece I talked about how diversification of TV content has led to a zillion channels. But the business model of advertising paying for shows is hitting some roadblocks. That’s affecting the bottom line. TV viewership, especially on the networks, is down. It’s caused a tightening of belts everywhere.
Internet usage is way up. More kids are going online than watching TV. You can download entertainment online. If you missed a show, it’s probably on the Net. Download it and watch it at your leisure for free. Movies are being pirated before they’re released in the theaters. The studios are fighting the pirates, just as the music companies fought the file sharers. But file sharing has only increased. Like Prohibition, laws banning things do not stop people from wanting them. Where there’s a demand, there’s a provider.
The studios fought the VCR in the early 80s. When VCRs first came out, you couldn’t buy a movie. You could only rent them. And they sued people for taping shows off the air. Look how well that worked out.
The studios eventually got smart and decided to go with the flow. And they made untold billions in revenue from the home video market.
Eventually they’ll figure out how to co-opt file sharing and downloads. They’re already trying different business models. When they’ve solved the puzzle of how to make money off it, they will reap more billions.
The DVD will go the way of the tape as everyone stores their films digitally as a file. The cost of storage is getting absurdly cheap and the devices themselves are getting more powerful all the time. You can buy a terabyte drive at some places for $100. And the hard drive is also becoming obsolete as we shift to “solid state” memory cards. Memory chips that can store vast amounts of information on things like the memory sticks you may use with your computer. These are approaching the terabyte range. And they’re extremely cheap. In no time we’ll be dealing with picobyte storage, which is a thousand terabytes. A terabyte is a thousand gigabytes. You get the picture. It’s plenty.
You can now load shows, movies, and large amounts of music on iPods. In fact, many cellphones can do that now. But it gets better.
The technologies coming out in the very near future will merge your computer, cell phone, and television all into a tiny device no bigger than a pen. They already have prototypes of this technology in labs. And don’t worry about the size of the video screen. They’ll have tiny projectors that can do HD quality on any blank surface. Your computer of the future may resemble this prototype: a projected laser keyboard (already on sale) with a projected “screen” on which you can watch movies, shows or play games.
You’ve already seen commercials for the iPhone or those BlackBerries with similar features. They are just the beginning of a trend.
They now have “e-paper” which is paper thin monitors that can be rolled up. E-paper is cheap to manufacture and will replace signs, billboards, newspapers and most other printed matter. You can read a book, a comic, or a newspaper, and change the page or even enlarge the view. Sony already has flexible, paper-thin color monitors. Supermarket price signs will be animated e-paper. Their message will be updated from the central office. Signs at bus stops or in stores will react to you as you pass them by, flashing ads tailored to your buying habits.
The cost of printing has held a lot of authors back from self-publishing. But it will cost you nothing to be published in the future. Just as it costs nothing to publish your work online now. A comics creator can get their books out on downloadable e-comics and charge whatever they want for them. A book author will no longer have to go through publishing houses to get distribution. New markets will be created online to allow people to get their work out. It’s already happening.
As for Hollywood, their lock on distribution is being eroded by the Internet. Right now they’re still an exclusive club, so they can afford to be snobs. If they don’t want to let you in for some reason, they can keep you on the other side of the red velvet rope. But those days are coming to an end, because competition is coming from foreign markets and soon from other markets in the U.S.
New markets mean new attitudes. The culture in L.A. and N.Y is not the culture of the South or the heartland. And you’ll see entertainment coming from there, too.
The state of California is no longer a good place to do business. The politicians have made such a mess of things: the taxes, labor laws, cost of living have driven many to flee the state. The expense of shooting in California has also gotten out of hand. Productions are running away to other locales. New studios are being built in other states willing to offer better tax breaks. The monopoly that Hollywood once had on entertainment in the US is fading fast. It will accelerate as new companies will find ways into these emerging digital markets.
You see, you don’t need a studio to make movies anymore. Video cameras are getting cheaper and higher resolution all the time. Home studio editing software, as well as special effects software can turn any competent geek into a film whiz.
Right now, fans are making nicely produced episodes of their favorite TV shows for an online viewership. The production quality is about as good as a professional studio would make, even if the acting or writing often falls short. A good example is the excellent ‘Star Trek: Phase II’ series which often has original cast members acting in episodes (and original show writers doing the scripts). There are many movies like this being made on the Internet from filmmakers all over the world. It’s only a matter of time before some of these efforts become big money makers. And then you’ll see even further erosion of Hollywood’s power.
The unions, the agencies, the studios themselves, will probably be around for many years. Some will find a way to capitalize on new markets and thrive. But the power structure of the past will not survive the way it has. And that means more opportunities for people with a competitive vision.
For one thing, the way money flows from the consumer is going to change. Advertising will still be a revenue generator. And they probably still charge money to see a movie or listen to a song. But more and more we’re beginning to see the “open source” approach where products are disseminated for free and people are encouraged to pay what they want. In several recent cases, like the release of Radiohead’s In Rainbows album, it earned the band many millions of dollars by making their music available for “free” online.
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31 Comments
Hi. I read a few of your other posts and wanted to know if you would be interested in exchanging blogroll links?
Nice to see some inside baseball about the way things are headed. I look forward to more columns from you and am going to look for earlier ones.
Yes and no.
Yes, the technology is growing so fast that the old models will lose SOME power (but not anything like all of it).
You can buy a videocamera now with features broadcast TV couldn’t get in 1980 or 1990.
But a camera doesn’t make you Steven Spielberg. And not being Spielberg, you won’t make work up to that level of quality or artistry.
(Full disclosure: I’m a long-time below-the-line employee, and I’ve worked on hundreds of feature films and network television shows for the last 15 years or so. That and $3 gets me coffee at Starbuck’s.)
What this really means is that the media is freer now than it was 10 or 50 years ago, and that’s a good thing. It’s easier, not harder, to get into the field.
But than again, oil paint is a piddling expense for the average American, yet we see no tsunami of Michaelangelos or Rembrandts suddenly shaking the world of art to its core as a result.
What Hollywood has that nobody else yet has a handle on, is a means of rewarding TALENT. (Yes, they reward mediocrity too, but that’s another issue.)
And just as there aren’t enough talented people to staff 200 major league baseball teams, there aren’t enough talented actors, directors, writers, and other professionals to make 100,000 great movies a year. In fact, Hollywood, with most of the breaks in their favor, can barely manage a dozen or even 3 some years.
What the change means is that conservatives, and others who have been shut out of the left-wing echo-chamber that much of the big studios have become, will now have the means to climb over the walls or kick down the doors. And that’s both good and healthy.
It doesn NOT mean that Hollywood per se is going to be sold to build mega-malls anytime soon.
The basic process hasn’t changed appreciably from 1920 to today.
Mere technological change isn’t going to make it obsolete in another 80 or 90 years either. Anybody who says it will is trying to sell you something. Probably their own cut-rate “How To Be A Big Hollywood Producer” 60-page booklet and weekend course.
If you want to see how it’s going to look, check out such things as Mel Gibson bankrolling “Passion of the Christ” after every studio in town turned it down – and pocketting all those hundreds of millions himself.
Or check out the Kendrick brothers & Sherwood Productions’ last three efforts, each bigger and better-received than the one before: “Flywheel”, “Facing The Giants”, and their latest, “Fireproof”.
They made “Fireproof” on a $1M budget – poverty by Hollywood standards.
It debuted opposite Bill Maher’s vitriolic spew “Religulous”, which cost a traditional studio $20M to make, let alone what they wasted to promote it.
Bill and the religion-haters got their Hollywood behinds roundly thumped by a hardcore Jesus-movie, to the tune of 5 to 1 in revenues in the first 10 days or so.
Maher probably won’t be able to get his phone call taken in Hollywood for another movie for years; whereas Sherwood Baptist Church and the Kendricks are going to have doors opened for them when they pitch the distribution for their next project.
THAT is what the new technology means: greater meritocracy, rather than cronies greasing the skids for their fellow toadies on the Left.
Great article!
And it’s a petabyte, not a picobyte. Pico is smaller than nano, which is smaller than micro… you get the idea.
You know what? I love coming to this blog in the morning and reading stuff that inspires me. I’m an singer/songwriter producing my own music on my own tiny little label, and I have to admit it’s a bit depressing at times to think of the amount of competition out there.
In music today the odds of being noticed are incredibly small, but for now I am not bothered with that because I’m stoked after reading this piece.
I get so tire of hearing the RIAA and the major labels whine about digital downloaded and file sharing, as though that is the only reason their sales are falling. I think it has more to do with the type of artists and the ways they are being produced these days. Nashville is probably by far the worst. It’s all cookie cutter stuff in my opinion, like a big assembly line of artists who sound like the last artist who didin’t write their songs, who arn’t being themselves, who’s music sounds too perfect to have any realism.
And don’t even get me started on the lyrical content of the country music of the day….uhg!
“Scoff all you want, but I think as technology improves more and more people will show their stuff. There are a lot of talented people out there who never get the chance.”
They will indeed show their stuff. And more and more of those people will be seen to have no more talent than many talentless hacks in Tinseltown. Witness cable TV. By definition, mediocrity is the norm in any field of endeavor. We can all buy a pen and paper, but a Dickens or a Twain comes along only once a generation. Only in Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon can everyone claim to be above average.
I’ll settle for a few (and growing number of) truly talented (but politically incorrect, underappreciated, and overlooked) folks getting inside the gates of the citadel.
Because IMHO, there isn’t enough cinematic talent in the whole country to support another Hollywood, no matter where you put it. So I’d much rather swing the pendulum back to something approaching sanity in the one we have, particularly those with the power to decide what gets created.
And Amritas,
I get your greater point, but did you really mean to point to “South Park” as a standard to emulate?
I think Amritas is right. The new technology will most likely create a larger pool of talent to draw from, with former outsiders getting around the velvet rope so to speak. IMO, if I wanted to “break into the biz” today, I wouldn’t waste my time banging out scripts and chasing down people to read them. No, I’d write my own “series” and post it on YouTube. You don’t think agents and studios are looking around to see what the kids are watching on YouTube? Of course they are.
There may also be future outside-of-L.A. independents as well, but it would take monster hits and some distribution cooperation to keep you independent (i.e. Lucasfilm and Pixar).
I appreciate your insight, Aesop. You bring real knowledge of how Hollywood works, but I have to ask you to consider that there may be much more talent out there than is known. True, there may only be a handful of Spielbergs, Twains, and Dickens out there, but maybe there are other comparable talents that have not been able to break into the exclusive club that is Hollywood. The new technologies discussed in this article may make this talent recognizable to more people, including the folks who are running the entertainment industry.
I’m with James on this. Hollywood may not even have the market cornered on talent, just the perception of exclusivity. Now, everyone thinks they have to go to Hollywood to make it big, but that may not always been the case. And honestly, is the old-guard talent of Hollywood all it’s cracked up to be? Sure there’s new blood, but as with any institution, it’s reluctant to change, so we have Spielberg and Cruise still around putting out a mediocre product on name recognition alone. There was a time when that was enough, but I don’t believe it’s still true.
Aesop, I don’t think you understand. What is coming is a media that is decentralized–not only in production, but in audience.
You laud Spielberg, Twain, and Dickens but fail to take into account that there are people who loathe them.
‘Great’ film, music, and television will gradually become something far more personal–and venues for one’s personal tastes will multiply.
And in those will be greats and not so greats.
The medium is being placed in many more hands.
You point out the cheapness of oil paints–and claim that we have seen no tsunami of Rembrandts or Michaelangelos–but we have. We have thousands who can paint at their skill level today–if not millions. And, because of this, our art has changed.
And the same is already happening to many other media forms.
As one virtuosity becomes commonplace, we find a new one.
The creators of Fireproof prove your point.
Since they’re now moderating comments here to try and keep out the liberal Mobys, they might want to remove the first comment on this article, which is spam.
An issue I haven’t seen addressed in this discussion is fragmentation. It’s a trend I already see occurring — while there are many more opportunities for the “small guy”, the market is splintered into many thousands of tiny pieces instead of the handful that existed previously.
While there are numerous sites featuring great indie music artists and small films or webcasts, will any of them reach any critical mass? I’m not sure that an increasingly fragmented niche market for entertainment really provides a suitable career or income for all the “new media” artists compared to the “old system”.
It may have been exclusionary, but it built big stars that were recognized by the masses and who were paid accordingly. If it weren’t for low-paid friends and family, what indie webcast could even launch? Can people on the street even name a web-only series?
It’s not so much a matter of getting rich as earning enough to survive in a modern western city in a market that depends less and less on the delivery of a physical product (album, tape, book, etc.). I’ve already seen excellent, hugely talented musical artists languish and drop off the radar since their online presence and small performance bookings generated little to no income. You can have 100 original videos or tracks on YouTube or MySpace — that won’t buy a single cup of coffee if visitors consume but don’t offer any payment.
I suppose I mourn the shared experiences we had as Americans during my childhood years in the late 50s through the 70s when there were 3 networks and PBS. Everyone watched Ed Sullivan on Sunday nights and I Love Lucy or Leave it to Beaver on other evenings and discussed the shows the next day. Now, I watch films and listen to musical artists that 95% of people on the street have never heard of.
I can’t say whether all of this is necessarily good or bad — almost surely a bit of both. Those who are under 25 have never known a different paradigm, but I was around before cable, satellite, VCRs, DVDs, PCs. We treated music much differently, giving it a sense of value and gently handling and caring for vinyl LPs. Today, digital media is devalued and considered to be disposable — just another quickly-consumed commodity like McDonald’s fast food. Eat it and forget it.
I can’t help but feel that in the decentralization from Hollywood and the large record labels, that we’ve gained some new freedoms, yet lost something precious in the process.
Which, again, argues for greater consolidation, not greater expansion.
Making the PRODUCT more readily available made teams which used to boast players with off-season jobs selling cars into leagues with gazillionaire players and owners.
It didn’t result in 200 NFL teams.
The economic theory of expanding the marketplace with “And here, a miracle happens” won’t result in chiselling into Hollywood’s share. If I have six more zeroes than you at the end of my bank balance, I guarantee you, over time, and overall, I’ll get better people to work for me than you’ll get, which will result in a better product, despite the occasional contrarian example. If Hollywood continues to get pounded at the box office for liberal trash, and make huge numbers for wholesome, traditional-viewpoint movies, no matter how few and far between, they’ll make more of them. (Kicking and screaming all the way, but they’ll make them.)
Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and now Chronicles of Narnia, aren’t coincidences or abberations. When hit over the head with a 2×4 enough times, the moguls eventually find their way back to common sense.
And yes, absolutely, there are tons of talented people within Hollywood overlooked because they’re too old, or not cool enough, or don’t toe the leftist PC line, or whatever.
But they got to Hollywood in the first place because they were first of all talented. The machine here, at the lowest levels, doesn’t care about ideology, left or right. It cares about money. Just like a sports franchise doesn’t care which party Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordan or Bret Favre votes for.
They want to win. And in Hollywood, they keeps score first and last with money.
I’m sure there are undiscovered talents out there, some of them likely to remain so as far as Tinseltown is concerned because the liberal elite “powerbrokers” would never listen to them. The dawn of their day beckons.
But there aren’t going to be 5000 or 500 or even 5 Hollywoods.
Like major political parties, anything more than 2 real players is an improbable suggestion.
Hollywood itself will either change, and co-opt more conservative-values films and production entities, or else insulate itself from them completely and seek to fight them, thus guaranteeing an ongoing bipolar struggle between the two sides.
Plan B, I think, will guarantee they will eventually lose.
I also think, deep down, no matter how much it sets their teeth on edge, they know this truth, and that’s why they’ll seek accomodation, so that they can siphon off profits from wholesome entertainment and funnel it to their vile little pet projects, in desperate attempts to keep pushing their low-return liberal dungballs onto the market.
That’s what examples like “Fireproof” prove. There’s untapped talent out there that doesn’t come with an attached liberal bent. But without a Hollywood distribution deal, that flick would be on YouTube, or else it would be getting sent out by Sherwood Baptist Church to a few thousand radio listeners contiguous to Georgia.
Instead, a film with a conservative viewpoint, and an overtly pro-traditional marriage, pro-mainstream religion (not “spirtituality” whatever that is), and unashamedly Christian message, got put out to thousands of theatres by a major Hollywood studio.
And it raked in the bucks, especially compared to the lackluster dregs out at the same time from Hollywood, made with far larger budgets and bigger stars. Which benefitted both Hollywood, and the outsiders that produced it. Thus guaranteeing that both will want to repeat that partnership again, for as long as it brings solid returns, both financial, and also intangible returns for the film’s production company.
I see no likelihood of Main Street becoming Hollywood 2.0. And I have no problem with Hollywood becoming conservative. (We should all live so long.) The biggest issue, strategically, is ensuring that conservative message-makers don’t “go Hollywood” on us.
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